Literature, Writing and Publishing

How does digital representation work in the context of the Humanities? How is literary content created for digital media? Will digital media be the death of traditional print culture? This course will examine, through an interdisciplinary viewpoint rooted in the Humanities, the ways in which technology can be used to present, archive, locate and evaluate information. It will provide an overview of the Digital Humanities, using English literature as a foundation, and will also examine questions about the appropriate use of digital media in creative and academic projects. Meets ITML1.

This course introduces students to a diverse range of literary works from around the world. As students make their way through selected texts and genres, they will gain insight into a variety of social and cultural issues and participate in vibrant cross-cultural dialogues. Ultimately, students will leave the course better prepared to navigate and interact with multiple identities and communities as citizens of the world.

Walt Whitman revolutionized American poetry with the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. This course will focus on the poetic career of Whitman, a 19th century resident of Brooklyn and lifelong devotee to American democracy. Special attention will be paid to Whitman in the context of metropolitan New York. The course will examine Whitman's poetics through interdisciplinary study. Interdisciplinary topics will include history, psychology, politics, art, music, science, philosophy, and theology. The class will listen to musical settings of Whitman's poetry and watch staged adaptations of his poems. We will discuss his love of opera and popular culture, his work as a journalist and novelist, his political activism and egalitarianism, and his revolutionary attitudes towards sex, class, and gender. We will also explore his philosophical and religious insights in the context of his work as a Civil War nurse and diarist. Field trips and walking tours will be included in the course, and students will be given the opportunity to do archival research through a partnership with the Brooklyn Historical Society.

This course provides students with the necessary theories, methods, and tools to navigate the digital publishing industry. To prepare students for cutting-edge writing and publishing jobs, the course includes hands-on experience in helping to run Unbound Brooklyn, the literary journal of the St. Francis College MFA program in Writing.

This course is designed to demystify the world of publishing and the life of the working writer through a series of readings and visiting professionals. Each visitor will speak to a different aspect of the publishing world, providing a survey of the profession. The focus will be paid to the intersection of creativity and commerce, where writers, editors, and publishers share their experiences finding an audience for the written word. Students will work on their own creative projects with specific assignments geared toward understanding those projects in view of finding an audience. Students will learn the processes of both the initial creative work and the editorial and critical review that goes into publishing. Students will practice thinking as both creatives and as publishing professionals, including pitching, editing, marketing, and discovering audiences. Prerequisite: WRI 1100. 3 Credits

A literary survey and history of British literature and culture from the end of the Eighteenth Century (the Romantic Period) up to the Modern Period. While the emphasis might fall (as the course title suggests) on the shift from the individual imagination to the question of what constitutes a self, the course will give students grounding in literature in all its genres.

In this course students will explore the various ways stories are told in the digital age across a range of media and will also learn how to make their own digital stories.

Survey of major authors, periods, genres, and themes in American literature from the narratives of the colonial period to the novels and poetry of the modernist period.

Survey of major authors, periods, genres, and themes in British literature from the epic Beowulf up to a novel in the Modern period.

Survey of Modernist, Contemporary, and post-Modernist periods of World Literature, including the study of novels, stories, poetry, theatre, and essays by authors from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe.

This course introduces students to the literatures of Latinx writers in the United States. Specifically, the course will focus on four major Latinx communities: Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Dominican American, and Cuban American. Students will also be introduced to the multiple genres of Latinx creative works, including poetry, fiction, film, essays, and memoirs.

This course introduces students to the literatures of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the United States. Specifically, the course will focus on major literary periods and themes in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature such as slave narratives, the Harlem Renaissance, protest literature, literature of the Civil Rights movement, Afrofuturism, anticolonialism and postcolonialism, the politics of language, transnationalism, migration and immigrant narratives. Students will also be introduced to multiple genres of creative works, including poetry, fiction, film, essays, and memoirs.

This course begins with the declaration from the U.S. Constitution that: All men are created equal. The struggle to live up this ideal has been a major preoccupation of American literature. In this course, we will explore a wide variety of texts that focus on the experiences of racism, diversity, and the struggle for equality.

Historical, cultural, and aesthetic study of lyric poetry, ballads, songs, and stories from the ancient Welsh tradition through the Renaissance and Romantic periods to contemporary pop with attention to nuance and development of the English language through the centuries.

This course is designed to give students an understanding of American Literary History from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As such, it begins where AML 2110 leaves off. We will begin with discussing the critique of writers of the American Renaissance and, in particular, American Romanticism. We will then discuss the rise of literary Realism and, later, Naturalism. Then, using one or two authors as transition figures, we will discuss the rise and triumph of American Modernism, with particular emphasis on the subjective narrator, and, to use Willa Cather's words, the shift away from the cluttered descriptive style of realism to the inexplicable presence of the thing not named. In the last week or so, we will glimpse ahead at what comes next and explore some definitions of Postmodernism. Reading some shorter works by later 20th century authors, we will ask how Postmodernism both continues and critiques Modernism. The course will use multiple genres of literature.

