Literature and Linguistics Courses for Fall 2008
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Please note that composition courses and Introduction to Literature sections (except for honors sections) are not listed here.
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English 151: Introduction to English Studies
9:00-9:50 MWF
Dr. Mary O’Connor
This course, required of all first year English majors, will provide students with the background and professional skills to read critically and write analytically about literary texts. Students will learn to write from a variety of critical and theoretical stances. In addition, the course provides training in research methods for the discipline, including use of print and electronic sources, and in MLA documentation style. Students will generate bibliographies, source studies, and both documented and undocumented critical papers. Papers will be based on readings from poetry, fiction, and drama.
English 151: Introduction to English Studies
1:00-1:50 MWF
Dr. Jason McEntee
This course, required of all first year English majors, will provide students with the background and professional skills to read critically and write analytically about literary texts. Students will learn to write from a variety of critical and theoretical stances. In addition, the course provides training in research methods for the discipline, including use of print and electronic sources, and in MLA documentation style. Students will generate bibliographies, source studies, and both documented and undocumented critical papers. Papers will be based on readings from poetry, fiction, and drama.
English 221.01: British Literature I
MWF 8:00-8:50
Dr. Michael Nagy
English literature survey from Beowulf through the 18th century.
English 221.02: British Literature I
12:00-12:50 MWF
Dr. Bruce Brandt
English 221 provides a broad overview of English literature from its beginning through the 18th century, introducing the student to the major authors, literary modes, trends, and distinctive characteristics of each literary period. Since the period of time covered by this course spans twelve centuries, we can only get an overview of this literature, but I have tried to select an interesting and representative reading list that will serve as a useful foundation for the further study and/or teaching of English literature.
We will use the current Norton Anthology of English Literature for our text, and proceeding more or less chronologically, we will devote about a fourth of the course to each of the four main periods that our course covers.
English 240: Juvenile Literature
MW 3:30-4:45
Dr. Karen V. Zagrodnik
“Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog, and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.”—Laura Amy Schlitz
“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.” –Stanley Kunitz
This semester we will examine how works of literature for young readers (pre-readers through age 12) use folktales, myths, and legends to explore and understand themselves and the world. The assigned works will focus on a range of different literary genres: illustrated works and picture books, film, chapter books, poetry, nursery rhymes, primers, biographies, informational works, and novels. The course will also focus on strategies for including literature in the primary grade classroom.
In addition to required readings and class discussions, students will prepare a major reading resource project, keep a reading journal, and make a presentation. Students will also be tested on their knowledge with quizzes and a midterm and a final exam.
Possible Texts Include:
Shannon Hale Princess Academy
Nancy Springer Dusssie
Julius Lester and Jerry Pikney John Henry
Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire Book of Greek Myths
Mayer Iduna and the Magic Apples
Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Laura Whipple If the Shoe Fits: Voices from Cinderella
English 241: American Literature I
9:00-9:50 MWF
TBA
This course offers a chronological survey of American Literature from the period of exploration to the decades immediately following the Civil War and focuses on the interplay of historical, religious, philosophical and social forces that shaped the literature of the period.
English 241: American Literature I
10:00-11:15 TTh
Dr. Charles Woodard
This is a foundational course which fulfills either the humanities requirement or the Cultural Diversity requirement. The course will begin with consideration of some of the songs, chants and stories from thousands of years of American Indian oral traditions, followed by examinations of the major early American writers, including Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Phillip Freneau, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
The course will be discussion-based, with periodic mini-lectures. There will be in-class writings and a final short-essay examination, and each student will also complete a 6-10 page research paper on an author of her or his choosing. There will also be several extra credit opportunities.
| English 248: Women in Literature
Crosslisted with WMST 248
Online
Dr. Kathleen Donovan
Catalog Description: Study of literature by and about women from early times to the present. Cross-listed with WMST 248. No prerequisites.
Additional Description: This course will examine the representation in literature and popular culture of several themes common to women’s lives: coming of age; developing a sense of identity; creativity; images of beauty and self-worth; parent-daughter relationships; restrictions and opportunities of economic class; domestic abuse; women’s health issues; and women in the natural environment.
