Department of English : University of Vermont

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Fall 2008 course descriptions

Course Descriptions Fall 2008

What follows is designed to aid students who wish to enroll in courses taught by the UVM English Department for Fall 2008. Although each description should be seen as offering a general outline for the designated course, the actual content of that course might vary slightly somewhat from the wording provided here. In addition, this is not meant to replace the counsel of your academic advisor. It is strongly recommended that students-majors in particular-schedule an appointment with their advisors to discuss next semester’s schedules before registering for courses. If you do not know who your advisor is, contact Professor Valerie Rohy, Director of Undergraduate Advising for the English Department (656-4198 / Valerie.Rohy@uvm.edu).

Description of Requirements for English Major:

Thirty-three hours at the level of 5 or above to include 86 (85 is recommended for first-year students planning to major in English) and at least 21 hours at or above the 100 Level, at least 3 of which must be from courses numbered 201-282 (Senior Seminars). Of the Credit hours above 100: (a) at least 3 hours must be in study of the English language, writing, critical theory, or film (listed in Departmental offerings as Category A); (b) at least 3 hours must be in Ancient, Medieval, 16th or 17th –Century Literary Traditions (listed in Departmental offerings as Category B); (c) at least 3 hours must be in 18th – or 19th –Century Literary Traditions (listed in Departmental offerings as Category C); and (d) at least 3 hours must be in 20th – or 21st –Century Literary Traditions (listed in Departmental offerings as Category D). One World literature course approved by the English Department may count toward the major; where appropriate, this course may be substituted for one course in the distribution categories. No more than nine hours of Advanced Writing (English 117 – 120) shall count toward the major. No more than nine hours of Film Studies at any level shall count toward the major.

Please note that there is a limit of 45 hours in the major field: that is, you can take no more than fifteen English courses at whatever level: English 1, transfer credit, etc.

Courses fulfilling A & S Race and Ethnicity Requirement

ENGS 005 B & C
ENGS 057 A, B, C and online
ENGS 112 A
ENGS 177 Z1

Courses fulfilling Non-European Culture Requirement

ENGS 061 Z1

Distribution Areas within the Major

Category A Category B Category C Category D

ENGS 112 A                          ENGS 136 A & B                   ENGS 156 A                           ENGS 166 A & B
ENGS 114 A                          ENGS 140 A & B                ENGS 195 B                        ENGS 167 A & B
ENGS 118 A                        ENGS 222 A                      ENGS 281 C                           ENGS 171 A
ENGS 195 A                                                                                               ENGS 173 A
ENGS 281 A & B                                                                                                              ENGS 177 Z1
All FTS courses                                                                                                                   ENGS 178 A
                                                                                                                                           ENGS 180 A
                                                                                                                                        ENGS 281 A, B, and C

Seminars offered Fall Semester (Instructor Permission Required)

ENGS 222 A
ENGS 281 A, B, and C

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COURSES:

ENGS 001 A
Written Expression
Patricia McGonegal

ENGS 001 B
Written Expression
Michele Patenaude

*Note: This class is open only to first-year students who are in the TRiO program. Instructor permission is required. *

Do you want to become a more confident writer? Are you interested in learning how to write the narrative, the literary analysis, the opinion piece and the research paper? Would you like to become a more effective researcher? If so, this may be the class for you. In this class you’ll deepen your understanding of the writing process -- planning, drafting, revising and editing -- and use it to improve your writing and create effective essays and compositions. You’ll work in student peer editing groups to give and receive feedback on each other’s work. You’ll also read and respond to the work of published writers and student writers. By the end of the semester, I hope you will think of yourself as a writer and that you will have developed a writing process that works for you. I also hope that you will see writing as a tool you can use to understand the world, rather than as a tool that teachers use to evaluate you.
* *
*Optional Lab: *Our classroom has been reserved for about an hour following our class (until 1:00). During this time, you can work on your homework or papers for this class (or for other classes) in an environment where you can consult with other writers – your classmates and me. Attendance during lab time is not required unless I ask to meet with you. However, you should reserve the time in your schedule

ENGS 001 T
Written Expression
Steve Candiotti

This course challenges students to write precisely. Students experiment with personal, interpretive, editorial, and other nonfictional modes of writing. In workshops, students exchanges ideas about topics and narrative approaches. The course features a discussion of common grammatical problems and their solutions. The instructor meets with each student to monitor progress and offer advice. Students negotiate with the instructor to plan and develop a final project. The instructor encourages students to use a concise personal voice.

ENGS 001 U
Written Expression
Steve Candiotti

ENGS 001 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Written Expression
Jenny Grosvenor

This introductory composition course takes the act – or art – of writing beyond the basic five-paragraph essay, while still providing the necessary instruction in basic grammar and mechanics. The course is, as its title suggests, “expression,” and encourages exploration and revision at various stages of the writing process. Through critical reading and analysis, students will study and learn: to identify purpose, central arguments, and rhetorical techniques; and to recognize effective and recurring patterns of persuasion and development. Through process writing, in peer workshops and one-on-one with the instructor, students will learn precision of thought, effective editing techniques, and clarity of self-expression. This course culminates in the completion of a final writing portfolio.

ENGS 001 Z2 (Continuing Education)
Written Expression
Stephen Cramer

Written Expression is an introduction to the sometimes complex process of college-level composition. The course is designed to let students practice writing in various styles in order to prepare them for all college writing to come. It will help them hone their writing through in-class assignments, close readings of the work of established writers, and critical discussions of the work of classmates. The class will examine each part of the writing process, brainstorming, exploration, drafting, revising, and polishing in order to let the student's work attain all the precision and clarity that an effective essay can offer.

ENGS 005 A
Crime Story
Andrew Barnaby

It would be hard to tell from our story-telling habits that human beings don’t like violence. From ancient works like the Book of Genesis or Oedipus Rex to modern films and television shows, we seem to be powerfully attracted to forms of physical, emotional, or psychological abuse that should repel us. No doubt one of the reasons for this paradox is that stories about violence—especially stories about criminal acts and their aftermath—are inherently “plotted”; that is, criminal acts are precisely structured as stories: as events, they have beginnings, middles and ends that mimic the very process of linear narration that shapes our most cherished stories. Just as important, our responses both to real criminal acts and to stories encourage in the witness, judge, or reader similar modes of ethical evaluation: what do we take to be right or wrong, a virtuous act or a moral failing, an act done freely or one compelled? And in our analysis of these responses, we often discover that our professed values are at odds with what we feel deep inside. In this course, then, we will be considering the relationship between story-telling and crime and / or the aftermath of crime, and in our writing we will be exploring, both creatively and critically, our own capacities—intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically—to understand just how perverse human beings really are. Texts for the course will include several contemporary films (including Pulp Fiction and Memento), Shakespeare’s Hamlet, short stories by Flannery O’Connor, and episodes from TV’s Law and Order and / or Homicide series. Requirement satisfied: one Literature course

ENGS 005 B
Survey of African-American Poetry
Major Jackson

This course delves into critical questions generated by African-American poetry, which has served as an eloquent testament and record of black life and humanity on the North American continent. We will examine the finer points of that record, its tacit argument for a greater liberty in America, its role in cultural and social justice movements, and its ability to represent black interiority unlike other literary forms. We will focus our gaze on how poems serve as sites of lyric freedom and engagement that extend our conversations of race and ethnicity in America. We will consider the ways in which black poets innovate and resist, how they redefine conventions and broaden traditions. We will begin our inquiry in the early poetry of Phillis Wheatley and journey all the way up to the present generation of award-winning poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, Harryette Mullen, Carl Phillips, and members of the Dark Room Collective and Cave Canem Workshop.

