ENGLISH DEPARTMENT GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS

Unless otherwise noted, all courses are 3 credits.

ENG 599 Selected Topics
Emphasis on a particular author or group of authors,
subject(s), theme(s), literary movement(s), related
literary interests, or genre(s) of writing not considered
as extensively in the other courses listed here. 1-6 credits

ENG 608 Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Their Age
Examination of the major and minor works of Poe,
Hawthorne, Melville and their contemporaries
against the background of their political, cultural, and
philosophical contexts.

ENG 614 Applied English Linguistics: Grammar and Style
A study of modern English grammars (traditionalstructural
and transformational-generative) and their
application to the understanding and appreciation of
style in language and literature.

ENG 615 Advanced Critical Writing
This course explores the various modes of essay
writing, paying particular attention to scholarly
analyses, argumentative essays, contemplative
intellectual works, and critical interpretations of
culture. Class readings survey the critical and
belletristic tradition of the essay form and its
contemporary manifestations. Students are encouraged
to expand and deepen their thematic range,
refine their writing styles, and further develop their
own voices.

ENG 616 Creative Writing I
Workshop devoted to writing in a variety of genres
including fiction, poetry, and drama. Discussion will
also be devoted to the style and technique of
established and contemporary authors.

ENG 617 Modern Techniques of Composition
An introduction to, and practical application of,
modern techniques of teaching and learning composition,
including free writing, embedding, imitation
and cumulation. Emphasis is on writing as process,
from self-expression through exposition to imaginative
creation.

ENG 618 Modern English and Its Background
Study of the English language from its origins to the
present, with detailed attention to changes in
grammar, syntax, phonology and vocabulary.

ENG 619 Writing for the Magazine Market
Intended for students interested in developing a
professional style of writing. Types of writing may
include fiction, nonfiction, poetry—anything that is
suitable for periodicals, commercial or noncommercial.

ENG 620 Teaching Writing as Process I
Designed primarily for high school English teachers,
this intensive seminar introduces the many new
techniques of teaching composition, discusses the
process of writing and explores the results of the
latest research. Members of the seminar participate in
practical workshops, in which they evolve individual
methods for use in their own school districts, thereby
enhancing the writing process for their students.

ENG 621 Fiction Writing Seminar I
This intensive seminar covers fundamental as well as
experimental techniques employed in the writing of
fiction. Students practice a variety of writing,
reading, and workshop skills, and peruse contemporary
published writing with an eye on its style, voice,
theme, and craft.

ENG 622 Fiction Writing Seminar II
Designed for those students who have completed
Fiction Writing Seminar I and who wish to continue
their study of fiction writing technique in greater
depth. Classroom time is divided among lecture,
discussion, and analysis of student manuscripts.
Each participant should bring a complete or nearly
complete first draft of a manuscript (a short story or
section of a novel) to the first session of the seminar.
Prerequisite: ENG 621

ENG 623 Poetry Writing Seminar
For those students interested in writing poetry and
learning poetic form. Emphasis is on discussion of
the student’s work in a workshop environment.

ENG 625 Teaching Writing as Process II
An advanced seminar for those teachers or administrators
who want to apply the principles learned in
“Teaching Writing as Process” or a comparable
introductory-level course in composition teaching.
Students use their understanding of composition
theory to design courses or curricula for use in their
institutions. Emphasis is placed on designing
assignments, conducting workshops, contemporary
research on the project, institutional support,
evaluation modes, research opportunities, and
preparation of a manuscript for publication.
Prerequisite: ENG 620 or equivalent

ENG 626 Creative Writing II
An advanced workshop required for students in the
writing program. Students may be proficient in one
or several genres including poetry, fiction, playwriting,
screenwriting, memoir, biography, and
autobiography. Students will more fully explore their
own voices and will be encouraged to try longer,
more sustained efforts.
Prerequisite: ENG 616

ENG 627 Writing Scripts for Movies and Television
This course is designed to give students practice in
writing for movies and television, emphasizing skills
in developing pitches, treatments, characters,
dialogue, action, visual cues, scenes, and plots.
Student writing is supplemented with readings of
exceptional scripts with occasional exploration of
their adaptation to either the big or small screen.

