200 courses with the subject ENG, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
A study of the use and power of words including poetic terms and of how words are best put together in an essay. This is mainly a writing course, and literary form will be used as a means to teach writing. The emphasis will be on expository prose. Required of all students except those qualifying for Advanced Placement.
Topics will vary according to the semester in which the class is offered.
Study of selected works of those writers who have most influenced the continuity and development of our national literature. Among those considered may be Irving, Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Stowe, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, Chopin, Gilman, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Morrison.
This course examines English as a global literary language through works of fiction and film. Students will read works by authors who represent diverse regions of the English-speaking world beyond the United Kingdom (excluding the U.S.) that expand the English language, rethink the present-day legacy of the British Empire, and redefine conceptions of Englishness. Specific course topics and reading lists vary with each course offering.
To prepare current and future English language teachers, this course focuses on various aspects of English grammar, especially those are particularly challenging for ESL/EFL learners. It provides useful background knowledge for English language teachers and preparation that strengthens applications for teaching positions, fellowships, and scholarships. This course is beneficial to Linguistics and TESOL majors/minors who plan to teach English in any context and at any level as well as to students in ENG, COM, EDU and other academic areas where a solid grasp on the linguistic structure of English would be useful. Counts as an ENG elective.
Critical study of various forms of drama.
Specific focus of the course will depend on the instructor. Approaches to the issue of cultural diversity in literature may include the courses such as the following: American Voices; British Multiculturalism and the Booker Prize, or Multiethnic Literature.
A practical course in the oral presentation of carefully crafted material. Based on principles of rhetoric, new and old, the course helps students in discovering, structuring, and expressing ideas with conviction and confidence. Some attention will be given to the appreciation of significant speech texts within these rhetorical traditions. Students will make multiple presentations and engage in peer critiques.
"Horror is like a serpent: always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. Like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious, it can’t be hidden away." —Dario Argento. Have you ever asked yourself: “Why do I like to be scared?” When the novel came into being in the middle of the eighteenth century, its most popular genre was the Gothic—the novel of horror. In fact, the modern era—the era of science, reason, and democracy—has been obsessed with terror, fear, and the unknown since its very inception. So, why do we like to be terrified? What is it about horror that so appeals to modern culture? We often avoid delving into such questions because they reveal to us that our pleasures often seem woefully uncivilized and unseemly. Beginning with early horror writings, the course will trace out a literary, philosophical, and filmic history by exploring how different psychological/cultural concepts of terror play out in a variety of aesthetic contexts.
Depending on the instructor, the course will focus on a particular topic of interest in literature (e.g., American West in Imagination, Psychology and Literature).
This course deals with film treatments of significant literary texts. Specific focus of the course depends on the instructor (e.g., King Arthur In Literature and Film, American War in Literature and Film: Vietnam to Now, Horror in Literature and Film, etc.).
Exploration of diverse writers who were part of the "make it new" challenge in the tumult of cultural change during the 1920s in America, with particular attention given to contributions by Anderson, Fitzgerald, Millay, Cummings, Parker, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Neill, and Hughes.
In “Disability & Storytelling,” we will approach disability through an intersectional lens as we consider how memoir, fiction, poetry, and film depict disability. In the spirit of the Disability Rights Movement’s call, “Nothing for us, without us,” our focus will be on art produced by people from the disability community, particularly BIPOC writers like Sherman Alexie, Octavia Butler, and Junot Diaz. We will consider mental health diagnoses and cognitive differences alongside physical disabilities, and reflect on how race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and other factors affect the experience of disability. We will juxtapose the medical model of disability (where disability is a problem to be “fixed” or “cured”) with the idea of disability as a social construct, and we will consider how disabled people have engaged in activism.
First created as a term applied narrowly to European visual arts, Magical Realism as a genre gained literary prominence in the hands of Latin American authors, most famously Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad, 1967) is still regarded as the apotheosis of the genre and, in my opinion, one of the best novels ever written by anybody ever. This course, however, will demonstrate a broader extent of this genre’s appeal, as it continues to wield a great deal of influence on the imaginations of authors worldwide who have found their way to magical realism as they attempt to depict states of reality that do not, or rather cannot, fit within conventional understandings of what real is.
In W.E.B DuBois' 1903 foundational text The Souls of Black Folks, he suggests emphatically that the most significant problem for the 20th century (and beyond) will be the color line. But what about those who write across the color line? What do we do with authors who write tales that straddle, obscure, erase that line? In the US, passing has almost exclusively referred to racial passing and more specifically, Black people passing as white people. Passing is understood to occur when a person deemed a member of one racial group performs as and is recognized as a member of a different one. Literarily, its meaning, presence and articulation has been far more broad. Some authors have written passing as an act of intentionality, one designed to undermine an oppressive racial classification system that habitually denies Black people basic human, social and political rights. For other authors, passing lacks any such political frame and rather exists as a place to express the complications of an ephemeral identity. This course will examine the range of such literary expressions.
Exploration of representative texts from diverse parts of the universe-in-revision that was the 1960s-from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; from Sylvia Plath's Ariel to Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider; from Nikki Giovanni's poetry to Bonnie and Clyde; from Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. We start with "Berkeley in the Sixties," and it never ends.
This course considers the defining attributes of the graphic novel—its formal limits, its contentious history, and its explosive potentials—in order to interrogate the unique ways in which this medium combines text and image to tell stories that are unimaginable in other venues. Though graphic novels have been long associated with the relatively narrow interests of twentieth-century “pulp” literature and comics—and have existed both alongside and in opposition to the counterculture and the avant-garde—the early twenty-first century has witnessed the gradual mainstreaming of the form. And just as the term itself has shifted from a defensive euphemism to a marketing label, so too has the audience for graphic novels (or comics, comix, pictorial literature, sequential art…) grown more diverse: more varied in its interests and tastes; more sophisticated in its hybrid literacies; more receptive to the medium’s assimilation of new genres, experiences, and perspectives. By learning about the unique formal elements of this medium—the conventions that dictate how meaning is created through the juxtaposition of words and images—students will analyze the unique dynamics that govern our interpretation of graphic novels; meanwhile, they will consider how those dynamics have been shaped by the wider cultural developments that have defined the century-long history of this medium. To focus our work, we will follow the insights of acclaimed comics creator Art Spiegelman: “What is most interesting about comics for me has to do with the abstraction and structurings that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed. In a story that is trying to make chronological and coherent the incomprehensible, the juxtaposing of past and present insists that past and present are always present—one doesn’t displace the other…” (Spiegelman, MetaMaus 165). Spiegelman urges us to recognize the basic “unit” of the comic as the page, widening our gazes to include multiple (often contradictory or “incomprehensible”) streams of information; moreover, Spiegelman asks us to consider how this formal “structuring” reflects both the psychic and the social experience of time and change, through the paradoxical coexistence of past and present. In successive units of the course, then, we will consider how these dynamics express human experience on a personal and a collective level, through the graphic novel’s engagement with three distinct modes: auto/biography, history, and adaptation.
Lesbian and Gay Narrative is designed to introduce students to works by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning persons. Our survey will include works in a variety of genres: plays, novels, essays and poetry. These will come from a range of historical periods.
Survey of the origins of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction in the mythopoeic imagination. Examines the history and themes of these genres in print and film along with their historical antecedents.
Survey of science fiction literature (novels, short fiction, and film) from its historical antecedents to the present. Special emphasis is placed on the intersection between science fiction, scientific discovery, and ethics.
This course will explore the rise of the speculative fiction genre known as “weird fiction,” an intersectional literature that incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Created and defined by H.P. Lovecraft, this literature consists of “a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” Our exploration will include Lovecraft’s original weird tales but also the extended “Cthulhu mythos” in poetry, fiction, and film from the nineteenth century to the present.
A seminar, ideally taken by English majors in the sophomore year, to explore a variety of significant texts in the British and American tradition, each to be examined from diverse critical perspectives, including (but not limited to) the following: formalist/New Critical, structuralist, New Historicist, feminist, deconstruction/poststructuralist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, race/ethnic/postcolonial studies.
This course will introduce you to some of most famous authors of the early twentieth-century Irish literature – James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett – who later became renowned writers and global ambassadors of Ireland and Irishness. We will read a selection of their works and study the way in which these texts have been received, circulated and consumed around the world. In the second half of the course, we will study famous contemporary Irish authors who, in turn, have set their novels outside the nation-space of Irish literature.