ENGS 005 C
Across the Line: Stories of Black and White From Ante-Bellum America
Mary Lou Kete

What can we learn, now at the beginning of the 21st century, from the stories Americans told about the relationships between "black" and "white" people in the years before the Civil War? How do these stories continue to affect the way Americans deal with the racial issues? This course examines the literature of racial difference from the colonial era through the Civil War era. This course will introduce
students to literary and cultural criticism with an emphasis on critical race theory. Some of the authors we may read include Venture Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Phyllis Wheatley, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, Hermann Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs. A reading and writing intensive course, this class meets once a week on Thursday afternoons.

ENGS 005 D
From Pucks to Parliament: Canada’s Cultural Landscape
Paul Martin

If you ask the average American about Canada, you'll find that most know very little about this mysterious land north of the U.S., labeled on most American maps as nothing more than "Canada." In this course's exploration of Canadian culture, we'll "travel" from coast to coast to coast in our quest to learn more about the people, culture, politics, and history of Canada, the United States' largest trading partner and one of its most important allies. Throughout our journey, we'll be paying particular attention to contemporary Canadian literature, music, popular culture, media, and, naturally, hockey. As this is an English course, there will be a strong emphasis on Canadian literature; the books and stories we read will help to give you a sense of the broad diversity of the country’s peoples, history, and regions as well as of the richness of its literature. This will also be a technology-driven, writing intensive course that will see you writing, blogging, and even podcasting about your new discoveries about Canada. The course will include a mandatory class trip to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, during which we will visit Parliament, the National Gallery and Museum of Civilisation, and, yes, even attend a hockey game.

ENGS 005 E
Literature in a Wired World
Richard Parent

The most popular and best-selling novels in Japan today were written on, and are meant to read on, cell phones. How does that affect what a novelist can write, and in what styles? Were the Lonelygirl15 videos an artless stunt or a compelling and innovative narrative experience for millions of viewers? Many video games offer 40-100 hours of story-filled game play ? what does this mean for the printed book and for a generation of readers growing up with Harry Potter and The Legend of Zelda? In Literature in a Wired Worlds we will be working on the cutting edge of English studies, bringing together novels, videos, web pages, blogs, games, and works that bring all of these forms together into hybrid forms that don't have names yet. During our explorations of contemporary literature and digital narratives we will work together to develop answers to the complex literary and literate questions posed by the present and future of literature and communication.

ENGS 011 A & B
Types of Literature
Charles Houton

Types of Literature is an in-depth study of fiction, poetry and drama. A wide variety of short stories, novellas, poems and plays will be read, analyzed and discussed. Readings will include short stories by Poe, Chekhov, Chopin, Crane, London, Faulkner, Hemingway, Porter, Steinbeck, Baldwin, Updike, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolf, Ha Jin, Le Guin, and many others. There will also be novellas by Tolstoy and Kafka. A great variety of poems by many authors will be studied as well. The drama section will include plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. The course will be an exciting and rich experience in literature.

ENGS 013 A & B
Introduction to Fiction
Isaac Cates

Fiction is capable of transporting us to other places and enveloping us in psychologically rich landscapes we might never otherwise imagine. It is also capable of complex meaning. What bearing can something imaginary have on the real world? What claims can fiction make, and how can we be sure what a non-argumentative text means? These are the questions that will propel our course this semester. Most of our examples will be short works: we'll read stories by Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Aesop, Woolf, Joyce, and others. We'll also read novels by Joseph Conrad and Joseph Heller.

ENGS 013 C & D
Introduction to Fiction
Deborah Noel

In this course, we’ll read and research stories by masters such as Hawthorne, Poe, Chopin, Cather, Crane, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Ellison, Carver, Le Guin, Link, and others. In a combination of in-class and online assignments, we’ll discuss these works in terms of the art form and their cultural contexts. Students will be expected to read and respond to the stories and the assignments in a variety of verbal and written formats (including discussion board posts, live in-class and online discussions, and in 3 traditional essays of 4-5 pages in length).

ENGS 013 Z1 (through Continuing Education)
Introduction to Fiction- “The Short Story”
Steve Candiotti

This course offers a broad survey of American and European fiction. We will read novels and short stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will encounter characters who are alternately noble, irredeemable, and baffling. We will try to place various stories and perspectives within a suitable historical context. In doing so, we ask whether certain characters are merely the naturalistic products of their respective genetic, economic, and historical situations. Are these characters trapped by their chromosomes and their places in society, or can they exercise free will? Students will be immersed in a discourse on narratology and historicism.

ENGS 014 A & B
Introduction to Poetry
Daniel Lusk

Exploring the literary traditions and innovations evident in poetry written in English as background to the study of the art and craft of recent and contemporary poets. Students discover the range of styles and voices and learn principles and vocabulary required for informed discussion and effective criticism regarding the techniques employed by master poets present and past.

ENGS 014 C & D
Introduction to Poetry
Elizabeth Powell

ENGS 014 Z1 (through Continuing Education)
Introduction to Poetry
Stephen Cramer

This composition course challenges its students to establish in their writing a definitive purpose. Students will learn to delight, persuade and inform their readers through creativity and control. Specific writing assignments and exercises will focus on the act of exposition itself, effective rhetorical patterns, and the vital and imperative process of revision. This writing course will explore a variety of writing forms, structures and purposes: from the reflective to the argumentative, the personal narrative to the persuasive essay; it will also include in its mix creative, concept-oriented approaches to writing, such as dialogue and advertising copywriting. Critical reading, peer workshops, and instructor conferencing are integral components of this course.

ENGS 021 A
British Literature
Rebecca McLaughlin

This course surveys British literature from the 8^th to the 18^th century. Students will examine a variety of works and consider how literature reflects the social and cultural attitudes within which it was written while simultaneously contributing to the construction of the period’s history as we understand it. Works considered may include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Marie de France’s Lanval, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath,” Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, various Elizabethan poets, Lanyer’s “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women,” Milton’s Paradise Lost, Haywood’s Fantomina, and Fielding’s Tom Jones. While the course focuses on surviving literary traces of British society, students will move toward an awareness of a complex, indistinct British past by looking at historical objects, art, and architecture; by viewing select videos; and by listening to readings, music, and songs. Course requirements may include reading responses, a term paper, a midterm exam, and a final exam.

ENGS 021 B & C
British Literature Survey I
Christopher Vaccaro

This course examines most of the canonical (and non-canonical) British works and writers from the eighth to the eighteenth century. Its focus is the historical and mythical involvement of literature (how literature simultaneously reflects and constructs myth, reality, and history). Students are expected to use and strengthen analytical and critical thinking skills to better understand the readings. They are expected to show a high degree of commitment to a) their academic work and b) the class as a whole through full participation and regular attendance.

