Department of English Current Course Listings

Fall 2002

One-Hundred Level Courses

Note: For information about ENGA 150: The Process of Composition or ENGA 190: Advanced Strategies of Rhetoric and Research please consult the Writing Program's Web site.

ENGA 193-01: SLU2000 Course
Writing Ethnic Literacy Narratives
MWF 9-9:50
Dr. Fred Arroyo
(This course counts towards the core requirement in "Foundations of Discourse.")
In this course we will analyze the personal, familial, and cultural forces from which ethnic literacy narratives emerge. In exploring the interrelations of language, family, and culture, we will also strengthen our literacy practices. To this end, we will read and discuss representative narratives by African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, while also considering some of the theoretical debates surrounding language, literacy, culture, and ethnicity. One of our main goals in this class is to understand how ethnic narratives often describe the way individuals learn to reflect on their experience within language: how individuals use language to shape their lives, how verbal and written language mediates their experience, and how the power of language helps them to create a different sense of self, while contemplating the dynamic changes literacy brings to their lives and culture. We will write short response papers and a mid-term essay, as well as a final “literacy narrative” of our own.

Two-Hundred Level Courses

ENGA 202-01: SLU2000 Course
Introduction to Literary Studies
MWF 12-12:50
Dr. Toby Benis
This course will focus on representations of subjectivity, exploring novels, poetry , and plays that deal with the construction of selfhood throughout literary history. Some questions we will be asking will include:
+ How have writers in different historical periods and cultural contexts conceived of themselves as individuals and as moral participants in a larger community?
+ What role does gender play in how writers conceive of their roles as artists?
+ How do literary forms (such as the sonnet or the dramatic monologue) shape the possibilities of personal expression and self-consciousness? How do writers change the conventions of literary form?
In keeping with the course's linkage to PSYA 101-02, some of the texts that we will read, while literary in character, are very much concerned with the impact of the psychological profession on individual narrators and writers — for example, we will read a memoir written by Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, detailing her experiences in a mental institution. Other works explore psychological trauma as a historical experience; Martin Amis' Time's Arrow, a novel about a Nazi doctor whose atrocities literally make time (and his consciousness) run in reverse, shows a metaphysical connection between subjectivity, the past, and literary form. We will continually search for points of connection and contrast between what these books suggest about the nature of human consciousness and what students garner from their exposure to introductory psychology. The course will expand this interdisciplinary interest to include film studies as well, since two books we will read (Girl, Interrupted and Spaulding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia) have been made into films that we will watch in class.
In addition, we will visit the Saint Louis Art Museum to consider subjectivity in painting. Particularly useful here will be examinations of portraits and portrait style. What differing implications emerge from self-portraits, group portraits, and individual portraits? We can sketch the evolution of portraiture from Reynolds through to Beckmann, as well as speculate about relationships between various schools of portraiture and psychological theories — e.g. possible connections between the execution of Picasso's portraits and certain aspects of Freudian psychology. Course requirements: 3 essays; 1 screen analysis from a film; 1 in-class presentation; final exam.

ENGA 202: SLU2000 Course
Introduction to Literature
Section 04 – TR 11-12:15 (limited enrollment – 19 students)
Section 05 – TR 12:45-2 (limited enrollment – 19 students)
Dr. Georgia Johnston
This course will introduce literature and the study of literature by focusing on plays, poetry, and fiction that have at their center ethical conflict. At times, the ethics of the narrative will revolve around individual dilemmas; at times it will seem that ethical harmony is disturbed or restored through an outside force or deity; in some texts ethical dilemmas may take place as cultural conflict. By introducing students to literature through ethics, the class will deliberately complement the study of ethics in the required PLA 205. The class, however, does not present the same material on ethics as Philosophy, nor do any of the students need to be taking or to have taken PLA 205. This English course complements that other course, rather than parallels it. In other words, the study of literature will raise questions about ethics that will encourage interdisciplinary thinking about the processes by which ethics are formed by literature and about the processes by which ethics manipulate our understanding of literature.
This course takes the departmental guideline of having students devise a third of a SLU2000 course, but instead of leaving that student participation to the end third of the course, we will spread that planning out over the semester. Therefore, early in the term students will help devise ways to study one of the texts; they will help devise one of the tests in the middle of the term, and their ideas will be instrumental in figuring out how best to create presentations in the last part of the term.
During the semester, we will read four plays, two long poems, and a novel. We will arrange field trips to the art museum, a movie, and the holocaust museum. We will incorporate individual conferences into the class. Graded work will include two in-class exams, two out-of-class papers, an in-class final, and a group presentation.
Texts will include:
Barnes, To the Dogs; Yeats, Purgatory; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Rossetti, Goblin Market; Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Shange, for colored girls; and Hogan, Solar Storms.