ENG 628 Short Story Writing
This course explores the fundamentals of writing short
fiction. Students practice a variety of writing, reading,
and workshopping skills, and peruse contemporary
and traditional published short story writing with an
eye on its style, voice, theme, and craft.

ENG 629 Playwriting
The principles of dramatic writing applied to the
creation of fictional scripts for the stage. Emphasis is
on literary style, raft, and structure. There will be
some lecture and discussion, though the class will
primarily concern itself with the critique of student
work.

ENG 630 Book and Magazine Editing
The course is aimed primarily at the student planning
a career in publishing. It should, however, be of value
to anyone interested in writing, in modern techniques
of printing or in the process of book and magazine
production. The main focus of the course is on basic
skills that any editor must know: copy editing,
proofreading, copyfitting, typemarking, and indexing.

ENG 631 Creative Non-Fiction Writing
This course is a seminar and writing-intensive workshop in the art of creative non-fictional prose. Students read and write a series of essays which may include memoirs of childhood, family histories, biographical sketches, travelogues, environmental pieces, reflections on cultural texts, explorations of self-identity, or contemplative intellectual works.

ENG 632 Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Their Age
Examines the major and minor works of Emerson,
Thoreau, and Whitman against the background of
their political and philosophical contexts.

ENG 633 Twain, James, Crane, Dickinson, and Their Age
Examines the major and minor works of Twain,
James, Crane, Dickinson, and their contemporaries
within historical, political, and cultural contexts.

ENG 634 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Selected poets from the classic moderns, the Harlem
Renaissance, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance,
the New York School, Black Mountain, language
poets. Modernism, Postmodernism, formalism,
confessional poetry, projective verse, ethnopoetics,
and the poetics of performance are among the literary
concepts that will be discussed.

ENG 635 Twentieth-Century American Fiction
Examination of the works of American moderns from
Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway to Thomas
Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, among others,
with a consideration of the contemporary trends that
their work has engendered.

ENG 636 Twentieth-Century American Drama
A study of the variety of dramatic modes ranging from
the traditional through the most experimental employed
by American playwrights beginning with O’Neill.
Representative plays by Williams, Miller, Hansberry,
Albee, Bullins, Hwang, Sondheim, Wasserstein,
Kushner, and avant-garde groups of the present day.

ENG 638 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
A study of the Canterbury Tales with special attention
to the tales as a reflection of Chaucer’s times.
Emphasis is placed on Chaucer’s language. Also
considered are some of Chaucer’s other works, such
as Troilus and Criseyde.

ENG 640 Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Romances
A close study of selected tragedies and romances,
with an emphasis on their historical context and in
light of contemporary critical theory.

ENG 641 Shakespeare’s Comedies and Histories
A close study of selected comedies and histories, with
an emphasis on their historical context and in light of
contemporary critical theory.

ENG 643 The Golden Age of Drama: Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
A study of plays selected to illustrate the development
of English drama from the early reign of
Elizabeth through the accession of James I. Dramatists
include Jonson, Marlowe, Kyd, Dekker, Greene,
Chapman, and Webster.

ENG 644 Milton’s Poetry and Prose
A study of John Milton’s poetry and prose, with
emphasis on the cultural context in which they were
written. Works may include Lycidas, Sonnets, Paradise
Lost, Areopagitica, and Paradise Regained.

ENG 645 Restoration and Eighteenth- Century Drama
A study of the cultural and political contexts of
Restoration and eighteenth-century drama including
such authors as Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve,
Farquhar, Behn, Manley, Dryden, Goldsmith,
Sheridan, Gay, Burney.

ENG 646 The World of the Satirists
Study of the Augustan humanists’ dissatisfaction
with the emerging modern age. Consideration is also
given to the critics of the Augustan humanist view.
Authors include Pope, Swift, Dryden, Rochester,
Behn, Defoe, Mandeville, and Manley.

ENG 647 Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge
A study of the major poems of Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, their critical theories, their relationship to
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precursors and
to women writers of the period, and the chief
criticism and historical contexts of their work.