ENGS 021 Z1 (Continuing Education)
British Literature
Rebecca McLaughlin

ENGS 023 A & B
American Literature
Sheila Boland Chira

This course is a survey of American literature from the beginnings to the Civil War that covers stories, narratives, letters, novels, and poetry, which explore the “invention” of “America” as a complex ideological space, not simply a geographic location. The relationship between literature and the cultural and historical contexts in which it was produced will be central to our investigation of the discipline of American literary history. We will consider a range of different genres over a long stretch of time including native creation stories; accounts of early encounters between European and indigenous peoples; literature from the periods of European settlement, colonization, and revolution; literature of the early republic and the “American Renaissance”; and literature from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century that consciously attempted to establish a national cultural tradition while also exploring the tensions in the new republic. For the first half of the semester, we will move quickly through three centuries from 16^th-century accounts of exploration to 19^th-century attempts to cultivate a “national” literature. In the second half of the semester, we’ll slow down and linger in the mid-19^th century exploring the literary strategies of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Students should expect to participate actively in class discussion, give a presentation, take frequent quizzes, and write and share frequent short reading responses and two longer interpretive essays.

ENGS 023 C
American Literature
Steve Candiotti

This course surveys American literature from the colonial era to the Civil War. We will read Puritan religious tracts, revolutionary polemics, and works of the nineteenth-century transcendentalists. This class will heavily emphasize historical, social, and spiritual context. The course will focus on authors such as Bradford, Winthrop, Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. Students are expected to read closely and to participate regularly in class discussions. Other requirements include frequent reading quizzes, two exams, and several short essays.

ENGS 023 D, E & F
American Literature
LeeLee Goodson

What makes American literature American? English 23 surveys significant literary voices from colonial times to the Civil War, focusing on the ways in which these writers struggle to express their American experiences and quests for identity. We will read, among others, Native American tales and colonial narratives, as well as selected works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman. We will make connections between and among the texts, learn about the writers’ times, styles, themes, and concerns. We will also examine how American literature and perceptions of identity have changed and evolved over time. Blackboard supported. Text: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, shorter 7^th edition, Volume 1.

ENGS 023 G, H & I
American Literature
Brian Kent

We will examine a broad cross-section of American literature, beginning with explorer/settlement accounts and Puritan texts, including the beginnings of American poetry. We will then highlight the influence of the Enlightenment as evidenced in Ben Franklin and writers of the American Revolution. Accompanying this, of course, will be a look at how Indian nonfiction, slave narratives, and women’s writings expose the contradictions between American life and Enlightenment egalitarian philosophy. As we move into the19th century, we will address the emergence of fiction in writers like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, before finishing the semester with examples from the American Renaissance of the mid to late 19th century, including works by Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson.

The class will be conducted in a discussion format and will include regular notebook/journal writings, as well as weekly reading quizzes. The major assignments are a multi-draft paper which we will work through together as a class, using instructor-student conferences and peer workshops to facilitate revision, and a comprehensive final exam.

ENGS 023 Z1 (Continuing Education)
American Literature
Steve Candiotti

ENGS 023 Z2 (Continuing Education)
American Literature
Brian Kent

ENGS 025 A & B
World Literature - The 17th Century to the Present
Charles Houton

This is a wide ranging survey of world literature from the early 1600s to the twentieth century. The course focuses particularly on non English literary texts in translation. There are many selections from Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. We will be using the Norton Anthology of World Literature, second edition vols. D, E, F. The course can serve as a continuation of Eng 25 World Literature for students who enjoyed that course. Works by Wu Cheng-En, Moliere, Racine, Voltaire, Saikaku, Basho, Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Holderlin, Heine, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tagore, Yeats, Dario, Pirandello, Ichiyo, Rilke, Lu Xun, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Inuit poets, Akhmatova, Storni, Brecht, Lorca, Neruda, Diop, Senghor, Camus, Lessing, Achebe and others will provide a rich experience of literature. The historical cultural and literary context of works will be provided.

ENGS 025 C & D
World Literature
Isabella Jeso

This course is an exploration of a broad selection of masterpieces of world literature, beginning with texts written some 2500 years before the common era and concluding with texts produced during the first half of the seventeenth century after the common era. The course traces patterns of, and shifts in literary sensibility over a period encompassing some four thousand years. We will critique how texts are written (technique / style); we will consider the content (themes) of the stories presented; and we will explore how historical events influence the subjects and styles of literary productions in every epoch. Such engagements with the reading of, with speaking and writing about, literature, aim to develop the student’s critical thinking skills.

ENGS 025 Z1 (Continuing Education)
World Literature - The 17th Century to the Present
Charles Houton

ENGS 027 A
Literature of the Western Tradition: Integrated Humanities Program
Tom Simone

Prerequisite: admission to the Integrated Humanities Program
A survey of important texts of the early Western Traditions from Homer to Dante. Parallel enrollment in History 13 and Religion 27.

ENGS 040 A, B & C
Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature
Jamie Williamson

We will survey the developments of the two genres, exploring where they overlap and where they depart from each other entirely. The reading will be divided fairly evenly between both genres, including some work which may be seen to embody elements of both. The emphasis will be on literature, though we will also view some films and film segments. Authors may include H.G. Wells, Philip Pullman, Philip K. Dick, and C.S. Lewis, and will span the time period from the late nineteenth century to the late twen- tieth/early twenty first century. Questions we will address: how can an imagined future reflect on the author’s (and our) present? What makes a human being human? What happens when what is believed to be knowledge turns out to be wrong?

ENGS 040 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Before Tolkien
Christopher Vaccaro

Fantasy literature has a rich and wonderful history, the roots of which began in the earliest fiction of Europe with the composition of poems such as Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight. J.R.R. Tolkien is considered the most influential author of modern fantasy and the most widely read author of the Twentieth Century. His life-time literary work in sub-creation marked a new era in the genre and culminated in his well-known mythological history of the elves, The Silmarillion. Though Tolkien produced something very different from what came before, he was influenced by a number of authors who had contributed to the cultural imagination and who provided him with a stock of fantastic images and themes for his Cauldron of Story.

In this class, we will direct our attention to those fantasy authors who came before the most creative author of our time. We will read texts by Andrew Lang, William Morris, Robert Browning, Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, E. Nesbit and others. We will ask ourselves why fantasy and its mythological and folk antecedents serve as useful registers of cultural attitudes.

ENGS 040 Z2 (Continuing Education)
Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature
Jamie Williamson

ENGS 041 A & Z1 (Continuing Education)
Crime Story
Rebecca McLaughlin

This course is an introduction to crime and detection in England from the 18^th to the early 20^th century, and the use of crime situations as a central plot device in British literature. Readings may include Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders; Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles; Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison, and P.D. James’ Unnatural Causes. Additionally we will view select videos; explore the economic and social context of crime; the biographical history of some famous criminals and detectives; and the tools and tactics of the criminal’s chosen trade. Course requirements may include weekly reading quizzes, reading responses, a presentation on a topic related to the course material, a term paper, and a final exam.

