Fall 2008 Course Descriptions
Introductory and Advanced Writing Courses
Introductory Literature Courses
Advanced Literature Courses
Introductory and Advanced Film Courses
First-Year Writing Courses
Fall 2008
151. First-Year Writing Seminar.Degree Requirement: F2
A course that develops the ability to read and think critically, to employ discussion and writing as a means of exploring and refining ideas, and to express those ideas in effective prose. Individual sections of the course will explore different topics in reading, discussion, and writing. Topics are selected by individual professors and are designed to help students develop transferable skills of analysis and argumentation, applicable to the various disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences. Several papers will be required, at least one of which will involve use of the library and proper documentation. The seminar will emphasize successive stages of the writing process, including prewriting, drafting, and revision, and will provide feedback from classmates and the instructor.
TOPICS:
ENGL 151 01 Writing in the Margins: Insider and Outsider Voices
MWF 08:00 am-08:50 am
ENGL 151 02 Writing in the Margins: Insider and Outsider Voices
MWF 09:00 am-09:50 am
Professor Emily Lindner
In this course, we will consider how and why people are included in and excluded from a multitude of groups, categories, and spaces, both in life and in literature. We will investigate our own roles as insiders and/or outsiders and discuss authors and artists who focus on the struggle to live in between groups (in the margins) and to overcome such labels. We will work with both conventional forms of writing (e.g., essays, short stories) and more experimental texts (e.g., performance poetry, comics/graphic novels) in order to explore how language and images are used to create and navigate categories of identity, place, and genre. Using daily exploratory writing and 3-4 focused draft sequences, you will refine your drafting, revising, and editing skills as well as your reading, interpreting, and critical thinking proficiency. Throughout the semester, we will literally, figuratively, and theoretically write in the margins.
MWF 10:00 am-10:50 am
ENGL 151 04 Contemporary American Representations of Friendship and the Platonic Tradition
MWF 11:00 am-11:50 am
Professor John Ronan
ENGL 151 05 Darkness in the Land of Light
MWF 01:00 pm-01:50 pm
ENGL 151 06 Darkness in the Land of Light
MWF 02:00 pm-02:50 pm
Professor Jason Richards
Seen from the perspective of Puritan settlers, early America was an unsettling contradiction. It was a land of freedom, promise, and renewal but also a vast and terrifying landscape, a “howling wilderness” they perceived as the devil’s domain. From the start a dark shadow has haunted this land of optimism and light as Gothic and transcendental forces have together shaped the American experience. Gothic is obsessed with how the past haunts the present, but it is also filled with a sense of impending doom. Transcendental thought seeks to free us from our bondage to the past while offering a hopeful vision of the future. In this writing-intensive seminar, we’ll study the competing energies of the Gothic and transcendental in American cultural life. We’ll first identify the origins of these forces in the fatalism of Puritan ideology versus the more liberatory thinking of Unitarianism. Then we’ll examine how American authors have absorbed and worked against these rival energies. While we’ll analyze the Gothic and transcendental in literature and film, we’ll also notice how Gothic conventions have crept into non-fictional realms and how real-life people have transcended antagonistic forces. Prompts for critical thinking and writing may include works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson; films such as Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Forrest Gump; and the political discourse leading up to the 2008 presidential election.
ENGL 151 07 Fakes, Frauds and Forgeries
TR 08:00 am-09:15 am
ENGL 151 08 Fakes, Frauds and Forgeries
TR 09:30 am-10:45 am
Professor Elise Lauterbach
When we read a novel or watch a movie, we recognize that no matter how “real” the story seems, it’s a manmade work of fiction. But how do we interpret fictions presented as fact? This introduction to college writing and argument explores a variety of fakes, frauds, and forgeries, including con artists, circus sideshows, photographs of ghosts, blackface minstrels, mockumentaries, and writers working under assumed identities. Some of our subjects—like counterfeit money—have joined the real world without being seen, while others—like artists who adopt alternate personas—raise questions about the very nature of “the real.” Our course material, which spans some three-hundred years of history, won’t provide us with a comprehensive history of fakers, but it will help us investigate issues of authenticity, identity, authorship, performance, and that trusty old standby, reality. In addition to a final research project, you will write three shorter essays related to the course material and work closely on improving your own rhetoric and style: In your prose, you’ll practice that smooth presentation that helps you take down your mark. Successful academic argument shares some of the skill set of the confidence man.
