UNDERGRADUATE Upper-division Cou

UNDERGRADUATE
Upper-division Courses for Majors and Minors
Department of English
Spring 2010

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305/306.001
Fundamentals of Creative Writing: Fiction I & II
1:00-2:15 MW
Palwick

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307/308.001
Fundamentals of Creative Writing: Poetry I & II
11:00-12:15 TR
Keniston

This workshop will emphasize ways to expand, complicate, and strengthen your poems—including their voice, theme, movement, sound patterns, and vocabulary. During
the semester, you will write a lot, combining imitations and exercises based on the works of contemporary poets with you write on your own, with the goal both of extending
your voice in new and unexpected ways and of generating a group of strong drafts to be revised by the end of the term. We will also focus on reading as poets—in ways, that
is, that will help you advance your craft as a poet. Most important, the workshop will provide a safe and supportive environment in which you can experiment, get help with
poems in process, and consider how to make your poems more engaging to you and more powerful to your readers. Readings for the semester will include excerpts from an
anthology of contemporary American poetry, as well as individual volumes by poets representing the range and strength of American poetry.

Admission to the workshop is by application. Please contact the instructor (keniston@unr.edu) for application guidelines. Applications must be received by
Monday, November 30.

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This class will function as both a topics course in which elements of poetic craft and tradition (form and theory) will be studied and discussed and as a workshop
in which work generated by the participants will be discussed and critiqued. We’ll study the poetics of both formal and “free” (organic) verse by emphasizing process
and aesthetics, with particular attention paid to modern and contemporary voices. Participants will, of course, submit their own work for group critique, and they will
also complete exercises, a book review. and a final portfolio. They will also deliver a “formal” recitation and present a “favorite poem” to the class. Participants will,
I hope, develop a sense of their own voices and come to appreciate the craft of the literary artist. Although this course is ideally suited to students who are already
practicing poets or who intend to apply for the poetry workshop, anyone with a sincere interest in the literary arts and/or contemporary literature and the tradition
behind it will find a place here.

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This workshop is an intensive exercise in honing individual style in non-fiction prose. Through reading, analysis, and practice, students will develop a customized
writing system that results in polished non-fiction that is unmistakably theirs. During the term, students will revise and edit documents created for other courses
or in the workplace. The final portfolio will include before-and-after versions of these documents as well as a capstone essay accompanied by a thorough
documentation of the student’s composition of that essay from brainstorming to proofreading.

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This course’s main goal is to help students advance as writers in a variety of nonfiction prose genres. You’ll write three assigned essays (education memoir, sense of place,

and text analysis) in order to get the feel for writing for publication. After that, you’ll be able to choose your writing project. A second goal is to help you become effective

editors of your own and other students’ prose. Toward that end, you’ll be doing a lot of focused rewriting of your papers and a lot of collaboration (in small groups) with

other students about their writing. (Obviously, the “writing workshop” aspect of this course–sharing drafts, critiquing drafts one-on-one and in small groups, and discussing

papers with the entire class--is very important. Engagement and participation in the class, including discussion of professional essays, will account for thirty percent of the

grade.) A third goal is to examine writing as craft–the skillful and purposeful shaping of writing from word choice to sentence structure, from paragraph coherence to

paper organization. Most of the writing we’ll read and do will probably be creative nonfiction. But writing as craft applies to all forms and genres.

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This course is designed to facilitate writing and revision of non-fiction, primarily academic, writing. We will focus on persuasive writing in a variety of genres by reading
argumentation theory and by practicing writing in various forms. There will be two major components of the course. In the first part of the semester, we will work
through a range of academic writing tasks from the initial inquiry through invention and discussion of ideas and into a polished presentation of those ideas. In the second
part of the course, we will return to and revise various texts that you have already written. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and writing
workshops; they will also be expected to deliver short oral presentations and a final portfolio of their writing projects from the semester.

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This course will focus primarily on the workshopping of student- produced works of fiction. Students will be responsible for writing and submitting to the class at least
two original works of fiction (including excerpts from longer works in progress), each at least seven double-spaced pages in length. In addition, students will
critique—both in writing and through class discussion—all other works presented to the class. A fiction workshop depends on the active participation of all its
members; students will therefore be expected not only to attend class, but also to provide regular, thoughtful, constructive comments. Students will also be expected
to read and discuss a selection of exemplary published fiction.