ENGA 220
Introduction to Poetry
Section 01 – TR 9:30-10:45
Section 02 – TR 11-12:15
Dr. Devin Johnston
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of poetry through an intensive examination of a handful of poets. We will focus on developing patient and close observations of voice, tone, sound, and diction, with an emphasis on how these characteristics contribute to what a poem “means.” We will explore the ways in which a poem “works”—or communicates—as well as how it was constructed. By the end of the semester, students will hopefully become comfortable articulating their responses to poems. Written assignments: two short papers, a midterm, and a final.

ENGA 230-02
Introduction to the Novel: Writing Back
TR 12:45-2
Dr. Caroline Reitz
Seeing revision as resistance and even survival, many women and postcolonial writers give names, voices and stories to the silenced characters of such classic English novels as Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We will pay particular attention to the issue of aesthetic form and its relationship to cultural politics as we examine what happens to novels and to readers when the "silenced" write back in texts such as J.M. Coetzee's _Foe_, Jean Rhys's _Wide Sargasso Sea_ and Valerie Martin's _Mary Reilly_. Writing assignments will include biweekly response papers, a midterm quiz and an 8-10 page final paper.

ENGA 240-01
Introduction to Drama
MWF 9-9:50
Dr. James Scott
This course serves as an introduction to the analytical reading of drama and provides practice in the writing of critical papers about theatre. It also offers an informal survey of major modern playwrights in the European, British, and American tradition, including figures such as Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinandello, Wilde, Williams, Miller, and others. The principal objective of the course is to equip the class with the tools and technical vocabulary necessary to treat drama as it would be approached by professional students of literature. Our essential concern is with the close analysis of language, stage decor, and dramatic action. The course requires good expository writing skills and is intended to develop facility in textual and linguistic analysis. Probable text: Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama. The course is WebCT affiliated.

ENGA 240-02
Introduction to Drama
MWF 10-10:50
Dr. Elisabeth Heard
How is reading drama different from reading novels or from reading poems? Drama takes into consideration elements which are not present in other genres—a set, actors, costumes, an audience. What is the relationship between these elements and the text? The objectives of this course are (1) to give you a broad familiarity with major British and American dramatists of various periods, and (2) to give you some experience in serious literary analysis as applied to drama. When possible, we will be supplementing our reading with live productions and video taped performances.

ENGA 260
Introduction to Short Fiction
Section 01 – MWF 8-8:50
Section 02 – MWF 9-9:50
Section 03 – MWF 10-10:50
Professor William Whealen
This course seeks to promote student understanding and appreciation of representative short fiction in the English language by examining the basic elements of fiction; influences of nonliterary figures such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud; and movements including realism, naturalism, and existentialism. Selected works reflect feminist and ethnic as well as traditional interests. Students will study methods of writing about literature which they will be required to demonstrate in essay performances. There will be three regular examinations along with a comprehensive final.

Three-Hundred Level Courses

ENG A305-01
Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry
TR 2-3:15
Dr. Devin Johnston
This is an introductory course in writing poetry; no previous experience is required. The class will explore a wide variety of formal techniques and methods in order to develop greater expressiveness and precision. We will focus on being receptive to what sparks a poem, and rigorous in revising initial drafts. Much of our time will be devoted to critiquing the poems produced during the semester; students should therefore be prepared to write on a regular basis and present their work to the class. Because skills in writing and reading poetry are so closely intertwined, there will be readings assigned, and each student will be asked to compile a personal anthology. At the end of the semester, each student will assemble a portfolio of his or her most accomplished writing.

ENGA 307-01
Creative Writing: Literacy Narratives
MW 1:10-2:25
Dr. Fred Arroyo
Literacy narratives describe the ways individuals learn to reflect on their experiences within language: how individuals use language to shape their lives, how verbal and written language mediate their experience, and how the power of language helps them to create a different sense of self, while contemplating the dynamic changes literacy brings to their lives and culture. Literacy narratives are distinctly inflected with the intention of showing how meaning—conscious and cultural—is produced, and this is especially so within ethnic literacy narratives, which we will read closely in this course, and which we will identify within different forms—poetry, short stories, memoirs, novels, and essays. To this end, we will analyze the personal and cultural forces from which literacy narratives emerge, while keeping in mind the different codes or literacies individuals negotiate in practicing a form of intercultural rhetoric. All the while, though, we will also practice our writing, develop our individual writing practices, and learn from writers talking and writing about their writing practices. Ultimately, we will begin to articulate the interrelations of language and culture by enriching our literacy practices and by writing literacy narratives of our own.