This course will explore the immigrant experience of Jews, Irish, Italians, and other groups in 19th- and 20th-centuries. American readings in literature, history, and other non-fiction is read in the context of ongoing discussions about the construction of the notion of America; what it means to become American, including the influences of class and gender; and constructions of identity.

Arthurian Romance from the early period of Marie De France, _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, and Sir Thomas Malory, for example, to Alfred Tennyson and T.H. White and more contemporary cinematic interpretations of a richly historical as well as cultural figure in search of the Holy Grail.

Is the American Dream a myth? From the optimism of Benjamin Franklin to present-day corporate greed, this course investigates various manifestations of the American search for freedom from poverty, self-sufficiency, and social mobility.

This course offers an introduction to the classical epic with a specific focus on the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and Vergil's Aeneid, with a consideration of some other examples of the genre. Topics explored include oral and literary epic, their historical, social and political contexts and the influence of classical epic on later literature.

This course offers an introduction to ancient Greek drama with a specific focus on selected plays from the works of the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as well as a representative work of the comic playwright Aristophanes. Students will explore the historical and cultural context of Greek drama and its role in ancient Greek society. Topics explored include the origins of dramatic art forms, ancient performance practices, religion and drama, Greek dramatic festivals and the significance of theater within Athenian democracy.

This course explores how male and female identity is constructed and represented in a wide variety of American texts. We will explore the changing ideals of manhood and femininity in an attempt to uncover how these texts present both acceptable and marginalized gender roles.

Early diaries will be read as performing the cultural work of constructing indigenous peoples for domestic audiences; as windows into the ideologies of dominant cultures; and as part of a dialectic with indigenous peoples. Diaries of explorers, missionaries, travelers. Readings may include the writings of Native Americans, Hawaiians, Maori, Aborigines, and diaries of Capt. Cook, Columbus, and Lewis and Clark.

Students will learn the art and craft of writing poetry in a workshop environment. They may read from published poetry and criticism. And will be encouraged to develop their own poetry writing skills and understanding. The workshop process includes having student's work discussed and critiqued by the instructor and by fellow writers. Class participation is essential.

This course surveys war literature from the colonial battles of King Philip's War to recent conflicts, such as Vietnam. Special attention will be paid to the writings of the Civil War in shaping the American Identity.

This course studies elements of the epic from the Greek classical models of Homers Iliad and Odyssey and the Roman models of Virgils Aeneid and Ovids Metamorphoses. We will consider the epic film and the epic novel along with the original poems to see how the ancient poems inform our modern perception of heroic action and character. Looking at contemporary values and comparing them with classical values of nation and hero should help us to gain insights into our culture and other national cultures. Films might include: Gone with the Wind, Das Boot, Lord of the Rings, Death in Venice, Eugenie Grandet, Notes from the Underground.

Students will learn the art and craft of writing fiction in a workshop environment. Participants will read from master writers; they will write original pieces and revise them. The workshop process includes having student work discussed and critiqued by the instructor and by fellow students. Class participation is essential.

Students develop the art and craft of writing fiction in a workshop environment. The primary objective of the course is for students to write and revise original works of fiction. The workshop process includes having student work discussed and critiqued by the instructor and by fellow writers, so class participation is essential. At the end of the semester students will have produced and will read publicly from a portfolio of their best work. In addition, reading and writing about selected short fiction (contemporary and not, American and not) and in-class and out-of class writing exercises are an essential component of the course.

An overview of medieval and Renaissance plays and theater practices, including the societal developments that gave rise to them.

The course will look at the political and religious changes brought about from 1660 to 1700 with the Restoration and Charles II, and then turn to the major writers of the 18th century. Works of Dryden, Etherege, Fielding, Pope, Defoe, Johnson, and Swift will highlight the poetry, prose, and fiction of the period.

From 1642-60 the theaters of England were closed by the ruling Puritan Protectorate. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, so was English drama performance. This course explores major plays of the Restoration Period as well as the sociopolitical context that gave rise to it, and the English theater's most dramatic innovation: the introduction of women actors.

The 1940s was a unique decade in American history. Dominated by Americas entry into World War II, the 1940s were also a boom time for American creativity in the arts and sciences. During these ten years, the country saw the emergence of the American musical on Broadway, while at the movie theaters Americans watched Westerns and, later in the decade, the stylistic films noir. The first successful use of penicillin came in the 1940s, along with the launch of commercial television stations, and the shocking arrival of Abstract Expressionism. Americans listened to Big Band music, radio comedies and dramas, and Edward R. Murrows broadcasts from London during the Blitz. American Letters saw the publication of John Crowe Ransoms The New Criticism, the use of traditional forms in the work of poets such as Robert Lowell, the coming of American realism in fiction, and the staging of the stark plays of Eugene ONeill. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this course will examine a number of American works (novels, poems, radio broadcasts, films, Broadway cast recordings) to help students come to an understand of the singular nature of the American experience in the 1940s.

Undeniably, we live in a visual culture. Film and television have become the dominant creative modes. How do today's writers compete in a world dominated by image? What are their concerns? How have they experimented with and challenged traditional narrative forms and genres? This course surveys some of the most dynamic contemporary poets, novelists, and dramatists who are making a name for themselves today.

