Literature and Linguistics Courses for Spring 2008
Please note that composition courses and Introduction to Literature sections (except for honors sections) are not listed here.
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Ling 203: English Grammar
1:00-1:50 MWF
Dr. John Taylor
Linguistics 203 focuses on four major paradigms of teaching and learning about English Grammar commonly taught in American high schools and post-secondary education. The basic paradigm remains rooted in traditional grammar parsing and its simplified manifestations in what linguists call American School Grammar. Related to this tradition, the Reed & Kellogg system of diagramming sentences appears as a significant part of the NCTE Grammar Alive! textbook. Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language provides both diachronic and synchronic approaches to grammar, with respect to the American Structuralist Linguistics model as well as the British Descriptivist model that historically encompasses the approach to teaching English language arts on a global basis well beyond the borders of the Upper Midwest. The course covers the topics of etymology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and American dialectology. The third textbook encodes the lexicographical approach to language awareness. The American Heritage College Dictionary 4th ed provides data, etymologies, metalanguage, and normative usage patterns. The greater part of the course seeks to provide language awareness development that will enable English Education majors to teach the most frequently encountered models in American high school grammar curricula. In this regard, the course explores material that directly links the South Dakota Department of Education and its Language Arts Content Standards to the rhetorical standards represented by the St. Martin's Handbook 6th ed. (2008) as mandated for use by the SDSU Department of English.
Course grades will derive from in-class exercises, quizzes, short out-of-class exercises, board work on parsing, traditional recitations on diagramming, and both a midsemester and final examination.
Required Textbooks:
American Heritage College Dictionary 4th ed. (hardcover), Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Benjamin, Amy. Engaging Grammar. NCTE, 2007
Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language 2nd ed. 2003
Haussamen, Brock.Grammar Alive! NCTE, 2003
St. Martin's Handbook, 6th ed., 2008
Engl 210: Introduction to Literature-Honors
1:00-1:50 MWF
Dr. Christine Stewart-Nuñez
In Introduction to Literature (Honors) we will read a variety of genres—novel, memoir, graphic novel, collection of short stories, and two books of poetry—all contemporary texts that have at least one aspect in common: all address life experience specifically from various social, cultural, religious, gender, racial, ethnic, and national locations. We will also be reading essays alongside these texts as sources for additional ways to enter the conversations that these books offer. Short reflective papers and two collaborative presentations will be the main work of the course.
Tentative Reading List:
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek.
Joseph Millar, Overtime.
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner.
Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz, What Becomes You.
Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Engl 212: World Lit II
INTERNET
Dr. Kathleen Donovan
Selected works of world literature in translation since the Renaissance
Engl 222: British Literature II
12:00-12:50 MWF
Dr. Mary O’Connor
The English Literature Survey II covers the period of Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary Literature in Britain and Britain¹s colonies. Students read, discuss, and analyze fiction, poetry, and non-fiction from the period 1783-2000. Representative major authors are drawn from the following list: Blake, Wollstonecraft, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Wordsworth, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, Brontë, Arnold, Hopkins, Wilde, Hardy, Owen, Yeats, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Walcott, Heaney, Carter. The course will situate and interpret texts within their historical and cultural contexts.
Engl 222: British Literature II
8:00-8:50 MWF
Dr. Micki Flynn
A chronological survey of British literature from the 19th century to the present.
Engl 240: Juvenile Literature
4:00-6:50 T
Dr. Karen Zagrodnik
The focus for the Spring 2008 Juvenile Literature course will be the young adult reading experience. A significant component of this course is a service learning activity to develop a book club for and with students at the Flandreau Indian School. As a class we will evaluate and select appropriate works, analyze presentation methods, and guide a book club session.
Although this course is intended for English secondary education majors, all students who are interested in this topic and these works are welcome. The course will include writing a defense for challenged books and strategies for incorporating these works in the classroom.
Course assignments include a reading journal, class presentation, and a major project or paper. The course will incorporate WebCT.
