ENG 101
Composition
A study of the fundamentals of effective written expression, with emphasis on the development of thesis-directed essays that make use of evidence and argumentation to validate their theses. Required of all first-year students with the exception of students who evince superior facility in written expression.
ENG 102
Writing About Texts
A study of thesis-directed writing that incorporates the work of other writers for the development of the students' own writing. Required of all students. Prerequisite: Successful completion of or exemption from ENG 101.
Courses on the 200-level that are intended to serve as general studies literature offerings are 210, 235 and 270. 300-level advanced literature courses may be taken to fulfill general studies requirements with permission of the course instructor. Please note that English 233 and English 234 are reserved primarily for students in education. ENG 102 is a prerequisite for all 200- and 300-level English courses.
ENG 201
Major British Texts to 1780
A survey of major British texts, writers and literary trends from the Anglo-Saxon period to 1780. This course also is designed to provide intermediate students of literature with a wide variety of critical skills and approaches. While it is intended for English concentrators, other serious students of literature may enroll in the course with the permission of the instructor. Offered every fall.
ENG 202
Major British Texts from 1780 to the Present
This course surveys central British texts, writers and literary trends from the Romantic period to the present. It also provides intermediate students with a wide variety of critical skills and approaches. The writers studied include: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Browning, Austen, E. Bronte, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Yeats, Pater and Wollstonecraft. Organic form, the lyric and Gothic Strains in 19th century literature, along with "aesthetic theory," "The Woman Question," and postcolonialism are some of the topics this course considers. The course is intended for English concentrators, but other serious students of literature may enroll with the permission of the instructor. Offered every spring.
ENG 204
General Survey of American Literature
As a survey of American literature and culture, this course introduces students to some of the major themes and writers in American history via discussion of a variety of works produced by American authors. Some writers will receive some depth of treatment, but we will treat most authors briefly in order to focus on the author's place in the development of American cultural expectations. As a consequence, questions of canonicity and of the mutual shaping of canon and cultural expectations will be recurring themes of the course. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 210
African-American Literature
A survey and analysis course divided into rubrics of period, activity and/or genre designed to acquaint the student with the formal links and traditions within African-American literature, including drama, the short story, poetry and nonfictional prose. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 225
Creative Writing
A course designed to offer practical skills in various kinds of imaginative writing. A given course will address one of the following four genres: nonfictional imaginative prose; long fiction; the short story; or survey of poetry, short fiction and prose. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 226
Intermediate Grammar and Composition
Intended for all students interested in writing, this course provides instruction in the theory and practice of English grammar, emphasizing the formal rules of grammar and their deployment in well constructed, organized and developed writing. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG/COM 222
Writing for the Mass Media
Introduction to the fundamentals of gathering, sifting, and writing for the print and broadcast news media: news concepts, story structure, news style, and so forth. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 233
Children’s Literature
A survey of literature written for children, with attention to the history of and generic variations in the literature. The course addresses current best practices and strategies for teaching the literature. Intended for students specializing in primary education. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 234
Literature for Adolescents
A survey of literature written for children in their high school years, with attention to the history of and generic variations in the literature. The course addresses current best practices and strategies for teaching the literature. Intended for students specializing in secondary education. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 235
Major Authors and Topics
These courses, designed primarily for general studies credit, focus upon major authors, major literary forms, or significant intellectual issues in world literature. Foreign literary works are read in translation. Because these multiple sectioned courses are intended to offer a variety of options for students, course topics are made available prior to registration each semester. May be repeated with a new topic. Recent topics include "Humor in Literature," "American Short Fiction," "Arthurian Literature," "Black Women Writers," "The Ghost Story," "American Women’s Poetry, "Twentieth-Century American Poetry," "Literature of War," "Utopian Literature," "Reading/Reading Rabbit," "The Vampyre," "Irish Literature" and "African Autobiography." Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 270
The Classical Heritage