Description of Instructional Methods: This course will be taught entirely online. Requirements include extensive reading and analysis, weekly posting to a Discussion Board, two papers, and one electronic group presentation. Students must have or have access to computers that meet the requirements of WebCt. Go to the Distance Education website for further information on technical requirements.
English 256: Literature of the American West
Crosslisted with AIS 256
10:00-10:50 MWF
Dr. Kathleen Danker
Literature of the American West will concentrate on various attitudes toward the West expressed in literature, including American Indian literature, and is accepted as credit for the American Indian Studies minor. This course invites students to take a trip down some of the American West's greatest literary rivers and streams in search of adventure, human drama, and a better understanding of issues surrounding the environment, rivers, and water use in the Western United States. The course meets SDSU requirements both in Humanities and in Land and Natural Resources and, so, will be interdisciplinary. It will cover information concerning the interrelatedness of biological and human systems and the politics of scarce resource allocations as well as matters literary and historical, from both Euro-American and Native American perspectives. The effort you put into this course will reward you with an introduction to a rich and fascinating literature and with a better understanding of the human role in the ecology of the West.
Partial List of Required Texts:
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie
Fools Crow by James Welch
Shane by Jack Schaefer
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers
English 256: Literature of the American West
Crosslisted with AIS 256
11:30-12:45 TTh
Dr. Charles Woodard
A study of the literature produced in our region, centered on the Great Plains, including that of Native Americans, both oral and written; of pioneers; immigrants; and farmers; Western literature, and current writers.
English 268: Literature: Poetry Revisionaries
11:00-11:50 MWF
Dr. Christine Stewart-Nuñez
In this class you will study how poets have responded to—and often resisted—the rules of poetry they “inherited” from previous generations of poets. This response includes content (writing about taboo or ignored subjects like sex, sexuality, and the body) and form (a poem’s embodiment on the page). The course begins with Whitman and Dickinson and extends through the twenty-first century. We will give the majority of our attention to poets whose social locations (race, class, religion, sexuality, gender, culture, etc.) influenced his or her revisionary choices.
The teaching methods I employ include discussion, small group/collaborative presentations, and mini-lectures.
Work of the course: (1) reading responses and participation based on personal response, literary analysis (aesthetics), and analytical response (inquiry questions); (2) final course narrative (3) two writing projects/presentations selected from three options: (a) Research paper of a poet not on the syllabus (biography, descriptions of works, themes, etc.) (b) Literary criticism researching the criticism about one or two authors on syllabus and synthesizing research with student analysis to argue an issue (c) Creative response to the writers or themes with annotations and project introduction.
Texts: To Be Announced
English 330: Shakespeare
2:00-2:50 MWF
Dr. Bruce Brandt
Our goal is to develop an understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's dramatic works. We will be reading 13 plays, about a third of Shakespeare's plays. The selections will be representative of the various genres in which Shakespeare worked: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. Assessment includes a midterm and final, a research paper, and weekly quizzes.
English 383: Creative Writing I
12:00-12:50 MWF
Dr. Mary O’Connor
This is a poetry and fiction workshop. We learn to write in each genre by studying contemporary poets and fiction writers, by doing exercises to build up our strengths in the genre, and finally by writing (in poetry, approximately ten poems; in prose, three short stories, or three chapters of a novel, or three sections of a creative non-fiction project. And as the course subtitle implies, we learn to write by workshopping, or presenting for class discussion, our major efforts. Work on revising one¹s poetry or prose for publication is assisted by conferencing, three to five times during the course of the semester, with the professor.
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English 424: 7-12 Language Arts Methods
6:00-8:50 Monday
TBA
Techniques, materials, and resources for teaching English language and literature to middle and secondary school students. Required of students in the English Education Option.
Linguistics 425/525 S01: The Structure of English
6:00-8:50 Thursday
Dr. John Taylor
Linguistics 425/525 introduces students to the methods that British and American linguists use to describe the primary levels of structure in the evolving worldwide varieties of English. David Crystal's acclaimed textbook The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language 2nd ed. (2003) sets forth engagingly detailed descriptions for the basic linguistic levels of analysis: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Although the primary focus of the course remains on contemporary American English, we will also explore some of the diachronic origins of certain topics, especially when we look at usage and dialects, including oral-colloquial Upper Midwest varieties and African-American Vernacular English. For English Education majors, we will also investigate the origins of Edited American English, register variations, global varieties of English-based pidgin/creoles, and the phenomenon of linguistic engineering. Deborah Tannen's bestselling textbook You Just Don’t Understand will provide a focus on genderlectal pragmatics—the interaction of male/female language varieties and behaviors. Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By introduces an influential cognitive theory in the sociosemantics of metaphor. Assessment for grades will consist of required weekly constructive participation, bi-weekly quizzes and exercises, an I-Search project and presentation, and a summative final (open-book).
