THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH COURSE DESCRIPTIONS SPRING SEMESTER 2015

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1 THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH COURSE DESCRIPTIONS SPRING SEMESTER CREATIVE WRITING, MW 11-12:15, FH 2430 MILLER The purpose of this class is to introduce students to the art and craft of creative writing through studying narrative and poetic conventions, reading exemplary poems and stories, and analyzing their own works in progress. Students are required to write at least fifteen pages of fiction and five poems, along with any in-class exercises, quizzes and critiques. The majority of the course is discussion/workshop: one half poetry, the other half fiction. Students must be prepared to contribute to discussions eloquently and often. At the end of the semester students will assemble a portfolio of their own best quality stories and poems to be turned in for a final grade. Also, be warned: this is not a class for congratulatory ego-fluffing, so students should come with thick skin, a rigorous work ethic and prepared to produce quality writing CREATIVE WRITING, MW 12:30-1:45, FH 1270 MILLER SAME DESCRIPTION AS ABOVE CREATIVE WRITING, TR 7:20-8:35, FH 2040 BRADLEY In this class students will develop writing skills by studying narrative and poetic conventions, reading exemplary poems and stories, and analyzing works in progress. Students are required to write fifteen pages of fiction and five poems. Students will also complete short writing exercises and are required to critique each other's work. However the class is not a competition; it is a supportive, nurturing environment for helping us all to become better readers and writers READINGS FOR WRITERS, MW 11-12:15, FH 2210 STROUD Through the analysis of a diverse range of literary styles in prose and poetry, this course will teach writers how to develop their own material by studying as models the formal strategies of other writers, including but not limited to language, structure, narrator or speaker, character, dialogue, plot, tone, and the many other elements of literature. 1

2 PERSUASIVE WRITING, MW 11-12:15, FH 1350 STABILE This course is designed to aid students in their understanding of developing effectives and using reason and logic as means of persuasion. We will examine several historical documents, speeches, etc. in order to come to an understanding of how words and meanings serve as agents for social change and the construction of perception SCREENWRITING WAC, TR 2-4:50, FH 1910 YOCKEY This course involves practical analysis of screenplays, emphasizing story structure and characterization. Students plan, write and refine storylines before writing actual scripts. 3150/5/7-001 LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES, MW 2-3:15, FH 1270 REICHELT Course is crosslisted as LING An introduction to modern linguistic theories about the nature and structure of language with emphasis on English. 3150/5/7-002 LINGUISTICE PRINCIPLES, MW 4:10-5:25, FH 2910 REICHELT SAME DESCRIPTION AS ABOVE BRITISH LITERARY TRADITIONS, TR 2-3:15, FH 1270 FREE An introduction to the concept, techniques, and major categories of British literary history. This course provides an overview of the development of British Literature from the Middle Ages to the early 21 st century. It gives students a sense of the relationship between writers and the traditions from which they learn their craft as well as a sense of the uniqueness of each author and the literary period in which they wrote LITERATURE & MYTHOLOGY, MW 2-3:15, FH 1220 TURLEY This course begins with an overview of selected creation myths and then specifically explores Western myths from Greek and Roman society using a wide variety of such genres as the epic (e.g. The Iliad), poems, art, and drama. The course then further explores how archetypal characters and concepts as well as universal motifs of mythology shape events and characters through the ages. Students will be expected to identify these motifs (e.g. the hero s quest and cycles of nature) and recognize archetypal characters such as the guide, the temptress, the scapegoat etc. using some contemporary models. Some sources will be Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Virgil, and 2

