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Course Descriptions for Spring 2010
- 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 2010 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.
CWR 206 Creative Writing: Required foundation course for Creative Writing minors. Students write and revise their own fiction and poetry, improving their craft through writing exercises and by discussing the writing of both published writers and their classmates.
CWR 305 Screenwriting Workshop: This class is about finding your subject as a screenwriter, and learning how to write a shootable screenplay. The course assumes that the writer is essentially a beginner in the craft of planning and writing a screenplay. Unlike the other 300-level writing workshops, WRI 305 does NOT require that you first take WRI 206 as a pre-requisite. The writing proceeds in a step-by-step process, beginning with simple exercises and proceeding to the more complex. Through writing and revisions prompted by workshops, group discussions and conferences, the beginning screenwriter is encouraged to discover her or his individual voice and subject. While not ignoring the longer, feature-length film, the class will focus primarily on the short film, by screening both animated and live action shorts, and exploring their structure and cinematic techniques. Each student will write and workshop at least four short screen-plays, one of which will be significantly revised. You will also, as part of the collaborative process common to screenwriting, write coverage of each work-shopped screenplay. Instructor: Hannold
CWR 306 Fiction Workshop: This course is an intensive workshop in fiction, intended for those who have completed CWR 206. We will spend the entire semester reading and critiquing one another's work; we will also read and discuss a selection of contemporary short stories and excerpts from novels, and possibly (depending on time and interest) some critical texts as well. Grades will be based on engagement and a final portfolio of revised work from the semester. Instructor: Row
CWR 406 Writers' Workshop: In this final workshop for the Creative Writing minor, we will provide close and rigorous critiques of one another's extended writing projects, either in poetry or prose. SOme supplemental reading (fiction, poetry, reviews, critical texts) will be assigned, but the focus will be on helping each student work toward a completed manuscript. Instructor: Row
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.
IMM 440: Interactive storytelling:
Interactive storytelling explores computational approaches to the creation of narratives that engage audiences in novel ways. Students will begin with a grounding in narrative theory and develop interactive stories using such emerging technologies for modeling the process of story construction. Students will build stories using Scratch and Scratch boards, Second Life, and Storytron. The will also analyze interactive narratives and explore approaches to interactive storytelling that are under development. This class is an advanced professional writing course for students within the writing concentration of the interactive multimedia major, but students from other majors may take the class with the permission of the instructor. Instructor: Pearson
JPW 208 Intro to Journalism: The basics of news reporting and news writing, with an emphasis on the ethics of journalism, clear writing and online reporting. Students will learn how to prepare for news conferences, how to cover breaking news and how to prepare for the changing nature of the news industry. Instructor: Lounsberry
JPW 251 Feature Writing: This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of feature writing, with an emphasis on clarity and style. Combining the story-telling techniques of creative writing with the timeliness and facticity of hard-news reporting, students will learn to craft stories for print, online and interactive media as well as explore the different kinds of features. There will be a strong emphasis on the art of writing an effective opening, stating clear themes and exploring how to effectively use quotes. There also will be an emphasis on creating web-based interviews, videos and graphics to accompany the feature story. Instructor: Lounsberry
JPW 309 Media Ethics: This course will explore and underscore the importance of ethical behavior in journalism. Students will study ethical standards, professionalism, conflicts of interest, reporter-source relationships, privacy, the “watchdog” role of the media, national-security conflicts and the news media’s responsibility and accountability to the public. Instructor: Lounsberry
JPW 321 Race, Gender, and the News: This class focuses on the degree to which interlocking social systems of privilege such as race, class and gender affect the process of defining and creating news. We examine ways in which the tacit acceptance of these hierarchies led to their becoming encoded into the definitions and process of professional journalism in the 19th and 20th century, and review the efforts made since 1968 to meet the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ goal of “cover[ing] all communities fairly. The disruptive impact of the Internet on news organizations, as well the debate over “post-racial” realities will also be considered. Student will complete a major project which will be either a research study or a original reporting about an underserved community. This course counts as an option in the JPW major and an option in the African American studies minor. It counts in the “race” category for liberal learning, but not gender. Instructor: Pearson
JPW 350 Magazine Writing: Instructor: Staff
JPW 498 Beats & Deadlines: Prerequisite: JPW 208 or permission of instructor: This advanced reporting course provides working experience in covering regular newspaper assignments (beats) such as local government, courts, statehouse, police, and environmental issues. Instructor: Shaw
LIT 227 Global Animated Film: This course explores animation as a modern and post-modern art form, in a global context. The focus will be on animated films from America, Europe and Asia, with a special emphasis on recent Japanese animation. Also, in this course we will appreciate how animation resembles and differs from live action film, and how animation has influenced and been influenced by techniques and themes in live action film, and has embraced subjects ranging from dinosaurs to cyborgs. Instructor: Hannold
LIT 232 World Literature Since 1700: National Fictions: If, as many critics have pointed out, the rise of the novel coincided with the emergence of nationalism, then examining the relationship between the two should yield valuable insights into social and historical forces that gave rise to a modern literary sensibility. The central question that this course examines is: How has literature shaped, and been shaped by, the emergence of nations and nationalisms? Works by: Charles Dickens, Anton Chekov, Ignazio Silone, Ayi Kwei Armah, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and others.