ENGA 311-01
Fantasy in Literature: Monsters and Myths
TR 11-12:15
Dr. Lucien Fournier
This course explores fantasy literature from various literary periods, chiefly of British Literature, examining how such highly imaginative literature reflects the ideology, culture, and mores of its particular time. The literature studied includes such works as Beowulf, the Arthurian Legends, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, and The Hobbit. The course requires midterm and final examinations, three papers, and frequent quizzes.

ENGA 313-01 (crosslisting: THA 402-01, MRA 301-01, MPA 321-01)
The Bible and Literature
TR 8-9:15
Dr. Donald Stump
The course will focus on a selection of the greatest--and the most puzzling--stories in Scripture, such as those of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Israelites, Saul and David, Job and Satan, along with several parables and incidents from the life of Christ. From each of these, we will turn to works of literature that have drawn heavily on them, such as Dante's Inferno, C.S. Lewis's space fantasy Perelandra, and a sampling of poems and short stories. The aim will be to probe deeply into key passages in these works, pondering not only their literary beauty and power but also the great questions that underlie them--questions about biblical conceptions of God, human nature, good and evil, and the afterlife. May be counted toward the Certificate in the Christian Intellectual Tradition.

ENGA 322 (crosslisting: WSA 375-01,02)
Women in Literature
Section 01 - TR 9:30-10:45
Section 02 – TR 11-12:15
Dr. Ellen Jones
Women in Literature will analyze literary works written by women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in conjunction with various topics in current postcolonial, African American, and American-European feminist theories, in order to assess the following questions: What is the relationship of women to symbolic systems in various patriarchal cultures? How is "woman" conceptualized in both historical and current feminist theories, in women's films, and in women's writings in poetry, essay, autobiographical narrative, and, particularly, fiction? Does the very concept of the feminine or of "woman" imperialistically repress racial, class, cultural, and historical differences? What theoretical and political concerns do women writing from "minority," colonial, or postcolonial cultures articulate in their artistic productions?
Through careful reading and re-reading of assigned texts, researching material placed on library reserve for the course, teaching fellow students through group class presentations, actively participating in class discussions, and writing papers and examinations, students will come to know representative works of women's literature written in English and films of two female directors; learn how the writers work both with and against literary conventions to create their art; relate the writers' artistic concerns with political, social, racial, and economic issues of their time; and develop strategies for effective reading, teaching, and writing.

ENGA 354 (crosslisting: MRA 307-01,02)
Shakespeare for Non-Majors
Section 01 – M 12-2:30
Section 02 – R 12:45-3:15
Dr. Thomas Walsh
This is an introduction to Shakespeare’s life and works. Selected plays and poems representative of several dramatic and poetic genres—history play, tragedy, comedy, and lyric—will be studied in their historical, political, cultural and literary contexts. Analysis of language, characterization, plot and structure will aim at developing an appreciation of Shakespeare’s art. Whenever possible, tapes, films, and/or live performances of the plays will be seen.
Students are expected to read and study all assignments as well as participate in class discussions. There will be at least two exam-projects and one paper. Texts: several paperback editions.

ENGA 363-01
19th Century American Literature
TR 11-12:15
Dr. Hal Bush
This course will be a rapid-reading, historical survey of major American literature of the nineteenth century. We shall give frequent consideration to the historical and cultural forces that influenced the various writers, but our primary focus will be on a close reading, understanding, and critical analysis of the works themselves. We will attempt to cover generally the entire century, although much of our work will be on the magnificent achievements of American writers of the antebellum period--roughly 1835-65. Particular attention will be reserved for the several figures generally recognized as the century’s major writers: the poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; the masters of prose, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln; and the masters of fiction, especially Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain. Additionally, we will read and discuss selections from a number of other important writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. DuBois, and Kate Chopin.
REQUIREMENTS:
Ten minute in-class presentation on one of the works by the author of your choice, comprehensive final exam, and two brief essays (5-6 pp. each)

ENGA 389-01
Reading/Writing the Native American Renaissance
T 5-7:30
Dr. Fred Arroyo
The postmodern period of the late twentieth century is often characterized as fragmentary, schizophrenic, without affect or spirituality, and, with regard to narrative and storytelling, unable to tell or write a communal story. In other words, we live in a time in which we have seemingly lost the ability to communicate and share experiences. As a result, it is as if storytelling no longer has a necessary role in society and we are witnessing the decline of narrative, a decline that could lead to the deterioration of communal experiences and wisdom. In Reading and Writing the Native America Renaissance, however, this course will try to understand how Native American writers read and write a "different" history, one, perhaps, "in spite of everything," that continues to have spiritual conviction in words, languages, places and the power of communicable experiences. How can storytelling help us to create community? How does storytelling help Native Americans to discover a way home? These are important questions we will continue to return to.

