English 267 Courses – Fall 2002

 

Eng. 266B – Study of the Short Story

CID: 5936 (10:00-11:00 MWF) – Dr. Tracy Bilsing

CID: 5939 (1:00-2:00 MWF) – Dr. Tracy Bilsing

CID: 7031 (12:00-1:00 MWF) – Dr. Tracy Bilsing

 

This course will focus on the history of the short story (the evolution of its form, subject matter, and author’s technique).  We will explore the unique nature of this type of fiction which draws from both the novel and poetry to achieve its form.  Too often overlooked as a “fluff” genre, this particular form has proven, until recently, to have been the most accessible to the general reading public.  Poe’s definition of modern short fiction will provide a good base from which to start, and students will be provided with various critical overviews of the short story form in order to help them understand, interpret, and write about short fiction.  Students will read stories by well-known masters and innovators of short fiction including, Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Mansfield, Lawrence, Hemingway, Welty, and Hurston.  Supplemental stories may be included as part of the required reading.

 

Eng. 266C – Introduction to Fiction

CID: 5935 (10:00-11:00 MWF) – Dr. Julie Hall

CID: 5941 (12:00-1:00 MWF) – Dr. Julie Hall

 

               In this course, we'll study fiction from various periods. Texts could include an anthology of British and American short stories and these five novels: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, William Faulkner's Go Down Moses, and Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster.

 

Eng. 266I – 20th Century Literature

CID: 5942 (3:00-4:30 MW) – Dr. Gene Young

CID: 5944 (4:30-6:00 MW) – Dr. Gene Young

 

A general introduction to literature through the fiction, poetry, and drama of the 20th century.  Literature of the world is the subject, although the principal focus will be American literature.

 

Eng. 266N – The Fairytale

CID: 5949 (12:30-2:00 TTh) – Dr. Melissa Morphew

 

From Horny-Toads to Handsome Princes: 

The Fairytale and Its Contemporary Transformations

 

This class will explore the genre of the fairytale and its impact upon western culture.  We will read and analyze the original Grimms’ Tales (as well as others) and look at ways in which writers have either re-written (or re-visioned) these classic tales to address contemporary issues and themes, and/or at ways in which contemporary writers are revitalizing and continuing the tradition of the literary fairytale.  Some of the books we will read may include Anne Sexton’s Transformations, Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde, A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn and the Nightingale and/or Elementals, Angela Carter’s Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, Maria Tatar’s The Hard Facts of Grimms’ Fairytales, The Oxford Book of Modern Fairytales edited by Alison Lurie, etc.  We may also watch and analyze films which have used classic fairytales as their basis, such as Everafter and Snow White: A Tale of Terror.  

 

Eng. 266O – Introduction to Literature

CID: 5947 (11:00-12:30 TTh) – Dr. Heidi Johnsen

CID: 5950 (2:00-3:30 TTh) – Dr. Heidi Johnsen

 

This course will examine some of the fundamentals of literature: How is it different from other writing? What are some strategies for understanding literature?  How is writing about literature different from other kinds of writing? How is one type of literature different from another?  How does the form an author chooses affect the meaning of the writing?  We will focus on three specific types or “genres” of literature in this introduction: poetry, short stories, and drama.

 

Eng. 266Q – American Humor

CID: 5946 (9:30-11:00 TTh) – Dr. Robert Donahoo

CID: 5951 (2:00-3:30 TTh) – Dr. Robert Donahoo

This course uses popular and literary humorists to give students an understanding of the basic concepts of humor as well as opportunities to practice their skills in thinking and writing about literature. Classes are designed to explain various humor types (satire, farce, black humor, ethnic humor, slapstick) and humor techniques (deflation, reversal, incongruity) that are easily seen in understandable popular works of humor as well as to show students how to apply the concepts to more literary texts.  The literary writers we will read include Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Jean Shepherd, Christopher Durang, Nathaniel West, Saul Bellow, and John Irving.  While most of our reading will focus on prose fiction, we will also look at a play, some poems, and at least two films.  Students will be asked to write two brief papers and to take two or three exams (as time allows) to determine their course grade.  Students who take this course should have a broad sense of humor and enjoy reading. 

Eng. 267G – Modern British Mythmakers

CID: 5960 (9:30-11:00 TTh) – Dr. Darci Hill

CID: 5963 (12:30-2:00)– Dr. Darci Hill

 

This course will be a study focused on representative works of British mythmakers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, George McDonald, Lewis Carroll, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton. All of the writers mentioned above had a shared passion for myth, fantasy, the heroic tradition, philology, and the compatibility of faith and reason.