ENGS 042 A, B & Z1 (Continuing Education, cross-listed with WGST 076)
Women in Literature
Annika Ljung-Baruth

And all these questions, according to the Angel of the house, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women: they must charm, they must conciliate, they must - to put it bluntly - tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard.
Virginia Woolf. "Professions for Women"

In this course we use Virginia Woolf’s “Angel of the house” as the point of departure for our exploration of women’s voices in (mainly) British and American 20th century literature. Woolf’s ideas about “Shakespeare’s sister,” “the androgynous mind” and “the looking-glass vision” will guide us as we come to understand the negative impact of traditional societal roles and restrictions on women’s creativity and modes of self-expression. In this spirit we will read critical texts addressing questions about writing and gender, as well as fiction/nonfiction concerned with women’s situation in literature and/or society as a whole. We will discuss and investigate ways in which selected authors illustrate women’s struggle for autonomy as individuals, as artists, as political beings, as spiritual beings, as sexual beings, as wives, and as mothers. Our perspective will be shaped by but not limited to theoretical viewpoints expressed by the authors that we study. We will focus on the 20th century but also cover pivotal texts from earlier time-periods.

ENGS 042 C & D (cross-listed with WGST 076)
Women in Literature- “Mirrors, Masks and Medusa’s Laugh”
Deborah Noel

We'll read visionary and revisionary essays, poetry, fiction, drama and graphic novels by women addressing gender and the power of language arts to shape our culture. Genres include: fairy tale, modern and historical novels, "confessional" poetry, autobiography, and more. Among the featured authors will be: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Octavia Butler, Gish Jen and Alison Bechdel. Students will be expected to participate in classroom and online discussions, post short reader responses for each text (similar to journal entries), and write three 4-5 page essays on topics discussed in class.

ENGS 50 A & B
Expository Writing
Sheila Boland Chira

The primary goal of this intermediate-level writing workshop is to develop your skill and confidence as writers of creative non-fiction. You will work in the forms of essay and reportage and will produce a portfolio that includes four finished pieces that result from your engagement in a rigorous process of writing, reading, reflecting, researching, and revising. We will explore how language can be used to create images, arguments, reflections, and queries, and we will also experiment with how image, sound, and design can help to develop and communicate our ideas. Our secondary goal is to create an atmosphere in which we are comfortable enough to achieve our primary goal. You will do a lot of reading and writing. You will share your work with others. You will be asked to develop your skill as a reader of your own work and of the work of others and your ability to provide constructive feedback. During this workshop, writing will be a tool with which you will examine, reflect upon, and test your own values and assumptions against what you know of culture, learning to develop ideas and write creative non-fiction.

ENGS 050 C
Expository Writing: Reading and Writing the Forms of Journalism
Elaine Harrington

This course offers an opportunity to engage with modern written media - first, as a reader and critic of influential work that is now being published, and then as a writer. We will survey newspapers, magazines, blogs, and websites with attention to point of view, language, and the ethics of journalism. Detailed analysis of rhetorical structures will aid the student's growing ability to write clearly and concisely in journalistic style. Frequent writing assignments will include practice in these forms: reporting and investigation, commentary (social and political), profiles, reviews (art and music), and specialized topics -- business, courts, local and state government, environment, and sports. Editing skills and grammar are covered, and we host guest speakers from various fields of journalism. Field trips and interviewing tasks offer students a chance to engage with the local community as both observer and reporter.

ENGS 050 D & E
Expository Writing
Daniel Lusk

This is an introductory course in writing the essay. Students will develop skills for writing and analysis of various kinds of non-fiction essays. Supported by workshop discussion and individual conferences with the instructor, students will work through successive drafts to produce five well-crafted essays. Readings provide models for developing reading, analytical and writing skills required for producing clear and readable prose. Students learn to transform personal knowledge, interests and experience into engaging essays. Final portfolios take the place of examinations.

ENGS 050 F
Expository Writing
Angela Patten

This introductory course will provide guided practice in the writing and analysis of various kinds of expository (non-fiction) essays. Supported by workshop discussion and individual conferences with the instructor, students will work through successive drafts to produce five final essays. Essays by outstanding writers will offer models for developing reading, analytical and writing skills necessary for producing clear and readable prose. In-class writing exercises and discussion will play an important role. This course is designed to take advantage of students’ personal knowledge, outside interests, and life experiences. Student portfolios will take the place of midterm and final examinations.

ENGS 050 G
Expository Writing
Jamie Williamson

Students in English 50 will work on developing their writing voices through a number of different types of essays. Beginning with expressive work, drawing on self-generated subject matter, we will work up to a research based essay, exploring strategies for maintaining the individual voice while simultaneously processing external information and perspectives. All essays will move through at least two drafts; in-class work will include informal writing exercises, selected readings, and peer review; students will meet with the instructor at least once in the course of work on each essay.

ENGS 050 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Expository Writing
Jenny Grosvenor

This class, as an introduction to the art of poetry, meets at the intersection of the aesthetic and the technical. Because of this, students will discover not just whether they like or dislike a poem but why it is (or is not) effective. The class will explore various styles and forms of poetry. Students are expected to read assigned essays and poems, to bring them in marked and annotated, and to be ready to talk intelligently about them. Readings will serve as points of departure for discussions on craft. Students will leave this course with a greater capacity to experience and express their ideas about poetry.

ENGS 053 A & B
Introduction to Creative Writing
Angela Patten

This introduction to writing poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction offers guided practice in the making of original work. Student reading and writing is divided more or less equally among these three areas of creative writing. Students will read and explore works by contemporary masters as models for their own writing. The course will employ a workshop format, offering a supportive environment for discussion of both student writing and assigned readings. Student portfolios will take the place of mid-term and final examinations.

ENGS 053 C & D
Introduction to Creative Writing
Elizabeth Powell

ENGS 053 Online (Continuing Education)
Creative Writing
Jenney Izzo

Explore your writing urges with others who love language and story makings as much as you do. This is an introductory course in the techniques and craft of writing poetry and short prose fiction. Student work is shared then discussed in group sessions and one-on-one with the instructor. Outside reading and journal observations will help to strengthen your writing intuition.

ENGS 057 A
Introduction to Race and Ethnicity Literary Studies
Isabella Jeso

This course is a study of U.S. minority voices in literature. It introduces students to the ways in which various American ethnic groups have employed story-telling, dramatic representation, poetry and the essay form to explore issues relating to their place as minorities in the national social fabric. We will examine how authors exploit literary conventions in each genre studied. At the same time, we will consider how these writers explode and / or go beyond those expectations, creating unconventional stylistic devices for literary self-representation; as these new methods of speaking emerge from their individual and collective minority experiences. We will thus have two primary foci. One will be to examine technical devices employed by each author as an individual and also as a voice of the particular minority group under which society categorizes him or her. The second will be to study thematic schemes prevalent in each of these works.

The course is divided into four units, with each unit consisting of works by selected authors representing one American ethnic group. I list them here in alphabetical order: African-American; Asian-American; Latino/na-American and Native-American. Selected material for each unit includes one or more of the following literary genres: novels, short fiction, plays, poetry and essays. There will be an exam at the conclusion of each of the first three units. Because of time constrains at semester’s end, students will have to be tested for the fourth unit under the comprehensive final exam. Additionally, each student will be required to write a four-page critical essay on a single work of his or her own choice.