A study of selected ancient Greek and Roman epic, dramatic, lyric and theoretical works that have influenced later world literature and thought - especially literature in English. All works are read in translation. Special emphasis is on the relationship of these works to contemporary critical issues. Writers studied vary from year to year but always include most of the following: Homer, Sappho of Lesbos, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Plautus, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Juvenal. Offered in response to demand. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 301
Introduction to the Historical Study of Language
This course provides a survey of the historical development of the English language from Indo-European roots through dialects of Middle English to modern English dialects around the world. The course also introduces linguistic terminology and theories, and debates socio-linguistic issues like African-American Vernacular English and the survival of minority languages. Alternates with 352 Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 352
Chaucer
A careful reading of Chaucer's major works from the House of Fame to the Canterbury Tales. Basic instruction in Middle English pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar are given so that the student may read Chaucer in his own language. All of the texts are studied with reference to historical and cultural backgrounds. Offered in the fall; alternates with 301 Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 354
Shakespeare
This course examines the major Shakespearean plays. Primary emphasis is on a close reading of the plays, but the Elizabethan background and modern Shakespearean criticism are also studied. Offered every fall. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 355
Renaissance Literature
Poetry, prose and drama, from the late 15th to the early 17th century. Emphasis varies, but the course includes such writers as More, Wyatt, Elyot, Sidney, Spenser, Marlow, Raleigh, Jonson, Donne, Webster, Herbert, Bacon, Burton, Beaumont and Fletcher, as well as continental writers such as Pico, Petrarch, Ficino, Vives and Rabelais, in translation Offered in the spring in alternate years. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 356
Milton and the 17th Century
A study of Paradise Lost and either Paradise Regained or Samson Agonistes as the focal points of Early Modern controversies in poetics, ecclesiology, theology, politics, science, and gender. Other readings vary, but may include Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Richard Hooker, Bacon, Browne, Calvin, Filmer, Hobbes, Lilburne and Winstanley, as well as selections from Milton's prose and minor verse. Alternates with 357. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 357
Dryden to Blake: Restoration and 18th Century Literature
A survey of poetry, drama and prose from 1660 to 1798. Emphases vary, but may include topics such as satire, changes in the conception of dramatic comedy and tragedy, the development of the novel, the advent of sensibility, and the rise of a protofeminist consciousness. Writers considered also vary, but may include Dryden, Wycherly, Behn, Otway, Montagu, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Thomson, the Wartons, Goldsmith, Johnson, Sheridan, Burney, Burke and Wollestonecraft. Alternates with 356. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 366
Romanticism
The course begins with a study of some of the more important 18th century forerunners of Romanticism and continues with selected writers of the British Romantic period. Poems by Wordsworth ("Tintern Abbey," “[Immortality] Ode," "The Prelude"), Blake ("Songs of Innocence and of Experience," "The Marriage of Heaven & Hell” “The Book of Urizen”), Coleridge ("The Eolian Harp,” "Frost at Midnight," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel"), Byron ("Childe Harold 's Pilgrimage" "Don Juan"), Shelley (“Ode to the West Wind,” "Prometheus Unbound," "Adonais"), Keats ("La Belle Dames Sans Merci" "Eve of St. Agnes,” "The Ode to Psyche,” ”The Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “The Fall of Hyperion,” “Lamia”), and Clare (The Shepherd’s Calendar) - as well as the prose of De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater) Dorothy Wordsworth (The Grasmere Journals) and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) are some of the many British Romantic texts that are studied intensively. Alternates, spring semester, with 380. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 368
Literature of the Victorian Era
The major writers of nonfictional prose, beginning with Carlyle, are studied in connection with the leading social, religious, intellectual and artistic movements of the age. The poets, with major emphasis on Tennyson, R. Browning, E.B. Browning, Arnold and the Rossettis, are studied against their contemporary background. Attention is also given to writers such as Meredith, Swinburne, Lear, E. Brontë, Morris, Kipling, Hopkins, Pater, Hardy, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde. Alternates with 374. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 372
British Fiction to 1890
The course offers an analytical and historical study of the technique and development of British fiction from the 18th century through Hardy. Major figures studied include Fielding, Richardson, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, the Brontës, Dickens, Meredith, Gaskell, Trollope and Hardy. Alternates with 373. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 373
Modern British and Irish Fiction
This course surveys major figures and themes in British and Irish fiction from 1890 to the present. The writers studied include many of the following: Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, Jeanette Winterson, Ladie Smith, and Anthony Burgess. Alternates with 372. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 374