The assigned works, which reflect a range of genre forms as well as writings from around the world, explore cultural, social, and sexual issues in texts from Germany, Africa, the Middle East, England, and America. Students will read novels, drama, a graphic novel, a collection of short stories, a collection of poetry, films, and electronic texts. Works from past semesters include:
M. T. Anderson Feed
Marjane Satrapi Persepolis
Naomi Shihab Nye The Space Between Our Footsteps
Gudrun Pausewang The Final Journey
Ursula K. LeGuin A Wizard of Earthsea
Margaret Craven I Heard the Owl Call My Name
Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton Facing the Lion: Growing up Maasai on the African Savanna
Anne Mozer, ed. America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories
| Engl 242: American Literature II
10:00-11:15 TTh
Dr. Paul Baggett
This course surveys a range of U.S. literatures from about 1865 to 1965, writings that treat the end of slavery and the development of a segregated America, increasingly urbanized and industrialized U.S. landscapes, waves of immigration, and the fulfilled promise of “America” as imperial nation. The class will explore the diversity of identities represented during that time, and the problems/potentials writers imagined in response to the century’s changes—especially literature’s critical power in a time of nation-building. Working from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition Package C/D/E, the course will require heavy reading, active class participation, two short papers, a midterm, and a final.
Engl 242: American Literature II
9:00-9:50 MWF
Dr. Kathleen Danker
English 242 provides a survey of American literature from 1870 through the late 20th century. It presents an introduction to the literary texts of this period, including the genres of essays, poetry, novels, short stories, and drama, as well as some Native American songs, orations, and tales. It covers literary movements including Realism, Naturalism, Regionalism, and Modernism, and provides historical and cultural contexts for the literature.
The course provides you with an opportunity to improve your reading and writing skills, with the basis for taking further courses in American literature, with a chance to enrich your life through an increased understanding of and appreciation for American literature, and with the opportunity to increase your knowledge about some of the diverse cultural perspectives to be found in our nation.
Course requirements include weekly reading journal entries, a critical paper with documentation, an oral presentation based on the critical paper, participation in class and small group discussions, a midterm, and a final.
Engl 256: Literature of the American West
11-11:50 MWF DDN
Prof. Mary Haug
Literature of the American West is a course that fulfills either a humanities requirement or a land stewardship requirement. To fulfill the stewardship goal, we will deal with texts that examine the mysteries and power of rivers and the ability of the natural world to move us, teach us, and heal us as well as the consequences of ignoring our relationship to the land. During the semester, we will examine the impact of the development of the West on the land and people along the upper Missouri River region, and we will consider the environmental, cultural, and economic concerns and problems affecting Missouri River management decisions. We will also debate the ethics of water and land use. In meeting the humanities goal, we will read a number of texts that use rivers as a central theme. We will also discuss the literary strategies the authors used to tell a story. The texts I have selected will also provide a powerful understanding of metaphor as a critical element in helping writers to represent a truth which might be incommunicable by another means. Finally, during our reading and discussions, we will examine the challenges that face us as people of diverse cultures, as people who must confront the challenges of a new century, and as stewards the land.
Engl 256: Literature of the American West
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
Engl 335: Engl. Novel: The Worlds of Jane Austen
10:00-10:50 MWF
Dr. Karen Zagrodnik
A reviewer for the March 1818 edition of the British Critic praised Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, explaining that “[h]er merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation; no ridiculous phrases, no affected sentiment, no foolish pretension seems to escape her notice.” While Austen’s novels are often studied as models of the novel of manners, such an approach tends to overlook their complex engagement with so many other social, cultural, and global issues. Her “talent for observation” elucidates many aspects of the period and in this course we will examine the different worlds Austen presents in each of her unique writings: the world of the gothic in Northanger Abbey, the world of the military in Persuasion, the world of the Regency marriage market in Pride and Prejudice, and, of course, the world of manners, as portrayed in Emma.
Readings will include Austen’s less familiar writings—her letters and her juvenilia, her short fiction and poetry, even some of her prayers—as insights to the Austen’s novels and their presentation of additional worlds.
Engl 336: American Poetry
1:00-2:15, TTh
Dr. Charles Woodard
The main goals of this course will be to demonstrate how to appreciate and love poetry, and to demonstrate that poetry, our language most intensified, is foundational to all of literature.