ENGS 057 B & C and online
Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary American Literature
Sarah Turner

In an interview several years ago, Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison stated that racism is a scholarly affair and one that is useful for whites. In the 1998 movie American History X, Ed Norton's character claims that all problems in this country are race-related. Poet and activist Maya Angelou envisions a time when “ideally, race should be [only] as important as the color coordination of one’s costume.” What do these statements mean? And what relevance do they have for us, in 2008? This course considers a variety of contemporary texts -- novels, short stories, movies -- written by and about non-hegemonic groups living in the United States today that explore the intersections of race, class, socioeconomics, racism and institutionalized racism. Because the course expects students to engage in polemical and engaging dialogue, students are asked to “agree to disagree’ in a respectful environment.

ENGS 057 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Introduction to Race and Ethnicity Literary Studies
Isabella Jeso

ENGS 061 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Introduction to African Literature
Isabella Jeso

This course is a study of African writers, with an emphasis on how their voices seek to, at once, dismantle negative images of Africanity, recreate a usable African past, and create new images through which to view Africanness, both at home and abroad. We will explore each author’s handling of conventional literary devices to create a story that his uniquely told. We will consider such elements of style as symbolism, allusions, imagery, dialogue / speech patterns, irony, and grammar, to name just a few. Additionally, we will examine themes and motifs that emerge out of the construction of texts as evident in the technical devices that each author utilizes.

ENGS 086 A & B
Critical Approaches to Literature
Elizabeth Fenton

What does it mean to read a text? And what does it mean to read a text critically? In this course, we will explore the practice of reading by examining a set of methods for interpreting literary and cultural productions. Although the course will offer students background on a range of theoretical perspectives, it will focus mainly on structuralism and post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist and gender studies, and critical race theory. The course will also provide students with an introduction to some of the key terms that structure literary study. Reading for this course will consist largely of critical essays, though we will use three different versions of King Lear (the play itself, Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, and Kristian Levring’s 2000 film The King is Alive) as case studies to anchor our readings.

ENGS 086 C & D
Critical Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Tempest
Helen Scott

The purpose of English 86 is to familiarize English majors with their discipline through studying and practicing different critical approaches to literature. While each professor teaches the course using different texts and methods, we all share the goals of introducing at least four distinct critical approaches while fostering students' development of their own critical voices. This section accomplishes these goals through a case study: we read (and watch) Shakespeare's The Tempest and then study a range of critical and creative responses to it from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. We explore how different contexts lead to diverse versions of the same play, and we examine the theoretical assumptions behind distinct interpretations. Most importantly, we look at the way historical and social contexts produce particular forms of literature, and of criticism, the significance of which changes over time. Texts to include Shakespeare's The Tempest (published by Bedford, edited by William Graff); Aimé Césaire's A Tempest; W.H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror; the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.

ENGS 086 E & F
Critical Approaches to Literature
Stephen Schillinger

Your point of view effects what you see. Rarely, if ever, can you look at something from a purely objective position. Therefore, your perspective matters. As an introduction to literary theory, criticism and methodology, this class is focused on understanding the philosophical issues involved in our perspectives when reading texts. We will critically analyze both the most current theories and methods in the field as well as the earlier theories of literary analysis that make up the background for contemporary scholarship. By the conclusion of the semester you should have a basic understanding of the dominant methodologies in literary studies as well as an appreciation for how those methods relate to and broke from earlier forms of literary analysis. Furthermore, this class will serve as an introduction to the often dizzying terminology of literary criticism. Lastly, this class will be a place of both theory and practice in that we will not only analyze models of literary theory, we will also employ these models in the analysis of texts both literary and non-literary.

English 095 A (and Z1 Continuing Education)
The Popular Conscience: Popular Fiction since the 1950s
Brian Kent

The texts used in the class reflect the evolution of American attitudes and behaviors since the postwar period of the 1950s. We will examine how popular fiction during the decades between 1950 and 2000 represents, reflects, and (perhaps) helps to reshape the social dynamics of American life, dynamics that include politics, media, race, gender, sexuality, drugs, morality, and more. Students should be prepared to read one short novel (200-300 pages) per week. Representative authors include Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Toni Morrison, Rita Mae Brown, Ann Beattie, and Tom Robbins.

ENGS 095 B (and Z2 Continuing Education)
Introduction to Old English Language and Literature
Christopher Vaccaro

Yes, this is the language spoken by Beowulf to Hrothgar and by Theoden to the riders of Rohan in Tolkien’s romance! The semester will be spent studying the grammar, then parsing and translating elementary sentences and passages taken from the prose of King Alfred and Aelfric, the poetry of Cynewulf and the Beowulf poet, the anonymous romance of Appolonius of Tyre, and the riddles of Anglo-Saxon England! Students will be evaluated through translations quizzes and take-home exams.

ENGS 095 Z3 (Continuing Education)
Writing Feature Articles and Arts Reviews
Elaine Harrington

Writers can find great freedom within the discipline of the “new journalism,” a trend that blends traditional reporting and research skills with the literary techniques of narrative, plot, and character development. Our class will read feature articles and reviews from the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, blogs, and other sources - and analyze them for voice, language, style, structure, and impact. The writing assignments will be varied and frequent. Students will emulate aspects of work by the best feature writers, while continually developing their own style. Projects will include columns and articles on lifestyle, science, health, environment, fashion, food, travel, technology, and business. The class will also devote several weeks to writing reviews of the performing and visual arts, including film, using models but finding their own voices as critics. Grammar and editing will be covered, as well as the conventions and opportunities of each type of story. Successful feature and arts writers will visit the class, and students will be encouraged to seek publication of their work.

ENGS 104 A
Tutoring Writing
Susan Dinitz

This weekly seminar is a course for students who will be tutoring in the Writing Center. We consider theories and practices of tutoring writing, role-play tutoring situations, hear guest speakers on such subjects as working with students with disabilities, and, most importantly, discuss and learn from our tutoring sessions. Throughout the semester students keep a journal synthesizing their experiences reading, writing, and tutoring. In order to try out the strategies discussed in class, students write and revise three papers, all of which are submitted in a final portfolio. Students tutor for three hours each week in the Writing Center as part of their coursework. PERMISSION OF THE INSTRUCTOR IS REQUIRED--this class is only for students who were recommended for and accepted into the program in the spring of 2008.

ENGS 112 A
Constructions of Race in Popular Culture
Sarah Turner

This course will consider the mediums of film, television, comedy, video games and print texts in order to explore the various constructs and depictions of race in America today. Questions we will address might include: Why do comedians such as Margaret Cho or Dave Chappelle use race and racial stereotypes as a means to generate humor? Why is Samuel Jackson willing to do the voice-over for a character whose tag is Nigger in one of the recent editions of Grand Theft Auto? Is American History X an irresponsible film? What about Crash?

ENGS 114 A
Travel Writing
Greg Bottoms

This course will focus on the theory and practice of the literary travel essay. Students will write several exercises as well as longer travel essays, which we will workshop and peer edit as a group and finally revise for a portfolio. Throughout the class we will read and define literary travel as a genre, which has been rightly criticized at times as ethnocentric, culturally oblivious, and simply reporting by someone from the privileged class about people often outside the privileged class for readers in the privileged class, or what Jonathan Raban calls the worst sort of “pastoral.” All true, but my own interest is in the tradition of writing that uses the travel genre—the journey or the meditation on place—as a vehicle for investigation of both self and world in complex and artful ways. Writers may include Jack London, W.E.B. Du Bois, D.H. Lawrence, Andre Gide, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, as well as recent and innovative travel writers such as Bruce Chatwin, William Vollmann, Jamaica Kincaid, Joan Didion, Pico Iyer, William Least Heat-Moon, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Prerequisite: English 50 or 53 and instructor permission.