European Fiction
The writers studied in this course are drawn from continental authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. Major works of Pushkin, Gogol, George Sand, Flaubert, Turgenev, Stendhal, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Colette and Chekhov are among the works read. Alternates with 368. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 380
Twentieth Century American Poetry
The course offers close readings of leading American poets from Whitman and Dickinson to the present. The course is designed primarily for English concentrators and/or students with a strong interest in poetry. Alternates with 366. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 384
Major American Writers to 1865
This course begins with two or three writers from the colonial and federal periods such as Bradford, Bradstreet, Franklin and Irving. It then concentrates on major figures of the three decades before the Civil War: Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson. Alternates with 385. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 385
Major American Writers from 1865 to the Present
Beginning with writers from the era of Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Adams and Edith Wharton, this course moves to modernists such as Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Faulkner, O'Neill, Wright and Cather, concluding with writers from post World War II era to the present such as Williams, Miller, Malamud, Lowell, Plath, O'Connor, Updike and Morrison. This course includes poetry, fiction and drama, always concluding with a unit on living writers. Alternates with 384. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 386
Modern American Fiction
The development of American prose fiction - primarily the novel - from the late 19th century to the present. Beginning with realistic and naturalistic fiction, this course moves through modernism to the postmodern novel. Writers studied may include James, Chopin, Wharton, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, Wright, Nabokov, Bellow, Roth, Updike, Pynchon, Morrison and others. Offered in alternate years. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG/THR 388
Postmodern American Drama
This course explores the themes, theories and theatrical techniques of the contemporary American stage. Students study the works of several major American playwrights, their use of traditional and nontraditional methods of stage production and their exploration of the undercurrents inherent to contemporary American life. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG/THR 389
Postmodern British and European Drama
This course explores the themes, theories and theatrical techniques of the contemporary British and European stage. Students study the works of several major British/European playwrights, their use of traditional and nontraditional methods of stage production and their exploration of the diminishing role of nationalism inherent to the ever-changing face of contemporary Europe. Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 390
Topics in British and American Literature
This course explores a topic or central problem of current importance in literary study. This course may focus on the work of major writers such as Virginia Woolf, Henry James or Joseph Conrad. In some semesters the course will focus on themes, genres, and traditions in American and British literature such as "The Gothic," the "American Renaissance," “Mythology,” and "Women's Fiction." Prerequisite: ENG102
ENG 399
Seminar on Theory and Methods (W)
This course affords the student an intensive exposure to prominent theories of literary interpretation, from structuralism to deconstruction and from discursive analysis to feminist theory, and an application of those theories to a variety of examples of writers from Britain, Italy, France, Africa, and the US. Emphasis falls upon in-class reports and critical papers. To be taken in the Spring of junior year. Offered every spring.
ENG 491
Senior Seminar: The Discipline of English Studies (W)
Opening with a review of students' personal experiences of the English concentration, this seminar moves through analysis of issues in current English studies to consideration of new directions. Students also read texts drawn from both English and American literatures and grouped around a major literary topic such as "romance." Throughout the semester, students work on a research paper concerning a topic of their own choosing not necessarily confined to the subjects of the seminar. Offered every fall.
Courses in Communications
Beginning with the 2011 fall semester, the prefix for communications courses changed to COM from ENG.
COM/ENG 222
Writing for the Mass Media
Introduction to the fundamentals of gathering, sifting and writing for print, online and broadcast news media: information gathering, news concepts, story structure, news style, and so forth. Offered every fall.
Prerequisite: ENG 102
COM 230
Public Speaking
An introduction to research, organization, composition, and delivery of speeches for various occasions, with emphasis on developing and supporting arguments, listening skills, informative and persuasive speaking, and small group communication.
COM 231
Communication in the Workplace
This course introduces students to the key forms of communication in a business/professional environment. It focuses on three things: determining what form to use depending on audience, purpose and subject; learning the language of a professional environment; and recognizing that communication is both the mechanism by which people work together and the engine that drives results.