Cold War politics, Civil Rights and the Women's Movement, the Vietnam War, the Me Generation, Wall Street, Cyberspace. How did U.S. writers and artists respond to all this? This course investigates how poets, fiction writers, and playwrights dealt with some of the major questions of their generation. Works may include poets Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, W.S. Merwin, and Rita Dove; fiction writers James Dickey, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler; and playwrights Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Edward Albee, and Anna Deveare Smith.

No other city in America (or perhaps the world) has fired the literary imagination more than New York. We will look at the incredible diversity of this literature, from immigrant narratives and migration tales to essays, comic strips, and short stories. We will also investigate what it is about New York that provokes such interest among writers. What is New York a metaphor for--power, prestige, poverty, diversity, American exceptionalism? Why does the rest of the country continue to care about New York stories?

Arguably, modern American poetry stems from two mid-19th-century master poets: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. This course closely analyzes the canon of both poets and may also provide an overview of subsequent poets influenced by the lady from Amherst and grey man from Camden.

Classical Mythology is a literature course that surveys the evolution of Greek and Roman beliefs about gods, heroes, monsters, and the creation of the universe and considers the continuing influence of these archetypes and myths on the art, literature, and culture of the Western world. Theories regarding the purpose and function of myth are also explored. Readings include both ancient texts and secondary sources. 3 credits.

This course explores literature and photography as ways of seeing the world, and as artistic and evidentiary ways for human beings to represent the world around them and to express themselves. Photography and literature are examined as companion forms in artistic movements such as realism, expressionism, and modernism. We will also develop and explore our own photographic eye. During spring break 2013, we are planning to go on a trip to Cuba along with St. Francis students from sociology, Spanish, and creative writing. The trip is optional.

This course provides students with the necessary digital publishing industry. In addition, to prepare students for cutting-edge writing and publishing jobs, the course places students at the frontlines by providing hands-on experience in helping to run Unbound Brooklyn, the literary journal of St. Francis College Low-Residency MFA in Writing. After taking this course, students will be one step closer to vibrant, socially conscious careers in digital publishing and storytelling.

Close reading of the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer, including _The Canterbury Tales_. Medieval culture and thought formulate essential background for an understanding of Chaucer's works.

An examination of William Shakespeare's life and works with readings selected from poems, sonnets, and plays. Included is a study of important cultural history of Tudor and Stuart England.

An examination of John Milton's life and works with a focus on _Paradise Lost_ but including his sonnets, elegies, and selections from his prose and dramatic works.

This course will survey plays from world drama and theatre traditions from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the early nineteenth century. Readings will include such plays as Oedipus Rex, Lysistrata, The Second Shepherd's Play, Volpone, School for Scandal, and Faust. Students will attend at least one live performance.

This course will survey plays from world drama and theatre traditions from the late nineteenth century to contemporary. Readings will include such plays as A Doll House, Trifles, Six Characters in Search of an Author, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Laramie Project, and Arcadia. Students will attend at least one live performance.

This course looks at the long neglected fields of Native American, African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic-/Latino-American literature. Possible authors include: Momaday, Morrison, Lahiri, Silko, Erdrich, Anaya, Cisneros, Alexie, Hijuelos, Kingston, Tan, Ng, and Kogawa.

This course takes an interdisciplinary look at American sports writing and film as cultural expression. Possible focuses include but are not limited to: baseball, football, basketball, and the Olympic Games.

This course will examine the literary tradition of stories set in a speculative universe. Dystopian novels create worlds that revolve around a set of principles that enlighten and heighten social, scientific, technological, political, personal or psychological conditions. We will discuss the interplay between major authors, scientific and sociological foresight, and how our world today has been influenced by ideas from speculative fiction. Works may include: Labyrinths, Jorge Louis Borges Neuromancer, William Gibson A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller JR Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick The Night of the Long Knives, Fritz Leiber Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card The Watchman, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Literature, Art, Culture, human aspiration or struggle does not exist only in the country or culture one grows up in, but in its inextricable connection to all countries both historically and in the present. Literature of course can and does deal with the individual, with the particular, yet always in the context of the Universal, that is in how we all share in the universal, how we all participate, as individuals, in the past as well as the present, in the stirring of the Universal pot. This course will survey Modernist, Contemporary and post-Modernist periods, of World Literature and will include such International writers as Lu Xun, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anna Akhmatova, Natalia Ginzburg, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, Marguerite Duras, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christa Wolf, Ismail Kadare, Leslie Marman Silko, Ursula Hegi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alia Mamdough, Amanatta Forna, Arundhati Roy, Mariane Satrapi and others.

Students will read and create original works in a range of creative genres, including fiction, poetry, performance poetry, creative nonfiction, drama, comics, journalism, film, graphic design, and multimedia.

This course will provide instruction and practice in close reading of literary texts; an introduction to the techniques of literary creation; practice in writing analytically and critically about works of literature; and an introduction to literary criticism as an aid to understanding and as a resource in extending the conversation about literature.

Some of the most highly praised and canonized women authors emerged during the modernist period. This course investigates their literature and think about why this is such a fruitful literary period for them. While the authors in this course write from different traditions and disparate positions, they are also responding to common events and ideologies. Authors could include Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Carson McCullers, Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Wolfe, Stevie Smith, Jean Rhys, and Djuna Barnes among others.