3 Joseph Campbell. Students will write one paper, take quizzes and examinations as well as participate in class discussion FOLKLORE WAC, TR 12:30-1:45, FH 1050 COMPORA This web assisted course examines different types of folklore and its importance in culture. This course primarily focuses on the work of noted American Folklore scholar Jan Harold Brunvand, though other perspectives are examined. This course delves into many different genres, such as folk music, folk games, religious and familial traditions, riddles, games, poetry and proverbs. Special emphasis is placed on urban legends and folklore in popular media. The course requires a research project in which students gather and research folklore, along with possible short writing assignments, quizzes, and an exam FOUNDATIONS OF LITERARY STUDY WAC, MW 9:30-10:45, FH 1230 LUNDQUIST This class will be intensely concerned with three or four primary texts in prose and poetry, for each describing its style and determining its themes, discussing the ways it goes about telling its truths. We will be learning the vocabulary that readers use to describe how literature works. We will also ask the larger questions of literary study: What is literature? Why do we read; how do we read? How do our assumptions and expectations color the way we read? How do our social and educational circumstances affect our reading? What is criticism? What kinds of ways do writers respond to literature? What is a literary essay? How does one go about constructing an interesting thesis about a piece of literature? We will begin with Formalism, which teaches awareness of the writer's stylistic choices, his/her craft and art. How does the writer employ these in conveying his/her concerns and passions? We will then consider some schools of contemporary criticism and theory, including Psychological, Historical, Feminist, Deconstruction, and Reader-Response, always with our primary texts as focus. Which elements of a particular work of literature does each of these critical approaches emphasize? Is there a right way to read? FOUNDATIONS OF LITERARY STUDY, TR 4:10-5:25, FH 2430 FITZGERALD This course introduces students to the various methods, terminologies, and discourses of literary interpretation, as well as to the variety of 3

4 literary genres and forms across the vast temporal and geographical range of English literature. While we cannot possibly hope to cover all periods, genres, and approaches, assigned primary and secondary texts will cover a variety of types of literary texts and approaches, from various periods in literary and scholarly history. By the end of the course, students should a solid grasp of the way we approach and have approached literary study in English, and an introductory level of understanding of the technical language and theories of literary study, which they can then put into practice in other courses. Primary texts will come from the major genre categories -- poetry (lyric and narrative), prose fiction (short and long form), and drama and will range across British, American, and Anglophone literature, and from medieval to post-modern literature. Secondary texts will likely include a handbook of literary terms and articles demonstrating various approaches to the primary texts we read. Requirements will likely consist of a series of short analytical papers to hone skills, plus medium-length papers in which you put multiple skills into practice. Active participation and engagement will also be a significant part of your grade SHAKESPEARE I, TR 5:45-7:00, FH 1230 FITZGERALD An introduction to the close reading, study, and interpretation of Shakespeare s plays. Readings will include 6-8 plays from various genres (comedy, tragedy, history, and romance), as well as contextual and background material. Requirements will likely include a number of short writing assignments with an emphasis on close reading and both thematic and dramatic interpretation, participation in discussion and in acting scenes, and a final project or exam, to be determined WRITING WORKSHOP POETRY, TR 12:30-1:45, FH 2660 MILLER This workshop-format class is for practicing poets who want to improve their craft and work toward publication. Over the semester we ll focus on work-shopping one poem from every student each, while also reading two to three books of contemporary poetry. Students will revise toward a final portfolio of their semester s work, from which they will choose two or more poems to submit for publication in journals or magazines chosen with the instructor. Also, be warned: this is not a class for congratulatory ego-fluffing, so students should come with thick skin, a rigorous work ethic and prepared to produce quality, publishable writing. 4

5 WRITING WORKSHOP FICTION, MW 12:30-1:45, FH 1030 STROUD In this class you'll each workshop two stories. You'll also deepen your understanding of craft through readings and discussions. Be prepared to write, read, and talk. 4090/5-001 CURRENT WRITING THEORY WAC, R 7:20-9:50, FH 1200 EDGINGTON This course is devoted to studying current theories, trends, and authors in the field of writing studies, with a particular focus on various literacies connected to how we read and write. Specifically, we will focus on key articles and studies from the field of composition that guide research and practice. To better understand these studies and the underlying theories, students will read a variety of texts, complete course papers and be active participants during course discussions. The class will be primarily discussion-based (both full class and small group), with some lecture and student presentation involved. 4170/6-001 APPLIED LINGUISTICS II, TR 4:10-5:25, FH 1030 COLEMAN This course deals with theories of how people learn new ways to communicate (especially in terms of what is thought of as "second language acquisition", or "SLA"). Students will come to grips with a selection of the major topics in the field of SLA. In so doing, they will examine people learning to communicate "in a foreign language" within the framework of Human (a.k.a., Hard-Science) Linguistics, which deals not with the so-called "mentalism" predominant in mainstream linguistics, but with people communicating in the real world. Enrollment by undergraduates below senior status is not recommended. All students will do required readings, will write three short position papers (max. of 2-pages plus references), do individual research papers that analyze and synthesize existing work (including several written components, a final write-up of 7-10 pages plus references, and a presentation). Interested students are encouraged to contact the professor for details (Douglas.Coleman@utoledo.edu). 4280/5-001 AMERICAN FICTION: 20 TH CENTURY, MW 8-9:15, FH 1030 STROUD Major developments in content and form of the 20th-century American short story and novel. Writers studied include Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison, Roth, Oates, DeLillo, and Wallace. 5