ENGL 151 09 The Making of Identity
TR 09:30 am-10:45 am
ENGL 151 11 The Making of Identity
TR 12:30 pm-1:45 pm
Professor Kristin Cole
From the organizations we choose to join to our carefully constructed online profiles, we put on many different faces or identities each day. This course asks you to consider how people use the forces of inclusion and exclusion to craft identities at various levels, from the personal to the national. We will look at identity from historical and sociological perspectives, and we will evaluate mainstream and fringe groups and their interactions. We will exploit the context of the 2008 election, probably addressing Michelle Obama’s comment about being proud of America for the first time and the furor it aroused, the many kinds of voting Americans and how pollsters slice and dice them, and other issues that necessarily rely on identity such as gay marriage and illegal immigration. Course materials will include excerpts from the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History Of England and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. We will also consider films that deal explicitly or implicitly with identity such as American History X and Transamerica.
ENGL 151 10 Negotiating Limits: Self, Society, Nature
TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm
Professor William Dolphin
TR 02:00 pm-03:15 pm
Professor Wlliam Dolphin
All politics is born of rhetoric. The language of political persuasion, past and present, will be this class’ focus, with an emphasis on the ’08 Presidential campaign. But your first task will be grappling with the politics of the classroom. After a practical, collaborative exploration of how learning is evaluated and those evaluations are experienced, you will negotiate a consensus on assessment and collaboratively write a self-constituting document for the class. The insights gained from that process will then be applied as we read commentary on the ’08 campaign as it unfolds, as well as speeches of the candidates themselves, comparing conservative and liberal perspectives and analyzing how the rhetoric of persuasion works. We will also look back in time to accounts of the 1972 Nixon and McGovern campaigns (Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail) and 1992’s contest between Clinton and Bush (Joe Klein’s Primary Colors).
155. First-Year Writing Seminar: Daily Themes
Degree Requirement: F2
An alternative to English 151 offered to outstanding first-year writers, by invitation only. The course is limited to twelve students who meet as a group once a week and individually with the instructor once a week. Students will turn in five one page themes each week. Some research and writing will be required and students will use their daily themes as the basis for two longer papers: one at midterm and the other at the end of the semester.
ENGL 155 01 Daily Themes
R 09:30 pm-10:45 pm
Professor Rebecca Finlayson
In English 155, the Daily Theme alternative to English 151, each student will submit daily (one page) writing assignments, largely analyzing the argument and style of our weekly readings from The New Yorker magazine, a highly respected and popular weekly magazine with essays covering politics, medicine, the arts, science, history, international relations, religion, business, and music. Additionally, students will write themes employing specific rhetorical strategies. Twice during the term, you will write longer argumentative and research papers. Class time will be spent discussing the readings and your writing. By Invitation Only.
Introductory and Advanced Writing Courses
Fall 2008
ENGL 200 01 Introduction to Poetry Writing: Form, Theory, Workshop
MW 03:00 pm-04:15 pm
Professor Tina Barr
Tina Barr has been teaching poetry workshops for over 20 years. She has developed methodologies and exercises to help students generate poems. She encourages them to transfer their own visions onto the page, translating those ideas into writing that becomes valuable to others. By focusing on word choice, the use of the five senses, through one on one instruction, as well as workshop participation, students find their own voices. With reference to the advice of Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Hugo, and through readings of work by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Dave Smith, Robert Burns, James Wright, Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marianne Moore, William Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence as well as poems by former Rhodes students, participants will learn to write basic narratives, as well as received forms such as villanelles, and to find forms suitable for their own work. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 201 01 Introduction to Fiction Writing: Form, Theory, Workshop
MWF 11:00 am-11:50 am
ENGL 201 02 Introduction to Fiction Writing: Form, Theory, Workshop
MWF 12:00 pm-12:50 pm
Professor Barrett Hathcock
A study of narrative form and theory, leading to a workshop in which students present their own fiction for discussion. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 203 01 Introduction to Dramatic Writing
TR 09:30 am- 10:45 am
Professor Barrett Hathcock
In this playwriting workshop, students will read several contemporary plays and will write a variety of scenes and exercises culminating in a complete one-act play to be performed in a staged reading at the end of the semester. We will study the readings with a keen eye toward narrative structure—how it is created and manipulated—as well as how some contemporary playwrights deploy a narrator-figure while others explore a documentary-like approach to telling a story. Readings will include work from Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Paula Vogel, Ellen McLaughlin, Moises Kaufman, and Peter Shaffer. Students will be required to review a handful of local productions, and class will consist of a great deal of reading aloud from student scripts, combined with verbal and written critique from your classmates. Cross-listed with Theatre 250. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 300 01 Advanced Poetry Workshop I: Form
TR 02:00 pm-03:15 pm
Professor Tina Barr
This advanced workshop will help writing students to develop a greater sense of the use of received as well as individually-developed forms in poetry. In the pursuit of their own styles, participants will experiment with the idea of form. Through reference to essays by other poets, on free verse, syllabics, the villanelle, the sonnet, blank verse, blues poetry, as well as through readings of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Robert Creeley, Marianne Moore, Li Young Lee, Robert Hass, Anthony Hecht, Amy Clampitt, Robert Hayden, Yusef Komunyakaa, Henri Cole, Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove and others, students will broaden their own experience with poetry. Prerequisites: English 200 and permission from the instructor
ENGL 301 01 Advanced Fiction Workshop I: Narrative Form
TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm
Professor Marshall Boswell
Practice in the craft of fiction with an emphasis on elements of narrative form, including point of view, character development, plot, temporality, and tone. Includes study of narrative form and close readings of contemporary short fiction.