Modernism consists of experimental literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some ways, the literature was experimental in style. More often, however, literary themes became more open and daring, ranging from subjects and themes dealing with evolution, the horror of war, women's issues, sexuality, the fragmentation of identity, or the politics of colonialism. While emphasis might fall on literature in English, this course is international in scope.

This course will chart the evolution and development of European Modernism from Parisian salons to the backyards and front porches of American towns. Writers such as Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Faulkner, Stevens, and William Carlos Williams may be considered.

Postmodernism is the term used to describe art and literature since mid-20th century, a period showing the effects of totalitarian states, the threat of nuclear and thermal annihilation, environmental catastrophe, globalization of industry and culture, and the digitalization of communication. This course offers an introduction to ideas surrounding postmodernism by looking at some of the work of John Updike, Paul Auster, and other writers or artists routinely identified as postmodernist.

Politics, culture, and history in the theme of detection from early tales by, for example, Edgar Allan Poe (_Murders in the Rue Morgue_) and Sir Arthur Conan Coyle (_Sherlock Holmes_), through such writers as Wilkie Collins (_The Moonstone_), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (_Lady Audley's Secret_), Bram Stoker (_Dracula_), Robert L. Stevenson (_Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_), Charles Dickens (_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_), to Henry James (_The Princess Casamassima_) and Joseph Conrad (_The Secret Agent_), and other recent manifestations in Agatha Christie and P.D. James.

Cross-listed with: SOC-3130. This course is designed as an introduction to representations of crime and justice in contemporary American society. The course will focus on constructions of crime and justice in literature, comic books, and film. We will explore the social construction of crime and the cultural meanings that these images provide. We will debunk various crime myths and deconstruct stereotypes perpetuated by popular images of criminality. The course is interdisciplinary, providing students with multiple perspectives on crime and criminality and explores ways of critically analyzing and interpreting media images.

A cultural, historical, and aesthetic study of, for instance, the prophetic and profound visions of William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to, for example, Lord Byron's _Don Juan_, with an examination of poetry and letters by writers such as P.B. Shelley, John Keats, and Edward Fitzgerald (_The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_). Readings could also include prose by William Hazlitt, Thomas DeQuincey, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (_Frankenstein_).

A close analysis of three master writers from the American Renaissance period. Close attention is paid to topics such as memory, nationhood, identity, religion and the unknown, race, class, and gender.

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are a core of readings for this course which will turn to the influence these writers have on 20th-century literature and thought. Other selections of representative poetry, fiction, and prose will be included.

Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Cardinal Newman, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, George Eliot, Thomas Henry Huxley on the pains and joys of human life, love, and marriage at home and in society, the role of men and women, liberty, arts and letters, and science, where particular attention to historical and cultural considerations prevails.

This course will explore the literatures and cultures that arose as a result of English colonial domination. The postcolonial issues of hybridity, unhomedness, indigenous essentialism, contestedness of the English language, among others, will be explored. Literature and theoretical readings may include works by Naipaul, Hulme, Mukherjee, Ondaatje, Achebe, Friel, Rushdie, Bhabha, Said.

This course will examine significant works of genre literature through the lens of literary theory. By reading, analyzing and writing about genres such as detective fiction, horror stories, and romance novels, students will come to an understanding of the complex nexus in which theory and literature meet. In the course of their semester of inquiry, students will find that the very genres they are studying are expanded, explicated, and even problematized through the application of literary theories.

This course will examine the nature of comedy, including its relation to the normative values of the society that produces it. Plays and theoretical writings from classical to contemporary times will be read. The class will attend a live performance.

This course examines the development of American Drama; the great age of innovative American Drama and theater practice; and the great theater houses. Playwrights may include O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Mamet, Albee, among others. The class attends a live performance.

July 2, 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation was the culmination of many decades of difficult, often dangerous, work by both civil rights leaders and ordinary Americans who believed that all people were created equal and should enjoy equal protection under the law. This course examines the American civil rights movement through its literature: speeches, editorials, novels, poems, short stores, music and film. Students will trace the course of the modern battle for civil rights from its roots in the abolitionists of the 1800s through A. Philip Randolph and his March on Washington Movement of 1941 to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and beyond.

This course will examine the stories and novels upon which many of Alfred Hitchcock's films are based, as well as some of the films themselves. Hitchcock transformed these literary works into unparalleled film masterpieces of mystery and suspense, giving students the opportunity to analyze the process of adaptation from page to screen. In this course we will view such classic films as 39 Steps, Rope, Rear Window, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and others.

This course will explore the American obsession with murder and mayhem, the killer, the psycho in the American Psyche. From the Indian wars to the opening of the west, the mutual mass murder of the Civil War and its aftermath, from the growth of cities, the immigrant experience, racial inequality and urban blight, through depression and world war, the atomic age and beyond, violence, murder, mayhem, both organized and chaotic, individual and collective, has been part of the American imagination. Through the works of such writers as Poe, Hammett, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Wright, Brett Easton Ellis, Stephen King, as well as such filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, the course will examine the dark side of the American Dream, both real and imagined.