Roster spots are available by application only. Application forms are available on the bulletin board outside the English department office in Frandsen Hall; these
forms, plus 7-10 double-spaced pages of original fiction, are due in my mailbox (in the English department mailroom) no later than 5:00 PM Friday, Dec 4. I will
notify students of their status as soon as possible thereafter. I will not accept electronic applications for the course. Students applying for ENG 403 must first
have completed one section of ENG 305 in order to be considered.

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Admission to the workshop is by application. Please contact the instructor (keniston@unr.edu) for application guidelines. Applications must be received by
Monday, November 30.

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411B.001 (65667) - NEW DAYS AND TIME
Principles of Modern Grammar
1-3:45 W
FH 129
Fridland

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Language is one of the most fundamental of human capacities. We are able to speak even before we have mastered many of our basic skills, and well before we start any formal education. As we will explore in this class, such abilities and the creative capacity of human language suggests a specialized brain design containing the blueprint or universal grammar that generates all spoken language.

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We will study the history and development of the English language from its Indo-European roots up to the early modern period. In addition to learning linguistic tools
and concepts, such as phonetic transcription and phonological analysis, you will also gain a first-hand acquaintance with the early stages of English through the translation
of brief passages of Old English and slightly longer passages of Middle English. There will be three tests and frequent homework assignments; graduate students will
also do a research paper.

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422A.001
Topics in Literary Theory
1:00-2:15 TR
Chaput

Ideological criticism has long been the privileged domain for grappling with the conscious and unconscious motivations behind language as well as its sociopolitical effects,
both intended and unintended. However, such analysis has been criticized for its purported ability to uncover hidden motives and correct “false consciousness” as well as
for relying on and reinforcing one-to-one causal relationships. From this muddled territory, affect studies has emerged, diversified, and gained a great deal of critical attention.
This course is interested in the theoretical evolution from ideological analysis to affect studies and how various strands of these theories attempt to understand the linkages
between materiality and consciousness as they play out in language. We will read theorists of ideology such as Marx and Engels, Volosinov, Horkheimer and Adorno,
Eagleton, and Zizek and trace their critical projects through different theories of affect. We will read about affect from the cultural studies perspectives of Raymond
Williams, Eve Sedgwick, and Melissa Gregg; from the post-Marxist perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guarrari as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri;
and from the perspective of theorist interested in the physiological role of affect such as Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan.

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Course Description: Characterized by emotional excess, apprehension, and elements of outright horror, Gothic fiction directly opposes the principles of reason advanced by the Enlightenment. Such qualities designate the genre to be a particularly feminized form, often written by and read by women, at least at the time of its inception. Taking gender and genre as our focus, we will consider the Gothic for the ways in which it both defines and disrupts gender categories. By examining how bodies—human, textual, geographical, architectural, or otherwise—are gendered in the Gothic, we will explore the prevailing tensions that arise between good and evil, reason and emotion, the civilized and the primitive, sanity and madness, repulsion and desire, etc., to determine how the fiction functions ideologically in its given cultural and historical moment. Beginning with a late-eighteenth century example of the gothic novel, we will chart its manifestations through the nineteenth century to the present in the forms of science fiction, satire, detective fiction, psychosexual drama, gothic romance, the fairy tale, and the ghost story.

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425B.001
Topics in Literature
1:00-2:15 MW
Grady

Course Description: Writing Critically about Film This course will be an introduction to writing about film, with a focus on learning to use a variety of theoretical approaches
including postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, gender theory, auteur theory, and more. We will survey American film of the last century, and learn the vocabulary
of film analysis. The class will teach you how to write about film, how to use theory as a framing device for your arguments, and how to integrate theory and research into
your writing.