Instructor: Rao
LIT 233 World Drama: We will be reading Greek, Shakespearean, and modern tragedy and comedy, a Medieval morality play, Asian and African drama, and more; plus supplementary readings on theories, movements, playwrights, and productions from our anthology. Instructor: Konkle
LIT 282 20th Century African American Lit: A study of literature in the African American Tradition, focusing on the realist, naturalist, and modernist writings of the 1940's and 1960's, the prose, poetry, essays and speeches of the Black Arts Movement and contemporary African American literature. We will interrogate how the social matrices of competing definitions of black identity are reflected in and through writing produced by African Americans, while we trouble notions of authenticity, representation, and essentialism. Works by Zora Neale Hurston, RIchard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, and others. Instructor: Williams
LIT 310: Literature for Younger Readers: The purpose of this course is to provide you with a working knowledge of Young Adult (YA) literature. As you sample works by a select, yet diverse, set of widely-read writers, you will be asked to read across genres—realistic fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy), nonfiction, and graphic novels—as well as to discuss and analyze YA texts using various theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, the course will introduce you to the growing body of criticism being written about YA literature. As you are approaching these texts from the standpoint of future educators, this course will take up issues of pedagogy, canon formation, and curricular choice. Instructor: Meixner
LIT 315 Men & Masculinities Literary Perspectives: This course focuses on representations of men and masculinity in literary texts, although we may also look at film, video, television, advertising, and music. Some of the issues we will be thinking about include: the construction of modern male identities, the diversity of men's lives, the complex dynamics of men's relationships, and questions of power and social justice within the contemporary gender order. Instructor: Landreau
LIT 316 Global Women Writers: This course will explore various literatures from around the world, encouraging students to examine the politics of gender, culture, and nation as well as the intersections of those systems of power. Common themes include feminist politics, post- and neo-colonialism's, reproductive rights, translation, globalization, and activism.
LIT 340 The Bible as Literature: In this course, we will read and analyze the Bible as a piece of literature. In particular, we will examine the historical and cultural background of the various books of the Bible with an eye to understanding the peculiarities of Biblical narrative, imagery, and style. We will read as much of the Bible as a single semester allows-from the Torah to the Gospels, from the Prophets to the letters of St. Paul. Through this course, you will become conversant in the most influential images, stories, and characters of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Instructor: Steinberg, G
LIT 342 Mythology: This course provides students with the opportunity to study significant myths and legends which have influenced the shape and content of both Eastern and Western literature and to acquaint them with the shifting and conflicting ways in which mythology has been transmitted and studied from the ancient world to the contemporary, from the East to the West. Instructor: Hustis
LIT 343 Late Medieval Writers: This course will examine the flowering of vernacular literature in fourteenth-century Europe. Emphasis will be placed on reconstructing how and why fourteenth-century European writers, such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, came to create a vernacular tradition that transcended national and linguistic boundaries. Topics covered in the course this semester will include classical and vernacular precursors to the fourteenth-century writers and issues of life, sex, and gender. Instructor: Steinberg, D
LIT 357 Modern British Literature : Literary production in early modern England flourished in spite of and because of the political, religious, and social turmoil of this period. In this course, we will read poetry, prose, and drama by writers including More, Marlowe, Donne, Lanyer, Whitney, Jonson, Wroth, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Sidney siblings. Prepare to immerse yourself in the Renaissance. Instructor: Carney
LIT 361 British Romanticism: British Romantic Era will look at the literary world in Britain from 1789 (the French Revolution begins) to 1837 (Victoria’s reign begins). LIT 361 will explore both the Romantic ideology and its construction in academia and the popular imagination. The construction of the “Romantic” canon will be a major concern of the course. LIT 361 focuses on the poets whose work has come to define “British Romanticism”: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, as well as on three early 19th century novelists whose works are sometimes at odds with Romantic poetry: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. These three novels written at the height of the Romantic Movement in poetry – Persuasion, Frankenstein, and Ivanhoe – are very different from one another, and thoroughly undercut any assertions about the homogenous nature of Romanticism.