Required textbooks:
David Crystal The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language 2nd ed. (2003)
Deborah Tannen You Just Don’t Understand (2001)
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Metaphors We Live By (1980)
English 445: American Indian Literature
Crosslisted with AIS 445
2:00-2:50 MWF
Dr. Kathleen Danker
Work closely with your classmates in an exciting Service Learning experience by taking part in a weekly storytelling circle with high school students from Flandreau Indian School. The content of American Indian Literature concentrates on traditional oral tales and autobiography, with a focus on how both relate to the education of Native Americans. As indicated in the catalog description for AIS 445, most of the oral tales and the autobiographical writing will come from the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota (Siouan) language group. The thought and effort you put into understanding, talking, and writing about the readings in this course will reward you with an introduction to a rich and fascinating literature. Moreover, the course incorporates a Service Learning component to give you direct experience with Indian people and to provide you with an understanding of how education issues raised in the readings affect these people. For this aspect of the course, you will have the choice of traveling one evening a week to Flandreau Indian School to join in a storytelling circle or of doing a research and presentation project at SDSU.
List of Required Texts:
Pretty Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, edited by Frank B. Linderman
Black Elk Speaks, edited by John G. Neihardt
Choteau Creek, Joseph Dudley, Sr.
The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages, N. Scott Momaday
Dakota Texts, Ella Deloria
Lakota Star Knowledge
American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Zitkala-Sa
The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, Francis LaFlesche
Shaping Survival: Essays by Four American Indian Tribal Women
English 454/554: American Realism and Naturalism
6:00-8:50 Tuesday
TBA
American literature of the realist and naturalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
English 479: Capstone Course: The Gothic
TH 3:00-5:50
Dr. Karen V. Zagrodnik
Creaking floors. Hidden rooms. Ghosts. Inexplicable deaths. In his classic work The Castle of Otronto Horace Walpole introduced readers to a new genre—the gothic—and taught readers how to read gothic literature. Other gothic works, destined to become classics, followed: The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Frankenstein, Dracula. Responding to the demands and interests of emerging literate consumers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers and publishers adapted the genre in order to provide readers with affordable and enthralling selections.
While students will study many of the classics, the course readings will include less familiar traditions and adaptations of the gothic, such as gothic chapbooks, pamphlets, penny dreadfuls, poetry by women writers and gothic dramas. The analyses of these works and the topic will be conducted using a range of theoretical approaches.
As noted in the Bulletin, this course offers students “an in-depth study . . . of an aspect of literary history” and provides students with an opportunity to “review . . . current methods of literary criticism” while providing an “intensive focus on research and writing within the discipline.” Seminar members will research and write a major scholarly essay (20-25 pages) which will be the basis of additional documents, such as an annotated bibliography, a conference abstract, and a conference paper.
| English 492: Tp. Transatlantic Literature & Culture
W 3:00-5:50
Dr. Todd Tietchen
This course shall examine the Atlantic region as a distinct yet complex cultural geography through which writers, musicians, and visual artists of various kinds have attempted to imagine identities and ways of life uneasy with the imperatives of national belonging, while giving shape to anxieties surrounding the history of European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the ongoing “security” of the Atlantic region. Our primary focus shall be the novel, including works by Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Bessie Head, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Amado and Russell Banks. We will also consider the graphic novel V for Vendetta, several essays on Atlantic musical culture (focusing on the shared lineage of Reggae, Punk, Hip-Hop and Sound System culture), and a few contemporary films (such as Dawn of the Dead and Cloverfield) focused on Atlantic security anxieties.
Student work for the course shall include a group presentation, a take-home midterm examination, and a final research paper of 8-10 pages.