This course will study Irish literature from the perspective of Empire Studies; as such, it will not only locate Ireland and Irish literature in the context of the now defunct British Empire, but will also focus on the rise of neo-imperialism that has emerged in its wake and Ireland’s place within the 21st-century world system. Topics covered in this course include the colonization of Ireland, the Famine, and the 2008 financial crisis and immigration.
In this course, we’re going to study Ireland through film and literature. We’ll focus on some of the key issues/events/experiences in Irish history such as the Troubles, Easter 1916 and the Magdalen Laundries’ scandals. While analyzing recent Irish films and literary works, we shall consider the following questions: how does our reading and understanding of the same event changes when it is being portrayed via a different medium and/or in a different genre? What can be communicated via a documentary and how does a work of literary fiction complicate and/or challenge the representation put forward by a documentary film or drama? What does a comedy allow us to see about the (tragic) past? While we will definitely watch and analyze Derry Girls, this course endeavors to introduce you to many new Irish films, novels, and TV series!
By focusing on the representative detective novels of 20th-and 21st-century Britain and Ireland, this course charts popular culture’s complex and often contradictory influence on representations of class, gender, and disability. Starting with the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction in interwar Britain, this course will consider the rise of feminist crime fiction as well as questions of national and post-imperial identities in British and Irish detective novels.
This course will begin with Hamlet – the first of Shakespeare’s so-called ‘great tragedies.’ From there, it will proceed through a selection of problem comedies, tragedies, Roman plays, and romances. Throughout the semester, we will interrogate Shakespeare’s construction of the individual and history, art and life, family and state, and particularly the intricate nexus of power, performance and self-consciousness in these plays.
This course focuses on the histories and romantic comedies written in the first half of Shakespeare’s career (through about 1599). Throughout the semester, we will interrogate Shakespeare’s construction of the individual and history, art and life, family and state, and particularly the complicated nexus of power, performance and self–consciousness in his plays and poems.
For some, the sonnet form epitomized a revolution – the shift from a communal world of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, a rebirth of the individual. The fourteen-line form, with its not-quite-mid-poem shift of direction, revealed and, for some, may even have created modern mind in its depiction of torturous action. We will examine its origins in love poetry and its very different modern uses, attentive to the politics of the form and its technical aspects, as well as how it has seemed to define kinds of people and kinds times. We will also attend to dissenting voices that question the sonnet’s uniqueness and its place in apparently transformative movements.
Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel argues that our brains are “creativity machines,” ultimately and efficiently designed for problem-solving. This course will explore the landscape of creativity, or the space between complex challenges and innovative solutions. Through experiential exercises, case studies, intensive writing exercises, and course projects, students will learn how to identify and re-frame problems, how to generate and test ideas, how to challenge assumptions, and how to tell a compelling story to communicate ideas.
Using the lens of literature, this course explores how the built environment—from the Great Pyramids to modern-day skyscrapers—reflects and projects our personal and cultural history, values, and vision. Part environmental studies, part literature and writing studies, and part visual rhetoric, this course re-envisions the very concept of literature and “text” and asks: How do architectural works emerge from a culture’s values? How might they mirror society’s hierarchy or the challenges to that hierarchy? How might the culture’s “architects”—writers, leaders, builders, or artists—suggest or impose a future onto a society—political, spiritual, ethical, or otherwise? Finally, how do different genres of writing and literature—from nonfiction autobiography to drama and poetry—offer us a framework for addressing the global and personal challenges that await us?
In this course, students will read key novels by the English author Jane Austen (1775-1817), in order to investigate the human need to tell stories, make art, and foster social change. Through textual analysis, class discussion, and critical response essays, students will examine how Austen employs distinctive literary devices, structures, and genres to affect and inform her contemporary readers and to reveal to later readers the complexities of her culture. By exploring Austen’s works, students will gain a greater understanding of human diversity, since by seeking to understand early nineteenth-century English discourses of class, gender, identity, and art, we can recognize better the roots and stakes of our current American moment. In addition, we shall explore the social conventions of early nineteenth-century England and how they might help us to understand why Austen’s novels continue to be enjoyed and studied, even though current contexts and conventions are often significantly different.
This course examines the life, literary works, and ethical perspectives of the Irish writer Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900). In January 1895, Wilde remarked self-deprecatingly to the French writer André Gide, “I have put all my genius into my life: I have put only my talent into my works.” Later, after having been sent to prison for two years on the charge of “gross indecency” (under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885), Wilde consoled himself by declaring (somewhat less modestly), “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.” In this class, we shall investigate the implications of Wilde’s claim about his emblematic “relations to the art and culture” of his time, and the complex processes by which he drew upon his life to create art and upon art to shape his life. In addition, since the questioning of gender roles and of sexual orientation is at the heart of Wilde’s life and literature, we shall investigate these topics throughout the course, to understand both the sexual conventions that Wilde sought to challenge in his own time and the effect that his trials, tribulations, and artistic triumphs have had upon our contemporary discourses of gender and sexual orientation.
James Joyce is probably Ireland’s most famous dead author, and Sally Rooney its most famous living one. Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Ulysses (1922) have frequently been rated as the greatest short-story collection and the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim, large sales, and two television series adaptations. In this course, students will read key pieces of fiction by Joyce and Rooney, in order to investigate the human need to tell stories, make art, and foster social change. Through textual analysis, class discussion, and creative and critical response essays, students will examine how literary texts employ distinctive formal devices, structures, and genres to affect and inform their audiences and how these literary techniques and features have the potential to increase our capacity for imagination and empathy and to expand our ethical awareness of self and other across space and time. In addition, students will explore how changing contexts of history, culture, race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, or ethnicity have influenced literary creation, interpretation, and evaluation.
In this course, students will read key satirical novels from the 1700s to the 2000s (and look at a contemporary satirical TV show), in order to investigate the human need to tell stories, make art, and foster social change. Through textual analysis, class discussion, and critical response essays, students will examine how satirical writers employ distinctive literary devices, structures, and genres to affect and inform their contemporary readers and to reveal to later readers the complexities of earlier cultures. By exploring these works, students will gain a greater understanding of human diversity, since by seeking to understand earlier and more distant discourses of class, gender, identity, and art, we can recognize better the roots and stakes of our current American moment. In addition, we shall explore the social conventions of Ireland, England, and the USA in the 1700s to 2000s, in order to understand why these satires continue to be enjoyed and studied, even though current contexts and social conventions are often significantly different.
Exploration of at least two creative genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays). For models and inspiration, students will examine selected works by contemporary creative writers in varied styles. Writing workshop format.
This course examines how madness, broadly defined, has been depicted in literature, using works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from various historical periods. We will critically examine how madness is both a recognizable clinical entity and a social construction, and how literary works have effectively shaped our understanding of it. We will look at the changing conceptions of madness in literature, the historical, cultural, and medico-legal contexts that influenced those changes, and, in short, try to make some sense of madness by understanding how it was perceived by writers old and new. Through class discussion and scaffolded writing assignments (including multiple drafts, peer reviews, and workshops) we will examine both the production and reception of the literature of madness, focusing on how notable texts about madness were produced and received, the connection between creativity and madness, and the diversity of human experiences when it comes to the spectrum of mental health. We will explore a variety of genres (play, poetry, short story, novel, memoir, case study) by diverse authors ranging from ancient to contemporary.
The realities of being a nurse will never be the same as the public’s imagination of the profession. Yet nurses are on the front lines of healthcare, an important social good, so their professional lives have long been the focus of fictions, memoirs, films and other visual mediums. In this course, we take a historical journey through the imaginative representations of nurses in the US and Britain. We will closely analyze novels, films, and some still visual images of nurses (postcards and nurse recruitment images).
In this course students will learn and practice interviewing skills. The reason the word art is included in the title of this course is that a good interview is just that: a work of art, one that involves creativity and deep thinking. It also requires curiosity and active listening and the ability to read people. Good interviewers do their homework before they ask questions, but they also know how to think quickly on their feet, crafting new questions, following new trails, depending on where the interview takes them. They know when to push their subjects and when to pull back and how to balance easier questions with the hard ones. They understand the power of both words and silences. If this sounds intimidating, remember: As with any skill, practice is key. The more interviews you do, the more comfortable you will become doing them.
