Upper-Division and Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2010
Reading maketh a full [hu]man, Conference a ready [hu]man, Writing an exact [hu]man.
--Francis Bacon
303/505 Advanced Composition D. Carithers
TR 9:30-10:45 CRN 20278/20279
Directions for your new cell phone, editorials in The Pacer, academic essays on Sigmund Freud: these are examples of expository prose, one of the most common and useful types of writing around. Students in English 305/505 will study the principles of the various modes of expository composition, including sequence, cause and effect, classification, comparison, definition, and description. As we will discover together, there is plenty of room for creativity within these modes of writing. The primary text for this course is student writing, which we will work on together through in-class free-writes, workshops, and revision sessions. We will also read and discuss several collections of published expository prose.
315/515 Poetry Workshop L. LaChance
TR 2:30-3:45 CRN 20339/20340
Poetry Workshop is designed for students interested in developing their creative and intellectual abilities through the craft of poetry writing. The course addresses all aspects of the poetry writing process from the genesis of a poem through early drafts, critique, revision and manuscript submission. Since the course is a hands-on workshop, much of our time will be devoted to writing and discussing students’ original poems. Students will write and revise a substantial body of original work for portfolio-based evaluation and possible publication. To better inform the creative process we will study selected poetic forms including free verse, sonnets, blues poems, ballads, haiku, renga, and performance poems. Selected readings from various poetic traditions will be required, as will a short research project, weekly written homework, attendance and participation in live readings, and an interdisciplinary poetry assignment.
320 Introduction to English Linguistics T. Hacker
TR 1-2:15 CRN 20309
At the end of the 19th century, several new disciplines emerged that sought to apply the research methods of the natural sciences to human behavior. These disciplines, called the social sciences, include several that are well known to students on this campus: criminal justice, political science (or government), psychology, and sociology. Another discipline that is less familiar to us here is linguistics, the scientific study of human language.
In this introductory course, we will learn what linguistics is, and how it divides up the study of language into components such as phonology (the sound system), morphology (word building, including features like prefixes and suffixes), syntax (sentence-level grammar) and semantics (the connection between language and meaning). We’ll also learn what linguists do and how their work is a useful complement to other branches of English Studies.
Students in this class will complete exercises from the course textbook and supplemental workbook. They will write several short, exploratory papers; one for each linguistic sub-discipline. There will also be three exams, including a comprehensive final.
325/525 Technical Communications B. Powell
MWF 11-11:50 CRN 20371/21555
MWF 12-12:50 CRN 20373/21567
This upper-level technical communications course is structured as a workshop where students will learn about and discuss rhetorical theories of composition and communication relevant to professional communities. Some of these theories involve audience awareness, genre elements, document design principles, teamwork strategies, and collaborative writing techniques. Students will apply these theories in their own compositions, creating works in various genres such as correspondence, job application materials, websites, and reports. They will also apply theories of teamwork and collaboration through the process of working together to complete projects. Through these applications, we will explore how to tailor documents to specific rhetorical situations. In addition, we will discuss the role of technology in the twenty-first-century workplace, and investigate different avenues for composing professional messages and sharing knowledge, including public venues like websites, blogs, and wikis.
345 Black Writers in America M. Hill
The African American Experience in Context MWF 1-1:50 CRN 20473
“The African American Experience in Context” is an interdisciplinary subject that explores the lived-contexts of African Americans through overlapping approaches of philosophy and literature. The course focuses on socio-cultural, religious, political, and racial attitudes and ideologies. We will closely examine constructions of whiteness and misrepresentation of blackness. Our focus will also include concerns about existence, oppression, resistance, and empowerment through selected works by African American writers. The central unifying theme of this course is existence where people of African descent affirm their existence in a world that suggests otherwise. This overarching theme will facilitate the readings, lectures, and discussions and address the significance of what it means to be human.