Prerequisite: English 201 and permission from the instructor.
ENGL 481-482 SENIOR WRITING PROJECT
Professor Marshall Boswell
Enrollment by special application only. This is a two-semester course in which students create and assemble a substantial manuscript of writing in their major genre. Interested students will submit an application for entry into this course at the start of the senior year. See the Director of the Concentration in Literature and Creative Writing for information on the application process.
Introductory Literature Courses
Fall 2008
MWF 10:00 am-10:50 am
Professor Jennifer Brady
A study of the evolution of the novel of manners from Jane Austen’s Regency-era comedies through the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton, set in Europe and in the United States, and written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We will read Wharton’s work in particular through the lens of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. Texts will include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion; Henry James, Washington Square, The Aspern Papers; William Wyler’s film, The Heiress; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. Will count toward English Major. This course may also be applied to a women’s studies minor. Prerequisites: First Years and Sophomores only.
ENGL 190 03 Shakespeare on Screen
MWF 02:00 pm-02:50 pm, R 07:00 pm- 10:00 pm
Professor Scott Newstok
What happens when Shakespearean dramas written for a 17th century theatre audience get ‘translated’ to a 20th century cinematic medium? What interpretative strategies shape film adaptations? This course will survey Shakespeare on screen from a range of periods, directors, nations, and media in order to confront the full span of adaptation, and to complicate conventional notions of “fidelity” to the “original text.” After reading the plays, we will evaluate versions of three ‘major’ tragedies (Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) as well as As You Like It, a comedy that will be performed in the Memphis area this fall. Final projects require that students explore a contemporary adaptation of one play, in dialogue with earlier versions we viewed as a class. Will count toward English Major as well as pre-1800 credit. Thursday night screening ′lab′ encouraged. Prerequisite: First Years and Sophomores Only.
ENGL 225 01 Southern Literature
MWF 10:00 am-10:50 am
Professor Marshall Boswell
ENGL 225 02 Southern Literature
MWF 11:00 am- 11:50 am
Professor Marshall Boswell
A study of literature written about the South, primarily but not exclusively Southern literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Authors likely to be studied include George Washington Harris, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 265 01 Introduction to the African American Literary Tradition
MWF 09:00 am- 09:50 am
Professor Rychetta Watkins
This course will introduce you to the African American literary tradition from its beginnings through the present day. During the course of the semester, you will read selections from the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and several additional novels, including Nella Larsen′s Passing, Ralph Ellison′s Invisible Man, Alice Walker′s Meridian, and Colson Whitehead′s The Intuitionist. We will pay particular attention to issues of identity, citizenship, belonging, and subjectivity, considering how authors constructed selves and imagined audiences through their stories and the way they told them. This course will also consider the African American literary tradition in relationship to the social, historical, and cultural contexts which informed it. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 265 02 Imperial Horrors, Postcolonial Hauntings
TR 12:30 pm-01:45 pm
Professor Jason Richards
This course examines the Gothic horrors and hauntings that issue from the imperial and postcolonial experience. We’ll begin with imperial writers who use the Gothic to explore the terrors of empire as well as the boundaries between civilization and savagery, reason and irrationality, self and other. Our imperial Gothic texts may include Dracula, Heart of Darkness, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Then we’ll turn to postcolonial texts, where the ghosts of colonization make their uncanny return. By reading Gothic fiction from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia, Canada, and America, we’ll examine how postcolonial spaces, worldviews, and literatures are haunted by the trauma and darkness of colonization. Our postcolonial Gothic novels may include Wide Sargasso Sea, Surfacing, Beloved, Brown Girl in the Ring, among others. Throughout the semester, we’ll consider issues of racial difference, national identity, and the re/writing of history in relation to the Gothic mode. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 265 03 The New Woman in American Literature 1880-1930
MWF 09:00 am-09:50 am
Professor Leslie Petty
The term “New Woman” has been in use since the 1860’s, and it became a popular catchphrase at the end of the nineteenth century in both America and England. The popularity of the term during this period reflects the rapid change in gender roles brought about in conjunction with rapid changes social and professional life. Not surprisingly, this chaotic time of transformation sparked the imagination of many writers, both male and female. In this course, we’ll read authors such as Wharton, Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Crane and Fitzgerald and discuss how they grapple with “new women” characters in a rapidly changing world. The goal of our class is to examine these works as part of a larger cultural dialogue, tying the textual pieces together to create a more expansive picture of the "New Woman” that takes into account the ways region, race and class are central to her experience. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