ENG 648 Byron, Shelley, Keats
A study of the major work of Byron, Shelley, Keats, of
their relationship to women writers of the period, and
of the philosophical and political backgrounds of the
Romantic movement.

ENG 649 Tennyson, Browning and Their Era
A study of the selected verse of Tennyson, Browning,
Arnold and other nineteenth-century British poets,
together with some of the notable prose works of
Macaulay, Carlyle, Newman, and Arnold.

ENG 650 Rossetti and His Circle
A study of representative works by Morris, Meredith,
the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hardy, Wilde, the Yellow
Book group, and others.

ENG 651 Women and Autonomy: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature
Study of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century
British and American women writers, from a variety
of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, to determine
how they have imagined and constructed women’s
roles. Writers studied might include Jane Austen,
Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Harriet Jacobs, Kate
Chopin, Tillie Olsen, Toni Morrison, Anita Brookner,
Pat Barker, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

ENG 652 The Victorian Novel
Discussion of representative works of the major
Victorian novelists. Attention is given to such
novelists as the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope,
George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy. Students are
expected to increase their knowledge (through
supplementary reading) of the social, political, and
religious ideas—conservative and revolutionary—of
the period and to evaluate the significance of these
ideas in the light of their impact upon the intellectual
life of the times.

ENG 653 Twentieth-Century British Drama
A study of plays by representative British dramatists
from the 1890s to the present, with an emphasis on
the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Other dramatists
include Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Granville-Barker,
O’Casey, T.S. Eliot, Osborne, and Pinter.

ENG 654 Twentieth-Century British Poetry
A study of the major British poets representing
various schools and movements, including Eliot,
Yeats, Lawrence, Graves, Auden, Spender, Lewis, D.
Thomas, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney.

ENG 655 Twentieth-Century British Fiction
A study of major novelists and story writers,
including such authors as Conrad, Joyce, H.G. Wells,
D.H. Lawrence, Woolf, Mansfield, Bennett,
Galsworthy, and Forster. The major criticism of their
work is also studied.

ENG 656 Contemporary Modes of Criticism
An examination of various contemporary approaches
to the analysis and evaluation of literature. The course
begins with a consideration of traditional approaches
to literary criticism and analysis in Aristotle, Longinus,
and Horace, and in twentieth-century normative critics
such as Eliot, Brooks, and Richards. The second part of
the course introduces students to trends in contemporary
criticism such as Deconstructionism, New Historicism,
Feminist Criticism, Queer Theory, and Postcolonial
Theory. The principal aim of the course is to
familiarize the student with a range of approaches
for later exploration.

ENG 658 The Early English Novel
A study of the late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury
novel, with particular emphasis on the
history and criticism of the novel genre. Studied
writers may include Behn, Defoe, Haywood,
Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole, Smollett,
Burney, Austen, and others.

ENG 662 Seventeenth-Century Metaphysical Literature
Discussion of the poetry of Donne, Marvell, Herbert,
Vaughan, Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, Katherine
Philips, and the prose of Sir Thomas Browne and
Jeremy Taylor. Emphasis is on the metaphysical
vision of a universe that is one and organic, concepts
of human sexuality and death, and the techniques of
private-mode poetry and prose.

ENG 663 Jonson, Herrick and Their Contemporaries
Discussion of the Cavalier or Social Poets of the
seventeenth century, including Jonson, Herrick, King,
Carew, and Lovelace; the Public Poets, Milton and
Dryden; and selected prose of Milton, Burton, and
Bacon. Emphasis is on the concept of friendship and
the nature of true happiness, which is central to these
artists, and on the techniques of social and public
poetry and prose.

ENG 664 Johnson, Boswell and Their Circle
A study of the competing roles of sentiment and
reason in the move away from authoritarianism
toward liberalism and social reform as represented by
the writings of Johnson, Boswell, Walpole, Goldsmith,
Burney, Sterne, Burns, and Wollstonecraft.

ENG 671 Literature and Psychoanalysis
Examines the interrelationship between depth
psychology and literature, and the use of psychoanalysis
in interpreting works, in analyzing artistic
creativity and in practicing literary criticism. Selected
authors studied include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce,
Gide, Beckett, and Dostoevski.