More specifically, through reading mainly contemporary American poetry, especially the poetry of this region, you will have the opportunity to closely examine the range of poetic expression, from very personal, even “confessional” writings, to writings which seem to be almost altogether about other matters and themes. You will be encouraged to find favorites, and to make important connections between their writings and your life. During the course of the semester, you will also have opportunities to directly experience contemporary poetry, through interactions with contemporary poets.
| Engl 383: Creative Writing
2:00-2:50 MWF
Dr. Dan Landes
Study and practice in the techniques of writing fiction, poetry, and/or drama. In this course we will focus on three main writing genres: the short story, the one act play, and the television/film screenplay. There will be numerous opportunities for students to combine creativity with formal and disciplined written discourse. Students will be given some choices as to what specific creative writing form they would like to focus on throughout the course.
Engl/GBLS 399: Futuristic Communications
1:00-2:15 TTh
Dr. Jason McEntee
We will begin by examining the Italian Futurist Movement (c. 1909- c. 1930) and then proceed through the course by examining several readings (both fiction and non-fiction) and movies that reveal how future studies (IE, pondering technology, innovations, etc.) can affect our day-to-day lives. Moreover, we will move away from preconceived notions that studying the future is about “predicting” what will happen; instead, we will consider how art and criticism can inspire us to take action and shape the future.
Because we will work from a global (some say “multi-cultural”) perspective, we will consider the following: 1) Who am I in the grand scheme of things, and how can I influence the future of the planet? 2) Globalization, as a convergence of cultures, is causing new worldviews (socio-economic, geo-political, etc.) to emerge—how do we see the world when we consider that the United States is not the world? 3) Is the nation-state becoming an irrelevant entity? 4) When we consider Copernicus’ discovery that Earth is not the center of the universe, can we also consider that we are not the center of universal existence? and 5) Is science the only meaningful way to debate the future, or must we consider the roles of fate, religion, socio-political thought, etc.?
In addition to rigorous class discussions, the mid-term and final exams as well as a formal essay will allow you ample opportunities to showcase your ongoing perceptions of how future studies can contribute to a global society.
Engl 427/527: Advanced Shakespeare
3:00-5:50 Th
Dr. Bruce Brandt
The objective of Advanced Shakespeare is to help students to gain an understanding and appreciation of selected plays and poems by Shakespeare and to become familiar with significant trends in recent Shakespeare criticism. This semester I will again focus on issues of gender and sexuality, topics that have weighed heavily in current studies of Early Modern drama. Through Shakespeare's plays and poems (plus four texts by his contemporaries), we will encounter ideas about human sexuality, gender roles, marriage, patriarchy, male dominance, marriage, love, fear or distrust of women, cross dressing, the exclusion of women from the Elizabethan stage, and sexual orientation. Class discussion will not be limited to these issues (or to any one theoretical approach), but they are important aspects of the works on the following list, and they will provide a unifying theme for the
This course is taught as a seminar, by which I mean a course which focuses on discussion rather than lecture and in which student papers and projects are shared with the class and serve as springboards for class discussion. My assumption in such a class is that we are sharing an intellectual journey and that my role is primarily that of guide and facilitator.
Reading list: I woll order The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th edition, ed. David Bevington. If you own some other edition of Shakespeare, you may use it, but I would strongly encourage you to use an edition that reflects recent advances in textual criticism and that provides the help that modern readers need with allusions and vocabulary. I plan to supplement our reading of Shakespeare with Marlowe's Edward II, Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, Heywood=s A Woman Killed with Kindness, and Marlowe's Hero and Leander. We will also have weekly reading assignments (essays or chapters) in three other works. Phyllis Rackin=s Shakespeare and Women is a reassessment of the historical situation of women in Shakespeare=s time. Frances Dolan's The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts includes nearly 200 pages of extracts from poems, ballads, sermons, and pamphlets which illustrate Early Modern ideas about gender and marriage. Stephen Orgel's Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England explores Early Modern assumptions about a number of gender?related issues, including homosexuality, using boys to play women's roles, human physiology, and cross?dressing.
Engl 447: Am. Indian Lit of Present
11:30-12:45 TTh
Dr. Charles Woodard
You should consider taking this course if:
- you have not yet studied the rich literary and cultural traditions of American Indian people.
- you are interested in earth relationship, human relationship, and the creative power of words.
you are concerned about the issues which continue to divide the people of our region, and you want to be better prepared to understand the issues which are causing problems between peoples everywhere.
- you enjoy reading and talking about interesting and meaningful stories.
This course will feature lively discussions of a wide variety of writings by such well-known contemporary authors as Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. There will be an 8-10 page research paper assignment and quizzes and a final examination, as well as extra credit opportunities. A main goal of this course is summarized by these famous words of the legendary Lakota leader Sitting Bull:
“Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.”