Four-Hundred Level Courses

ENGA 410-01 (crosslisting: MRA 410-01, ENGA 534-01)
History of the English Language
MWF 12-12:50
Dr. Paul Acker
The course examines in representative detail the various major phases of the English language. We will begin with an introduction to phonology and the phonetic alphabet. We will then place English within its Indo-European and Germanic context, after which we will focus on distinguishing features of Old, Middle, and Modern English. Finally we will look at differences between American and British English and dialect variation within American English. Assignments will consist of readings from the textbook and exercises from the workbook.
TEXT: Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language
Workbook: John Algeo, Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language

ENGA 423-01 (crosslisting: MRA 413-01, MRA 506-01, ENGA 625-01)
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
TR 11-12:15
Dr. Antony Hasler
Readers of all periods have found something to enjoy in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, probably the best-known single work to survive from medieval England. In introducing students to the range of characters, narratives and genres so vibrantly on display in Chaucer’s great collection of stories, this course will not lose touch with whatever it is that still makes the Tales enjoyable today, six hundred years after their author’s death. However, it will also attempt to explore the social and cultural contexts that make the Canterbury Tales a creation of its own time and place, including its beginnings not as a neatly-edited course text with helpful footnotes and glossary, but in a messier (perhaps richer?) world of textual production in which everything was written by hand. We will also, I hope, gain some sense of why the work has proved of interest in a variety of current critical perspectives, and consider what, in general, it means to enjoy the Middle Ages.
The Tales will be read in the original Middle English, and some attention will be given to the specifics of Chaucer’s language.
Requirements: two papers, a midterm, a final, class participation and some translation and pronunciation exercises.

ENGA 424-01 (crosslisting: ENGA 536-01)
Medieval Drama
TR 9:30-10:45
Dr. Antony Hasler
The large-scale, Scripture-based dramatic cycles of the late Middle Ages, along with such other theatrical kinds as the morality, the miracle play and the interlude, make up an important contribution to medieval religious writing in England. However, these plays are also very much to be seen as social texts, shaped at a deep level by the material circumstances of their production and performance in the regions and urban centers of late medieval England and in private households. This course will accordingly pay attention to the material origins of medieval drama, and the role of the major cycles in celebrating the social body of the medieval city and mediating tension and conflict among its members. It will further consider the changes that occurred after the beginning of the sixteenth century, when dramatic forms and content were altered by violent political and doctrinal change. We will also pay attention to what anthropology, theories of corporeality and gender, and other recent approaches can tell us about these plays. The texts will be read in the original Middle English. Requirements: two papers, a midterm, a final, and class participation, which will include one in-class report on a specified text or topic.

ENGA 426-01 (crosslisting: MRA 416-01, ENGA 526-01)
Introduction to Old Norse
MWF 1:10-2
Dr. Paul Acker
The course aims at enabling students to read Old Norse works in the original, thereby providing access to the myths and sagas of the Viking Age. We start right in translating prose selections from Snorri's poetic and mythographic handbook, the Edda, consulting our textbook's grammar along the way for inflectional paradigms, conjugations and syntax. There will be occasional quizzes on the introductory grammatical material, a longish quiz on a selection of paradigms and conjugations, and a mid-term and final involving in-class translation, Grettis saga and the poetic Edda.
Graduate students will give short oral presentations on critical approaches to a mythological Eddic poem of their choosing (the rest of the class will have read the poem in translation). At that time also graduate students will pass in a translation of a passage from the said poem, an annotated bibliography of five or so useful studies of the poem, and a page or two of original remarks.
Text: E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse

ENG-A 431-01 (crosslisting: MRA 421-01)
Early Shakespeare
TR 11-12:15
Dr. Donald Stump
The course will explore the first half of Shakespeare’s career (1590-1599), a period notable for its exuberant variety of forms and styles. Likely readings include an early tragedy (Romeo and Juilet or Julius Caesar), three of the most brilliant comedies (such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and Twelfth Night), and two or three of the English history plays (I and II Henry IV, Richard III). The emphasis will be on close reading, though we’ll also give considerable thought to social, philosophical, and political issues raised by the plays. In the comedies, for instance, we’ll consider shifting views of marriage and various ideals of courtship and the proper roles of the genders. In the histories, we’ll explore the changing nature of the English monarchy in the late medieval period and Shakespeare’s subtle delineation of the long-term psychological and political implications of rebellion and regicide. Requirements: several half-page exercises in asking good interpretive questions about the plays, a two-page exercise in researching and reading secondary literature, an eight-page term paper (written in two drafts), participation in the critiquing or staging of a scene, a midterm and a final exam.