The course will provide a way of looking at urban literature as a momentary connection to the sensible and the intelligible world around us. Brooklyn is that world. As an introduction to literary themes in fiction, poetry, and film within the frame of Brooklyn, we will look into themes or motifs of works by authors and poets such as Bernard Malamud, Jonathan Lethem, Charles Perry, Colson Whitehead, Walt Whitman, Paul Auster, and David Amsden.

A reading of On the Origin of Species (1859, first edition, complete text) by Charles Darwin, in the context of selections from Genesis, William Paley (Natural Theology), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and T.H. Huxley. The emphasis of the course, however, is on Darwin's work, and so we will also read a very brief selection from Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). While the course is open to all majors, it has been designed with science majors in mind (particularly biology), since they might not have a chance, otherwise, to read (in the context of the period and other writings) what Darwin and Wallace mean in saying: evolution by means of natural selection of traits and characteristics through adaptive processes. Although literary elements might be discussed, the course (having a scientific audience in mind) will focus on rhetorical devices (such as substantive and evaluative claims; ethos, pathos, and logos; enabling assumptions and addressing opposition), the elements of argument, and how one assembles evidence in making a series of claims. For their documented essay, students will be encouraged to read science papers in current journals, as well. As a naturalist, Darwin's writings offer an excellent grounding in the fundamentals of how to observe the diversity of life and how to make inferences about the origins and survival mechanisms of such.

How has storytelling changed in the digital age? In this course, students will explore the various ways stories are told in the digital age across a range of media. Students will also learn how to make their own digital stories. For example, we will look at/create podcasts, vlogs, etc. Students will work in and analyze various modes of written expression and oral communications in and for public settings. Students will also learn how to locate, evaluate, and effectively use different communication technologies.

This 3000-level course would look at American women's writing from 1880-the present. We will primarily read fiction and short stories. Topics would include: Race, Sexuality, Women's Rights, Immigration, and Class. Literary time periods and women's output would also be addressed, looking specifically at Realism, Modernism and Post-Modern writing. Authors would include: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Conner, Tillie Olsen, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Sandra Cisneros.

A reading of On the Origin of Species (1859, first edition, complete text) by Charles Darwin, in the context of selections from Genesis, William Paley (Natural Theology), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and T.H. Huxley. The emphasis of the course, however, is on Darwin's work, and so we will also read a very brief selection from Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). While the course is open to all majors, it has been designed with science majors in mind (particularly biology), since they might not have a chance, otherwise, to read (in the context of the period and other writings) what Darwin and Wallace mean in saying: evolution by means of natural selection of the fittest through adaptive processes. Although literary elements might be discussed, the course (having a scientific audience in mind) will focus on rhetorical devices (such as substantive and evaluative claims; ethos, pathos, and logos; enabling assumptions), the elements of argument, and how one assembles evidence in making a series of claims. (Students will be encouraged to read science papers in current journals, as well.) As a naturalist, Darwin's writings offer an excellent grounding in the fundamentals of how to observe the diversity of life and how to make inferences about the origins and survival mechanisms of such. There will be one short, analytical paper, one class presentation, and one longer (light) research paper. While the instructor will guide the class with some presentation, his aim is to have the students study the texts so as to generate meaningful and substantive class discussions.

This course will explore a range of historical, cultural, social, political, and literary issues at play in The Wire.

The doppelg?nger, German for double walker, can be described as one's alter ego, that mirror image that reveals our darker, hidden selves. This course will explore the doppelg?nger in literature in such works as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyl and Mr Hyde, EA Poe's William Wilson, and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

The aim of the course is to have students read environmentally oriented non-fiction texts by scientists or social scientists. Principally, the purpose is to engage students in a look at environmental concerns across the recent past by reading and discussing books by Carl Sagan, Kirkpatrick Sale, Rachel Carson, James Lovelock, E.O. Wilson, and Bill McKibben.

A study of work by Jane Goodall (In the Shadow of Man; Through a Window), Dian Fossey (Gorillas in the Mist), Birut Galdikas (Reflections of Eden), Shirley Strum (Almost Human), and Karen Strier (Faces in the Forest). Students will read remarkable narratives by women scientists who endured tremendous hardships and risks to engage in long-term field studies of wild chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, orangutans, olive baboons, and muriqui monkeys. While the field research in every case began as a species study, environmental and animal welfare concerns eventually took hold as well.

Nothing has inspired more fear and terror in fiction and film than stories of the human mind gone wrong. This course will explore - in such works as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, Psycho, Vertigo, Silence of the Lambs, and others - the terrifying consequences that result when that fine line between fantasy and reality, between sanity and madness, ultimately disappears.

This course will examine contemporary trends in drama and theatre practice via readings and performance of works by playwrights such as Lauren Yee, Dominique Morisseau, Katori Hall, David Henry Hwang, Anna Deveare Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks. Attendance at one or more live performances will be a required part of this course.

Literature and Film of Stanley Kubrick This course will examine how stories and novels by writers such as Nabokov, Burgess, Thackeray and Stephen King-inspired many of the great films of director Stanley Kubrick-known for their dark humor and realism-such as Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Paths of Glory , The Shining and others.