ENGS 118 A
Advanced Fiction Writing
Philip Baruth

At its simplest level, this course will be a workshop in which you will write short stories; these stories you will show to one another and discuss openly amongst yourselves. At its most complex level, the course will ask you to take apart the process by which you compose your stories, as well as the social situation in which you critique them. The workshop as a whole, in addition to each of your individual writing styles, will be the subject of our group exploration. It’s difficult if not impossible to write well unless you have read well. Sitting at a blank screen or page, searching for a plot or a tone or a voice, a writer really engages in a complex process of remembering and changing, opposing, or mimicking things that others have written. This facility with the voices of others is one of the keys to developing a personal voice, ironically enough. For that reason, we’ll read a selection of current short stories by a wide range of contemporary authors. English 53 Prerequisite Required.

ENGS 136 A & B
Shakespeare: Appropriations
Stephen Schillinger

As an advanced introduction to Shakespeare's drama, this course will focus on adaptation and appropriation in Shakespeare and in the period of Shakespeare's drama. One of the great ironies of Shakespeare's role in cultural history is that his work is considered nearly iconic as a manifestation of originality and genius. And yet not only is this originality harvested throughout literary and cultural history for the sake of revision, rewriting and representation (seemingly "unoriginal" acts of cultural production), but it is an originality that was itself often the consequence of Shakespeare's rewriting, revising, rethinking and reconstructing the ideas, narratives and relationships seemingly developed by other writers. And so the project of thinking through Shakespeare's originality is, ironically, always a project of thinking through adaptation and appropriation. Therefore, in this calls we will consider how Shakespeare uses, adapts and revises sources, as well as how Shakespeare's plays were and are adapted, used and revised. We will read not only plays from Shakespeare but plays from his contemporary playwrights as well as later writers and artists who appropriate his texts. We will develop an ongoing discussion about artistic, cultural appropriation and what these appropriations suggest about their contexts of articulation.

ENGS 140 A & B
Survey of British Literature to 1700
Jenny Sisk

English 140 is designed as a broad historical/thematic survey of (mainly canonical) British literature from the Anglo-Saxon period through the seventeenth century. Though the course will cover a lot of ground, it is not an introductory literature course and presumes—along with an appetite for plenty of great reading—a willingness to engage in some of the critical theory that comes to bear when reading literature historically. Works on the syllabus will include Beowulf; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; excerpts from Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric poetry by Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, Lanyer, Herbert, Jonson, Philips, Marvell, and Rochester; Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which we will also see performed live by the Blackfriars Company); selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and all of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. (This course is particularly recommended for students who are considering a graduate degree in English and who will be taking the GRE subject exam.)

ENGS 156 A (A & B are being combined into 1 section)
The Romance of American Romanticism
Mary Lou Kete

Last year's movie of John Krakauer's Into the Wild is just one example of America's continuing romance with the texts and authors of the 19th-century American Romantic Movement. This course will look at two phenomena: the literary expressions of the American Romantic movement of the nineteenth century and the continuing fascination with those authors during the twentieth century. Significant attention will be paid to the key authors of American Romanticism including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. We will also be reading twentieth century responses including fiction and non-fiction as we think about the way American Romanticism shapes and is shaped by our concepts of national identity, gender and race. This course is reading and writing intensive.

ENGS 166 A & B
Branding the Author: Literary Authenticity and the Modern American Novel
Sean Witters

Modernist heroes like Stein and Hemingway made their mark on the world, in part, because of their conscious cultivation of literary celebrity. By tracing their transformation from upstarts to iconic literary "brands," and examining the anxieties and crises produced by their legacy, this course will explore the standards of "literary authenticity" that shape American modernism. We will look at the impact of mass culture and the 20th century’s shifting ideologies and aesthetics on literary “street cred," on the relationship between author and reader, and the performance of the literary self. Readings will include Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, McCarthy, Baldwin, Mailer, and Roth, as well as selections from key 20th century thinkers.

ENGS 167 A & B
The Modern Masterpiece in Fragments
Isaac Cates

In the aftermath of the first World War, many artists described their sense that human experience was somehow totally shattered, sundered into fragments that might never be rejoined. Many of the monumental achievements of early twentieth-century literature therefore come to us in broken, prismatic, or fragmented forms. In this course, we will tackle a number of these major works, in all of their variety, obscurity, and power. Some of our texts will be daunting, but we will take them at a pace that will allow us to assemble the fragments into coherence. Works will include Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, selections from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Jean Toomer's Cane, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and fiction by Virginia Woolf. Forays into Cubist painting and George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip are also likely.

ENGS 171 A
Contemporary American Poetry
Major Jackson

In this survey course, we will examine the elements of poetry currently practiced by a selection of diverse American poets. Our ultimate aim is to become sensitized to the poem as an aesthetic object and to the cultural phenomenon of poetry as an artistic practice and multivalent source of pleasure for an ever-growing audience in America. Our journey will inevitably teach us something about the creative process and the role of the imagination in the development of a national identity and consciousness. Furthermore, we will identify professional organizations and institutions, mainstream and independent journals, as well as aesthetic movements and schools which have contributed to the arts' development.

ENGS 173 A
Contemporary Short Fiction
David Huddle

Among the considerations of this discussion-oriented class will be strengths and weakness of short stories and story collections published from 1990 to the present.

Texts: Selected Stories by Andre Dubus; The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat; Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones; Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson; Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx; Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; Drown by Junot Diaz; Collected Stories by David Leavitt; Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain.

ENGS 177 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Harlem Renaissance and Negritude
Lokangaka Losambe

The Harlem Renaissance Movement is believed to have played a great role in the emergence of the African and West Indian Negritude Movement in Paris in the early 1930s. This course explores points of connection and disconnection between these two most prominent 20th-century Black cultural movements and their relevance to contemporary pan-African literary production. Authors include Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Aime Casaire, Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, David Diop, Rene Maran, and Hamidou Kane. Fulfills A&S Race and Ethnicity requirement, fulfills ALANA requirement.

ENGS 178 A
The Literature of Vermont
Philip Baruth

First and foremost, I mean for this course to introduce you to the Vermont literature that is happening today: on the UVM campus, on other local campuses, on Burlington stages and in Burlington coffee houses. Too often we venerate the past, and disdain the present, when in fact the writers and artists working today will be the Robert Frosts and Shirley Jacksons of tomorrow. So while the course will be anchored in classic Vermont literature — the iconic Robert Frost anchoring the anchors — we will always be pointed unerringly toward the present, working artistic moment. Before we’re finished this semester, you’ll attend readings and performances; you’ll document some of that work in a small documentary film you’ll make in conjunction with four or five other people; and you’ll meet a number of prominent Vermont writers who will circulate through the classroom. By December, you should be conversant in some of the central thematic traditions of the state — perhaps chief among these something I call “the Vermont gothic” — and in the literary canon as it exists in the early twenty-first century.
Vermont’s film industry has experienced healthy growth in the last 20 years, and we’ll sample some of the more interesting products: John O’Brien’s Man With a Plan, which caught fire nationwide for reasons we’ll try to deduce; moving dramas Jay Craven and Nora Jacobson; and finally, an action-thriller by David Giancola (the only Vermont director so far to make money with his films) called IceBreaker, about terrorists taking over Killington ski resort and threatening the US with a nuclear bomb.
Throughout I’ll be asking you to think through some critical ideas of your own: How can we most profitably approach Vermont literature? What are its central characteristics, and how does its history come to bear? In what ways does it represent a counterpoint to national literature and politics, and in what ways does it shape those national conversations?