Instructor: Steinberg, D
LIT 37001 Creative Non-Fiction Workshop: This course introduces students to the reading and writing of creative non-fiction. In a workshop setting, students will learn how to adapt the elements of fiction and poetry writing-especially character, story, imagery, form, metaphor, and voice-to the non-fiction essay, what some have called "the literature of reality." Readings include works by such writers as Baldwin, Berger, Didion, Dillard, and Lopate. Students will produce a portfolio of writings that may include such sub-genres as memoir, profile, travelogue, comedy, and political/cultural critique. PLEASE NOTE: This is not a course in writing academic papers. Instructor: Blake
LIT 37002 World Film: This course will investigate the development of film as an art form, in a global context. We will explore trends and movements in film, and view selected master works. While live action films are the primary focus, some attention will also be given to animation. This course meets the Liberal Learning World Designation. Instructor: Hannold
LIT 370-03 South Asia: Literature and Conflict: This course offers an in-depth study of a wide range of Indian and Pakistani literary texts. The thematic goal is to examine the conflict between these two nuclear-armed rivals through a literary and cultural lens. By reading Indian and Pakistani autobiography, fiction, poetry, and drama of the twentieth century, we will explore how the partition of British India paved the way for the conflicts that ravage the subcontinent today. The course will also introduce students to the origins and nature of Hindu fundamentalism in India and Muslim fundamentalism in Pakistan, as well as their representation in post independence literature. Instructor: Rao
LIT/JPW370-04: Literary Journalism Many of the nation’s most prominent 19th and 20th-century novelists began their literary careers as reporters or magazine writers. By comparing and contrasting the structure, style and content of news articles, non-fiction essays and novels of writers such as John McPhee, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Lafcadio Hearn, Stephen Crane, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, John Hersey, Nelly Bly and others, we will explore and question the distinction between “fiction” and “non-fiction” and consider when, how, and what it means to identify oneself as a novelist and a journalist in the changing social, political and literary contexts of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instructor: Hustis
LIT 375 U. S. Literature, 1800- 1900 : The Growth of an American Literature: When the 19th century began, the United States had been politically independent from England for 17 years. But culturally it was still very tied to England. We will look at various attempts to free ourselves from this dependence and to write a distinctly American literature, from Emerson’s “An American Scholar” to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Other authors will include Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglas, and Whitman. Instructor: Bearer
LIT 421 Shakespeare: Tragedies & Comedies: Intensive study of Shakespeare's tragedies,and romances with special focus on figurative language, dramatic structure, and cultural, political, and religious contexts. Texts to be read include three tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello), one problem play (Troilus and Cressida), and two romances (The Winter's Tale and the Tempest). Instructor: Venturo
LIT 49901 Seminar: Representations of the Holocaust: Elie Wiesel wrote that only a text written by a witness or survivor can
be about the Holocaust; otherwise, it is not about the Holocaust.
Philosophers have argued that the only appropriate response to the
phenomenon of the Holocaust is silence. Such views cast the Holocaust in
a special category of representation. Is the Holocaust so sacred that
its representation should be limited? What should the limits be? Who is
to say what qualifies and what does not? How will it be remembered if it
cannot be represented by each new generation? Should we think about
authenticity in Holocaust representations? How do we regard the
Nazi-created texts documenting the Holocaust, such as the iconic
photograph in the Warsaw Ghetto of the boy with his hands raised? That
is, is the particular gaze of the creator of the representation important? To consider these issues, students will engage with theories
of Holocaust representation by such figures as Berel Lang, Hayden White,
Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Janet Wolff and others. They will
study a range of Holocaust representations in literature and film that
test these theories.