The development of Irish Drama and theater spans both Ireland and America. Students will learn about Ireland's 110-year-old Abbey Theatre, the major catalyst for a distinctly Irish drama. Readings will include such plays as The Rising of the Moon, The Playboy of the Western World, A Long Day's Journey Into Night, Translations, and The Weir. Students will attend at least one live performance. Prerequisite: Any ENG 2000 or higher. 3 credits.

Women have a long history of writing for performance. This course will introduce students to early playwrights such as Hrotsvitha and Aphra Behn and then focus on modern and contemporary playwrights such as Sophie Treadwell, Susan Glaspell, Lorraine Hansberry, Caryl Churchill, Ama Ata Aidoo, Yasmina Rez, Sarah Ruhl, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks among others. Students will attend at least one live performance.

This course will focus on the fiction and essays of James Baldwin as a means toward understanding the ongoing civil rights movement and other contemporary issues concerning identity and culture.

This course will begin by looking at the works of the major authors of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, and Claude McKay. Then, during the second half of the semester, we will look at their lasting impact on Black writers in the United States during the second half of the 20th century, including works by James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Tony Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The general aim of this seminar is to study Dante's major work: The Comedia. The complexity of the poem in its canticles: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso and its beauty, require careful and regular reading of the text along with a consideration of some major commentaries. Pope Paul IV, also a Dante scholar, at the end of the Vatican Council, in solemn ceremony in the Baptistry in Florence, had Dante Alighieri declare the Poet Laureate of Christendom. The seminar will look to understand why.

Willa Cather is considered by many to be one of America's best writers. She has a huge, dedicated following and the scholarship on Cather is immense. But she has never fit very easily into the accepted American literary canon. Part of this has to do with questions of literary genre: Is she a realist? A modernist? A regionalist? She also brings up many interesting debates around the place of biography when reading and analyzing literature. For example, what role does her sexuality play in understanding her fiction? Was she a lesbian? Does it matter? Does her gender and her sexuality have anything to do with her uneasy place in the literary canon? We will read Cather's fiction and a few of her short stories. We will also read sections of two famous biographies on Cather as well as scholarly articles on her fiction, her life and the politics of reading itself

The Character and Consciousness English seminar offers a short survey of British novels from George Eliot (Middlemarch), Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles), E.M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India), and D.H. Lawrence (The Rainbow). The novels are part of the literature of transition from late Victorian to early modern, and the focus of class conversation will deal with character, ethical behavior, and the question of self.

This seminar will focus on the works of Anna Deavere Smith and Moises Kaufman, whose groundbreaking plays have established the genre of documentary theatreplays created through extensive interviews with real people. What new sensibilities, insights, and techniques arise from such a process? What do we learn about our American character and identities? Among the plays to be read are Let Me Down Easy, Fires in the Mirror, Seven, The Laramie Project, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

This seminar will explore the major fiction of Herman Melville. Possible topics include race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, epic, and ecology. We will also explore the ethical, moral, and political issues addressed in Melville's work. A large section of the course will be devoted to Melville's epic 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. Other works to be explored include: Type,Bartleby-The Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, The Encantadas, and Billy Budd.

We will examine a number of works by British author D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), such as his novels The Rainbow, Women in Love, Kangaroo, and Aaron's Rod. We will also read his book of essays, Twilight in Italy, and perhaps some of his poetry or other works. Roughly speaking, the theme of the seminar is leadership, on a personal, interpersonal, and political level.

This seminar will focus on the works of Anna Deavere Smith, Moises Kaufman, Jessica Blank, and other playwrights whose groundbreaking plays have established the genre of documentary theatre-plays created through extensive interviews with real people. What new sensibilities, insights, and techniques arise from such a process? Among the plays to be read are Let Me Down Easy, Fires in the Mirror, Seven, The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and The Exonerated.

This seminar will explore the life, times, and work of the great American singer-songwriter, poet, and American icon Bob Dylan. Topics include: his musical (and literary) influences and influence; connections between his work and the social, political, cultural, and historical events and movements of the last half of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries; the nature of individual and collective identities.

In this seminar students will examine the modern epic fantasy series, and their historical, mythological and contemporary influences. Series such as A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin, Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, Harry Potter by JK Rowling, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, and The Earthsea Chronicles by Ursula K le Guin offer intricate cycles of hero stories. Using the scholar Joseph Campbell's work to decode mythic themes, the seminar will explore the authors' relationships with one another, the progression of sequence from one book or episode to the next, and the role of modern fantasy as a portal to the historical and mythic traditions of epic tales.

The focus and emphasis of this course will fall on the character, consciousness and literary work of women writers in Britain. What does it mean to be a woman in a class-conscious society? What rights and privileges, if any, did women have at the end of the eighteenth century, during the nineteenth century, and at the beginning of the twentieth century in England? What types of domestic, social, and other constraints were imposed on women? What opportunities for love or work did women have? What choices did women have in terms of marriage and education? In addition to the seminal work about women's rights by Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century, how is it that a man, John S. Mill, comes to write The Subjection of Women (1869), rumored to have been written, and no doubt heavily influenced, by his wife Harriet Taylor Mill. In this way the course will consider the minds, manner, morals, and lives of women in England from the late eighteenth century up into the early twentieth century. Students will be encouraged to consider and discuss both sexuality and gender. Course content might vary, but authors covered may include: Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion), Charlotte Bront (Jane Eyre), Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton or North and South), George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss), and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own).