This course introduces students to reporting and writing for the news media. In frequent assignments throughout the semester, students will practice the basic principles of journalism with an emphasis on structure, accuracy, clarity and style - key for journalists working in any medium. They will gain experience in story pitching and development and in news gathering methods, including interviewing, fact gathering and fact checking. Additionally, students will study timely topics related to journalism ethics and the law as well as journalism's transition into the digital age. While this course is based in the classroom, students are expected to learn and adhere to professional newsroom standards.
Comprehensive examination of various forms of writing that are produced in managing organizations, including email, memoranda, letters, reports, brochures, guidelines, and slide share presentation materials.
This course introduces students to writing in the empirical and health sciences, with particular focus on clinical research and the scientific method. Students learn to write scientific reports, review essays, literature reviews, scientific articles for publication, and informal science articles. Additionally, students learn about the research and publication cycles of the scientific community as well as how to present papers and posters at conferences.
This course introduces students to the basic strategies and techniques of public relations writing through the creation and evaluation of a variety of materials commonly used in PR. Students will gain core knowledge of the following: AP style, branding, crisis communication, social media (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), audience targeting, blogging, media kits, media tracking, fact sheets, press releases, feature articles, and brochures.
The course involves students in an eclectic writing process that includes legal research, conflict analysis and public speaking. Modeled in part upon the Harvard Negotiation Project's Getting To Yes methodology, the course also involves newly emerging practices that challenge the notion of argument and encourage exchange between disputing parties. The thesis of the course is that, when individuals embroiled in a conflict begin to hear and understand one another's stories, they have the option to change and to grow. Although courtrooms and trials will be examined, quite unlike a law course, the format for our class includes dramatic performance, passages from fiction and poetry as well as essays to reveal the common sense that can provide peace between warring interests. The focused goal of this sequence of readings, dramatic exercises and writing is for each student to evolve and to articulate communication strategies for crisis situations.
With daily charges of "fake news" flying off the tongues of politicians and citizens alike, there has never been a better time to learn how to be a fact-checker. In this course, students will dabble in the art of fact-checking and arm themselves with media literacy tools to help them discern fact from fiction. In addition to the required course texts, students will read articles and analyses, listen to podcasts and watch films that will provide fodder for discussions about the fake news debate that occupies the current moment in history.
Topics will vary according to the semester in which the class is offered.
This course provides an introduction to the various ways that human beings have encountered the problems of time in literature and theory, considering perspectives drawn from mathematics, science, religion, art, and philosophy from multiple cultures in an effort to understand how and why time both rules our lives and escapes our grasps. Because this course is meant to facilitate a complex inquiry into both historical and present-day understandings of time, course requirements prioritize active participation, close critical analysis of texts, sustained, thesis-driven writing assignments, and short presentations.
What can you do with a degree in English? Do you know how to search for an internship or a job? Are you ready to apply for a position should the opportunity arise? This professional development seminar will enhance your knowledge about internships and careers within your major and help you build practical skills through class instruction, assignments, and alumni exposure throughout the semester. This one-credit course meets once a week through the semester to provide practical instruction and skills in areas that include internship search and application, resume/cover letter prep, professional communication and networking/interviewing. Please note that this course does not replace any English major requirements.
This course will provide an overview of Middle English literature, excluding Chaucer, by beginning with the earliest Middle English texts and ending with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will focus on language, translation, and close reading to start, with the goal of arriving at a broader consideration of the Middle English literary tradition and its role in the creation of English literature as we now know it.
Was the Renaissance the age of the individual? Was poetry - the dominant literature of the day - a means to power, a force for good or instead a corrupting agent? This course will consider divergent views on the English Renaissance alongside major works by authors such as Sidney, Spenser and Milton.
A study of the drama of Tudor and Jacobean England, excluding Shakespeare. The plays of Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and Ford and their distinctive dramatic qualities will be emphasized.
Shakespeare’s plays have been staged around the world, made into novels, films, ballets, musicals, and operas, set in the Wild West, medieval Japan, fascist Italy, and on fictional planets, blended with Bollywood Cinema, Chinese Opera, Zulu dance and Japanese Noh Theater. What do global artists gain from Shakespeare’s works? Studying a handful of Shakespeare’s plays directly, we pay particular attention to race, gender, disability, and religion – issues that are often foregrounded or altered in adaptations. We also deal with the racism, misogyny, ableism, colonialism and anti-Semitism and the real-world violence behind these representations. This lays the groundwork for our study of adaptations from around the world. Some suggest that the Western canon, with Shakespeare at its center, has been used as tools of cultural oppression; might reinventions of Shakespeare be seen as acts of liberation or rebellion? This course participates in the new major and minor in Global Literatures.
This course deals with the literature of the Restoration and eighteenth-century, a time of intellectual, cultural, and political revolutions. Among the writers who may be studied are Behn, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, Burney, Inchbald, and Wollstonecraft. Depending on the instructor, the course may focus on a particular genre or it may deal with a specialized topic, such as "The Rise of Gender in the Novel," "The Idea of Authorship in the 18th Century," or "The Satiric Mode."
Depending on the instructor, the course may be focused in a variety of ways, all exploring different developments in literature in England in the 19th Century (Major Romantic Poets, The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Rebels-Reactionaries: Victorian Literature).
A study of representative authors of British and Irish Modernism, including Auden, Conrad, Eliot, Forster, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Yeats. Depending on the instructor, this course may also explore works by Bowen, Ford, Lewis, Moore, O'Brien, Wilde, or other authors.
This course will give you an opportunity to consider contemporary literature from a new and exciting perspective: we will focus on marketing and the making of the literary canon, and each text in our reading list will facilitate a case study of a different aspect of literary marketing and/or publishing. We will examine the rise of international publishing conglomerates and indie presses and will study review and “list” cultures. We will consider the role of literary magazines but also GoodReads and (the former?) BookTok as well as its replacement(s), all the while querying how race, class and gender impact authors on the global literary marketplace. While we will read all the assigned books from cover to cover, we will also scrutinize the actuals covers of these books: how do blurbs, endorsements from other writers and the actual cover designs influence our reading of these novels? Finally, we will analyze international book prizes and we will talk about the economy and geography of prestige that these prizes carry, especially in the global context.
Focusing mainly on postwar Britain and Ireland and the changing immigration policies of these countries, this course investigates how economic conditions as well as historical and political events such as 9/11 and/or Brexit have influenced nationalism, gender, race and language at the end of the 20th and the start of 21st century.
This course will introduce you to representative Black writers from Britain and Ireland. With a focus on postwar and contemporary British writers, the first half of the course provides you with an in-depth overview of the 20th - and 21st-century Black British writing. In the second half of the course, we will study the emerging Black Irish tradition with a special focus on spoken word poetry, rap, experimental drama and short stories.
This course will introduce you to the best, the brightest and the loudest voices in today's Irish literature. We will read a wide variety of authors, among whom you will find more established names such as Martin McDonagh and his wickedly funny and startlingly original drama; Tana French, whose recent success has put Irish crime writing on the world (literary) map; and Ireland's first fiction laureate, Anne Enright. While exploring questions of nationalism, immigration, gender and identity, we will also study the most recent works of Irish literature, which have shaken and stirred the reading public over the course of the last couple of years.
Irish theatre is haunted by the idea of nation. This course will examine issues of national and sexual politics and identity with attention to some of the most well-known playwrights in the history of Irish theatre - including but not limited to W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, and Marina Carr.
Designed to give you an overview of contemporary Irish women’s writing, this course will explore the thematic nexus of gender, class, disability, migrancy, immigration, and reproductive justice. In doing so, it will pay considerable attention to Ireland’s history of institutionalizing women in Magdalen laundries, asylums and mother-and-baby homes. This course will showcase some of the most vibrant voices in contemporary Irish writing, including but not limited to Anne Enright, Marina Carr, Sally Rooney and Anna Burns.
Ireland’s colonial history and its current, intense focus on the commercial or market value of land and landscape, have transformed the Irish relationship with land and the environment. In Ireland (as elsewhere), environmental decisions are all too often justified by the need to satisfy economic and business decisions that are deemed to supersede environmental concerns. While considering such moral quandaries produced by the age of Anthropocene, this course will focus on their literary representations in recent Irish novels, plays and poetry.