360/560 Sixteenth-Century Literature C. Hill
TR 9:30-10:45 CRN 20327/20329
This course is an intense survey of the major works of the Tudor period in English literature. We will discuss, among other things, the English Reformation, the rise of Renaissance Humanism, the Neoplatonic literary and philosophical tradition, Petrarchanism, and the depth of the influence of the Italian Renaissance, particularly as embodied in Niccolo Machiavelli and Baldesar Castiglione. The focus of this course will be on reading samples from each major English genre of the period, including Spenser’s epic romance The Faerie Queene, Sidney’s famous essay The Defense of Poesy, and lyric poetry from Sidney, Shakespeare, Wyatt and others. Plenty to feed the mind and heart, and to delight the eyes and ears. You can expect a fairly good amount of informal writing and two substantial critical essays, along with plenty of energetic class discussion.
365/565 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature D. Pigg
MWF 10-10:50 CRN 20365/20366
Beginning with 1660, a new day in the life of English politics, philosophy, and literature, English 365 considers the range of poetry, prose, and drama written during this very important period in the development of literary forms and ideas. Often misunderstood as overly devoted to the concept of human reason, the period explores such topics as reason and passion, gender roles, satire, history and politics, nature, imagination, and comedy, all with the intention of understanding the role of human beings in relation to themselves and their world. In addition to reading the key male writers of the period (Rochester, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Boswell, Johnson, Blake, and early Wordsworth), we will examine works by women writers such as Aphra Behn, Katherine Phillips, Eliza Heywood, Mary Manley, and Mary Wollstonecraft and works by several Black Atlantic writers such as Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Cugoano.
385 Modern Poetry J. Glass
TR 11-12:15 CRN 20300
Students in English 385 will focus on the intellectual and aesthetic movements that shape Modern poetry in English and pursue concentrated study of major Modernist poets and their work. Following a brief review and grounding in the ideas of the British Romantics and Victorians and several key nineteenth-century American poets and thinkers, the course will move into a discussion of the expression and aesthetics of major poets writing between the 1890s and (roughly) the 1950s. Some further attention will be directed to the influence of the Modernists on contemporary poetry.
395 Literature and Film TR 2:30-3:45 J. Longacre
Hunted: Gothic Literature and the Horror Film Lab M 2-3:50 CRN 20360
Why are so many of us drawn to entertainments that intentionally elicit responses of fear, terror, shock, and even repulsion? Why has horror, as a genre, enjoyed such an enduring popularity? What does the popularity of this genre suggest about our deepest drives and our darkest impulses, both as individuals and as a culture? From things that go bump in the night to vampires, mad scientists, resurrected corpses, and poltergeists, horror and the Gothic continue to shock and fascinate us. Through intensive study of key texts in the gothic tradition and a survey of corresponding horror films, we will work together in a seminar format to critically define what exactly horror and the Gothic are as critical terms and as literary and filmic genres. Then, through an examination of some relevant supplementary scholarship, we will draw some conclusions about what our cultural obsession with horror suggests about human nature. We will also spend some time learning about film as an art, how to “read” films (and write about them), and the process of adapting books to the screen. Readings will be selected from writers such as Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Stephen King; and we will survey horror films throughout the 100+ year history of cinema, ranging from pioneers like F.W. Murnau and James Whale to later auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Warning: this class is not for the faint of heart, those with weak constitutions, or the easily disturbed; it may just scare you to death!
Note: this course will have a lab component so that we will have an opportunity to screen more films in their entirety.
425 Advanced Grammar A. Clark
MWF 9:00-9:50 CRN 20281
Understanding English Grammar will be our basic text as we discuss English as a world language, system and pattern implicit in the English language, basic sentence patterns, inflections, determiners, parts of speech, expansions, and usage. Our interactive and dynamic class periods will be further enriched by guest speakers, reports from independent research projects, and opportunities to use resources in the Hortense Parrish Writing Center. Students who are preparing to teach—and all who want to be better prepared for communication in the workplace—should find this course beneficial.
445/645 American Novel to Faulkner L. Jarmon
TR 9:30-10:45 CRN 20336/20337
Students in this class will read representative novels from the beginnings to Faulkner, with attention to the historical development of the genre.