6 BRITISH LITERATURE: RESTORATION & 18 TH CENTURY, TR 9:30-10:45, FH 1030 FREE An overview of the literature of the "long eighteenth century" (from 1660 to 1798), this course will focus on two movements: the neoclassical in the first 2/3 of the period and the romantic in the last third. Discussion will center on the aesthetic and cultural values of writers and audiences, the importance of satire, the rise of modern, democratic social and political institutions, and the place of this period in the development of the modern world. Texts will be examined from a number of perspectives (e.g., formalistic, psychological, historical-biographical, reader response). The text will be the Restoration and Eighteenth Century volume of The Longman Anthology of British Literature. This text makes it possible to discuss the relationship between literature and other arts, such as painting, architecture, and sculpture. There will be a mid-term test, final examination, book report on a text not included in the anthology, and term paper LITERATURE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE: 1850 TO PRESENT, MW 3:30-4:45, FH 1050 SARKAR This course offers an introduction to the literature produced in Britain and its former colonies from the late nineteenth century to the present age, focusing on the way writers deal with Britain s imperial legacies. The nineteenth century witnessed some major historical changes -- unprecedented industrial growth and production following the Industrial Revolution, Britain s growing imperial ambitions and the seeds of the women s movement, the effects of which continued well into the twentieth century. And with the Nationality Act of 1948 and the arrival of the Empire Windrush, Britain s demographics were fundamentally altered. In this course, will seek to answer, among others, the following broad questions: Were the major British writers proponents or opponents of imperialism? How did the British intelligentsia react to the rapid transformation of Britain from an agrarian to an industrial economy and how did the devastating effects of the world wars fundamentally change Britain? With the fading away of the empire, how did British writers envision a new Britain? How are contemporary British novelists like Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith re-imagining what it means to be British, citizens of a postcolonial and multicultural Britain faced with social and political instability and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism? We will study mostly novels, essays and film, but will also try to focus 6

7 on how the assigned texts both engage and reflect the social and cultural anxieties of the times NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE, TR 11-12:15, FH 1030 ERBEN Native American Literature and Culture interrogates a selection of texts by and about Native Americans, including the oral traditions of storytelling and mythology and selections by contemporary writers. The genres examined will be film, autobiography, poetry, short fiction, novels, history, and manifestos. We will read and discuss texts by Vine Deloria, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Cultural and historical context will be integrated into discussion by means of lectures and study questions. derben@utoledo.edu 4850/5-001 ZADIE SMITH, MW 5:45-7:00, FH 1910 SARKAR The Philadelphia Inquirer calls Zadie Smith, not merely one of Britain's finest younger writers, but also one of the Englishspeaking world's best chroniclers of race, class, and identity in urban confines. Zadie Smith (b. 1975) shot into fame with the publication of her first novel, White Teeth (2000), a gripping, complex, but hilarious portrait of multicultural London. The book won a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. White Teeth has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted successfully for the screen by Channel 4 television. Smith followed up this tremendous success with equally engrossing novels like The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005) and NW (2012) and her intricate characterization and deft storytelling has quickly established her as one of the leading contemporary British writers. Quite fittingly, she was named as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and 2013 by the prestigious Granta magazine. Smith is also a prolific non-fiction writer and her essays are regularly published in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books and other literary magazines. This course will focus on the major novels, short stories and nonfiction essays by Smith and will explore questions of migration, globalization, multiculturalism, and hybridity, themes that are ubiquitous in her work. Through an analysis of her texts and some other contemporary writing/films/documentaries about multiracial England, we will also try to understand the impulse/urgency behind 7