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Advanced Literature Courses
Fall 2008
ENGL 320 01 Medieval Literature: Chaucer and His Time
MWF 11:00 am-11:50 am
Professor Kristin Cole
England in the fourteenth century was an exciting and dangerous place, one of great social upheaval and unrest brought on by plague and war. Out of this crucible came the foundational works of English literature, most especially Chaucer’s verse. This course aims to integrate Chaucer in his time period and thus create a better understanding of England and English literature at the end of the Middle Ages. We will study a range of poems, prose, and plays from this time period, including short lyrics, excerpts from Piers Plowman, selections from The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Second Shepherd’s Play. These texts will enable a lively discussion of how literature interacts with politics and society and how writers engage and foment social change. Prerequisite: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor
ENGL 335 Milton
TR 02:00 pm- 03:15 pm
Professor Scott Newstok
A study of the major poetry and selections of prose of the 17th century writer John Milton, whose 400th anniversary of his birth we will be celebrating (1608-1674). Milton′s a fascinating figure who composed in an extraordinary range of genres, including an epitaph on Shakespeare; sonnets on historical events as well as on his own life; poems about Christ, including a dialogue with Satan; a play about shepherds; prose treatises on divorce and governance; an influential elegy on the death of a companion; a ′closet′ drama about the biblical Samson. While we will be surveying the full range of these genres across his learned career, we will be devoting much of our attention to Paradise Lost, the major epic of the English language, based on the story of Genesis yet encompassing profound and still relevant reflections on liberty, rebellion, history, providence, social hierarchies, and domestic relations in magnificent verse. As a contemporary writer praised this undertaking: "You who read Paradise Lost, the sublime poem of the great Milton, what do you read but the story of all things." Prerequisite: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 361 01 American Realism & Naturalism
MWF 12:00 pm- 12:50 pm
Professor Leslie Petty
An advanced study of literature -- primarily novels and short stories – produced in post-Civil War America. Prompted by post-war disillusionment and the rapid and dramatic changes in American culture, this period saw the concurrent and overlapping emergence of realism and naturalism as well as an increased interest in a regionalist aesthetic. Authors may include Twain, Howells, Chesnutt, James, Jewett, Chopin, Crane, Norris, and Dreiser. Prerequisites: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor
ENGL 364 01 African American Literature
MWF 01:00 pm- 01:50 pm
Professor Rychetta Watkins
A study of the works, mainly twentieth-century fiction, of black writers in America. Analysis of the artistic expression and vision of such writers as Chesnutt, Ellison, Hughes, Gaines, Brooks, Marshall, Walker, and Morrison will include an exploration of black aesthetics, as well as an investigation of the ways in which these authors treat personal, racial, historical, political, and gender-based issues. Prerequisites: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 380 01 The Autobiographical Origins of American Literature
MWF 02:00 pm-02:50 pm
Professor John Ronan
This course will trace the development of American literature in English from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on foundational autobiographical writings of African Americans, European Americans, and Native Americans. Our readings will range from Briton Hammon’s tale of captivity and deliverance to the slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, from the Puritan spiritual autobiography of Thomas Shepard to the enlightenment memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, and from the “Short Narrative” of Samson Occom to the tribal conversion narrative of George Copway. Over the course of the semester, we will pay close attention to the ways in which early American writers adopted and eventually transformed the Augustinian conversion narrative into new and distinctly political forms of autobiography. Prerequisites: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 385 01 John Fletcher: The Case for Collaborative Writing
TR 09:30 am-10:45 am
Professor Jennifer Brady
This seminar explores the exceptionally popular Renaissance dramatist, Fletcher (1579-1625), who was Shakespeare’s successor as the principal writer for the King’s Company. Fletcher wrote by preference in collaboration with other playwrights, a practice that was the norm in early modern theatre. We will read not only his plays co-authored with other playwrights, including Beaumont, Shakespeare, and Massinger, but plays written as sequels or adaptations or revisions of other playwrights’ work. This course will introduce majors to an important body of work that remains unfamiliar to most undergraduates: the plays are racy and the dialogue witty and accessible, and they invite feminist analysis. Prerequisites: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor. This course satisfies a pre-1800 requirement. Majors Only.