This seminar will examine a variety of artistic responses--memoirs, novels, shorts stories, poems, and films--to the Vietnam War.

Ray Bradbury is one of the great American storytellers. This seminar takes an in-depth approach to Bradbury's work through an examination of some of his most-famous stories and novels.

This course explores the ant-hero, the rebel, who has so completely captured the American imagination in literature and film. This is the outsider, the outcast, who struggles against the dark side of the American dream--its social inequality and moral bankruptcy, its political corruption, its economic greed and exclusion. This struggle, both internal and external, sometimes triumphant, sometimes fatal, will be illuminated in the works of Melville, Twain, Eliot, Hemingway, Anderson, Faulkner, Steinbeck, West, Ellison, O'Connor, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Bradbury, and others.

This seminar will focus on answering the question What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen? In addition to selected fiction and film, texts will include Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, essays of James Baldwin, selections from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and a range of interdisciplinary readings that address issues at play in our current social fabric related to, among other things, the following: individual and collective identities; protest, power, and privilege; rhetoric, truth, and artistic expression.

In this seminar students will discuss questions and concepts of identity as they are explored in literary and autobiographical works, and as they are studied and defined in disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, and law.

This seminar is an exploration of works by indigenous authors from cultures including Native American, Hawai'ian, New Zealand Maori, among others.

This course examines Vietnam as a war that changed America, and as a resilient people and culture, both contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American. Vietnamese, American, and Vietnamese-American works of literature, non-fiction, photography, news media, and film will be the subject of our study.

In literature as in film, dark humor often deals with the unlaughable, those taboo subjects that range from death and murder to family dysfunction to global conflagration. This course will explore-through literary works such as Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five and the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor and such films as Dr. Strangelove, The Trouble With Harry and Arsenic and Old Lace-how the dark side of humor can often illuminate the madness and absurdities of human life.

This course will explore a range of historical, cultural, social, political, and narrative issues at play in the television series The Wire

This course will focus on works of literary fiction that feature a working through of plot that applies the structures of the mystery genre. This course will examine the function of this genre device as a tool of revelation as used by literary novelists such as William Faulkner, Umberto Eco, and Iain Pears.

This seminar examines the visual storytelling of film director, David Fincher. Students will examine film and literary influences, including brief examinations into his commercials and music videos, as well as excerpts from shows such as Mindhunter and House of Cards. Possible films to be included in the course include Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Game, Panic Room, The Social Network, Gone Girl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Mank.

From the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Poe and Hawthorne to Black Mirror and the Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone, the concept of the Mask, has been used to obscure, to deceive, to hide, that which lies beneath the surface of human character, as well as to reveal and to illuminate the duality of human nature. In this seminar, we will explore the literary concept of the Mask through the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne, Wilde, Stevenson, Dunbar, Highsmith, and others. We will also view some thematically related films such as Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Teshigahara's The Face of Another, and Peale's Get Out!

How does fiction imagine humanity's future? What lessons and warnings do they offer? What commonalities do they share? How do they reimagine community as well as the individual's relationship to a changed society? How are issues of race, gender and sexuality imagined or reimagined in these futures? And, what do they tell us about the fears and hopes of the time in which they were written? This course will look at both science fiction and literary fiction. Authors include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Carmen Maria Machado, Charles Yu, Ted Chiang, Lucy Corin, and Tao Lin among others.

This tutorial will provide writing students with the opportunity to see their research and efforts materialize into an actual exhibition. The writing experience they get from this tutorial will be extensive. Grant writing, business letters, press releases, writing for the web, along with narrative and interpretive text will all be part of this tutorial.

This tutorial will have students design and pursue a series of independent projects focused on the drafting and editing of short stories and/or memoir pieces, with a view toward public presentation of their work. The instructor will meet with students both during and outside the weekly tutorial session, and will engage the group in peer editing activities.

This tutorial will explore artistic and social developments in literature and photography, as well as the nature of storytelling in words and in images. Readings, photographers, and activities will include, among others, On Photography, How The Other Half Lives, excerpts from Leaves of Grass, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, The Jazz Loft Project, photo essays, and a student group exhibit.

The tutorial to be offered will work on the process of designing, researching, and writing the senior thesis.

ENG 4411 is a writing tutorial intended to increase the student's ability to write effective business communications through memos and letters for both internal and external customer and clients audiences. Attention will also be paid to organization and communication skills needed to conduct meetings, projects, reporting, and daily communication. Prerequisite: Chairperson's approval.

This tutorial is a continuation of Advanced Fiction Writing and, for many, will serve as a bridge to a creative English thesis. The primary focus will be on workshopping student work. We will also read and analyze published short fiction (some chosen by me, some chosen by students) as writers as well as selected essays on craft and process. Each student will be expected to read and write about a particular issue of craft in a particular collection of short fiction that they will choose in consultation with me. We will meet as a group every other week; in addition, there will be individual consultations throughout the semester. Prerequisite: Chairperson's approval.