Along with mandatory attendance at weekly film screenings (Wednesday evenings 6:30-8:30, or you must make time to view the film on your own), the course requires
the following Major Assignments:

15%      Essay #1: Screening Report (2 pages)
20%     Essay #2: Analysis of a film using framing theory (3-5 pages)
25%     Essay #3: Longer Analysis of two or more films (5-7 pages)
10%      Participation/Attendance
10%      Exercises, Quizzes
10%      Journal
10%     Final Exam

Texts:
Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing on Film, 6th Ed. Pearson/Longman, 2007.
Bernard F. Dick, Anatomy of Film, 5th Ed. Bedford/St. Martins, 2005.
Additional readings on Course Reserves

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425B.002
Topics in Literature
11:00-12:15 TR
Branch

While regionalism has long provided a rubric for understanding place and culture in various parts of the country, American environmental writers have
experimented with a variety of new ways to conceptualize and localize identity. Among the most provocative of these “new regionalisms” are bioregional
conceptions of place, which attempt to locate cultural and individual identity within a richer, more nuanced understanding of environment and home. In
“Bioregionalism and Western American Literature” we will read the work of a variety of gifted nonfiction writers who explore and often attempt to redefine
the relationship of self to place in the American West. What is the importance of local consciousness in our increasingly globalized world? What is the nature
of the relationship between the West and national culture in the U.S.? How might bioregional conceptions of home differ from regional understandings of place?
How do race, gender, and ethnicity impact cultural and environmental identity in the American West? Our survey of place-based western American nonfiction will
take us from the deserts of the Mojave and Great Basin to the high peaks of the Sierra, from the Great Valley of California to the snowy forests of Montana, from
the volcanic arc of the Cascades to the coastal rainforests, from wilderness to family farm to nuclear test site. Along the way we will examine the work of such
writers as Mary Austin, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez, Rick Bass, David Mas Masumoto,
Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Michael Pyle.

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ENG 415A, Old English, is a prerequisite for this course, and indeed, this course cannot be passed without a reading knowledge of Old English.

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We will devote most of the semester to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and will conclude with his Troilus and Criseyde. Our initial goal is to ensure that everyone
becomes comfortable reading Chaucer's Middle English. As long as you are willing to put in the effort at the beginning of the course, you will soon find yourself
reading Middle English with little difficulty. Once you are comfortable with the language, you will find that Chaucer is a quite manageable course: Most reading
assignments are relatively short, and each new tale will open up new vistas of possibilities in interpretation, because most tales can be read and understood as
individual tales, as the expression of the pilgrims narrating them, and also as integral parts of the greater whole, the series of tales told by the pilgrims as they
journey from Southwerk to Canterbury.

After we complete the tales, and everyone is thoroughly familiar with Chaucer's Middle English, we will turn to Troilus and Criseyde, which can
rather loosely be described as a courtly romance, although like most of Chaucer's works, it confounds ordinary genre distinctions.

In addition to the daily schedule of readings, there will be three translation and vocabulary quizzes, two tests, and two short papers (4-5 pp.).
You will also keep a journal, with entries for each reading assignment. Graduate students will write a longer paper (8-12 pp.) in addition to the shorter ones.

Texts: Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor.
Geoffrey Chaucer. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Stephen Barney.

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How did William Shakespeare’s comedies, which he wrote as scripts for performance in the vital, commercial world of the Elizabethan theatre, arrive in the 21^st
century as perhaps the most widely revered element of the western literary canon? What traditions and sources contributed to these plays, and what are their unique
qualities? If all the world’s a stage, do our selves consist of nothing more than a collection of roles? Do all human relationships—interpersonal, commercial, romantic,
political, sexual—depend on disguise, deceit, and drama? What’s the nature of love? Of power? What’s the nature of “the human,” and did Shakespeare really invent
it, as Harold Bloom has famously claimed? In this course, we’ll comb through some the playwright’s greatest hits (and some of his B-sides) to explore these questions
and more.

Footnote: Text will include A Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, and
The Winter's Tale.

