Interim, 2010

General Education 111 or its equivalent is a prerequisite for all courses in the English department except some Level I Interim courses. While a few courses have additional prerequisities, most Level I and Level II courses are open to all -- majors and non-majors alike -- after General Education 111. Level III courses (numbered 300 or higher) are primarily for English majors and ordinarily build upon prior work. All Level III courses require as a prerequisite English 185 and at least one Level II course in an area of relevant background as confirmed by the instructor or the department.

GLE Courses:

English 108 Trickster/Post Colonial Literature
English 123 Introduction to Poetry
English 224 Modern Irish Literature (abroad)
English 248 Literature & Sport
English 253 Authors in English: Text, Contexts, and Intertexts in The French Lieutenant's Woman
English 260 Beat Generation (Cross-Disciplinary)
English 340 Advanced Lit Era: Declarations of Independence

English 108: The Hero and the Trickster in Post-Colonial Literature (Joseph Mbele)
Students examine various heroic and trickster figures as manifested in post-colonial literature from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, both oral and written, and seek to understand what basic human needs and realities these figures express and fulfill.
(MCS-G, ALS-L)
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English 123: Introduction to Poetry (Mary Titus)
This course introduces students to poetry from a range of perspectives including, but not limited to: the poet's life; the application of categories of analysis such as race, gender, and nationality; poetry as literary craft; and the aesthetic appreciation of poems. To "experience" the literary medium of poetry in the fullest sense, students are required to write about, memorize, orally interpret/recite, and compose their own poetry. (ALS-L, ORC)
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English 224 - Modern Irish Literature (off campus) (Richard DuRocher)
This course will involve the study of modern Irish literature in four distinct Irish settings (ancient city, coastal village, urban capital and northern town), where this literature was written. James Joyce's Dubliners put Dublin on the map; Irish men and women, some of whom students will meet on the trip, continue to write engaging stories about modern life in a variety of locales. Readings, discussion and cultural experiences (including theater, museum and excursions by van) will provide the basis for daily journal entries and several short papers. (ORC, ALS-L) Pre-requisite: GE 111 or its equivalent.
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English 248: Literature & Sport (Mark Bresnan)
Students read fiction, drama, poetry, and literary journalism in which sport plays an integral role. By focusing on this intersection between sports and literature, students develop a richer understanding of the ways in which literary texts critique and re-imagine popular culture. In addition to analyzing and interpreting literature, students will critique contemporary sports culture at large, analyzing the constructions of athletic identity that dominate sports media. The course requires three formal essays, frequent short writing assignments, and a comprehensive final exam. Literary texts focus primarily on postwar American sports culture and include work by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, August Wilson and David Foster Wallace. Pre-requisite: GE 111 or equivalent. (ALS-L)
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English 253: Authors in English: Text, Contexts, and Intertexts in The French Lieutenant's Woman (Molly Westerman)
This course focuses on a single novel: John Fowles's 1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman, a bestseller that's also a highly allusive postmodernist classic. After reading Fowles’s novel, we will spend the term following up on its many references to and relationships with other texts—leading us to a wide range of writers and artists including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Hayden White, and Harold Pinter (who wrote the rather quirky 1981 film adaptation of the novel). Returning to The French Lieutenant’s Woman after exploring this larger context of history, fiction, art, criticism, and theory, we will ask: What difference does this body of knowledge make in our experience of the novel? How does intertextuality—a text’s network of relationships with other texts—work? We will also consider postmodernism and its take on history and intertextuality, ideas about the ‘ideal reader’ or ‘implied audience,’ sex and sexuality in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, and a deep twentieth-century fascination with the Victorian era. Pre-requisite: GE 111 or its equivalent. (ALS-L)
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English 260 - Beat Generation (Colin Wells)
xxxxxThe Beat Generation represents a moment in 20th-century American literary and cultural history that has continued to capture the imaginations of successive generations of readers. In this course, we will examine the literature of Beat writers such as Kerouac, Ginsburg, DiPrima, Snyder, and Baraka, and we will consider their works and the literary movement they inspired in the context of American cultural history since 1945. In the process, weÕll explore the complex points of connection between the Beats and such topics as the Cold War, 1950s conservatism, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, psychedelia, modern art, jazz, folk, and rock music. Finally, we'll trace the legacy of the Beat Generation to later American writers. (ALS-L) Pre-requisite: GE 111 or its equivalent. (Cross-Disciplinary)
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English 340: Advanced Studies in American Literary Eras: Declarations of Independence in 19th Century American Lit (Carol Holly)
This course will focus on nineteenth-century American writings that, in the decades before the Civil War, concern themselves with the issues of freedom, self-determination, and self-reliance. Writing during the period we often call the "American Renaissance," some of these authors embraced the idea of literary independence for American writers, spiritual liberation from the religious institutions of the past, and the opportunity for unlimited develoment of the self. Others were concerned with the possibilities of freedom from slavery, from marriage, or from economic oppression. But all of these writers can be seen as entering into a conversation or debate with one another about the possibilities--or lack thereof--of attaining personal freedom and reforming American life. Among the texts we will consider: Emerson's essays; Thoreau's Walden, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Fuller's "The Great Lawsuit," Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno," and Whitman's poetry.
Prerequisite: English 185 plus one additional course of relevant background
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