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Course Descriptions for Spring 2006
---Course descriptions are listed in alphabetical order by code and number.
---Only courses for which descriptions are available are listed here; for the full Spring 2006 English Department Course Schedule, see links on previous page.
---If a course in which you are interested is not listed here, please contact the professor for further information.
EED 390 Methods of Teaching Secondary English : Focus on reading and comprehension strategies as well as debates over "best practices" in the teaching of secondary English. Students introduced to a number of theoretical and pedagogical approaches and required to develop corresponding curricular materials.
ENGL 489 Student Teaching Seminar: Every-other-week content seminar in support of student teaching. Focus on sharing of content-rich and differentiated age-appropriate methods, classroom management and reading strategies, job search/interviewing information, and on-going professional development opportunities.
ENGL 490 English Secondary Student Teaching: A semester of full-time teaching in local middle or high schools.
JPW 311 News Editing and Production: An intensive introduction to modern practices in news editing and production, both print and electronic. Field trips may be required at student expense. Prerequisite: JPW 208 or permission of instructor.
LIT 217 (Jackson) Issues in Multicultural Lit: The categories in the title of thi course "Identity, Difference, and Desire" will perform as guideposts in our examination of texts that consider the formation of selves in light of racial and gendered social formations. All of the books we will read are concerned with personal development and to some extent intersect generically with the bildungsroman , a term traditionally used to describe the story of a young man finding his way in the world, reconciling his own subjectivity with the pressures of society. In this course, we will ask the question what happens when the central player in this context becomes female, black, or poor with limited opportunity to act on the world around her. While most of the works that we will consider are by African-American women writers, we will also examine works by one European-American woman writer and one Asian-American woman writer, not simply as a comparative pieces, but rather as complex intersections that illuminate the interdependence of the racial categories, while also highlighting how this inter-constructedness informs culture.
LIT 226 The Film: The specific focus of this course, /The Film/, is to introduce you to the fundamental aspects of cinema as an art form. We will explore how the film medium gives us experiences similar to those provided by painting, sculpture, literature, music, theater or dance. This course will make you more aware of the aesthetic strategies which makers of both live action and animated film employ, thereby enabling you to assess how these strategies shape and structure the art form, film.
LIT 251 British Literature to the Restoration: In this course, students take a close look at specific literary techniques and genres, and at aspects of British culture, in selected examples of pre-1660 British literature. "How does this literary work reflect the values and beliefs of the culture that produced it?" Some authors on whom we will focus are the Beowulf-poet, Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. Link to online syllabus.
LIT 272: Literature of the United States: A broad look at American literature in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, organized around subjects that our authors wrote some of their best works about, including 1) race (e.g., works by Twain, Chestnutt, Ellison, Faulkner, Hurston, Kingston); 2) war (e.g., works by Whitman, Twain, Howells, Crane, Vonnegut); 3) gender (e.g., works by Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, Wharton, Dunbar-Nelson, Freeman, Hemingway, and Albee).
LIT 310 Literature for Younger Readers: Link to online syllabus.
LIT359: 18th Century British Novel: Link to online syllabus.
LIT 370: Studies in Lit: Power and the American Dream: An exploration of the American dream through the fiction, nonfiction, popular culture, and poetry in the period of industrial capitalism. Students will focus on the effects of industrialization -- beginning with the steam engine and ending with mass production of electrical power -- and how changes in production and distribution of power and wealth affect the imagination of writers. Authors may include Henry Adams, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B DuBois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frank Norris, Booker T. Washington, and Walt Whitman.
LIT 376: American literature 1860-1920: An in-depth study of the era and its authors, including Twain, Crane, James, Whitman, Dickinson, Wharton, Chestnutt, and Holley. We will examine the rise of realism and naturalism, as well as the emergence of the scientific and intellectual developments that would ultimately result in modernism.
LIT39401 Topics in Comp Literature: Contemporary Literary Theory: Link to online syllabus.
LIT39402 Topics in Comp. Literature, Zen and the Beat Writers: This course will study the cultural and literary reception and the routes of transportation of Zen and Zen Buddhism into American culture in general and the Beat Writers of the 1950s and 1960s in particular. We will read works by Zen masters, novels by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs,poems by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Di Prima, Cold Mountain and Kenji, and will have some films and pop beat music.
LIT 42101: Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories: Intensive study of Shakespeare's comedies and history plays with special focus on figurative language, dramatic structure, and cultural, political, and religious contexts. Texts to be read in spring 2006 include four comedies ("The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night," and Measure for Measure") and four histories ("Richard II," "Henry the Fourth, Part One," "Henry the Fourth, Part Two," and "Henry the Fifth").
LIT 427: Major Authors Before 1900: Twain: Mark Twain was primarily a satirist who wrote on almost every conceivable subject. From telling a rather crude shaggy dog story to poking fun at the dirty Elizabethans to twisting a sharp knife that he stuck into the king of Belgium or the President of the US , Twain loved to point out to humans how absurd they could at times be. We will investigate Twain's era, laugh with and critique Twain's writings, and even watch excerpts from some awful films supposedly made from his works. In other words, Twain did write a heckofalot more than Huck Finn .
LIT 49901: Camp Aesthetics: The first duty in life," Oscar Wilde wrote, "is to be as artificial as possible." This course explores everything from the Rocky Horror Picture Show to authors like Gore Vidal and Oscar Wilde. If camp is a certain way of "seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon," what tools do we have to recognize the shifting relationship between the text and its consumption? How is consumption itself an artistic act? What are the politics of camp? Are we viewing queer subversiveness or aestheticism gone awry and is there a difference between bad art, kitsch, and camp?