COM 250
Mass Communications and Society
Examination of the historical, social, economic, cultural and political influences that have shaped present-day mass communication and the effects of mass communication industries, contents and processes on contemporary society. Survey of mass communication theories and the interaction of mass communications and society. Prerequisite: ENG 102
COM 255
Desktop Publishing
An introduction to designing and creating publications using Adobe InDesign and related programs, as well as an introduction to the theory and practice of designing and producing a variety of publications (from advertisements and business cards to newsletters and magazines) from conception to final product. Prerequisite: ENG 102
COM 283
Special Topics in Communication
Courses are offered on an occasional basis according to instructors' and students' needs. Recent topics have included fashion writing and health communication.
COM 314
Writing for the Web
Writing and editing for online media, with an emphasis on understanding the principles of writing for interactive media and applying them to journalism, advertising and public relations. Prerequisite: ENG 102
COM 315
Public Affairs Reporting
Advanced reporting and writing techniques, with an emphasis on local, county, and state reporting on government, politics, courts and business. Practice in investigative reporting, information gathering skills, use of federal and state Freedom of Information Acts, and so forth. Rights and responsibilities of public communicators. Offered every spring.
Prerequisite: COM 222
COM 316
Editing and Print Production
Practice in the techniques of news evaluation, copy editing, headline writing, picture editing, illustration, editorial strategy and design, and layout for print and online media.
Prerequisite: COM 222
COM 317
Public Relations and Advertising
Introduction to the theory, principles and practices of advertising and public relations, including market research, planning and designing messages, and media selection and scheduling. Study of the economic and social influences of advertising and public relations and the role and responsibilities of advertising and public relations practitioners. Prerequisite: ENG 102
COM 318
Broadcast Production
Practice in the principles of radio and television production and their application in journalism, advertising and public relations.
Prerequisite: COM 222 or permission
COM 319
Feature Writing
Practice in planning, research, reporting, writing and marketing nonfiction articles to general and specialized magazines, newspapers and online publications. Prerequisite: ENG 102
COM 320
The System of Free Expression
The system of free expression, legal doctrines of political and commercial speech, press freedom and censorship. Study of the legal rights and constraints of mass communications industries, including print, broadcast, cable and online media. Discussion of the ethics and criticism of the practice of journalism, advertising and public relations. Offered every fall.
Prerequisite: ENG 250
COM 321
Media History
A survey of the history of American mass media from a historical perspective, with an emphasis upon their social, political and economic environments.
Prerequisite: COM 250
COM 327
Public Relations Writing & Production
In this course, students will build public relations writing skills through hands-on practice preparing public relations pieces such as press releases, brochures, radio spots and newsletters. Students will also gain experience in basic print design and layout techniques. Through classroom instruction and lab experience, students will come to understand the basic writing and production skills needed to enter the public relations field.
Prerequisite: COM 317
COM 333
Practicum in Communication
Supervised internships with newspapers, broadcasting stations, and advertising and public relations agencies.
Prerequisite: COM 222 or 317
COM 337
Public Relations & Advertising Research
This applied research course focuses on consumer and market research that are used in today's public relations and advertising industries to plan and evaluate creative campaigns. Students will explore audience segmentation, media audience measurement and profiles, surveys, focus groups and concept testing.
Prerequisite: COM 317
COM 383
Special Topics in Communication
Courses are offered on a regular basis according to instructors' and students' needs. Recent topics have included gender and mass media, citizen journalism, and multimedia reporting.
COM 480
Senior Seminar in Mass Communication Research
Students are introduced to the role of theory in shaping research studies and interpreting their findings, and explore a variety of research methods commonly used in the field, including experimental, survey, content analysis, focus groups, case studies, and ethnography. Students develop a research question, conduct a literature review, and design an original research study. Offered every fall.
Prerequisite: Senior standing and COM 250
COM 490
Senior Seminar in Mass Communication
Current issues in mass communication with particular emphasis on ethical and theoretical considerations. Literature and history of the field also are examined as participants explore selected areas of mass media study. Using the literature review and research plan developed in 480, students will strengthen their theoretical analysis, obtain Institutional Review Board approval, conduct their research projects and interpret research findings. Offered every Spring.
Prerequisite: Senior standing and COM 480
