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ENG 155a: Topics in Literature: Theory and Play of Fiction (Professor Pizzolatto)
This course is designed to be a primer for beginning fiction writers, featuring an extensive survey of short fiction from a number of writers, combined with lectures, exercises, and a workshop practicum wherein students will read and critique one another's work. This class includes a substantial amount of both writing, reading, and class discussion as we work toward understanding the principles by which fiction writing operates, and how it achieves its effects on readers. Our goal will be to increase students' abilities as close, aesthetic readers, and effective, skilled writers of fiction.

ENG 155b: Topics in Literature:  The Art of the Short Story (Professor Bean)
In this class, we will read short story collections by Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Conner, Junot Diaz, Alice Munro, and Stuart Dybek, as well as individual stories by a wide range of short story writers in a variety of forms. We will pay particular attention to what the writers themselves have to say about their art. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “Of the forms of literature none is more supple, more flexible and open to aesthetic variation than the short story.” This will be a discussion class and you will have the option of writing at least one short story during the class.

ENG 155C: Topics in Literature: Men, Might, Politics and Poetry (Professor Mou)
The course examines literary images of women from Chinese antiquity down to the 20th century.  We will sample works that have had lasting influence on Chinese literature, written by both men and women, from a variety of genres.  Most of these works have created paradigms that find their way into works by modern Chinese and non-Chinese writers alike.  Looking fat these paradigms, we will examine how certain notions about Chinese womanhood are developed, molded, perpetuated, and adopted by both male and female writers.  Keep in mind at least three different angles in the making of women’s images: male authors who describe what they see, male authors who use female narrators to present what they are interpreting or what they want to express, and female authors.  These viewpoints are, of course, further complicated by other social, political, and economical factors.

Whenever appropriate, Western literary and feminist theories will be brought into our class discussions; you are also encouraged to apply them in your own work, keeping in mind that they have their limitations, especially when confronted by certain cultural specifics.  Probably the most fruitful way to apply these theories to works from distant times, places, or cultures is to take certain issues as points of departure and then follow the lead of the texts under study, rather than imposing the issues on the texts.

ENG 155D: Topics in Literature: Unhappy Loves: Masterpieces of the Italian Tradition (Professor Seaman)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
In this course we will see how the greatest authors of the Italian tradition have written about Love.  We will start with Dante’s Vita Nuova, and investigate some of the Cantos from the much celebrated Divine Comedy.  We will continue with Boccaccio’s revolutionary short stories, and consider his writing as the emergence of a new consciousness.  Petrarch’s collection of poems, The Canzoniere, will take us to consider introspection as a way to understand conflicts within oneself.  We will study the metaphors that these authors have chosen to speak about human emotion, we will question the limits of expression, the role of silence in literature, as well as the influence of their writing in today’s the western consciousness.

The course will continue with readings from the Italian romantic tradition.  We will look at Foscolo’s love letters, Leopardi’s diaries, and some of his poems.  We will also consider some of the more recent literature, like the popular short stories of Calvino, and perhaps Tabucci and Allessandro Baricco.

The students will acquire vocabulary appropriate to literary analysis of poems, short stories, novels epistolary and diaristic writings as well as film.  Students will learn how to question a theoretical text, and investigate the multiple possibilities of interpretation.  They will develop critical thinking skills by evaluating the strength of a literary argument, and by learning how to formulate hypotheses, theories and questions that can generate a debate.

All texts will be read in English translation, though advanced students of Italian will be able to read these texts in the original.

COURSE GOALS
Through class discussion and weekly informal writing assignments, students will consider some of the most beautiful works from the Italian tradition, and investigate how words have the power to explore key issues of the human experience.  By the end of the course they will have acquired skills essential to their college work, above all they will know how to write a textual analysis and will have acquired critical thinking skills.  Moreover, they will learn how to paraphrase, summarize and contextualize a literary work, as well as build support for an argument from a text.  The students themselves will generate ideas, theories, and questions, and provide a defense for their own interpretations.

ENG 264 Women & Lit Topics: Cinema’s femme fatale (Professor Flury)
In this course we will study the roles and images of women in various film genres throughout film history, with a particular focus on the so-called femme fatale.  We’ll begin with silent films (including, for example, Pandora’s Box, from 1929) and end with more recent ones.  Our study of cinema’s representations of unruly women will include comparative clusters, as when we study the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice (based on a novel by James Cain) as well as Italian and German adaptations of the same novel, Visconti’s Ossessione, from 1943, and Petzold’s Jerichow, from 2008.  Along the way, there is a range of reading, including film theory.  This is a W course, so expect to do a prodigious amount of writing.

ENG 302: Creative Writing II: Fiction Topics: Crime Fiction (Professor Pizzolatto)
This class involves a rigorous study of a particularly popular literary genre, the crime novel, from an aesthetic point of view. That is, we will endeavor to understand what principles the genre operates under, how it achieves its effects on readers, and why a mass audience that includes casual readers and literary writers are devoted fans of the form. In addition, we will examine and strive to acquire the mechanics and techniques involved in the plotting and writing of crime fiction, engaging in class discussions and exercises designed to facilitate our understanding of the genre and how to practice it. This class involves a substantial amount of reading, writing, and in-class discussion.

ENG 312: Creative Writing II: Poetry Topics: The Family (Professor Williams)
THE FAMILY:
The family is perhaps the most common (and challenging) topic for creative writers. The family is everywhere: in art, in novels, next door, upstairs. And the family is often the root of our most complex social interactions. This poetry workshop will focus on the family as an entity against which the writer writes, from which the writer emerges, and through which the writer comes to a better contextual understanding of her or his world. Students should expect to do some work in poetic forms that complement this topic in addition to reading work by master poets. However, most of our time will be spent assessing student work.

ENG 322: Creative Writing II: Nonfiction Topics: Nature Writing (Professor Schwipps)
Creative nonfiction, like fiction or poetry, is a type of creative writing.  As such, it uses the tools of the creative writer: figurative language (similes, metaphors), dialogue, flashbacks, scenes, frames – in short, tools that increase the dramatic effect of a piece of writing.  Various types of creative nonfiction exist: personal essays, articles, travel accounts, profiles, memoirs and narrative histories.  The lines surrounding this genre are not clear, and arguments do occur regarding the true definition of creative nonfiction.  For this class, we will limit this discussion, as it can be tedious and sometimes pointless.  Instead, we will focus on the reading and writing of creative nonfiction, and by the end of the semester, new definitions will emerge

ENG 391: Authors: Advanced Topics: Dickens & Tolstoy (Professor Csicsery-Ronay)
The Great Novel: This course is devoted to two of the great social novelists of 19th century Europe. The novel was long considered the most ambitious and exemplary literary genre of the period, yet because of their length, such novels are rarely studied in the classroom. We will read three works, two by Charles Dickens (Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend) and one by Lev Tolstoy (War and Peace). We will submit each to intensive, careful reading, with special attention to their historical contexts, their artistic architecture, and their philosophical implications.

ENG 394: Litertaure and Hisotry: Advanced Topics: Cosmo Global Lit Anthro (Professors Alvarez & Bhan)
This class will be looking at literary, anthropological, and philosophical accounts of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Roughly, the first half of the class will provide a historical introduction to these concepts, with readings from such authors as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, and others, along with early theoretical accounts in the work of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx. The second half of the course will tackle recent anthropological work on these concepts, and we will use the insights we gain from them to examine contemporary literary
representations of cosmopolitanism and globalization in such authors as Rabindranath Tagore, Amitav Ghosh, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and others. The course will be challenging but rewarding.