Course is designed to elevate a student's ability to write clear Standard Edited Written English for all college papers. The student is introduced to different composing procedures, editing strategies, and using multiple drafts during the course of the semester. Writing is taught as a continual learning process rather than just a finished product to be evaluated and graded. Students are also tutored in the fundamentals of the research process through the staged or scaffold completion of a well-informed and documented writing project. The use of library research is included in the course schedule, since students begin work on an extended writing project at the very start of the semester. Besides supporting the development of written sophistication and research competency, the tutorial aims to introduce the student writer to various strategies by having students write 4 or 5 short essays, with reflections on each piece of writing. Three credits. Prerequisites: Chairpersons approval.

This course provides the opportunity for students to work at department-approved locations for a structured, supervised, professional work experience within a company, non-profit organization, or approved institution.

When a student has a particular interest which is not addressed by any of the offerings in the English curriculum. When a student has been pursuing an idea and feels the need to do it on a more formal basis, it is possible to propose the idea for independent study. The student would seek out a member of the English faculty who would be willing and able to oversee or guide the student through a semester's activity on the subject. Specific guidelines for Independent Study in English are available in the English offices. Students interested in possible independent study should begin the process of securing a mentor and filling out the required forms before the Registrar's Office begins formal registration for the next semester.

This course provides students the opportunity to read, think, write, and discuss ideas for their senior thesis with their mentor. At the end of the course, students will have a completed proposal so that they can begin writing their thesis at the start of the following semester. At some point during the semester, the student must pick a second reader for their proposal and thesis.

Under the direction of an LWP faculty mentor, students develop an independent research or creative project (thesis) based on their thesis proposal in LWP 4996 Thesis Preparation and Proposal. Students will work with their faculty mentor to finalize their project, with regular meetings required throughout the semester.

This Honors Seminar has the student think about Franciscan responses to the world: responses similar to or reinforced by the examined literature, particularly biographical vs. hagiographical elements in Francis of Assisi's life; the writings of Francis of Assisi and Clare of Assisi; writing about St. Francis and St. Clare; and an examination of their influence on society throughout history.

In this seminar, we will read, listen to, and view works of prose, poetry, and drama from American Nobel Laureates. Each student will explore the reasons why the Nobel Committee selected a particular author for this prestigious award. Students will also be expected to develop some familiarity with American culture and aesthetics through oral reports. Through course discussion, presentations, and writing, we will collectively attempt to articulate why certain American authors have been singled out for international literary and aesthetic fame and we will place these authors within a globalized aesthetic framework.

A reading of On the Origin of Species (1859, first edition, complete text) by Charles Darwin, in the context of selections from Genesis, William Paley (Natural Theology), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and T.H. Huxley. The emphasis of the course, however, is on Darwin's work, and so we will also read a very brief selection from Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). Students will read (in the context of the period and other writings) what Darwin and Wallace mean in saying: evolution by means of natural selection of traits and characteristics through adaptive processes. The course will focus on rhetorical devices (such as substantive and evaluative claims; ethos, pathos, and logos; enabling assumptions and addressing opposition), the elements of argument, and how one assembles evidence in making a series of claims.

This interdisciplinary course brings together psychology and literature in order to examine how our view of the body, health, and illness are connected to changing psychosocial and political ideals. Gender, as a specific factor of these ideals, is the underlying focus of the course readings and discussions.

An exploration of blues, jazz, and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. In the process of developing a stronger, more critical appreciation of these art forms, students study such legendary figures as Alain Lock, WEB duBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. Lectures are supplemented with film, slides, and recorded examples. The class will attend live jazz performances.

This seminar examines representative works of utopian and dystopian literature and considers how the conception of perfect societies, and of the radically imperfect ones, illuminates our values and priorities as citizens of a society and as individuals. Such works also invite reflection on the achievements and failings of our own society. Among the readings are such works as More's Utopia, The Handmaid's Tail, Ecotopia, and excerpts from Genesis, Dante's Inferno, and Plato's Republic.

This interdisciplinary honors seminar will explore neurodiversity as it is represented in literature and film, and as a force in the creation of these works. What can literature tell us about neurodiversity? And what can neurodiversity tell us about literature? This interdisciplinary course brings together creative, medical, historical, philosophical, psychological, and analytical texts in order to explore issues and ideas related to neurodiversity in the context of a range of social constructs and beliefs, including race, class, gender, sexuality, politics, success, truth, goodness, power, and (dis)ability.

A study of work by Jane Goodall (In the Shadow of Man; Through a Window), Dian Fossey (Gorillas in the Mist), Birut Galdikas (Reflections of Eden), Shirley Strum (Almost Human), and Karen Strier (Faces in the Forest). Students will read remarkable narratives by women scientists who endured tremendous hardships and risks to engage in long-term field studies of wild chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, orangutans, olive baboons, and muriqui monkeys. While the field research in every case began as a species study, environmental and animal welfare concerns eventually took hold as well.