English 492/592: Tp. Creative Writing--Poetry
3:00-5:50 M
Dr. Christine Stewart-Nuñez
This class will immerse students in the writing of poetry. You will define, revise, and redevelop your definition of what poetry is and what “good” poetry can be; you will also explore why you write poetry, how you write poetry, and in what ways it can influence your life and the lives of others. Reading poetry will be an essential part of this course as well; you will analyze the authors whose texts I have included as part of the class and your classmates’ poetry with the eyes of a writer. Of course, I will ask you to write poetry and will emphasize the playing with/discovery of language and the experimentation with received forms. You will also be required to develop—and reflect upon—your own writing process.
The teaching methods I employ include small and large group workshops, seminar-style discussion, frequent in-class writing/craft exercises, and occasional mini-lectures.
Work of the course: Writing process portfolio which includes process writing; a writer’s notebook; mid-term and final course narratives; extensive drafts of at least twelve poems; and a review of a collection of contemporary poetry. You will also present your review to the class. Participation in class discussion and workshops is essential.
Texts: To Be Announced
English 492/592: Tp. Middle English Literature Excluding Chaucer
6:00-8:50 Wednesday
Dr. Michael Nagy
“Revolting Peasants and Preaching Pedants”
Despite the fact that alliteration is currently reserved for campaign slogans, bumper stickers, and advertising campaigns, the sudden flowering of alliterative poetry in fourteenth-century England represents a brilliant flash in the pan of literary history, one responsible for seminal works such as Winner and Waster and Piers Plowman, and even for the crown jewels of Middle English poetic accomplishment: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. Although some alliterative works seem intellectually and thematically distinct, many form a cluster of socially, politically, and religiously subversive poems whose poets show clear indications of mutual awareness. In this class, we will sample both groups, but lean rather heavily on the latter.
Overall, the aim of this course is to introduce students to the rich but often neglected store of rhymed and unrhymed alliterative poems composed in English in the fourteenth-century. Various themes to be covered include sociopolitical complaint and analysis, sexual temptation and sexual violence, mythology, medieval manners, the hypocrisy of religion, and the apparent evils of literacy.
English 705: Seminar in Teaching Composition
3:00-5:50 Wednesday
Dr. Michael Keller
This course is designed to ground you in the histories, theories, and practices of writing instruction and thereby 1) prepare you to teach your own classes at SDSU and beyond, and 2) introduce you to issues and debates that have shaped and that currently drive the profession. To serve these aims, the readings, discussions, and writing assignments will address a variety of practical and theoretical concerns. The former include assignment and course design, assessment, and classroom pedagogies; the latter, theories of rhetoric and composition, as well as the social and institutional contexts that inform them.
Past texts have included the following:
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan
Reading Popular Culture: An Anthology for Writers, edited by Michael Keller
St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing by Robert Connors & Cheryl Glenn
Teaching Composition: Background Readings, edited by T.R. Johnson
A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 by Joseph Harris
Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose
Written work for the course will include two short responses to the readings (2-3 pages), one research project (15 pages) that investigates an area of writing instruction of interest to you, and a syllabus for English 101 that includes a rationale (5 pages) for the sequence of reading selections and writing assignments. I recommend, too, that you keep a journal to record your thoughts on issues that arise in this class and in those you are teaching. In addition to class discussion, oral work will include two brief presentations: one to teach an essay from Reading Popular Culture and one to report progress on your research project.
English 725: English Literature Since 1660: An Unlikely Pairing: Shelley and Hopkins, Spiritual Bookends of the Nineteenth Century
6:00 – 8:50 PM Monday
Dr. Micki Flynn
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), whose poetry is intensely spiritual, considered himself an agnostic; Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), a Jesuit priest, has been called “the father of modern poetry,” for his tradition-breaking use of poetic form and original language. His poetry is deeply spiritual, and often religious. A bit of a romp through the age, I’d say…
Probable Texts:
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Selected and Edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. Norton, 2002.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, Oxford World Classics. OUP, 2002.
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (without which it’s difficult to understand Hopkins)
A biography of each; Paul Mariani’s biography of Hopkins, I’m still reading for Shelley’s bio.
Two major papers—one on each poet; two class presentations, leading the class discussion of a poem
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