Ling 452/552: General Semantics
[cross-listed with and equivalent to SpCm 452/552]
6:00-8:50 Th
Dr. John Taylor
General semantics (GS) explores the study of human semiotic systems which involve to symbols, signs, icons, indexes, complex symbol systems. GS integrates the study of how human cognition works in the traditional philosophical enterprise commonly called epistemology (the study of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity). Additionally GS continues to develop an educational theory that aims to study the evaluational processes of human beings, especially in relation to how verbal behavior influences our daily lives. The social science of linguistics informs the metalanguage of discussion in terms of the structural levels of analysis consisting of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, linguistic semantics, and pragmatics. Course assignments evaluated for grades will consist of in-class exercises, quizzes, out-of-class short writing exercises, a final project, and a final examination. For Linguistics 452, undergraduate students do not have to do a presentation on their final project; for Linguistics 552, graduate students must make a presentation of their final project.
Required textooks:
D. D. Bourland To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology, ISGS, 1991
S. I. Hayakawa Language in Thought and Action,5th ed. Harvest, 1991.
Susan & Bruce Kodish, Drive Yourself Sane. Extensional Pub., 2001.
Lisa Roberts E-Prime, ?eos, and the General Semantics Paradigm,1999.
| ENGL 460/560-S01: Contemporary American Lit: Existentialism and the Postwar Novel
6:00-8:50PM W
Dr. Todd Tietchen
This course will examine the influences of existential philosophy on the postwar American novel. Writing amid the wreckage of WWII and the ensuing Cold War arms race, existential philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre forwarded the audacious claim that human beings might actively define the meaning of their lives and the parameters of their existence in whatever ways seemed fit. As we shall see, a number of U.S. novelists employed this new philosophical insight as the narrative foundation for works which explored the boundaries of national, racial, sexual and gender-based identity in a manner unprecedented in U.S. literary history, while simultaneously stretching the limits of novelistic form itself.
Course readings shall include the following novels: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless. These readings will be accompanied by selections from Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions and Lewis Gordon’s Existentia Africana, along with selections by Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir and Donna Haraway. Course work will include a midterm examination, a group presentation and a final research paper.
ENGL 479-S01: Capstone Course: The Beat Generation
3:00-5:50 M
Dr. Todd Tietchen
The Beat Generation comprises one of the most significant and influential American literary movements of the postwar period. This course will consider their literary output and cultural influence against the backdrop of Cold War history, paying significant attention to the ways in which the Beat aesthetic responded to the cultural and political realities of postwar America via a creative ethos which privileged spontaneity, autobiography, and a romantic embrace of social outcasts and outsiders. We will also explore the ways in which the aesthetic and social concerns of the Beats resonated with the work of their contemporaries in the postwar underground film movement, the confessional school of poetry, the new journalism, the Black Mountain school, and movements in the visual arts such as abstract expressionism. At the same time, we will be interested in examining the Beat aesthetic within the context of a more protracted intellectual and artistic history in which the Beats took their cues from figures such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Charlie Parker, forwarding some of the foundational ideas and concerns of U.S. literature into the late 20th century.
The course readings will include poetry, fiction, and essays by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Joanne Kyger, Amiri Baraka, and Anne Waldman. Secondary sources will include selections from Daniel Belgrad’s The Culture of Spontaneity, Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace’s Girls Who Wore Black, and Jack Sargeant’s Naked Lens: Beat Cinema.
Engl 484: Literary Criticism
8:30-945 TTh
Dr. Mike Keller
To understand and appreciate any “literary” work fully, one must be able to comprehend more than the words on the page. No writer writes, no reader reads in a vacuum. Both, rather, harbor a host of ideas and assumptions about the nature and purpose of literature, and about the role writers and readers play in the making of meaning. In the western tradition, philosophers, critics, and—of course--poets, novelists, and dramatists themselves have written about these matters for centuries and have thereby shaped our understanding of literature. Indeed, their musings, meditations, and theories constitute our very understanding of what literature is, of how it functions or should function in the broader culture, and of why and how we should read it. What is literature? Is it distinct from other kinds of writing? Is it valuable? What, if anything, might readers learn from it? Why do some groups seek to censor particular “literary” texts? What philosophical and aesthetic traditions do they draw upon (often unwittingly) to authorize their actions? Why do some contemporary critics say that the “author is dead”—that he or she matters not at all in our understanding of text? How are we to assess the relative value of texts? How are they related to cultural power? And on what grounds can we say that one novel is superior to another? This is just a sampling of some of the very practical but knotty questions that, historically, readers have raised—and that only an understanding of the history of literary criticism can help us to answer.