 

Eng. 267I – Literature of the Supernatural

CID: 5957 (3:00-4:30 MW) – Dr. Debbie Phelps

CID: 6296 (10-11 MWF) – Dr. Debbie Phelps

 

A selection of short fiction and novels by British and American writers of suspense, horror, and science fiction, including Poe, Stephen King, and Robert Louis Stevenson. There will be three exams, one short paper and an oral presentation required.

 

Eng. 267M – Science and Technology

CID: 5956 (12-1 MWF)– Dr. Carroll Nardone

 

This course takes a historical and cultural view of how science and technology have been used as themes or have been represented in works of fiction.  We will begin with classic nineteenth century applications, such as Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and follow through with a postmodern critique of science, technology, and cultural representations.  Latter day authors include Michael Crichton and Kurt Vonnegut.

 

Since both science and technology are relative terms, in other words their definitions slip through time, it is important for us to study both the authors and the social contexts of the works in addition to studying the works themselves.  As such, students will be responsible for researching author backgrounds and presenting this information to the class.  Students will also lead class discussions on the major works.

 

This class is meant to help students look critically at texts and to form multi-layered opinions about their value through an analytic process.  We will work as a large discussion group and students are expected to take an active role in their learning and in each class session.

 

 

Eng. 267N - Cannibals, Savages/Headhunters

CID: 5954 (10-11 MWF) – Dr. Shane Graham

CID: 5955 (11-12 MWF) – Dr. Shane Graham

 

When Columbus discovered the New World at the end of the fifteenth century, he found strange peoples whose customs he thought primitive. The tales that he and later explorers brought back fired the imaginations of Europeans with pictures of bloodthirsty cannibals and noble savages, even as the Americas were being mercilessly colonized and exploited for their vast material wealth. The course will begin with the assumption that the development of racial ideologies and the rise of European colonialism are deeply interrelated. Among the central questions we will be asking are: What role did literature (as well as film and visual culture) play in the development of racial ideologies? How does literature reflect and respond to the rise of capitalism and imperialism in Europe, and especially in the British Empire? Is race a biological concept, or a historically constructed one? Why does the western imagination seem to depend so much on stereotypes of the racial “other”? How does literature by writers from former European colonies respond to western representations of Africans, Indians, or American Indians? Our reading list will begin with excerpts from the diaries and letters of Columbus and other explorers, and will include essays by Montaigne and Rousseau, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Kipling’s Kim, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Walcott’s Pantomime. This will be a writing-intensive class, with short writing assignments due almost every class day.

 

Eng. 267P – Classics Updated

CID: 5962 (12:30-2:00 TTh)– Dr. Diane Dowdey

Some stories are so much a part of the human experience that they get told and re-told.  We find that the situations, the types of characters, and the emotions portrayed are true across time and cultures.  Writers and film directors often update the story, change the time period, or even change the work from a comedy to a tragedy or vice versa.  In this course, we will look at one of the oldest works of literature, Homer's Odyssey and two recent retellings, Cold Mountain, a novel set during the American Civil War, and the film O Brother Where Art Thou?, set during the American Depression.  Shakespeare's Othello, a story about rivalry, interracial love, and jealousy,  has been set in an American high school by director Tim Blake Nelson in the movie O.  Jane Austen was an astute observer of female friendships and courtship customs in nineteenth century England.  Amy Heckerling takes the plot of Emma and places it in California in the 1990s in Clueless.  Students will be expected to write responses to the daily assignments, write comparison papers, and take exams over the material.  Much of the course work will be through class discussions.

Eng. 267Q – Science vs. Humanism

CID: 5958 (3:00-4:30) – Dr. Phillip Parotti

CID: 5959 (6:00-7:30) – Dr. Phillip Parotti

 

This course considers a serious intellectual debate which began in the Renaissance and which continues today.

 

Eng. 267R – Southern Literature

CID: 5952 (8:00-9:00) – Dr. Linda Byrd

CID: 5953 (9:00-10:00) – Dr. Linda Byrd

 

This course, by focusing on the literary works of writers with a Southern heritage, provides an opportunity to examine the changing South of the twentieth century.  Through the texts, we will study the attitudes, assumptions, and values that have informed Southern literature from the turn of the century, through the great flowering of the Southern Renascence, to our contemporary postmodern world.  Throughout the course, we will discuss the importance of such “southern” concerns as race, religion, family, community, place, and the past in an effort to determine how these issues are reflected thematically in the literature.  Readings for the course will encompass various genres (short stories, poetry, drama, memoirs, essays, novel), and represent such major literary figures as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Ernest Gaines, Tennessee Williams, and Alice Walker, among others.