ENGL 385 02 Tea at the Palace of Hoon: Solving the Mysteries of Modernist Poetry
TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm
Professor Tin Barr
The great modernist poets wrote challenging poetry, often in a circuitous style, so that their poetry is often a coded language. We will solve the riddles of their poems through study of their biographical backgrounds, selected essays and letters, accompanying video excerpts, and visual art, illuminating their poems’ meanings. This course will focus on the particular obsessions of these poets: W.B. Yeats’s political poems and poems that reflect his interest in the visual arts, T. S. Eliot’s spiritual quest, Wallace Stevens’s preoccupation with a muse figure, or idealized feminine, D.H. Lawrence’s animal poems, Marianne Moore’s interrogation of the definition of poetry itself, and William Carlos Williams’ equations. Prerequisites: Any 200-level literature course or permission from the instructor. Majors Only.
ENGL 483-484 SENIOR PAPER
Professor Gordon Bigelow
For majors in the literature concentration. An independent project in which students will produce a sustained work of literary criticism on a topic of their choosing.
ENGL 485 01 Senior Seminar: Critical Theory and Methodology
MW 03:00 pm- 04:15 pm
Professor Gordon Bigelow
An examination of selected developments in contemporary critical theory and their impact on the teaching and study of literature. Senior English majors only.
Prerequisites: English 385 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 485 02 Senior Seminar: Critical Theory and Methodology
TR 12:30 pm- 01:45 pm
Professor Brian Shaffer
An examination of selected developments in contemporary critical theory and their impact on the teaching and study of literature. Senior English majors only.
Prerequisites: English 385 or permission from the instructor.
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Introductory and Advanced Film Courses
Fall 2008
ENGL 241 01 American Cinema: History and Criticism
MWF 12:00 pm - 12:50 pm, T 07:00 pm- 09:30 pm
Professor Rashna Richards
This course introduces students to the history of American cinema as art and industry. Although Hollywood film provides the focus, the course may also examine independent cinema. Students will compose essays that demonstrate their grasp of film history and analysis. Prerequisites: English 151 or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 381 01 Tough Guys, Dangerous Dames, and Streets with No Name: American Film Noir
TR 02:00 pm- 03:15 pm
Professor Rashna Richards
In 1946, French critic Nino Frank used the term “film noir” to describe the existential, expressionist, and erotic crime thrillers being produced by Hollywood at that time. Since then, film noir has been regarded as a genre that undercuts U.S. optimism and exposes the dark side of the American dream. This course examines the noir phenomenon in American culture, from its beginnings during World War II to its explosion in postwar America to its recent neo-noir revivals. The first half of the semester explores how noir films deal with the fears, desires, and anxieties of mid-century America. The second half considers why the bleakness and disillusionment so pervasive after World War II have made a resurgence in postmodern American cinema. Prerequisites: Any 200-level film class or permission from the instructor.
ENGL 382 01 Film Theory
TR 02:00 pm- 03:15 pm, M 06:00 pm- 08:30 pm
Professor Valerie Nollan
Introduction to the ideological and aesthetic forces that have shaped the development of world cinema, focusing on the theoretical work and masterpieces of Russian filmmakers. Theories to be studied are formalism, Marxism, auteurism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, realism, and surrealism. Filmmakers include Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Tarkovsky, and Mikhalkov. All foreign films are subtitled; course is taught in English. Requirements include mandatory attendance at film screenings, to occur outside of regularly scheduled class hours. Prerequisites: Any 200-level course in Film Studies or Russian Studies, or permission from the instructor. Cross-listed with Russian 400.
Special Courses
Fall 2008
ENGL 399 TUTORIAL FOR HONORS CANDIDATES
ENGL 460 01 INTERNSHIP
A directed internship in which students will apply analytical and writing skills learned in the classroom to situations in business, journalism, not for profit organizations, and the professions.
(Pass/Fail credit only. English 460 does not satisfy an upper-level English course requirement for the major.)
ENGL 465 01 TUTORIAL: ONE TO ONE WRITING
Professor Rebecca S. Finlayson
Theoretical and applied study of one-to-one writing instruction.
By invitation only
ENGL 495 01 HONORS TUTORIAL
Professor Gordon Bigelow
Satisfies the Senior Paper requirement. For seniors only.
Prerequisites: English 399
2008-2009 Rhodes College Catalogue
See .pdf pages 72 - 77 for all English courses
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