Upcoming Courses

Spring 2005 

• ENG 114 (formerly14), Expository Writing
  Expository writing is writing in which one explains or explores a concept or argues for or against an idea. This course is flexibly designed and individualized to meet a variety of student needs and interests.
  
  Fulfills the Writing Requirement
   

• ENG 121 (formerly 15), Interpreting Literature
  This course focuses on how to find meaning in texts and how to argue for those meanings both orally and in writing. It emphasizes the identification of themes, images, metaphors, myths, various types of motifs, irony, rhetorical patterns, larger structures of organization, etc., and why these matter. Though topics, texts and genres do vary from section to section, all sections emphasize close reading, detailed analysis, and effective critical writing.
  
  Fulfills the Writing Requirement
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 122 (formerly 38), Literary Analysis: Research and Writing
  This course emphasizes alternatives and controversies in interpretation with attention to secondary critical texts and the value and methods of research writing, culminating in a formal research essay. Prerequisites: ENG 121 (formerly 15) or instructor permission
  
  Fulfills the Writing Requirement
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 251 (formerly 40), ROOS: Southwestern Environmental Ethnic Literatures
  Since the United States is responsible for about 25% of the planet's total energy consumption, it is imperative that we begin to make changes in our relationships with our world. But we have known that we live unsustainably for decades: how do we begin to awaken from our complacency? In thinking about the environment from a literary perspective, we begin by acknowledging that part of our passivity about the ecological catastrophes we face is the inability of Western language and culture to adequately account for the problem. Because many "Ethnic" writers - a term we will call into question throughout this course - come from communities that live differently on the land than do the people we see or read about in literature, they offer valuable non-"Western" insights and approaches to addressing these important cultural issues. Indeed, seeing the ecological urgency may depend entirely upon whether the "empire writes back." Authors may include Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldœa, Rudolfo Anaya, Gerald Vizenor, Cormac MacCarthy. Freshmen are encouraged to take this course.
  
  Prerequisites: None
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 252 (formerly 40), PLATIZKY: Literature and Medicine
  Based on an exiting summer course I took on Literature , Medicine, and Culture at the Hershey Medical Center, this cross-disciplinary class will examine how literature and medicine challenge and influence each other as practices in literature and medicine change over time. We will read a series of "pathographies" (books written by or about people with serious illnesses) and examine ways that the scientific world treats patients and that patients respond to their doctors, nurses, and caretakers. Books read will include Anne Fademan's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man, Dr. Daniel Baxter's The Least of These My Brethren, Margaret Edson's Wit, and Teaching Literature and Medicine, a collection of essays edited by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre. Concerns addressed will include cross-cultural perspectives on medicine, whether the study of literature can make medical personnel more empathetic, differences between medical treatments of men and women, and ways that the language of medicine and literature matter. Course discussions will be supplemented by periodic visits from lecturers in the sciences and social sciences.
  
  Prerequisites: none
  Fulfills Gender Studies Minor requirement
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 255 (formerly 40), DAELEY: Drama and Religion
  Religion and drama grow from a common root that is as old as history, and probably older. As early human communities began to define themselves they enacted stories that told about themselves and their relations with their gods. Even in highly literate and complex modern societies, communities, however they define themselves, often turn to drama to address these same problems: who are we? how do we relate to the divine? These concerns, expressed dramatically, appear world-wide and in most religions. This course will address selected examples of religious drama, including medieval European mystery and passion plays (and their modern examples), classical Greek tragedy, the Japanese Noh, Sh'ia Taziyeh plays, Hindu Ramlila, Shakespeare, modern African, American, and English plays, and recent movies. We will also look at religious drama in Christian and Jewish worship and in Indian classical dance. As is obvious from this long list, the course is organized around breadth rather than depth, but students will have the opportunity, if they wish, to pursue interests of their own in greater depth through alternative assignments.
  
  Prerequisites: none Fulfills Asian Studies Minor Requirement
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 257, SILBERGLEID: Creative Writing: Poetry
  Li-Young Lee, Mark Doty, Catherine Bowman, Vandana Khanna, and more. If you want to add your name to a list of up-and-coming American writers, please join me for an intermediate (to advanced) workshop in poetry. In addition to writing drafts and more drafts and producing a portfolio of original work, you will read a substantial body of contemporary American poetry, both by your peers and published writers. This course is geared toward students who love language and who want to learn about it, play with it, and struggle with it. NOTE: If you are interested in taking this course, you must submit a writing sample and set up a pre-registration interview during advising week. You will not be considered for admission without doing so.
  