This course examines contemporary fiction and film from the Indian subcontinent (primarily India, but with some focus on Pakistan as well). Works studied include both Anglophone texts and texts in translation read alongside major events of twentieth- and twenty-first century South Asian history, particularly Independence and Partition. Featured authors may include Mulk Raj Anand, Saadat Hasan Manto, R.K. Narayan, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie.
This course provides a historical view of South African literature, focusing on apartheid, its segregationist precedents, and its present-day legacies. Utilizing novels, historical and legal documents, and creative nonfiction, as well as short fiction and film, the course introduces students to the writings of South Africans who represent diverse subject positions and experiences, but who are all united in the common goal of re- examining and working through South Africa's traumatic past.
Engagement with a wide range of writers whose work represents both radical extension and rejection of the earlier modernist movement, with exploration of texts by Fowles, Barth, Barthelme, Calvino, Heller, Vonnegut, Pyncheon, Smith, Eggers.
This course examines representations of religious faith in a variety of literary genres (fiction, drama, poetry, film) from the 20th century to the present. Students will consider to what extent the texts studied reflect and develop traditional expressions of religion and the degree to which they engage readers in an evaluation of faith as a source of knowledge.
A study of the literary genres that emerged from the colonization of North America and the establishment of the federal republic of the United States, with a focus on the role of literature in defining American national identity. Readings will include histories, journals, sermons, poems, autobiographies, and novels by authors including John Winthop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as explorers, Indigenous people, and other early national authors.
An in-depth study of the writers associated with the Transcendentalism and the social reform movements they inspired, including abolition, women's suffrage, labor reform, and projects of associated living. Authors considered include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. A variety of critical and creative writing assignments will provide opportunities for us to reflect on how matters of race, gender, class and ethnicity continue to affect perceptions of democracy today.
A survey of American literature between the Civil War and World War I, from realism to naturalism, with consideration of such writers as Twain, Howells, James, Crane, Dickinson, Robinson, Cable, Wharton, Norris, and Dreiser.
An exploration of a century of dramatic change in the American literary landscape-from Dreiser's Sister Carrie to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye; through poets as diverse as E. E. Cummings, Allen Ginsberg, and Rita Dove; with options that may include key work from William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, Don DeLillo, and Louise Erdrich.
An exploration of representative American works (creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry) from the past 25 years- including books from Jhumpa Lahiri, Joy Harjo, Tobias Wolfe, Junot Diaz, Mark Doty, Kevin Powers, David Eggers and Cheryl Strayed.
With a mix of literary and film texts, this course explores the impact of the West in shaping the American character and sense of identity. From Mark Twain's "Roughing It" in the 19th Century to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "Legends of the Fall" in the 20th Century, the West has provided dramatic stimulation for remarkable works of human imagination.
An overview of Southern literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with consideration of both poetry and fiction. Selected authors may include Poe, Twain, Faulkner, Welty, Warren, Taylor, Styron, Smith, Edgerton, and McCorkle.
This thematic survey explores how African American authors write about what it means (and has meant) to be a Black person in the U.S. Exploring poetry, autobiography, drama, short stories, novels, essays, and films, we grapple with the multifaceted experiences of "Blackness" in literary texts produced from the era of slavery to the present. Through our reading we develop an understanding of specific African American literary traditions.
Linked by history, race, gender, and fate, but arguably little else, how do Black women writing in the U.S. write themselves into the idea of America? This course examines exclusively Black women's literature in order to answer this question. Covering a minimum of three traditional African American literary periods, students are positioned to question notions of privilege and power driven by the intersectionalities of gender and race.
This course explores the intersectionalities of racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities within Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literary traditions. In dialogue these literary traditions complicate a monolithic Caribbean narrative. With careful study of language, class, color, and identity we determine how authors contend with and memorialize French, British, and American imperialisms in the Caribbean. Likely authors include Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Merle Hodge, Thomas Glave, George Lamming, and Jamaica Kincaid.
Major English and continental dramatists of the modern period from Ibsen to the present; a survey emphasizing not only major writers but also significant changes in dramatic form.
This course offers students the experience of creating original material for stage presentation, with particular focus on the one-act play structure and concern for character, scene, and plot development.
Examination of the diverse functions of the dramaturge developing background perspective for bringing dramatic texts to the stage, adapting various texts for stage presentation, writing interpretive notes for staged productions. Students will adapt literary texts for Reader's Theatre performance.
This course is a survey of major American women playwrights from 1975 to the present. We will read plays by a diverse group of writers including Shange, Wasserstein, Henley, Vogel, Nottage, Ruhl, Baker, Gionfriddo, Izuka, Kron, and others.
Exploration of poetry by reading and writing. Each student will be responsible for creating a set of poems. Writing workshop format.
Exploration of fiction by reading and writing. Each student will be responsible for creating a set of stories. Writing workshop format.
Exploration of creative nonfiction by reading and writing, with particular focus on the form of the personal essay. Each student will be responsible for creating a set of essays. Writing workshop format.
Exploration of screenwriting in a workshop format with consideration of the whole process involved in development of screen projects, including feature-length film projects.
This course introduces students to writing center history, theories, and practices. Readings include landmark and contemporary texts about writing pedagogy in general and the tutoring of writing specifically. Additionally, students study issues and strategies of relevance to ESL writers for whom English is not their first or home language. Students are introduced to the practices of peer tutoring through class discussions and through observation and tutoring in the University Writing Center. Upon successful completion of this course, they are eligible to be hired in subsequent semesters as writing tutors. Open to students from all majors who are interested in writing and/or the teaching of writing. Permission of instructor required.
At its most basic definition, feature writing is journalism that tells a story-generally, the kind of story that you don't soon forget, that lingers for many moments, or days, or years after you first encounter it. In this course, students study outstanding examples of feature stories and multimedia feature packages. From those examples, they learn how to combine the best reporting practices with the best storytelling practices in order to produce their own powerful features that marry in-depth reporting and research with captivating and creative storytelling skills. Students should have taken ENG 261 or have prior journalism experience before enrolling in this course.
In 1887, when journalist Nellie Bly feigned madness in order to get herself locked up in the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York, stunt journalism wasn't yet a brand. But the kind of immersive, investigative journalism that Bly did would soon become a way for journalists and newspapers to grab headlines, increase circulation and even affect real social change. Nowadays, serious stunt journalism is more commonly referred to as "immersion journalism" while some of the less serious attempts are questionably journalism at all. No matter what you call it, stunt journalism differs from traditional journalism in this significant way: The journalist deliberately becomes a part of the story-and often in disguise-in order to tell it. In addition to required readings, students will produce significant works of stunt journalism that, at least on a smaller scale, mirror the challenges of the stunt journalist.
The chief purpose of the junior-level independent study project is for the student to acquire knowledge in a particular area of literature (reading and research project) or to produce a substantial piece of writing, either creative or discursive (writing project). For the reading and research project, the student will develop a course of study with the project director that may utilize audiovisual as well as printed material. In addition to a reading program, the student will write a substantial paper that develops from that reading program; the paper should use primary texts and have a textual perspective-historical, critical, aesthetic, or mythic. For the writing project, the student will develop a program of reading and writing with the project director. Minimum GPA of 3.0 (or cumulative average of 3.4 or higher for courses in the major field).
This class offers a unique opportunity to have meaningful discussions about a range of topics from inside a correctional facility. Inside-Out classes bring together students from Saint Joseph's University and adult students who are incarcerated to learn about and discuss topics such as the causes of crime, racism, literature, philosophy, and restorative justice. Through the readings and dialogue, inside and outside students will be able to integrate their theoretical knowledge with lived experiences. It is through this exchange that we hope to critically analyze and challenge the current system in the U.S. that has resulted in a higher incarceration rate than other similar countries.
Focused examination of some key factors in rhetoric over the ages: for example, invention strategies, the ethics of writing, methods of delivery.
A comprehensive study of the essay form through time, with special concern for identifying forces of change upon the style and function of the essay within selected cultural contexts.
An examination of the development of various medieval narrative forms, including the romance, and the climax of their development in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. The major historical focus will be on work written in England from 1300 to 1485; there will be some continental material included.