ENGA 441-01
Dryden, Pope, and Swift: The Shape and the Shaping of the City
MWF 10-10:50
Dr. Duane Smith

Focusing on the works of John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, this course will examine the relationship of changing aesthetic and political attitudes during the Restoration and early eighteenth century, especially in their relation to the city of London. The city and its inhabitants, from the King in his Court to the hack writers in the garrets of Grub Street, constitute the subject and locus of much of the literature of the period. From Dryden's Annus Mirabilis which celebrates London rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the Great Fire and the ravages of the plague to Pope's The Dunciad which depicts civilization tumbling into universal darkness, the literature of the period plays out the aesthetic struggles of the ancients and the moderns and the political turmoil of the Whigs and Tories against the backdrop of London and its environs. We will focus to some extent on the relationship between neoclassic aesthetics of order and the growing, chaotic sprawl of the city.
The focus of the course will be such works as Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, MacFlecknoe, and Absolom and Achitophel, Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels,Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and Pope's Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. We will also read a variety of other literary and non-literary texts.
Requirements will include two papers, a mid-term, a final, and class participation.

ENGA 449 -01
Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
MWF 1:10-2
Dr. Elisabeth Heard
Pope, Swift, Johnson. Yes, the Restoration and 18th century include these writers, but this time period also saw the emerging of a strong female literary voice, the formation of a nation, issues of race and identity, and the rise of the novel in English. In this survey course we will be exploring these issues and topics in the various genres--poetry, drama, novels, and intellectual prose. The objectives of the class are (1) to introduce you to the wide variety of texts written in the period, and (2) to further develop your critical analysis and writing skills.

ENGA 450-01
The Age of Romanticism
MWF 11-11:50
Dr. Toby Benis
This course will explore the great variety in content and form exhibited by the literature of British Romanticism, a term denoting the flowering of poetry, in particular, from 1780 to 1832. The poetry we will read was revolutionary in its time; the Romantics broke with tradition by arguing that the poor, the outcast, and the everyday were legitimate subjects for authors. This aesthetic agenda had significant political implications; many of the writers during this period believed in a democratic government when democracy was often seen as risky at best, or sheer anarchy at worst (i.e. the French Revolution). The depth of the Romantic commitment to individuality through artistic expression assumes particular importance for us today when we recall that from 1793 to 1815--22 years--Britain was almost constantly at war with France. The pressure from the government, as well as from the general public, to conform to received ideas during these tumultuous years was enormous and constant. The Romantics courageously compel us to rethink the virtues of conformity, offering potent critiques of what they often perceived as the artistic, sexual, and racial prejudices of their culture. Texts will include poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson; Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein; and Thomas DeQuincey's memoir of drug addiction, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Course requirements: 2 papers, midterm and final exam, frequent quizzes, and 1 in-class presentation.

ENGA 451-01
The Victorian Period: The City of Dickens
TR 9:30-10:45
Dr. Caroline Reitz

Victorian culture was shaped by the belief that London, for better or for worse, was the center of the world. Dickens is the author most associated with both positions. This course will examine the often contradictory representations of London in a range of genres (poetry, the novel, journalism and social criticism) and writers, with an emphasis on Dickens. We will look at such figures of the city as the detective and the prostitute as we grapple with the implications of the rise of the city not only on the Victorian imagination but on conceptions of modernity still with us.

ENGA 462-01
Modern Irish Literature
W 2:10-4:40
Dr. E. C. Jones
The cultural productions read for Modern Irish Literature—fiction, poetry, drama, political writings—were written during the late colonial period of Britain's control of the entire island, the fight over Home Rule, the agitation for independence, the 1921 signing of the Treaty dividing the island between six counties of the north and the twenty-six counties of the south, the civil war of 1922-1923, and the first years of the Irish Free State.
To analyze the revolutionary political potential of Irish writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the course will ask what is the significance of that writing's dependence on conventional imperial representations of colonial cultures despite a seemingly radical break with these representations.
How do these writings reveal the metaphysical component of nationalism, nationalism as driven by the ambition to realize what it considers its intrinsic essence in some specific and tangible form, perhaps as political structure or as literary tradition? In what ways does the metaphysical essentialism of nationalism tell a particularly modernist story? How have works by writers such as James Joyce become both the law of modernism and the resistance to that law? In what ways do his works represent a postcolonial contra-modernity?
And how does one, working from the position of a postmodern historical subject, read early twentieth-century Irish writing? With what textual strategies do these writers authorize their own readings? What are the theoretical and political questions encountered in such readings?
This course enacts dialogues among works by Irish writers and works of Irish history in order to explore the complex relations between Irish writing and the history and politics of Ireland and between the projects of nationalism and modernism.
Through careful reading and re-reading of assigned texts, teaching fellow students through class presentations of research material, actively participating in class discussions, and writing papers and examinations, students will come to know representative works of Ireland's richest literary period; relate the writers' artistic concerns with political, social, racial, and economic issues of their time; and develop strategies for effective reading, teaching, and writing.