8 the re-evaluation of British national identity in the twentieth and twenty-first century PLAYWRITING-WAC, TR 5:45-7:00, FH 2040 BRADLEY In this class, you will learn how plays are the result of both creative impulses as well as logical choices on the part of the writer. This class is designed to help you learn to use the tools of writing a play as you go from week to week. Each weekly writing exercise is designed to help you know not only the story you want to tell but how you want to tell it. This is a WAC class which means you will be doing a lot of writing, both creative and critical writing. You will develop the craft of writing plays by studying the elements that go into the making of a playscript: character, dialogue, action, setting, plot. Through tightly focused and directed writing exercises you will develop characters whose desires and conflicts will drive your plot forward. Please note, your work will be read aloud in class and critiqued by your professor as well as your classmates, so don t be shy about sharing your work or about sharing you insights into the work of others. 4980/5430 L APPROACHES TO ESL, TR 5:45-7:00, FH 1260 COLEMAN The goal of Approaches to ESL is to provide a bridge between theories in the field of second language acquisition and practice in the field of second/foreign language teaching. In this sense, it fits somewhere between Applied Linguistics I and II on the one hand and Environments for ESL and the Externship in ESL on the other. Thus, its primary focus is on how classroom teaching methodology can reflects (or fail to reflect) theory and how it can be implemented (or can fail to be implemented) in actual practice. Assignments include several short analytical position papers and a term project (the latter to be completed in several stages of work) METHODS: COMPOSITION RESEARCH, DESIGN, & ASSESSMENT, T 7:20-9:50, FH 1260 SCHNEIDER We begin by considering how it is we assess writing, reflecting on our own experience and theory and then extend that assessment of writing to how we design our courses. We then take up methods of research currently used in the field of rhetoric and composition, including but not limited to ethnography, discourse analysis, teacher-research, and inquiry. From that study, students produce a proposal for an extended research project that will be carried out in a capstone project that fulfills the final requirements for the Certificate in the Teaching of Writing. The class closes with a reflection on the 8

9 assessment of writing as it is enacted in our research and course design SEMINAR: COLD WAR IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, FILM, & MUSIC, R 4:15-6:45, FH 1250 REISING In this course we will examine the various ways in which American literature, film, and music registered the pressures, contradictions, and fears associated with nuclear war and the possibility that human life in the northern hemisphere might be obliterated at the push of a few buttons. Students will read DeLillo's End Zone, Ellison's Invisible Man, Ginsberg's Howl and other poems, and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. We will watch films such as Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Iron Giant, The Manchurian Candidate, Big Jim McLain, The Day After, and The World, The Flesh, and the Devil. We will listen to music by a variety of folk, rock, jazz, gospel, and country/western artists. Each member of the seminar will write one brief (5 pages) paper and one substantial seminar paper on a topic of her/his choice. Each member will also be responsible for leading one of our weekly discussions SEMINAR: JOHN DONNE, T 4:15-6:45, FH 1100 MATTISON The history of responses to the poetry and prose of John Donne ( ) has been extraordinarily complex. In his own time he was called wanton and blasphemous, as well as exalted miraculous and holy. At various times since, Donne has been regarded as the premiere English lyric poet and dismissed as a metrically irregular wit, only to revert to an eve n loftier reputation. This course will examine Donne s life, work, and reception history in the context of the dynamics of literary reputation in seventeenth-century England. In addition to the literary history of the period and the history of the circulation of poetry in manuscript and print, it will explore theoretical questions of the relationship between biography and meaning and the hermeneutics of intention and reception. In the various forms in which Donne s poetry has been circulated since the 17 th century, it has usually been paired with at least a brief sketch of his life: a wild youth, periods of sickness, a religious conversion, and his ordination as an Anglican priest in The idea that the different genres and modes of Donne s poetry limn the stages of his life which is endorsed implicitly in the early editions of Donne s collected works in the 1630s and explicitly by Izaak Walton 9

10 in his biography of 1670 actually dates from within Donne s lifetime. Ben Jonson mentioned to his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden that Donne, since he was made Doctor, repenteth highlie, and seeketh to destroy all his poems. In this seminar, we will consider first, the historical question of whether we should believe this third-hand statement and what exactly it would mean in the context of the time; second, what effect the general idea of Donne s repentance had on the reception of his poetry the early love poetry as well as the later satirical, religious, and philosophical work; and third, what effect such histories should have on modern interpretations. In pursuit of this last idea, we will also continue our history of Donne s reception, through his relative neglect in the eighteenth century, his association with the metaphysical school in the nineteenth, his celebration as the quintessential Renaissance lyric poet in the twentieth, and the broad and varied discussion of his work in recent scholarship. First and foremost, we will examine closely, and discuss the relationships between, many of Donne s works: poetry in all genres, Biathanatos (a treatise on suicide), Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (a set of meditations on sickness), Death s Duel, sermons, and his surviving letters. 10