An exploration of some aspect of Shakespeare's literary career. Topics may include "Comedy & History" "Tragedy & Romance," or "Sonnets & Poems," or may involve specific themes.
This course considers race in the Renaissance through Shakespeare's plays, five of which involve people of color: Cleopatra and the Egyptians at her court in Antony and Cleopatra; Aaron in Titus Andronicus; the Prince of Morocco (and, arguably, Shylock) in The Merchant of Venice; Othello in Othello; and Caliban in The Tempest. We may also read Shakespeare’s “dark lady” sonnets, literary criticism, and/or additional plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe.
An in-depth study of one to two significant authors of a particular period, the choice to be made by the instructor.
Anne Boleyn was the most consequential queen in English history. To marry her, Henry VIII created the Church of England and forced his subjects to swear oaths confirming his control over it and their own allegiance to Anne and her heirs. Those who refused - including Thomas More - faced imprisonment and death. Anne reigned barely a thousand days before her execution for adultery. This course is about Anne, Henry VIII, the politics of their world and the literature by and about their court - including the poetry kept and commented upon by Anne's female friends and relatives.
The medieval period is thought of as a time before concepts of race emerged - before the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, before European colonialism, before scientific racism. It continues to be used to justify the modern phenomena of racialized nationalism and ideologies of whiteness. This course examines some of the stories, images, ideas, and institutions of medieval England. We will ask how race aids our thinking about the way human difference is articulated and how it operated in the Middle Ages. Some readings will be in Middle English; others will be modern English translation. No previous experience with medieval literature is expected.
Focusing on the study of major developments in British fiction from World War I to Brexit, this course will analyze issues of globalization and Britain's role in the globalized world. Focusing on issues of nation and nationality, of Britishness and history, the course will investigate the state of the nation in what has been seen as a far-reaching identity crisis and/or a massive inferiority complex. The authors may include Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, and, depending on the instructor, also Fowles, Spark, Ishiguro, Ali Smith and others.
This course explores how various Irish (and English) novelists and short-story writers have depicted in fiction "the Troubles"-a protracted period of politically-motivated violence in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, which began in the late 1960s and has not fully ended today. By identifying the stories' aesthetic and ethical dimensions and their social and political contexts, we shall examine both the representation of violence and the potential violence of representation. Key questions include: What is the role of the artist in representing politically motivated and other types of violence? Should artists offer solutions or only pose problems? What are the aesthetical and ethical stakes of making art out of atrocity?
Interrogating issues of genre and historical context, this course traces the evolution of Irish gothic and ghost stories from the early nineteenth century to the present.
This course examines the attempts of four long novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to recapture the epic tradition in the form of the modern novel: the modernist epic, the postcolonial epic, the postimperial epic, and the epic of globalization. During the semester, we will discuss how modern and contemporary authors depict how individuals can imagine connections and responsibilities to one another while undergoing rapidly changing notions of community, national belonging, and global citizenship.
An examination of diverse literary texts, films and theoretical essays that engage the idea of "post colonialism," the circumstances and effects of one nation having sovereign power over another. We will emphasize works with a relationship to the British Empire (e.g., Forster, Conrad, Rushdie, Collins, Dickens, Joyce, Winterson), but we will not be limited to this particular historical context.
This course explores how British and American women of the late seventeenth to early twentieth centuries used writing to rebel against the status quo. We will examine both the historical circumstances in which women found themselves and the literary production that resulted. We will examine a wide variety of women's texts-- narrative fictions, poetry, political polemics, conduct books, letters, autobiographies, social theories, sermons, and protest leaflets--and we will discuss the effects of these different responses to women's plight. We will look closely at the influences that British and American writers exerted upon one another.
Many believed that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would usher in a radically different era of freedom and opportunity for all Black Americans, ultimately improving their quotidian experiences with racism. This has not proved true. In this course, we will approach the study of Black literature by understanding that, in some ways, life informs art and/or the artists who create it. We will read literature and theory written after the signing of the Civil Rights Act identifying common themes, styles, imagery and artistic strategies emerging from what literary critic Mark Anthony Neal has termed the "post-soul imagination". How are African American authors articulating the concepts of freedom and citizenship as raced and gendered subjects into the 21st century? Likely authors may include: Octavia Butler, Brittney Cooper, Michelle Elam, Percival Everett, Victor LaValle, and Kiese Laymon.
An in-depth study of one or two significant American authors, the choice to be made by the instructor.
A study of the evolution of the novel in America; may include novels by Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Chesnutt, Wharton, James, Hemingway, Pyncheon, Bellow, Updike, Kesey, Tan, Silko, or others depending on the instructor.
An analytical study of poetic development, with emphasis on Romantic and modern theory and practice. Among those studied: Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Frost.
An exploration of the current American poetry scene, including representative works from a wide range of styles and poetic movements. You will read and discuss recent poetry collections, keep a journal responding to your reading, and write imitations of the poets we read for class. To more fully experience poetry as working poets do you will write a poetic imitation of each of the books we read, and we will regularly workshop the poems you write for class. Guided by the advice you receive in workshop, you will revise eight of your poems toward a polished, fully-realized final portfolio. You will also present to the class on a contemporary poetry collection of your choice.
A critical study of selected plays. The emphasis will be on the works of O'Neill, Wilder, Williams, Miller, MacLeish, and Albee. Acceptable for Theatre/Drama track.
Nature & Environmental Writing incorporates attention to both literature and student writing in an effort to help students understand the conventions of American nature and environmental writing and to use those conventions in their own writing.
Black artists in Harlem (and other densely populated urban areas) produced a significant collection of work remarkable for its breadth and complexity during the anachronistically named Harlem Renaissance (1922-1941). This course explores that creative explosion in an attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of what compelled the movement and why the Harlem Renaissance continues to be so influential in Black literature and culture today. ENG 215, 328, or 329 recommended.
A study of writers in the 1950s and early 1960s whose work reflected rebellion with regard to social and cultural norms.
Consideration of how writing-speeches, poetry, fiction, and autobiography-from the U.S. Civil Rights movement shaped social change. Including a close look at the rhetorical strategies involved in a wide range of texts; authors include Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Taylor Branch, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty. Also considers other movements that emerged from the Civil Rights movement including gay rights and disability rights.
Course content to be determined by instructor.
In an era of depleted natural resources and climate change, environmental justice explores creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction, and poetry that addresses climate change and its impact on communities of color and impoverished communities in the U.S. and elsewhere. We also consider how to tell stories about climate change and global warming that influence policy makers and the public. We use the lens of race, class, and gender to consider how environmental writing works.
This course will explore literary responses to climate change through an exploration of memoir, fiction, poetry, and popular environmental writing. The primary emphasis on the course will be on the relatively new genre of “climate fiction,” also known as “cli-fi.”
This course will explore literary responses to Darwin’s theory of evolution from the publication of On the Origin of Species to the present, in science writing, nonfiction and fiction. Topics will include evolution, scientific racism, eugenics, genetic engineering, robotics, and transhumanism.
An investigation of literacy as a social practice, using composition theory, ethnography, fiction, autobiography, and popular culture to define literacy and ask questions about it. With concern for the defining forces of race, class, and gender, the course explores different uses of literacy and considers the concept of a literacy "crisis." Students will compose narratives of their own literacy practices and pursue independent research on some aspect of literacy and its applications to schools, society, and quality of life.
In this course, students will engage in writing projects based on a specialized area of study (e.g., Writing and Faith, Running to Write).
We investigate "identity" as an intersectional construct. Theories of whiteness and racial identity, gender and sexuality, and social class are presented through reading and writing in poetry, memoir, fiction, and film. Course can include readings on disability, mental health diagnoses, and trans identities. Drafts of writing will be shared with classmates in large and small workshops.
A writing course designed to explore alternative and experimental genres that combat sexism and do social and political work, with particular focus on narratives developed to challenge dominant cultural structures and practices.
This course introduces students to the grant-making process from initial research to the submission of a final proposal. Students will first work together to consult for a single non-profit, while learning about the components of a strong grant proposal and the grant-making process overall. Then, each student will be paired with a local nonprofit organization, as volunteer consultants for that organization. Students will work with their nonprofit organization to identify a new or existing project that needs funding. They will then take what they learn in class about the grant-making process and apply it to meet the needs of their nonprofit "client," with the ultimate goal of producing a complete grant proposal that can be submitted to funders
In this study abroad course, you will use travel as a lens through which to explore the elements of creative nonfiction in general and travel writing in particular. You will read travel memoirs, keep a journal, do in-class invention exercises, and research, write and workshop travel essays. A portfolio of your revised writing will be due after the study tour is over.