ENGS 180 A
Topics in Canadian Literature
Paul Martin

This course is a broad survey of the last hundred years of fiction in Canada, from before the First World War to the present day. We will cover novels and stories by writers from Canada's three founding peoples (English, French, and First Nations), although our primary focus will be on texts originally written in English. Throughout the course, we will also interrogate the connection between literature, place, and identity. By covering a wide range of texts from different language and cultural communities and from different regions of Canada, we will gain some perspective of the diversity of Canada, its peoples, and its literatures. At the same time, we will also question the assumptions we inevitably make about any country and its people through reading its literature. As with any survey course covering such a large period of time and variety of literary expression, the selections of readings is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather provides you with a wide sampling of periods, genres, and authors.

ENGS 195 A
Literature and Opera
Tom Simone

The adaptation of literature into other art forms has a long and fascinating history. This course will look at the ways in which a number of major works of narrative and dramatic literature have been converted into important operatic expressions. We will discuss some aspects of sung drama and a brief view of the history of opera. And we will investigate some of the most notable examples of this transformation including: the myth of Orpheus and Monteverdi’s early opera Orfeo, Shakespeare’s Othello and Verdi’s opera Otello, Beamarchais’s play and Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and Benjamin Britten’s opera based on it. We will have both audio and video versions of the operas available for study.

In addition to study of the literary and operatic versions of these works plus background material, we will have at least one live recital of operative material and, if possible, attendance at an operatic performance. Student presentations, essays, and occasional quizzes.

ENGS 195 B
Reading the American Wilderness
LeeLee Goodson

Reading the American Wilderness is a literature course with a theme: we will consider the different ways American nature has been portrayed and constructed by writers over the past 400 years. How did early notions of the “dolesome woods” and “howling wilderness” transform into Transcendentalist notions of natural divinity? And how do we express our attitudes toward nature today? Over the next three and a half months, we will read and think about how these shifting literary interpretations have challenged and reshaped American attitudes toward nature and identity. Our primary text will be Roderick Nash’s classic and important Wilderness and the American Mind. Other texts include Constructing Nature: Readings from the American Experience, Walden, A Walk in the Woods, Into the Wild and other short online texts. Resources will include a visit to UVM’s Fleming Museum. Blackboard supported.

Senior Seminars open to only Seniors English Majors and Concentrators
Instructor permission required for ALL seminars

ENGS 222 A
Performing Restoration Comedy
Philip Baruth

This course is designed to pursue a hugely ambitious agenda. It’s my hope that by the time we’re finished, you will have 1) read a small survey of Restoration and eighteenth-century English comedies; 2) read and absorbed enough cultural history to understand some of the play’s more recondite comedic codes; 3) done enough research on your own to feel expert in at least one dimension of one author’s work; 4) performed scenes from a number of plays; and 5) contributed to a full-scale two-act production of one period text. By "full-scale," I mean that you will cast, set, block, costume, light, and perform the play for an audience of about 50-75 people. It will be as though a normal English class and a normal Theater class collided head on — and as that metaphor suggests, there are elements of risk to all of these undertakings. We will be trying to understand the theater of the period from multiple angles, outside and in. NB: this is a course in performance, and everyone must act, everyone must memorize lines. No exceptions for shy types, so please consider well before registering. Instructor Permission Required.

ENGS 281 A
Contemporary American Autobiography
Greg Bottoms

Paul de Mann famously wrote that autobiography as written text is an “impossible genre.” And there is no doubt that memory is fluid, the past is not a recoverable a place, a person is not one self but multiple selves over time and in different communities and situations, and of course there is always an ever-widening gap between lived experience and the artistic representation of that experience. The French writer Annie Ernaux says that narrative does not capture life but rather replaces it. Annie Dillard talks about turning life into “pieces of paper.” Freud has a famous saying about how the autobiographer always confesses to the lesser sin, by which he means that the autobiographer always lies even without meaning to. And what about all the controversies around memoir and “creative nonfiction” lately? And what about the construction of a private self used in a story for a public audience? That seems potentially awkward. Lots to think about! We’ll read some American writers—Paul Auster, Jamaica Kincaid, Dorothy Allison, Nick Flynn, among others—who deal with some or all of these issues in their own autobiographical books and often gleefully problematize ideas about self, memory, identity, truth, and reality. Students will write regular critical responses and one longer autobiographical essay. Prerequisite: One 100-level writing course and instructor permission.

ENGS 281 B
Writing and Reading Contemporary Poetry
David Huddle

Most of the reading for this writing intensive seminar will be carried out in class. On Tuesdays, we’ll read and briefly discuss poems selected from our texts; on Thursdays we’ll bring our own poems to class, read them aloud, and carry out workshop discussions of a few of them. In order to obtain permission to enroll in this class, students must submit three or four of their poems to the instructor.

Texts: Sue Ellen Thompson, editor, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry; Marie Howe, What the Living Do; Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel; Jack Gilbert, The Great Fire; Ted Kooser, Delights & Shadows. Additional required texts are likely to be added to this list.

ENGS 281 C
Seminar on the Gothic
Tony Magistrale

A senior seminar that traces the gothic traditions in literature and film from its incendiary inception with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to contemporary manifestations in Stephen King's The Shining. This seminar will entertain various theoretical approaches to the gothic, examining, among other issues, the creation of the monster as a political signifier of what the dominant culture can not incorporate within itself, and thus projects outward onto the hated/desired figure of monstrosity; the role of gender in horror art; the manner in which film transformed the gothic literary tradition; the role of otherness as a construction of the gothic; and the discursive and recurring themes, tropes, and symbols that characterize the gothic itself. Texts likely to include: Frankenstein, Poe tales and poems, O'Connor short stories, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and The Shining. Films: Blade Runner and Psycho. Students will be asked to produce two formal papers in the course of the semester, an oral report, and written summary / self-reflexive evaluation of the oral report.

Graduate Courses open only to English Masters Students

ENGS 320 A
Shakespeare and Tragedy
Andrew Barnaby

This course will explore three of Shakespeare's most famous works - Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello - in the context of tragedy as both a literary and a philosphical concept (I use the word philosophical in its broadest possible sense; we will see that it encompasses everything from ethics to political history and theory to psychoanalysis to genter studies to religion and religious history to anthropology). Along with those plays, we will also read and / or watch other works (plyas, films, literary criticism, philosophical texts) that help us to understand "tragic experience" (or, conversely, might actually problematize whatever notions we think we have). Those works will include Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are Dead, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, Alan Parker's Angel Heart, Christopher Nolan's Memento, Aristotle's Poetics, Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy, Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, and Janet Adelman's Soffocating Mothers.