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This course will undertake a close reading and analysis of the great English epic, Paradise Lost, in the context of Milton's political and literary career: his early
experiments in lyric poetry and masque; his radical support¾through prose, the writings of his “left hand"¾of revolution, freedom of the press, and divorce; and
his personal response to imprisonment and the death of his political hopes in the restoration of the English monarchy under Charles II. As we examine issues of freedom,
authority, and authorship in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, we will consider Milton's revisioning of classical epic and drama and of biblical texts. And as we
explore the attempt "to justify the ways of God to man," we will pay particular attention to Milton's account of gender and his examination of the literary imagination
and the creative process.

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The Elizabethan Age ends with the traumatic death of the Virgin Queen, and amid epidemics and threats of terrorism, the accession of the Scottish King James puts
an unknown foreigner on the English throne. Old ways of thinking continue to tumble as the Scientific Revolution replaces Humanism with the cold empiricism of the
Royal Society. Religious and political turmoil boil over into radicalism, civil war, and the beheading of God's anointed monarch. This course will explore the various
strategies that England's poets, essayists, pamphleteers and playwrights found, in a century of plague, trauma, fire, and revolution, to make sense of one world rising
from the ashes of another. We will explore various genres of cultural output: bawdy drama, satirical pamphlets, sensational crime fiction, lyric poetry both sacred and
profane, radical political rants, and the culmination of seventeenth-century England's literary culture, John Milton's revolutionary epic Paradise Lost.

Footnote: Authors may include Thomas Dekker, John Donne, Thomas Hobbes, Lucy Hutchinson, John Taylor, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and John Wilmot.

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The Victorian Period was a time of dynamic cultural, economic, and political change. In just under 70 years Britain transformed itself from a rural and agrarian society into
an urban and industrial and then into urban and commercial society. Moreover, Britain went from being a democracy in name only to being a democracy with near universal
male suffrage. Along with these economic and political changes came a flood of new social actors—the governess, the self-made urban gentleman, the self-made captain
of industry, the commercial author, the New Woman, the shop assistant, the shop girl, the office clerk, the typist, the telegraph girl, and a host of other new social identities
including those that would in the early twentieth century come to be know as gay men and lesbian women.

This course will explore how literary forms like the novel, the poem, and non-fiction prose along with popular culture forms like the music hall song & sketch, the illustrated
penny newspaper, and popular magazines not only reflected the rise of these new social actors, but also played an active role in constructing these new social actors.

We will read works by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, and wide range of popular
culture texts.

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The Problem of Culture in American Literature: From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism

This course begins in the wake of the Civil War, when the United States was experiencing seismic shocks that included the recent trauma of North fighting South,
the impact of industrialization on local communities, and anxieties about growing numbers of immigrants. While some American authors looked for ways that literature
could close schisms and help reunite the country, others questioned whether it even made sense to think in terms of a single national culture, a question that continues to
be raised today. As we read a range of fiction, poetry, and drama from the Civil War to the present in this class, we will also track what’s changed—and what’s stayed
more or less the same—in the ways people think about the culture and cultures of the United States. The tentative reading list includes: Walt Whitman, Sarah Orne Jewett,
Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Eugene O’Neill, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sherman Alexie.

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In this course we will read fiction—mostly novels—by writers in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. In doing so we will consider the aesthetic, social, and political
contexts that shape the novel in a century marked by the end of the Victorian era, the upheaval of the world wars, the decline of Britain’s prominence and empire, and
the transformation of the U.K. through immigration from former colonies and changing notions of nationalism. Topics of discussion will include the novel and short
story as literary genres, modernism, and postmodernism. Reading will include texts by some but not all of the following: Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster,
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Pat Barker, Penelope Lively, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi,
Jeanette Winterson, Roddy Doyle, Jackie Kay.

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English 475b/675b is a course in contemporary literary nonfiction about desert environments. The course aims to introduce you, as writers and students of literature,
to nonfiction, the “fourth genre,” and to explore contemporary nonfiction about American deserts, the Arctic, and other arid regions.

We’ll study prose style in each literary work, while we examine cultural attitudes toward arid environments. You’ll read and write about the ways in which population
pressures impact both the physical landscape and our perceptions of those landscapes. Course texts (seven for now, maybe one more) include nonfiction by Edward
Abbey, Mary Austin, Joan Didion, Barry Lopez, Mary Clearman Blew, Ellen Meloy, and John McPhee.