ENG 672 The Literature of African Americans
A survey designed to provide students with an in-depth
understanding of the African American experience as it
has been presented in fiction, drama, and poetry. The
major focus is on literature as experience, as ideas and
as social analysis and criticism.

ENG 673 Fiction and Film
An examination of literature that has been adapted
from novel, story, play, myth, legend, and the Bible
into various film forms, including narrative and
animation. Works discussed and viewed may include
Tom Jones, Death in Venice, “Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge,” “Beauty and the Beast,” Black Orpheus, Hamlet,
The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and Cinderella.

ENG 674 Literature and the Arts
A study of literature adapted to art, dance, film, music,
opera, television and spoken-word recording that may
include The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
and the Disney animation; the Bible and paintings by
the Masters; Beaumarchais’ The Barber of Seville and
Rossini’s opera; Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and the
video adaptation; E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, The Tales
of Hoffmann opera by Offenbach, the Nutcracker ballet
by Baryshnikov; Shakespeare’s Othello and Verdi’s
opera adaptation; and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
in many of the arts, including Zeffirelli’s film, Delius’
opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, the B.B.C. video
production, and Michael Smuin’s ballet.

ENG 675 Cultural Perceptions in Books and Films
This course explores the various ways an individual
country, its people, and their culture are depicted and
perceived by writers and filmmakers, both natives
and non-natives alike. The course will focus on only
one country and will follow a given theme through a
variety of works, although the country and theme
may vary from semester to semester.

ENG 676 Noir Women: Women, Culture, and Film Noir
Through film, literature, and cultural history, this
course examines key issues raised by the genre of film
noir and the film noir heroine. Topics for discussion
include what makes a “bad” heroine, the purpose of
the film noir heroine fantasy for its audience, how the
portrayal of noir heroines reflects historical shifts in
attitude about the role of women, and the relationship
between the noir heroine’s rapacious desires and the
articulation of selfhood.

ENG 677 Ethnic American Literature
This course will explore the rich multicultural nature
of the American experience focusing on immigrant,
Native American, and African American literature in
their historical and cultural contexts. Students will be
encouraged to explore their own ethnic roots and
family histories.

ENG 678 Modern Literary Biography
In this course, students will examine the evolving
genre of biography by reading biographies of literary
figures and selected works that established the
reputations of these writers. Issues for discussion
include the art of writing biography, how critical
theory influences the ways biographers approach their
subjects and their audience, and whether or not
connections can be established between a writer’s life
and a writer’s work. Students will have the opportunity
to conduct formal biographical research themselves.

ENG 679 The Beat Generation
This course will concentrate on the poetry and prose
of the Beat Generation with special attention paid to
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs,
and including Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, and Bob
Kaufman. Consideration will be paid as well to other
alternative “schools” of American poetry of the fifties
and sixties with which Beat literature shared aesthetic
and social concerns—The Black Mountain School, The
New York School, and The San Francisco Renaissance.

ENG 680 Virginia Woolf and Her Circle
A study of the major works of Virginia Woolf by
placing her in the different circles in which she moved
—modern female writers, modern male writers, artists,
biographers, gay and lesbian writers. This course will
include different genres: fiction, poetry, essays, drama,
and biography and will also study developments in
art. Gender and sexuality, the new modernist aesthetic,
and political ideas such as socialism and pacifism are
among the issues that will be explored.

ENG 681 The 1950s in Literature, Memoir, and Film
This course provides an examination of cultural
history, popular culture, literary movements, and
cultural anxieties of an era fraught with contradictions.
Students will study fiction, poetry, films, and plays
produced in the 1950s, as well as cultural artifacts,
commentary, and memoir that look back to this era.

ENG 683 Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature
An in-depth study of colonial and post-colonial
works—written in English—of Africa, Asia and the
Caribbean, within cultural, historical, and theoretical
contexts. Students will pay close attention to
representations of race, nationality, class, and gender,
to Eurocentric assumptions about culture, and how
post-colonial fiction influences and is illuminated by
contemporary post-colonial theory. Authors may
include Kipling, Conrad, Achebe, Rao, Markandaya,
Rhys, Brathwaite, Coetzee, Soyinka, Mukerjee,
Kincaid, Jhabvala, Naipual, Walcott, and others.