ENGA 465-01
American Literature: Beginnings to 1855
TR 11-12:15
Dr. Raymond Benoit
In his book The Broken Center, Nathan Scott Jr. remarks that “what is desacralise in the predominate sensibility of our period stems from a cast of mind distinguished by an inability to descry in the world any reality that evokes a sense of ultimacy or of radical significance. This is a kind of total secularization of consciousness…the loss of connection with anything resembling what Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy called ‘the numinous’: the great impoverishment of the human spirit consists in the death of all awareness of any animating power or presence amid and within the familiar realities of nature and history.” Or, as epitomized in Howard Nemerov’s poem: “There used to be gods in everything, and now they’ve gone.” How they went, why and where they went, and varied efforts to recover their presence will be one primary theme explored in selected works of American literature from the beginnings to 1855 anthologized in The American Tradition in Literature, published by McGraw-Hill. Several short papers as well as mid-term and final exams will be required.

ENGA 477-01
Adolescents in Contemporary American Short Fiction
TR 4-5:15
Dr. Thomas Walsh
This course fulfills a teacher certification requirement in the State of Missouri: a course on adolescents in literature or a course on ethnic literature. Familiarizing students with rites of passage in narrative structures, the course will consist of reading and discussion of American short stories and/or novels which have an adolescent and/or ethnic minority as a main character, in order to explore the way the author represents the process of coming to a sense of self-definition in a culturally diverse society.
Students are expected to read and study all assignments as well as participate in class discussions. There will be three major projects—two exams and one paper.
Tentative Texts: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (on reserve)
William Faulkner, “The Bear” (on reserve)
John Loughery, ed., FirstSightings: Contemporary Stories of American Youth
New York: Persea Book, 1992
(Satisfies American Literature requirement)

ENGA 484-01
Studies in Contemporary Culture: Tolkien, Lewis, and the Inklings
TR 12:45-2
Dr. Thomas Shippey
The group of “Oxford Christians” (JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Charles Williams) met and wrote primarily in the decades before, during, and just after World War II. They seemed at that time to be isolated and marginal in terms of literary culture. Their works have, however, shown astonishing durability with Tolkien at the top of the bestseller lists, and “sequels” planned for Lewis. Why should this be so? Were they in fact as detached from the literary mainstream as they once seemed? Moreover, what was it that held together a committed Catholic, an Anglo-Catholic, and an Ulster Protestant. This course will consider these and related questions, paying particular attention to cases where the authors seem to be offering alternative solutions to the same problems in their fiction – an approach which has not figured in any of the recent biographies and critical works. The course will center on Tolkien’s fiction (3 major works, and some minor ones), Lewis’s fiction (4 adult novels, 7 children’s works), and 3 selected from Williams 7 “occult thrillers.” The Inklings’ scholarly and argumentative works will also be brought into discussion. The course will be taught by lecture and group discussion.

ENGA 490-01
Senior Seminar: “Female Modernism”
MW 2:15-3:30
Dr. Georgia Johnston
One purpose of this senior seminar is to bring an awareness of the innovative work on gender that is central to radically changing conceptions of modernism. Throughout the course, the class will address and question the concept of a "female modernism" expounded by such background critical material as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's No Man's Land, Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank, Alice Jardine's Gynesis, Marianne DeKoven's Rich and Strange, Susan Lanser's rich work on women's narratology, and Bonnie Kime Scott's two-volume critique, Refiguring Modernism, Volume I and II.
The first part of the course will rely on Bonnie Kime Scott's 1990 anthology, The Gender of Modernism, for its gathering of early-twentieth-century men's and women's fiction, poetry, and expository writingBwriting that stresses gender ideologies. Much of the rest of the course will be dedicated to following up on Kime Scott's leads: the course will extend knowledge of this primary literature by considering modernist texts by both men and women in terms of these readings through the lenses of gender. The second half of the course will focus on full texts rather than anthologized excerpts.
Texts will include:
Bonnie Kime Scott, ed. The Gender of Modernism (a variety of texts from this anthology)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One=s Own and To the Lighthouse
Edward Morgan (E.M.) Forster, A Room with a View
Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor and AComposition as Explanation@
Thomas Sterns (T.S.) Eliot, APrufrock,@ Murder in the Cathedral, ATradition and the Individual Talent, and AHamlet and his Problems@
Requirements for the course: one shorter and one longer paper, a midterm, and a collaborative presentation.