We read memoir, novels, poems, creative nonfiction, and films in order to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability are depicted through the writing of caregivers, medical professionals, and patients. The course focuses on how cultural differences affect access to medical care and how illness and health are narrated depending on the writer's intersectional position. Mental health diagnoses, addiction, chronic illness, and trauma may also be explored.
This course explores "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland through fiction, poetry, film, and memoir. We consider the relationship of peaceful protest in Northern Ireland to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, reflect on how personal conflicts relate to historical and cultural clashes between groups of people, and consider how stories shape identities. We investigate the relationships between identity and conflict, violence and nonviolence, peace and reconciliation.
This hybrid literature and writing course considers the representation of animals in a range of texts and explores how the depiction of animals as companions, gods, guides, objects, heroes, or monsters reflects changes in relationships between humans and nature. Students will also use the literary forms we study (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) to reflect on their own experiences with animals (pets, animals in captivity or in the wild, and in books and films).
This course surveys works of literature from multiple genres, cultures, and time periods in order to witness how literature emerges alongside developments and dilemmas in medical practice. Literature can represent medical experiences that other modes of scientific and clinical writing cannot contain. We will investigate the ways in which expressions and descriptions of pain often fall short. We will learn how various writers have used complex literary effects, narrative structures, and figurative language to compensate for the inarticulate and untranslatable experience of suffering, treatment, and recovery. We will also analyze the role of listeners and readers who must discover new techniques to treat patients and maladies (both physical and psychological) that they do not fully know.
Narrative Medicine is a field that seeks to fortify healthcare practice with narrative competence: the capacity to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness. We explore the relationship between narrativity and identity. We engage in literary study that allows healthcare providers to better comprehend patients, convey knowledge, and accompany patients through the ordeal of illness. Narrative competence includes rigorous training in close reading, attentive listening, reflective writing, and bearing witness to suffering. By placing events in temporal order (with beginnings, middles, and ends) and establishing connections using metaphor and figurative language, narrative medicine employs elements of creativity and literary study to help us to recognize patients and diseases, convey knowledge, and accompany patients through the ordeal of illness.
In this course, students gain practice developing story ideas, pitching articles, writing to word-count, and abiding by AP style. The course also examines a variety of glossies plus online magazines in order for students to stay current with changing journalistic practices.
This class explores the political, spiritual, and economic aspects of eating and offers students the chance to practice writing about food in different modes, from restaurant reviews to blog posts to personal essays.
This course explores the elements of crafting narratives about journeys, creatively and journalistically. Students will read widely, exploring the historical and contexts of travel writing, current best practices and practicalities, and ethical considerations. They will also complete a variety of writing assignments that will help them explore the various craft elements of travel writing, from researching to reporting to writing. While the course will mostly focus on local stories that can be written and reported (and traveled to) within the greater Philadelphia area, students will also have the opportunity to write about past travel experiences.
This reading-intensive course provides an historical overview of a genre most often referred to as "literary journalism," once called "new journalism," and now sometimes dubbed "new journalism" or "immersion journalism." Students may read works by writers such as Nellie Bly, Stephen Crane, John Hersey, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Ted Konover, Sonia Nazario, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Susan Orlean, among others. In addition to their literary consumption and interrogation of the field, students will produce several short exercises in the style of the genre and one final project.
Focus on a particular issue in journalism, examination of some trend, of consideration of selected columnists/distinctive voices in journalism.
This course will introduce students to three basic levels of editing: substantive editing, copyediting, and proofreading. The course may include guest editor presentations as well as intensive review of grammar and writing skills and an introduction to copyediting marks. Finally, students will try on the multi-faceted roles of an editor--and experience the challenges of balancing aesthetic and pragmatic concerns--through several major writing and editing projects, including one multi-media project.
The senior-level independent study is for students to engage in faculty mentored research and writing. Students will develop a course of study with the faculty mentor that results in a substantial piece of scholarship, creative writing, or journalism. Minimum GPA of 3.0 (or cumulative average of 3.4 or higher for courses in the major field).
Course content to be determined by instructor.
Specific focus of the course will depend on the instructor. Approaches to the study of genres may include Books That Cook, Science Fiction, The Short Story in America, The Satiric Mode, The Lyric, The Sonnet, and Autobiography.
This course focuses on how literature engages readers in thinking through complex cultural problems. Specific focus of the course will depend on the instructor.
Drawing on both fictional and theoretical texts, the course explores how narrative attempts to give meaning and coherence to experience and how readers process narrative. Literary texts include linear and non-linear narratives and range from early modern to postmodern texts. Theoretical perspectives include structuralist, poststructuralist, and feminist.
This course provides an intense focus on a particular area of contemporary literary theory. Depending on the instructor, the course may cover major theoretical movements (e.g., feminist theory, deconstruction, new historicism) or concentrate on certain major figures (e.g., Bakhtin, Derrida, Cixous, Foucault).
Includes College Honors theses. Requirements for college honors are listed above and under 'Honors Program'.
Includes College Honors theses. Requirements for college honors are listed above and under 'Honors Program'
An overview of the work of a practicing writer, with explorations of particular genres of interest to individual students in the course. Assignments may include a writer's history (autobiographical account of interest in writing) and a writer's apprenticeship (in-depth examination of a writer admired by the student).
Consideration of the history of rhetoric, from the Sophists to the present day, with particular concern both for the ethical considerations involved in persuasive uses of language and for the stylistic choices in developing written work.
Exploration of the current poetry scene, particularly in America, reading collections from a wide variety of poetic schools and from the theoretical positions that inform the poems. Movements covered may include feminist and identity poetics, the New York School, poetry of witness, neo-confessional, Language Poetry, and the New Formalism. Use of imitation to experiment with difference poetic stances and styles.
This course focuses on the idea of “science accommodation,” or making complex scientific subjects more accessible to the general public or science writing for popular audiences. Readings include technical reports, original research studies, literature reviews, and abstracts, alongside memoirs, fiction, and poetry with medical, environmental, and scientific content. Assignments may include articles for popular audiences, literature reviews, abstracts, social media campaigns, posters, or creative writing drawn from scientific research. Students engage in several writing projects (one of which may be community-based) for different audiences and purposes. This course is distinct from Scientific Writing, which is technical in nature
This course will focus on reading and critiquing a number of important biographies, in order to see how various professional biographers have approached their task. Concomitantly, each student will be asked to choose a contemporary subject worthy of a biography (not a relative), who lives within a 50-mile radius of Philadelphia. Students will search out publications that often include biographical essays/profiles, gather detailed information about their subjects from various sources they determine to be important, and do the necessary interviews, with the aim of writing a biographical essay/profile.
This course focuses on reading and writing short stories with a particular focus on single-author contemporary and classic short story collections and their significance. Authors that maybe considered include Atwood, Diaz, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Lahiri, Munro, Millhauser, Poe, and Twain.
A study of the American cultural scene during the 1960s including how racial discrimination, gender discrimination, sexual repression and anti-war activism appeared in writing and culture. Writers may include: Jack Kerouac, Nikki Giovanni, Eldridge Cleaver, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Betty Freidan, and some Beat poets. Films were also consequential both in propelling and in reflecting revolutionary changes in American life through the 1960s. Several key films that may be considered include In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider.
This course will explore how Irish novelists and short-story writers have represented "the Troubles"-a protracted period of politically motivated violence in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, which began in the late 1960s and has not fully ended today. Key questions include the following: What is the role of the artist in representing politically motivated and other types of violence? Should artists offer solutions or only pose problems? What are the moral and aesthetical stakes involved in making art out of atrocity? How might studying the fiction of the Northern Irish "Troubles" provide students in the M.A. in Writing Studies with thematic, technical and ethical insights for their own artistic investigations of the many forms of violence within their own societies?
Study of relationship between the work of writers and that produced by other kinds of creative people (in music, in architecture, in painting and drawing, in film) in order to get a full sense of any particular cultural moment (the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Roaring 20's, the Rebellious 60's).