ENG 684 Gay, Lesbian, or Queer Literature
This course offers a historical survey of gay, lesbian,
or queer literary texts from the Renaissance to the
present. We focus on the aesthetic values, literary
forms, and styles in which writers portray samesex
desire.

ENG 686 James Joyce: The Major Works
This course will engage students in a close reading of James Joyce's major works, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Joyce's works will be examined from a variety of critical perspectives which may include feminist and gender criticism, post-colonial criticism, deconstruction theory, reader-response theory, and Marxist criticism.

ENG 690 Masculinity and Nation
This course will look at literary constructions of nation and gender, particularly texts that, in various ways, construct the nation in terms of masculinity and masculinity in terms of the nation. As an outgrowth of feminism's challenge to the unproblematic equation of male experience with human experience, masculinity itself has come under new critical scrutiny. At the same time, postcolonial discourse has helped shed light on the construction of the "imagined community" of the nation. The course will look at the role literary texts have played in the inter-related concepts of national identity and masculine identity.

ENG 691 Studies in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel
This course traces the history of the nineteenth-century European novel by studying texts that have been influential in that history. The works read will come from the realistic and naturalistic tradition. Students will study major works of criticism of each author. The novels will read against the social, political, and intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Europe. The authors studied may include, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Fontane, Gogol, Huysmans, Lermontov, Sand, Stendahl, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Zola.

ENG 692 William Faulkner and Toni Morrison
This course will examine selected major works of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, two of the most important twentieth-century American writers, reading their novels within the context of their respective cultural, historical, and social backgrounds. Students will learn how each author portrays life in America from his/her unique perspective and how each portrays issues of regionalism (north/south), race (black/white) and gender (female/male). The course will familiarize students with the major critical work about each author and with the literary movements of modernism and postmodernism.

ENG 693 Adolescent Literature
This course will examine selected major works of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, two of the most important twentieth-century American writers, reading their novels within the context of their respective cultural, historical, and social backgrounds. Students will learn how each author portrays life in America from his/her unique perspective and how each portrays issues of regionalism (north/south), race (black/white) and gender (female/male). The course will familiarize students with the major critical work about each author and with the literary movements of modernism and postmodernism.

ENG 694 History of Rhetoric
This graduate seminar focuses on the history of rhetoric, specifically the development and meaning of the term through (and in) Western civilization and thought. Beginning with the origins of rhetoric, the course offers an historical examination of rhetoric through the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Twentieth Century focusing on both the shifts in definition and the changes in use of the term as revealed through the literature of the periods examined. Readings may include definitive texts by Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Locke, Nietzche, Bakhtin, I.A. Richards, Derrida and others.

ENG 695 Jane Austen
This course is a study of the work of Jane Austen and the social, historical, economic, and political context in which she wrote. Students will read her six novels, a brief selection of her correspondence and juvenilia, and critical articles that examine Austen's work from a variety of critical approaches. In this seminar, students will also examine the enduring popularity of Jane Austen's work through consideration of contemporary film adaptations. Students will also become familiar with current scholarship in the field.

ENG 699 Research and Thesis Seminar
A seminar for graduate students in both concentrations
who are writing their master’s thesis. Under the
direction of the seminar leader, a member of the
English graduate faculty, students meet weekly in
order to discuss their progress, articulate, and solve
problems encountered in their research and writing,
and share their work with other writers/researchers.
Prerequisite: A thesis proposal approved by the
graduate committee the semester preceding the one
the student plans on registering for this course.

ENG 700 Independent Study
With the approval of the faculty advisor and the
Graduate Committee. 1-6 credits

COMS 628 The Press in a Global Society
This course provides an overview of the role of the
press in a global society from historical and contemporary
perspectives. Students study philosophical
and legal issues pertaining to journalism, analyze the
content and design of newspapers, and gain experience
in the principles of journalistic reporting,
writing, and editing.