ENGA 490-02
Senior Seminar: Myths, Symbols, and the Imagination
W 2:10-4:40
Dr. Raymond Benoit
“There used to be gods in everything and now they’ve gone,” writes Nemerov. And where they went – the mythic numina of rivers, mountains, woods – Jung says, is “underground into the unconscious” where “we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of the past.” This enormous loss, he continues, “is compensated for by the symbols of our dreams” and by myth, which “bring up our original nature” but “in the language of nature, which is strange and incomprehensible to us” – a not unusual reaction of readers to poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and its modern version “The Waste Land”; to novels like The Crying of Lot 49 or Mumbo Jumbo; and short stories like “The Jolly Corner” or Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly, Time.” That original nature, as Jung and Freud see it, its loss, and the counter-movement to integration in romantic/modern myths will be followed in themes and techniques in works such as those above as well as others. Psychology and Religion and Man and His Symbols will be principal works of Jung required, along with Edward Edinger’s The Living Psyche, as springboards for short papers, reports, and discussions of the writings.

Five-Hundred Level Courses

ENGA 500-01
Methods of Literary Research
M 2:10-4:40
Dr. Joya Uraizee
This is a required course for first year graduate students in the M.A. or Ph.D. program. Its purpose is to develop an appreciation and an awareness of good research and presentation methods in literary and cultural studies. We will try to understand both the form of the various methods and their functions in literary texts. We will learn about library resources, we will analyze textual interpretations that include feminist and postcolonial theories, and we will also examine archives and manuscripts and interpret them.
Some of the texts we will use include Altick and Fenstermaker's The Art of Literary Research, The MLA Style Manual, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, and other texts and readings on reserve. The writing requirements for the course will include several short writing exercises and a longer, probably 10 page term paper. Students will also be required to do at least 2 oral presentations.

ENGA 501-01
Introduction to Teaching Writing
R 2:10-4:40
Dr. Janice McIntire-Strasburg
This course serves as a general introduction to teaching college writing at the freshman level. It will include a brief history of post-secondary teaching, theory as well as practical applications to reading and responding to student work, grammatical issues, group work, and portfolio grading. It will also include a unit on teaching with technology, and students will be expected to use the computer lab, Webct, and Dreamweaver (software) for their own course work. The reading list has yet to be determined.

ENGA 524-01 (crosslisting: ENGA 436-01)
Medieval Drama
TR 9:30-10:45
Dr. Antony Hasler
The large-scale, Scripture-based dramatic cycles of the late Middle Ages, along with such other theatrical kinds as the morality, the miracle play and the interlude, make up an important contribution to medieval religious writing in England. However, these plays are also very much to be seen as social texts, shaped at a deep level by the material circumstances of their production and performance in the regions and urban centers of late medieval England and in private households. This course will accordingly pay attention to the material origins of medieval drama, and the role of the major cycles in celebrating the social body of the medieval city and mediating tension and conflict among its members. It will further consider the changes that occurred after the beginning of the sixteenth century, when dramatic forms and content were altered by violent political and doctrinal change. We will also pay attention to what anthropology, theories of corporeality and gender, and other recent approaches can tell us about these plays. The texts will be read in the original Middle English. Requirements: two papers, a midterm, a final, and class participation, which will include one in-class report on a specified text or topic.

ENGA 526-01 (crosslisting: MRA 416-01, ENGA 426-01)
Introduction to Old Norse
MWF 1:10-2
Dr. Paul Acker
The course aims at enabling students to read Old Norse works in the original, thereby providing access to the myths and sagas of the Viking Age. We start right in translating prose selections from Snorri's poetic and mythographic handbook, the Edda, consulting our textbook's grammar along the way for inflectional paradigms, conjugations and syntax. There will be occasional quizzes on the introductory grammatical material, a longish quiz on a selection of paradigms and conjugations, and a mid-term and final involving in-class translation, Grettis saga and the poetic Edda.
Graduate students will give short oral presentations on critical approaches to a mythological Eddic poem of their choosing (the rest of the class will have read the poem in translation). At that time also graduate students will pass in a translation of a passage from the said poem, an annotated bibliography of five or so useful studies of the poem, and a page or two of original remarks.
Text: E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse

ENGA 534-01 (crosslisting: MRA 410-01, ENGA 410-01)
History of the English Language
MWF 12-12:50
Dr. Paul Acker
The course examines in representative detail the various major phases of the English language. We will begin with an introduction to phonology and the phonetic alphabet. We will then place English within its Indo-European and Germanic context, after which we will focus on distinguishing features of Old, Middle, and Modern English. Finally we will look at differences between American and British English and dialect variation within American English. Assignments will consist of readings from the textbook and exercises from the workbook.
TEXT: Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language
Workbook: John Algeo, Problems in the Origins and Development of the English Language