To address these and other key questions, we will survey the history of literary criticism (a history spanning 2500 years), by focusing upon a number of key periods and writers: Greek Classicism (Plato, Aristotle), English Enlightenment (Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke), English Romanticism (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Willam Hazlitt, Thomas Love Peacock), English Victorianism (John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde), American Transcendentalism (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller), French Naturalism and Realism (Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert), Anglo-American Modernism (Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Rebecca West, D.H. Lawrence), Continental Marxism (Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs), French Post-Structuralism (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault), and Contemporary American (William Gass, Tom Wolfe, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen). We also will “test” these theories by examining how well they account for and help us to understand various poems and stories.
Engl 492/592: Topics in Professional Writing - Visual Rhetoric
10:00-11:15 TTh
Dr. Jason McEntee
This course will explore how professional writing—that which occurs in various workplaces (or, post-college writing)—intersects with the culture at large’s relationship to images. That is, we will occupy ourselves with the question: What does it mean to be visually literate? How does the role of the visual (that which we see in our day-to-day lives) affect the ways we process our thoughts and, in turn, develop our written documents? How do textual designs (charts graphs, illustrations, to name a few) impact the way we assign meaning to a document? We will consider these (and other) questions while we determine how professional writing intersects with the social, political, historical, racial, and gender-related issues in television, film, Internet, music-video, and advertising formats. Students will complete short writings, longer writings, presentations, group discussions, and final projects while we work at all times to improve our writing skills.
Engl 492/592: Tp: Writing Creative Nonfiction
6:00-8:50 Tuesday
Dr. Christine Stewart-Nuñez
In Writing Creative Nonfiction we will explore what boundaries of this ‘strange’ genre, which is sometimes called “literary journalism,” the “fourth genre,” and “new journalism.” We will examine the nature of truth(s) and memory, the ethics of writing about and representing the people in our lives, the relationship between “creative” and “nonfiction,” the breadth of “research” and its function, our motives for writing creative nonfiction, and the strategies for reading, writing, revising, responding to, and editing creative nonfiction texts. Specifically, we will focus on the personal essay, the place/travel essay, the collage essay, and rhetorical analysis. Students will produce a portfolio of writing that reflects their intellectual and creative work.
Tentative Reading List (I plan to add one more book or journal:
Natalie Goldberg. Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life.
Lauren Slater, Editor. Best American Essays of 2006.
Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz. What Becomes You.
Engl 704: Intro to Grad Studies
3:00-5:50 Tuesday
Dr. Mary O’Connor
An introduction to literary criticism and study of bibliographic tools (including
electronic sources) and research methods needed for scholarly writing in the
Humanities. Required of all candidates for the M.A. degree in English.
Engl 724: Seminar: Eng Lit to 1660: Tolkien’s Rings
6:00-8:50 M
Dr. Mick Nagy
J. R. R. Tolkien’s extraordinary literary and linguistic accomplishments have recently earned for him the title of “Author of the Century,” and rightly so. This fact is perhaps never more apparent than in his engaging (and sometimes brooding) novels, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for there Tolkien truly showcases the extent of his genius, and not simply by spinning a good yarn. It is a little known fact that in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien draws upon an imposing array of ancient languages, literatures, prosodic forms, and styles in order to construct both Middle Earth and those who inhabit it. Yet, despite Tolkien’s rather daunting range, his works nevertheless entertain rather than intimidate the reader for they seamlessly blend history and mythology, fact and fantasy, and philosophy and philology into labyrinthine tales of remote lands, times, and peoples, ones whose darker sides often seem disturbingly modern and familiar.
This will be a reading-intensive course designed both to introduce students to Tolkien’s primary sources from Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse literature (all in translation), and to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in light of these sources. Various themes to be covered include cultural relativity, the origin and nature of evil, religion and the lack thereof, philology, fairytale and folktale motifs, and the corruptions and continuities of language.
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