ENGS 330 A
Early US Novel: Narrating a New Nation
Elizabeth Fenton

What is the relationship between nation-building and literary production? What can the earliest U.S. novels teach us about the process of nation-formation? And what can a better understanding of early nationalism teach us about the development of the U.S.'s novelistic tradition? As print culture boomed in the post-Revolutionary United States, thousands of novels, newspapers, and pamphlets became available to consumers. The early U.S. public, then, was a reading public. In this seminar, through analysis of primary works produced in the aftermath of Constitutional ratification as well as recent scholarship on the early national period, we will consider the shared history of the U.S. nation and the U.S. novel. The course is designed to introduce students to both the early national novel and Early American Literary studies. The syllabus will include texts such as Royall Tyler’s the Algerine Captive (1797), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1804), Leonora Sansay’s Secret History: or, the Horrors of St. Domingue (1808), Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827), and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1832). Students will lead a discussion and produce a seminar paper for this course.

ENGS 345 A
Practicum in the Teaching of Writing and Rhetoric
Richard Parent

What is "writing and rhetoric," and how does one teach it? In this course we will explore the field of composition and rhetoric studies as it has come to be defined over the past few decades, and seek to apply these ideas to our own classroom practices. We will pay particular attention to the philosophical and pedagogical conflicts at the center of the critical discourse on writing and rhetoric, exploring their implications for our students and for us as teachers. We also will investigate the influence personal computing has had and continues to have on the field, and will examine a number of classroom technologies available to instructors at UVM and beyond. Enrollment is restricted to first-year graduate teaching assistants in English.

ENGS 350 A
Survey of Literary Theory and Criticism
Robyn Warhol-Down

This seminar introduces graduate students to a range of vocabulary, methodologies, and approaches that circulate in literary and cultural studies today. We will begin with excerpts from texts by Marx, Freud, de Beauvoir, and Foucault that have set the framework for much of current critical theory. Then we will survey major approaches from “New” Criticism and Structuralism; through such politically and historically based methods as “New” Historicism, Feminisms and Gender Studies; to such Post-structuralist ways of reading as Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic criticism, and Post-colonialism.

To ground our reading of theory in practical criticism, we will read literary and popular-culture texts to use as case studies. These will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and variations on the same story, including Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the Bollywood film Bride and Prejudice.

In order to expose seminar members to a range of perspectives on critical theory (and to introduce them to a variety of faculty members in the Department), we will have guest speakers on most class days. UVM English faculty will talk informally about theoretical approaches in which they have special expertise.

Each student will be required to present a 20-minute oral “prolusion” (a close reading of a brief passage from one of our texts, taking the approach of the theory being read for that day), a 20-page annotated bibliography on a chosen theoretical methodology, and a 20-25-page seminar paper using that methodology in making an argument about one of our literary, theoretical, or pop-culture course texts. Students will also be required to do weekly writings answering a specific question about the assigned reading, to be collected as a Critical Log.

Film and Television Studies Courses

FTS 007 A
Development of Motion Pictures I: From its Origins Until 1930
Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree

This course is an introduction to the history of film prior to 1930. We will read about and discuss the aesthetic, technological, social, and economic considerations surrounding early cinema. The course considers the development of film worldwide; hence, we will study not only American films but also German, French, Russian and British films. The primary objective of the course is to provide students with an introductory understanding of silent cinema as well as to sharpen skills in film analysis.

FTS 007 B
Development of Motion Pictures I: From its Origins Until 1930
Sarah Nilsen

Introduction to basic film history, theory, and analytical skills. An historical overview of international silent cinema.

FTS 007 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Development of Motion Pictures I: From its Origins Until 1930
Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree

This course is an introduction to the history of film prior to 1930. We will read about and discuss the aesthetic, technological, social, and economic considerations surrounding early cinema. The course considers the development of film worldwide; hence, we will study not only American films but also German, French, Russian and British films. The primary objective of the course is to provide students with an introductory understanding of silent cinema as well as to sharpen skills in film analysis.

FTS 009 A
History of Television
Sarah Nilsen

Introduction to basic television history, theory, and analytical skills. An historical overview of television from its invention to the present.

FTS 095 Z1 (Continuing Education)
Documentary Film Representation
Deborah Ellis

History of documentary film iwth particular attention to the question "what is a documentary"? In exploring this question, we will address the variety of methods documentary filmmakers have presented reality, and we will look at how both technical and cultural influcences affect the form of what we call "documentary film".

FTS 121 A & B
Studies in Film Theory
Hilary Neroni

This course will serve as a rigorous introduction to film theory. We will begin with the earliest attempts to theorize the cinema and move quickly to the film theory explosion of the 1960s and 1970s. The class will center on the theoretical underpinnings of this explosion. Semiotics, Marxism, and feminism. We will investigate the thinkers that brought these different theorectical perspectives to bear on film. The courses will conclude with two subject studies (on race in the cinema and on the filmmaker Kieslowski) through which we will investigate contemporary film theory. Pre req: FTS 7, 8, or 9.

FTS 122 A
Gender and Film Genres
Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree

Gender is historically and culturally circumscribed and genre films provide a site in which we can trace political and historical contexts of gender. In this class we pay attention to historical and cultural vicissitudes of gender and genre films both as a construction that is always particular and provisional. Specifically, we look at how political, economic and cultural relations over determine gender as well as its intricate place within the configuration of film genres such as Westerns, action adventures and melodramas.

FTS 131 A
Advanced Film/TV Studies
Sheila Kunkle

FTS 133 A
Avant-Garde
David Jenemann

The term avant-garde is a broad and perplexing one, particularly as it applies to twentieth century cinema. This course looks at a number of "avant-gardes" and attempts to situate them in a theoretical and historical framework. From Surrealism and Dada to Pop-Art and Fluxus, FTS 133 considers how the fringes of the art world at once react to and influence mainstream filmmaking practices.

FTS 141 A
Film and Video Production I
Deborah Ellis

Why are the images we see in movies so powerful? In this class you’ll learn how to shoot and edit video through hands-on experience. You’ll learn how to shoot images that have impact. And, you’ll learn how to juxtapose images through editing to serve a narrative or rhythmic or structural purpose. This class is for anyone who wants to develop skills that harness the power of film and video through shooting, editing, screening, making mistakes and revising. We will view a number of films that will probably be outside your experience, and you will be viewing and responding to other films that will be more familiar. The goal is to familiarize you with new work, and to encourage you to be more critical about work you tend to view on a regular basis. The combination of experiences will fuel your production work. Pre-req FTS 7, 8, 9

FTS 142 A
Film and Video Production II
Deborah Ellis

FTS 142 provides the opportunity to refine skills learned in the introductory production course. Each semester the course is offered, the emphasis is on a different aspect of the production cycle. The emphasis in the course is to work toward the development of your personal vision, with an increasing sense of control over your work – technically and aesthetically. You will be pushed to “see” with greater clarity, to produce work you care about, and to participate as a team member to support the production of your classmate’s work. The course may be repeated. Pre-req FTS 95 or 141, or equivalent

Last modified June 12 2008 11:05 AM