Instructor: Friedman
LIT 49902 Seminar: Paradise Lost: In this seminar, we will read Paradise Lost and selected other works by Milton, along with related literary theory, reflecting a range of approaches including feminist and postcolonial. For the syllabus, see http://graham.intrasun.tcnj.edu/schedule.htm. Instructor: Graham
LIT 49903 Seminar: Violence, Visuality, and Race: This course will examine literature by African-American writers and visual art that depicts African-Americans. Our focus will be on the representation of violence in these works. Reading literature and images as texts, we will consider the ways in which visual and literary art illuminate and in some cases speak to each other. We will question the representational possibilities and limitations that each medium encounters. While we will read visual theory, you will find that these works integrate familiar theoretical lenses, including psychoanalysis, new historicism, and deconstruction. This course is intended to be exploratory, an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of disciplines in order to experience African-American artistic expression in light of broad historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic issues. Texts will include, Charles Chestnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and Toni Morrison's Beloved. We will also view a wide array of images that span from the nineteenth century to the present. Instructor: Jackson
LIT 49904 Seminar: The Green 19th Century: This seminar will focus on the nature of “nature” in 19th-century British Literature. That is, by applying an ecocritical lens to a variety of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose, students will examine representations of the natural world and consider how writers and readers of the era understood their relationship to and place in that world. This will necessarily require scrutiny of changing constructions of the idea of “nature” and its corollary term “natural” with the further goal of better understanding how these changing definitions had broad social implications with respect to scientific inquiry, industrialization, imperialism, and gender politics. Along with lyric poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Hopkins, we will read Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Eliot’s Adam Bede, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Instructor: McCauley
LIT 49905 Seminar: Thrice Told Tale: Auto Ethnographic Fiction: Thrice Told Tales: Autobiography, Ethnography, Fiction: Literary scholars and anthropologists rely on the common ground of narrative to tell stories about people, places and things but they don't often come to easy agreements about what parts should be personal,"true" or imagined. The subject of this course is autoethnography, a hybrid form that draws on three genres: autobiography – the story of the “self” – ethnography – the anthropologist’s culturally descriptive narrative of the “other” – and fiction – the narrative of imaginative impulses that covers everything in between. In this way, our course is a study in genre and the ways in which scholars in both the social sciences and humanities “bend” the methods and modes of genre necessary to representing the cultural groups of their subjects. While the practices of autoethnography are still evolving in a wide breadth of theoretical and methodological sites, we’ll spend the semester tracing this evolution, mapping out some working definitions and determining what it takes for the author to transform the boundaries of writing"selves" and writing "others". Instructor: Ortiz-Vilarelle
LIT 49906 Seminar: Realism: We frequently say that a work of art is "realistic." But what do we mean? Is "realism" purely a matter of form? What is the connection between literary realism and economic, political and social forces? This course will examine these questions through a study of three centuries of fictional masterpieces and two centuries of literary theory. We will read two realist classics (Daneil Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary), plus examples of modernist realism (Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway), magical realism (Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude), the "nonfiction novel" (Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night), and postmodern deconstruction or realism (J. M. Coetzee's Foe), in addition to short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Bobie Ann Mason. Instructor: Robertson
LIT 49907: Seminar: Women's Autobiographies: This theory-intensive research seminar will explore women’s autobiographical literature throughout many different cultures and time periods. Drawing from a wide spectrum of primary and manuscript sources, we will study such representative works as 17th-century Puritan women’s Indian captivity narratives, 18th-century cross-dressed women’s Revolutionary War memoirs, 19th-century slave narratives, Victorian maidservants’ journals, women’s pioneer diaries of westward migration and expansion, and 20th-century women’s “fictional autobiographies.” The reading of these sources will be accompanied by rigorous research of secondary texts, incorporating the study of gender, history, and culture in relation to the primary works. Ultimately, we will explore the contemporary and rising field of autobiographical literary criticism, applying many theoretical perspectives to this ever-expanding corpus of women’s literature and life-writing across the ages. Instructor: Tarter
LIT 49908: Seminar: The Beatles and Their World: The lives and music of the Beatles reflect profound cultural changes that followed the Great Depression and WOrld War II. The extraordinary transformation of this musical group from a locally popular Liverpool band to one of the most influential groups of all time offers insight into our modern world. With the Beatles as its focus, this seminar will explore such topics in modern cultural history as race relations, women's rights and gender issues, youth culture, counterculture and protest, mass media and public relations, business practices in the music industry, and, of course, developments in popular music. Instructor: Venturo
LIT 49909: Epiphanal Blackness:
I employ the term “epiphanal blackness” to define the moment when what it means to be black is textually revealed throughout African American literature. The complicated ideas of race operating in the United States, the “notions” we hold about the meaning of race, both shape and are shaped by these textual moments. The moments when the writers and/or their characters first recognize that their race - perhaps embodied in skin or merely in notions of “blood”- has deep meaning in the context of American identity are ubiquitous in prominent texts in the African American literary canon. This course will explore the contradictions and ambiguities which become fundamental to the way race is conceived: blacks are seen and understood as different, while in their minds they know they also alike, as American, or at least human, but in any event shut out from the dominant society. It is this trope of “epiphanal blackness” and its subsequent implications for the construction of racial identity that we will trace in African American literature.
In addition, we will theoretically contextualize the study of the trope of “epiphanal blackness” in the context of African American literary scholarship. Our theoretical readings for this course will work to trace how the trope of “epiphanal blackness” catalogues and to a lesser extent recovers the black literary tradition while also considering the theoretical implications of how race is constructed and lived, by drawing on current scholarship on race studies, e.g. The Derrick Bell Reader (2005) a collection of criticism by prominent critical race theorists and Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001). Instructor: Williams
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. Instructor: Steele
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. Instructor: Steele