Coursework includes writing analysis essays, weekly written responses, two exams, and an oral presentation of your research.

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This course will focus on “Sense of Place in Pacific Rim Literature.” We will an assortment of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction from North, Central, and
South America, the Pacific Islands, Australia/New Zealand, and East Asia, exploring such topics as the aesthetics of exile, stories of globalization, culture and
water, insider/outsider perspectives, and the effects of scale on concepts of place. Our readings will range from Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s seventeenth-century
Narrow Road to the Deep North to Richard Nelson’s contemporary classic of American environmental writing The Island Within and New Zealander
Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider, which recently was made into a successful film. We’ll use such literary works to help us consider whether it makes sense
to think of the Pacific Rim as a unified region or whether the sheer vastness of the Pacific Ocean strains the concept of “place” to the point of meaninglessness.

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This theme course focuses on the most significant plays ever written on the theme/myth of Joan of Arc. Each play carries a different message, is structured and
presents historical/political aspects typical for the period and place where it was written, and more than that it reflects the intellectual and philosophical formation
of the dramatist who had created it. The course covers a long period of drama from the 16-20^th centuries, and brings together four different major western
cultures under the umbrella of the theme.The theme offers an excellent opportunity for a case study, an analysis of the moral conflicts the central character is
faced with, and an in-depth study on the concept of character .

The class will widen your horizons as it crosses path with history, philosophy, sociology, religion, ethics, gender issues, politics. All these offer excellent
opportunities for discussion.

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What does literature have to do with ethics? Can it make us better people, by offering us examples of good (or bad) behavior, or by increasing our empathy for our fellow
human beings? Or is literature detrimental to our ethical development, tempting us with stories of wickedness or distracting us from the real work of our lives? Does
literature’s imaginative capacity condemn it as nothing more than a fabric of lies, or recommend it as a source of transformative possibility? And what value, if any, is to be
had from studying the ways that literary texts grapple with ethical problems, rather than just leaving such things to the philosophers? In this course we will read a range of
literary, philosophical, and critical works from different periods and places (a majority of them will be read in translation) in our pursuit of these and other questions about
the place of ethics in literary studies, and of literature in ethical inquiry.

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483A.001
International Fiction of the 19th and 20th Centuries
1:00-2:15 TR
Fenimore

INTERNATIONAL POLICE PROCEDURALS

Auguste Dupin! Sherlock Holmes! Miss Marple! Inspector Maigret! You may not have heard of most of them, but the creators of NYPD Blue, House, and Law and Order’s

cast of recurring characters worked the same generic terrain originally mapped by Poe, Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Georges Simenon. Thanks in part to Holmes and Maigret,

police procedurals, as they’re called, have become wildly popular in Europe, where almost every industrialized country has spawned one or two writers whose best-selling

first effort along these lines has spawned a continuing series and, thankfully for this course, been translated into English. While novels by such literary superstars of the genre

as Henning Mankell (Sweden), Jan Willelm van de Wetering (Netherlands), Boris Akunin (Russian Federation) and Andrea Camilleri (Italy) are engrossing page-turners, they

also yield interesting findings from assorted critical perspectives. And, most seductively, their narratives are set among the familiar sights and streets of London, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome, and even Tsarist Moscow!

In what is essentially a “topics” course, we will survey a selection of novels including first efforts by the above plus a few others, and think about the origins and implications

of the genre and the way it developed over the past 150 years. In addition, we will read excerpts from ancient precursors to the crime novel, and critical essays that locate

the genre, novels, and writers we discuss in new and provoking ways. And we will ask: Why does almost every fictional detective or police investigator compare himself to

other fictional detectives? Why is almost every one of them a connoisseur of fine food and drink? Why do they mostly all smoke like chimneys? Why are they all chummy with

some pretty disreputable characters? We will screen film adaptations where available, and inscribe ourselves on the genre by parodying it in a collaboratively written novella.

Reading: 150-200 pages of light fiction per week plus an average of five pages of critical prose per week.

Writing: reading journal, short weekly responses, three short (three to five-page) papers, midterm, and collaborative final project.