  Prerequisites: English 116 or instructor permission
   

• ENG 332 (formerly 52), BARRIE: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
  A study of Shakespeare's drama and the drama of his contemporaries Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, with attention to the historical development and cultural contexts of that drama. English majors in the Austin Teacher Program may use this course to satisfy their Shakespeare course requirement. Students who have already taken a college-level Shakespeare course may take this course and may -- in consultation with the instructor -- redesign the Shakespeare section of the course syllabus so that they avoid repeating the study of plays which they have already studied on the college level.
  
  Prerequisites: Eng 122 or instructor permission
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 342 (formerly 54), GARGANIGO: Sex, Sass and Suffering in Restoration England
  Witty, bawdy, cynical, amoral -- these are some of the many terms applied to the comedies written for the era that began with the Restoration of both monarchy and theater in 1660. Taking these plays as the center of our course, we will look not only at the sexual politics of a newly racy court and society reinventing themselves as the antithesis of their Puritan forebears, but also at the other side of the coin: the gritty, violent, even exotic tragedies suggesting the troubles lurking beneath the comedies' sparkling and urbane surface at the start of the long eighteenth century.
  
  Prerequisites: Eng 38/122 or instructor permission
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 352 (formerly 54), PLATIZKY: Victorian Literature: Texts and Contexts
  The complexity of the Victorian Period has intrigued me since I was an undergraduate, and I hope it will do the same for you. In this course we will examine literature that poses conservative, liberal, and radical solutions to Victorian conflicts, some of which we are still facing today: crises of faith; class conflicts; questionable gender expectations; divisive political policies; the role of art and science in an increasingly secular and progressive society that sometimes fears it is evolving faster than ethics. In part of this course, we will discuss representative nineteenth-century poems by Tennyson, both Brownings, Rossetti, Arnold, and Swinburne. We will read two novels: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). These novels, along with other readings in Victorian poetry and shorter prose, will address such themes as the Condition of England, the Woman Question, Victorian Propriety and Transgression ,and the Role of the Artist in Society. Popular shorter readings may include Dickens' A Christmas Carol , Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and a tale or two of Sherlock Holmes.
  
  Prerequisite: English 38/122 or instructor permission
  Fulfills Gender Studies Minor Requirement
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 363 (formerly 62), SILBERGLEID: Narrative Seductions
  From Hollywood cinema to Harlequin romance, the epistolary novel to cyberpunk, narrative has been entranced with, and shaped by, desire. This course will trace the theme of seduction through twentieth-century American fiction. Toward this end, we will focus on three related inquiry questions: (1) how do representations of seduction reflect, as well as contribute to, prevailing attitudes about gender and sexuality? (2) how is narrative itself driven by desire? (3) how might the act of reading narrative be understood as a kind of seduction? In thinking about these and related questions, we will necessarily consider the social and historical contexts in which these novels were written and read. Texts will likely include Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden; James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters; Carole Maso, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat; as well as critical and theoretical essays.
  
  Prerequisites: English 38/122 or instructor permission
  Fulfills Gender Studies Minor Requirement
  Breadth Requireent: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A
   

• ENG 430, ROOS: Popular Film: An Introduction to Literary Theory
  This course is designed as an overview of contemporary movements in critical theory. We will use popular films like The Matrix, The Piano and Lone Star to help us visualize and articulate some of these ideas. We will discuss "theory" as a set of discourses with its own determinants and history. And we will work at developing a broad familiarity with important issues and some of the uses of theory. Students are not expected to become "experts" in contemporary theory. This course has a much more modest aim of making students conversant with a range of theoretical ideas and of providing them with some conceptual tools for their own thinking, research and writing about literary and cultural texts. Seniors and other students who are considering attending graduate schools in the humanities are encouraged to take this course.
  
  Prerequisites: 1 300-level course or inst perm
  Breadth Requirement: HU
  Exploration Dimension: A