In this course we immerse ourselves in a range of contemporary literary texts written for, read by, assigned to, or kept from young adults (ages 12-18). Our goals will be to become both more familiar with the wide variety of texts geared toward adolescents and more attuned to our own experiences as readers and writers of young adult literature. At the same time, we will be attempting to think through the multiple ways in which adults (particularly parents and teachers) and adolescent readers interact with these texts and with each other.
This course will consider a particular aspect of literature and culture relevant to contemporary writers. Content will vary according to the instructor. Course can be repeated when content varies.
When the novel came into being in the middle of the eighteenth century, its most popular genre was the Gothic-the novel of horror. In fact, the modern era-the era of science, reason, and democracy-has been obsessed with terror, fear, and the unknown since its very inception. What is it about horror fiction that so appeals to modern culture? Beginning with one of the earliest Gothic horror novels, the course will trace out a literary, philosophical, and filmic history. Each unit of the course will explore how a different psychological/cultural concept of terror plays out in an aesthetic context.
This course considers the ways in which contemporary authors reacted to scientific revolutions such as Einstein’s relativity theories, Bohr’s theory of complementarity, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. While focusing on the influence that an observer can have on an act of narration, we will study how this influence changed the narrative form. We will also consider the portrayal of scientific paraphernalia, such as microscopes, telescopes and lenses, as representations of science and scientific principles. While studying the reception and popular/literary engagements with these scientific theories, this course will chart the movement away from uncertainty and relativity in popular discourse, as, especially towards the early 21-st century, both popular and literary representations started to reflect the certainties of climate change.
This course focuses on the evolution of science fiction and its relationship to science from the Enlightenment to the present. Genres covered include popular scientific nonfiction, the short story, novels, film, and science fiction narratives in gaming and online culture. Science fiction related to climate change and utopian/dystopian futures are emphasized.
This course focuses on the narratives of climate change in fiction (“Cli-Fi,” “Climate Fiction), nonfiction, and popular culture. Through an examination of dystopian and utopian modes of thought, the course will examine how rhetorics of fear and hope construct future histories and direct human action relative to climate change.
Nature Writing & the Environment explores methods of restoring relationships with nature and with one another by writing about nature and the environment in a way that encourages others to care and act. It asks students to retain a sense of wonder in a time of justifiable fear and to write artistically without sacrificing scientific accuracy. In response to reading, discussion, and students’ own experience of nature and the environment, students will write both creatively and analytically and compose and revise a substantial essay or article to submit to a journal or magazine.
Writing and Environmental Justice considers how systemic racism and the exploitation of the earth are intertwined and unpacks why environmental hazards–oil refiners, landfills, and factories that pollute–are often located in communities of color. Writers will be invited to consider how exposure to environmental toxins affects the quality and length of lives in communities of color through consideration of crises like the lead in the water crisis in Detroit. Offered as community-engaged learning, writers will work with community-partner organizations on social media campaigns to address issues in their communities.
Exploration of theories of composition, with particular emphasis on contributions to the field in the past half century.
Consideration of the writing that teachers can do in order to develop their approach to the teaching of writing.
In this course students will explore how writing can be used as a tool, a method, and a means of empowerment. They will consider how the ability to tell one's story can be empowering and what the risks of telling that story are. They will also consider what an author might choose to leave out of the telling of a particular tale. Finally, students will research stories of empowerment and write their own stories of empowerment. Each student will complete two projects in different genres including fiction, nonfiction, pedagogy, poetry, and academic prose.
Through examination of fictional and nonfiction narratives and narrative theories, this course considers such issues as the shift from oral to print to hypertext narratives, linear and nonlinear structure, writing "taboo" subjects, and the impact of social-cultural-historical circumstances upon narrative form and function. Content varies with instructor.
Study of select issues in the domain of rhetoric, to be determined by the instructor.
This course considers the history of style from a rhetorical perspective and then moves to the work of 20th and 21st century writers to explore the use of style in contemporary writing, including your own. A discussion-based seminar with a workshop component, this course requires a high level of participation.
An exploration of a particular topic related to the essay. Topics may include women essayists, personal essays, writing and memory, or other topics.
This course studies scientific discourse as a mode of argument in specific historical contexts. Students will study the principles of persuasive and informational rhetoric from ancient and modern sources, and will analyze scientific texts from the ancient world through the current day. Students will develop an understanding of the scientific discourses of important figures in the history of science.
We are living during an exciting moment when engaging forms of physics writing and communication are widely accessible to popular audiences. Examples (to name just a few) include Brian Greene’s lucid writings on relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory; Carlo Rovelli’s poetic reflections on time; and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s lively podcast Startalk Radio. Such communication has the power to disseminate intricate physics theories and concepts in a digestible way, spark newfound understandings, philosophical reflection, and critical thinking among diverse audiences, and promote young people’s entry into science-related fields. In this course, we will both rhetorically analyze and engage in physics writing and communication. We will study a wide range of physics-related communications designed for popular audiences (including books, articles, podcasts, and short videos), analyze their rhetorical workings, and compose and circulate our own writing and communication about physics.
A writer's work can be incredibly varied and provide a multitude of challenges and opportunities for creativity. Multimedia writers may create a script for a storyboard developed by a graphic artist. They may also create the text for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posts. They might write copy for a news broadcast, or their own blog. The goal of this intensive writing workshop is to build a writing portfolio and introduce the many facets of multimedia writing while encouraging each student to find their own method, approach, and voice within the structures of each multimedia platform. Students will be guided in exploring, discovering, and strengthening their voices and writing styles with the goal of enhancing and expanding their analytical and creative communication skills, and preparing them for real world jobs.
Consideration of the writing that comes directly from life experience and development of an autobiographical narrative that reflects past achievements in this genre. Can satisfy Area I.
Workshop course in creative nonfiction; several pieces of nonfiction will be prepared for submission. Can be repeated with the permission of the graduate director.
In-depth look into the concerns of a publishing poet. Students will hone their own work, putting together a final portfolio of polished writing, and will explore publication options including chapbooks and literary magazines. Toward this end, the class will include workshopping and one-on-one conferences with the instructor, as well as reading and responding to contemporary poetry, with attention to the practical concerns of the poet. Can be repeated with the permission of the graduate director.
Workshop method of critique, with students expected to put together a portfolio of polished short stories. Published short stories will be read as models, and there will be discussion of strategies of getting fiction published. Content varies with the instructor. Fiction-writing workshop I can be taken either before or after Fiction writing workshop II. Can be repeated with the permission of the graduate director.
Workshop method of critique, with students expected to put together a portfolio of polished short stories or a short section of a novel or novella. Published short stories and novels will be read as models, and there will be discussion of strategies of getting fiction published in a variety of locations. Content varies with the instructor. Fiction-writing workshop II can be taken either before or after Fiction writing workshop I. Can be repeated with the permission of the graduate director.
In this course, you will study the mechanics of language and usage as related to scientific manuscripts and other documents, with the 11th edition of American Medical Association Manual of Style and its online resources as our primary guide. Topics covered include correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and usage in scientific writing; medical nomenclature, eponyms, and abbreviations; structure of common article types and other deliverables; referencing; reporting numbers and statistics in medicine; tables and figures; roles of author, writer, and editor in medical writing; and publication ethics, among others. Course activities will include a mix of lectures and class discussions reinforced by readings as well as practice exercises and quizzes. Medical editors working in the field will also be invited to share their experiences.
Exploration of screenwriting in a workshop format with consideration of the whole process involved in development of screen projects.
This course will introduce you to professional scientific writing in the health sciences. You will learn techniques that will help you write effectively and efficiently, summarize and analyze scientific research, evaluate the soundness and ethics of research methodologies, display scientific data, and present on scientific topics. Genres covered are abstracts, proposals, scientific research articles, review essays, presentations, and patient education websites. To get the most out of this class, a strong background in science is encouraged.
Exploration of a particular topic not covered in other writing workshops. Examples include "Playwriting," "Writing and Memory," "Writing through Race, Class, and Gender," "Food Writing," and "Nature Writing." Content varies according to instructor. Course may be repeated with permission of the graduate director.