Six-Hundred Level Courses

ENGA 604-01
Seminar in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory
R 2:10-4:40
Dr. Vincent Casaregola
We will examine how contemporary rhetorical theories interact with several areas of interest, both in the academy and in other cultural sites. We will examine the significance of rhetorical theory in several of the following areas: epistemology; argumentation; media technology; the public sphere and political discourse; discourse pedagogy; literacy studies; cultural studies; literature and the arts; and historical rhetoric. Students will read a series of common articles, as well as several book-length works (one for each major area). In addition, each student will select one area of theory and application for intensive, individual reading and research throughout the semester. This individual research should lead to an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the area being examined. Drawing on his or her research, each student will prepare an annotated bibliography (approximately 8-10 pages), a conference-length paper (approximately 2500 words C 10 pages), and an article (approximately 5000-6000 words C 20-24 pages). Students will also present an oral research summary at midterm and at the end of the semester. The paper and article should be directed at specific conferences and journals which the student will identify through the ongoing research. Students should set the realistic goal of submitting the paper to a conference and the article to a journal shortly after completion of the course.

ENGA 625-01 (crosslisting: MRA 413-01, MRA 506-01, ENGA 423-01)
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
TR 11-12:15
Dr. Antony Hasler
Readers of all periods have found something to enjoy in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, probably the best-known single work to survive from medieval England. In introducing students to the range of characters, narratives and genres so vibrantly on display in Chaucer’s great collection of stories, this course will not lose touch with whatever it is that still makes the Tales enjoyable today, six hundred years after their author’s death. However, it will also attempt to explore the social and cultural contexts that make the Canterbury Tales a creation of its own time and place, including its beginnings not as a neatly-edited course text with helpful footnotes and glossary, but in a messier (perhaps richer?) world of textual production in which everything was written by hand. We will also, I hope, gain some sense of why the work has proved of interest in a variety of current critical perspectives, and consider what, in general, it means to enjoy the Middle Ages.
The Tales will be read in the original Middle English, and some attention will be given to the specifics of Chaucer’s language.
Requirements: two papers, a midterm, a final, class participation and some translation and pronunciation exercises.

ENGA 635-01
17th Century Literature: Milton
W 2:10-4:40
Dr. Sara van den Berg
Milton maps ideas through polarities--good and evil, creator and creation, temporal and eternal, man and woman, public and private—which he then complicates, qualifies, and even denies. Two dimensions become three, even four, in his richly textured works. Members of this seminar will look closely at his poetry and prose, reading widely and closely. Readings will focus on Poems (1645), the prose of the 1640s, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Students will put Milton’s work in context of the new “ways of seeing” that were developed in the 17th century, and will review the theoretical “ways of seeing” developed in recent criticism. Members of the seminar will also explore areas of significant research opportunities in Milton studies. Requirements: one short paper (5-8 pages), one class presentation, one substantial paper. This seminar is suitable for both beginning and advanced graduate students. Required texts: John Milton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (Penguin); John Milton, Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides (U. Missouri); coursepack of critical essays.

ENGA 659-01
Realism and Surrealism in Late Victorian Fiction
M 2:10-4:40
Dr. Lucien Fournier
Realism is a term often used to describe the literature of the nineteenth century, especially the Victorian literature of the mid-century. Surrealism often defines literary works associated with the early twentieth century. This course examines late Victorian fiction as a literature that incorporates motifs, theories, and techniques from both identities as it attempts to identify and make sense of a rapidly fluctuating world. Novelists examined might include Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Moore, and Gissing.
Course requirements include seminar presentations based on researched topics and a final take-home examination.

ENGA 673-01
19th Century American Fiction: The New Historicism and the Public Sphere
T 5-7:30
Dr. Hal Bush
Roughly speaking, a rapid-reading, historical survey of major literary works (12-14, almost all of which will be novels) leading up to and including the turn of the century. We shall consider historical and cultural forces that influenced these writers and their productions. Despite a few idiosyncratic works of special importance (such as Maria Cummins’ sentimental novel The Lamplighter), most of our attention will be given to those authors who are typically recognized by today’s teachers and critics as the century’s major American writers of fiction. As such, this course can serve as a solid historical survey of 19th-century American fiction. Theoretical emphasis: New Historicism/Cultural Studies. Special attention to Jurgen Habermas and the way literary texts participated in the formation of an American public sphere, especially insofar as those texts fostered and/or interrogated regnant American myths and ideologies.
REQUIREMENTS:
1) two in-class presentations on novels of the student’s choice
2) abstract & annotated bibliography for the final paper (due week 12)
3) final essay (18-22 pp)
4) frequent, energetic class participation
TEXTS: A final list is not available, but the class will include works by the likes of James Fenimore Cooper, Maria Cummins, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. DuBois, Kate Chopin, and Charles Chesnutt. Suggestions from potential students are welcome.

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