450/650 Introduction to Literary Criticism C. Bradshaw
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Text (at least!) MWF 2-2:50 CRN 20210/
If Wallace Stevens could look at a blackbird in thirteen ways, then surely we can do no worse than examine a variety of texts from a variety of theoretical perspectives! We’ll look at the relationships between text and context, form and content, author and reader, and a number of other concepts as we read classic selections from Plato and Aristotle all the way up to contemporary theorists Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway (“A Manifesto for Cyborgs”) and Gayatri Spivak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”). We’ll also cover the major contemporary “schools” of literary theory such as Marxism, Structuralism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Poststructuralism, Feminist criticism, Cultural Materialism/New Historicism, Postcolonial criticism, Gender Studies, Moral/Philosophical criticism, Rhetorical criticism, Ecocriticism (Green Studies), and others. Students will read several short works by familiar authors (e.g. Poe, Coleridge, Woolf, Kafka, Alice Walker, and Elizabeth Bishop) and view a few films (e.g. Memento, The Prestige, and King Kong) for application purposes. Students will also be able to apply readings and concepts in this class to texts of their own choosing for their final paper.
495 Travel Study C. Bradshaw
Frontier Ecology in Landscape, Literature, and Film CRN 20269
Please see Dr. Bradshaw (Humanities 131M) if you are interested in a Spring 2010 course with a two-week trip to the American Southwest the last two weeks of May.
496/696.01 Persuasive Writing H. Huse
MWF 11-11:50 CRN 20333/20334
This course is designed with English majors in the writing track in mind, but anyone who has any reason to write persuasively (public relations, marketing, or political science majors, or students considering law school for example) will benefit from the course. We’ll examine the structure of effective argument while creating a toolbox of practical persuasive strategies to draw from as we craft our own strong arguments. Our textbooks include Anita Rottenberg’s The Structure of Argument an anthology of arguments from American history, Words that Changed America, and a graphic novel, Dangerous Woman, about anarchist Emma Goldman, along with reading individual articles and websites discussing or exemplifying effective persuasion online. Our “theme” issue will be food: fast food, slow food, junk food, health food, organic food, “frankenfood”… you name it. We’ll read the recent anthology of arguments, Food, Inc. and the extended argument Fast Food Nation, which will serve as the bases for your own argument analysis writing. The goal of the course is to employ strategies that will help writers create powerful and effective persuasive written or visual text for any communication setting, audience, or purpose.
496/696.02 Creative Nonfiction Workshop J. Wright
MW 2-3:15 CRN 20391/21622
Many are calling creative nonfiction the “emerging genre” in creative writing. This workshop course will explore the distinction between nonfiction and creative nonfiction, as well as the issues of truth, creativity, and responsibility to audience. From humorous or serious memoir to literary journalism to advocacy writing—and “everything in between”—this course will offer the opportunity to write and workshop creative nonfiction. The study of craft and artistic preference, as well as examples of acclaimed contemporary creative nonfiction, will be the focus to guide us in our quest to write this genre.
496.03 Reading and Writing about Travel L. LaChance
An Amsterdam Adventure M 6-8:50 CRN 20341
This course is designed to give students professional writing experience combined with literary study and travel. We will spend a semester sampling a wide spectrum of works in the genre of travel writing, including early American and European colonial travel narratives, adventure travel accounts, and recent popular works about living and working abroad. We’ll also study Dutch literature (in English translation) and culture, and enhance our studies with a seven-day excursion to The Netherlands, focusing in particular on the cities of Amsterdam, Delft and The Hague. We’ll visit numerous landmarks and sights in and around Amsterdam, including the van Gogh Museum, the Rijks Museum, and the Anne Frank House, tour the World Court in The Hague, and take a walking tour of Delft. We’ll also have the option to take a short bicycle trip around Amsterdam. There will be ample opportunity to explore the vibrant cultural life of Amsterdam on your own and to experience this truly diverse and multicultural world capital up close. Upon our return, we will work collaboratively to produce a professional-quality, multimedia travel document about our experiences, readings and research. We will meet during the spring term for 6 evening classes, travel May 17-24 in Holland, and attend 4 writing workshops May 25-28 in Martin.
***This course is a travel-study course. Students who enroll must plan on traveling with the group to The Netherlands in May 2010.
Completion of first-year composition is a prerequisite for all English classes 200-level and above.
If you have any questions about these classes or about the English Department generally, please call Lynn Alexander at 731.881.7300 or visit our website at http://www.utm.edu/departments/chfa/english/.