Successful freelance publishing begins with an awareness of what editors and their readers want. It demands knowledge of the manuscript market and familiarity with the requirements of specific publications: subject, length, organization, style. Unpublished writers can perfect their skills by analysis and imitation of authors who already write for the publications in which learners wish to appear. The course requires that assignments be composed-from the beginning-for specific publications and that completed work will be submitted for publication. Content can be fiction, nonfiction, or journalism and varies with the instructor. Can be repeated with the permission of the graduate director.
Comparative analysis of several public relations campaigns, with consideration of the rhetorical principles involved in the effort to sway public opinion.
Exploration of magazine publishing, and the study of several magazines-their histories and editorial styles- with consideration for changing demographics and the practical considerations of achieving success in the magazine market. Consideration of the state of magazine publishing in both print and the web, and the development of articles from pitch to publication.
Exploration of a particular topic in journalism. May include sports journalism, literary journalism, or other topics as determined by the instructor.
This course will teach you the basics of how to write for a nonprofit organization, and how to tailor your message and style to various audiences. Focusing primarily on grant writing, you will learn the basics of how to ask for money from organizations in writing and how to navigate the grant-making process from the initial research to the submission of the final proposal. You will also practice writing other important pieces for any nonprofit, like appeal letters, blog posts, social media outreach, performance reports, and more. Through hands-on practice with real Philadelphia-area nonprofits, you'll learn how to write for the different audiences a nonprofit organization needs to reach. While this course is geared towards the writing skills suited to nonprofit organizations, many of these skills are also transferrable to writing at other kinds of professional organizations.
This course is designed to set your professional life as a writer in motion. Over the course of 15 weeks, you'll meet a series of working writers from around Philadelphia who will visit our class. During these visits, you'll have the opportunity to network with professional writers and learn about possible career paths, from public relations to publishing. Each writer's visit will tie into a different writing assignment so that you can begin building a portfolio of professional work (likely assignments will include: a press release, a review, a book proposal, an edited manuscript, plus a professional resume and bio.) At the end, you'll develop an online portfolio that you can use as a calling card.
Exploration of new communications media as the hypertext world expands and technology continues to make possible increased broadcast media opportunities.
Assignment to a specific, actual editing project, with expectation that the student will engage in several editorial functions in preparing manuscripts for publication.
Are pharmaceutical makers influencing scientific research? What emerging infectious disease is likely to be the next big scare? What are the pros and cons of universal healthcare? Is chocolate really good for the heart? This course will teach students how to report and write on some of the pressing health issues of the day and encourage them to become more discerning consumers of medical news. Students will learn how to analyze research studies, conduct interviews of doctors, scientists and patients, and translate findings into lively and informative stories for the lay reader. The course will explore the connection between the environment and disease and examine trends in medicine as technology advances and funding shrinks. Students will get the latest information from guest speakers who are leaders in the fields of medical research, public relations and the media. This course will help prepare students for a career in health-related writing or sharpen their communication skills for whatever field they are pursuing.
We read memoir, novels, poems, creative nonfiction, and films in order to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability are depicted through the writing of caregivers, medical professionals, and patients. The course focuses on how cultural differences affect access to medical care and how illness and health are narrated depending on the writer's intersectional position. Mental health diagnoses, addiction, chronic illness, and trauma may also be explored.
Literature and Medicine considers how patients, doctors, and health care professionals write poetry, memoir, and fiction about health, wellness, illness, death, dying and suffering. It particularly considers how race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability influence the stories that are told. Projects can include writing narratives of our own encounters with the health care system, profiling doctors and other healthcare professionals, and community-engaged learning with community partners who are dedicated to health care.
Racism, Science, and Medicine explores how systemic racism appears in what is purported to be the neutral language of “science.” Because language shapes what we think and how we think it, we will consider how changing our language can work toward social change. By exploring how race was written in 19th, 20th, and 21st century scientific and medical texts, writers will be then encouraged to engage in a look at how race is encoded in contemporary science and medical writing. Writers will explore what anti-racist science and writing look like, and consider how other biases like gender, disability, and sexuality, are inscribed in writing. Offered as community-engaged learning, Racism, Science, and Medicine will invite students to complete projects for environmental and medical organizations committed to addressing systemic racism.
Science writing relies on understanding and interpreting scientific and technical genres (such as clinical studies and reports and scientific research and review articles) for lay audiences. This class will teach you how to read, understand, and critique primary research studies in a variety of scientific and medical disciplines, focusing on the right questions to ask about methodologies, funding, research ethics, and presentation and interpretation of results in context. Case studies will highlight high-impact research that had undue influence on public health and other areas of intersection between science and society (e.g., the Women’s Health Initiative 2002 study), as well as cases of false reporting or misunderstanding of scientific studies. Students will build a heuristic for reading scientific literature, will critique scientific studies, and will write science accommodations, e.g. publicizing high profile studies for select lay audiences.
This course will consider a particular aspect of science and literature relevant to contemporary writers. Content will vary according to the instructor. Courses can be repeated when content varies.
Special Topics courses will be offered based on students’ interests and the changing marketplace.
An independent study course, overseen by an instructor with the approval of the director. This course is utilized to fulfill a degree requirement under special circumstances with an emphasis on assigned readings.
An independent study course, overseen by an instructor with the approval of the director. This course is utilized to fulfill a degree requirement under special circumstances with an emphasis on researching a particular topic.
An independent study course, overseen by an instructor with the approval of the director. This course is utilized to fulfill a degree requirement under special circumstances with an emphasis on writing assignments.
An independent study course, overseen by an instructor with the approval of the director. This course is utilized to fulfill a degree requirement under special circumstances with an emphasis on community writing/teaching.
Students have workplace internship assignments in areas of career interest that involve writing (research, editing, writing). A component of the course will be research in the internship field, in addition to writing of various kinds about the actual internship activity, some of it done with an eye to publication. Each placement involves approximately 200 hours of work over the course of the internship, a letter from a supervisor upon completion of the internship, and a journal documenting the work of the internship
The thesis project can involve either an analytical study in some area covered by the program or a collection of original creative material. Each project will have a faculty director, selected by the student in consultation with the Writing Studies Program Director. For a project to be completed in one registration period, register for ENG 793 and ENG 794, 3 credits each, for a total of 6 credits. For a project to be completed in two separate registration periods, register first for ENG 793 for 3 credits, then later, for ENG 794 for the remaining 3 credits. It is recommended that each project also be read by a second reader, who will be chosen by the student and thesis director, and approved by the graduate director. At the completion of the thesis project, students will make a formal presentation of it in one of three ways: (1) A public reading of a selected portion of the project (2) A formal defense whereby the thesis will be explained and questions about it entertained (3) A public reading coupled with a formal defense. The method of public presentation would be agreed upon by the student and the thesis director. The English Department will host opportunities for public readings two times a year (in December and May) close to expected completion of degree requirements and the thesis project. Once complete, thesis projects will receive a P (pass). In progress thesis projects will be graded as Incomplete. Nota Bene: The Writing Studies diploma will not be conferred until the candidate has successfully completed the above steps, as well as submitted the thesis project in the correct format for binding. Details about the procedure for binding the thesis can be found on the Writing Studies website.
The thesis project can involve either an analytical study in some area covered by the program or a collection of original creative material. Each project will have a faculty director, selected by the student in consultation with the Writing Studies Program Director. For a project to be completed in one registration period, register for ENG 793 and ENG 794, 3 credits each, for a total of 6 credits. For a project to be completed in two separate registration periods, register first for ENG 793 for 3 credits, then later, for ENG 794 for the remaining 3 credits. It is recommended that each project also be read by a second reader, who will be chosen by the student and thesis director, and approved by the graduate director. At the completion of the thesis project, students will make a formal presentation of it in one of three ways: (1) A public reading of a selected portion of the project (2) A formal defense whereby the thesis will be explained and questions about it entertained (3) A public reading coupled with a formal defense. The method of public presentation would be agreed upon by the student and the thesis director. The English Department will host opportunities for public readings two times a year (in December and May) close to expected completion of degree requirements and the thesis project. Once complete, thesis projects will receive a P (pass). In progress thesis projects will be graded as Incomplete. Nota Bene: The Writing Studies diploma will not be conferred until the candidate has successfully completed the above steps, as well as submitted the thesis project in the correct format for binding. Details about the procedure for binding the thesis can be found on the Writing Studies website.
Source: Saint Joseph's University's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 59