LIT 49903: Thornton Wilder's Novels and Plays: Take a walk on the Wilder side. One of the great American writers of the first half of the 20th century, Thornton Wilder is still the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama (for The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth respectively); he also won the National Book Award for his penultimate novel, The Eighth Day. Although we read a few of his greatest plays, we shall focus more on his fiction since all 7 of his novels are back in print. In keeping with the theory component of the upper-level seminar, we will also study and apply to Wilder's texts theories of tragedy and comedy by such philosophers and scholars as Aristotle, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Northrup Frye, Eric Bentley, and others. Students will have the opportunity to participate in an event announcing and celebrating TCNJ as the academic home of the Thornton Wilder Society. Assignments include a research paper, a presentation on the scholarship of one of Wilder's novels, and a nonresearch paper or two.
LIT 49904: Seminar: A War of Words, 1650-1700: Study, in an exciting and newly enhanced course, British literature and culture in the aftermath of two civil wars and the beheading of King Charles I. The extraordinarily rich and diverse literature of the era from 1650 to 1700 reflects the tensions of a world torn by political, religious, and cultural conflict. Readings in Milton ( Paradise Lost , Samson Agonistes ), Dryden ( Absalom and Achitophel , MacFlecknoe ), Hobbes ( Leviathan ), Behn ( Oroonoko ), Bunyan ( The Pilgrim's Progress ), Butler ( Hudibras ), Rochester ( Satyr Against Reason and Mankind ), and Swift ( A Tale of a Tub ) range from ironic and satiric, to fervent and earnest, to obscene and salacious, to sublime and magisterial.
LIT 49905 Seminar: Victorian Crime and Criminality: This course proposes a theoretically informed examination of crime and criminality in the fiction of Victorian England. As we develop a dialog between the literary texts and their cultural contexts, we will consider these questions: Why were the Victorians' so interested in crime? What types of crimes interested them? In their fiction, how are crimes detected? Who tends to fall under suspicion? What motives are ascribed to criminals? Who, in fact, are Victorian criminals? How are they pursued? How are they punished? How do scientific advances (especially psychology) affect Victorian understandings of crime? Link to course web site.
LIT 49906 Seminar: Marxism and Literature: Literature is not produced (or consumed) in a vacuum, and the pressures of society-ideological, economic, and political-play a role in shaping cultural texts. Marxism offers us not only the tools to analyze and critique established structures of oppression and inequality, but also a way of approaching literary and cultural texts from a radical, liberatory perspective. This course will examine a wide range of Marxist writers and literary critics to understand the contemporary relevance of Marxist aesthetics. The course is thus both an introduction to Marxist theory and an exploration of its relationship to cultural criticism. Authors might include Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Gramsci, Bellamy, Orwell, Gordimer, Kingsolver and Danticat.
LIT 49907: Seminar: African Diaspora Literature and Theory : The course is organized around a balanced offering of African diaspora literature, different theoretical models that will help frame understandings of diaspora literature, culture and identity, and critical material (secondary sources) which focus on specific novels. Thus we will read articles which do one or more of the following: 1) offer a perspective in various schools of cultural and literary theory theory, including Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, and race theory; 2) address the changing critical conception, reception, and definition of diaspora literature, culture and identity and 3) provide critical interpretations of the novels we read. We will also read primary sources that engage with the theoretical issues through the vehicle of fiction. The course will conclude with a 2-week "workshop" period in which we will work on final papers, hear research presentations, and (attempt to) draw a series of conclusions about the form and function of African diaspora literature and culture and its "canonicity."
LIT 49908, Seminar: Slavery and the Contemporary African-American Novel:
When the title character of Shirley Anne William's Dessa Rose describes telling the stories of slavery, she says, "...we was seeing ourselfs as we had been and seeing the thing that had made us." This course will consider how contemporary African-American writers remember or "rememory" this defining experience of Africans in America . We will examine the limitations of rendering slavery through representation and the problems of reimagining slavery in contemporary explorations of identity. Texts include Octavia Butler's Kindred , Gayle Jones's Corregidora , and Toni Morrison's Beloved .
LNG
201 Introduction to the English Language:
LNG 201 focuses on descriptions and explorations of English in its
contemporary forms. Students will learn the basics of linguistic descriptions
and be introduced to general linguistic theory. The course includes
large units on Child Language Acquisition as well as language and
discourse in social contexts. If you've ever wondered how children
learn to speak so quickly and effortlessly, this is the class for
you.
LNG 202 Structure and History of the English Language:
LNG 202 focuses attention on the development of the English language
through time. After learning the basics of linguistic description,
students will learn about the grammatical structures of Old, Middle,
and Early Modern English. Students will also learn about the consequences
of this history to Present Day English. If you've ever wondered why
there's a 'k', a 'g', and an 'h' in 'knight', this is the class for
you.
LNG 311 Understanding English Grammar: This course
does not teach basic writing skills, the rules of usage, or editorial
conventions. Instead, the course focuses on the linguistic structure
of Present-Day English, principally the syntax (word order or sentence
structure) of Present-Day English. Moreover, the course addresses
some of the current controversies over usage, the status of dialects,
and "good English." Link to online syllabus. Link
to online syllabus.
