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2018-2019 Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Descriptions
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Course Numbering
The College of Wooster uses a five-digit course numbering system. The first three digits indicate the primary course number. The next two digits are the secondary course number and indicate whether there is a special focus for the course. For example:
The first letters are the department or program abbreviation. The next three digits are the primary course number (101 is the primary course number for all Introduction to Historial Study courses). The last two digits are the secondary course number. These two digits indicate that the special focus for this HIST 101 course is The History of Islam. A course with a given three-digit primary course number can only be taken once for credit unless specifically indicated otherwise by the department.
The following policy has been used in assigning primary course numbers:
- 100-level courses are usually introductory courses; some 100-level courses do have prerequisites, and students are advised to consult the description for each course.
- 200-level courses are usually beyond the introductory level, although many 200-level courses are open to first-year students and to majors and non-majors.
- 300-level courses are seminars and courses primarily for majors but open to other students with the consent of the instructor.
- The following numbers are for Independent Study: I.S. 40100 (Junior Independent Study), I.S. 45100 and I.S. 45200 (Senior Independent Study).
In addition to the regular course offerings, many departments offer individual tutorials under the number 40000 and internships under 41000. On occasion, departments will offer a course on a special topic as approved by the Educational Policy Committee, designated 19900, 29900, or 39900.
Abbreviation
In keeping with the general education requirements of the College’s curriculum
(see Degree Requirements ), course listings employ the following abbreviations:
W Writing Intensive
C Studies in Cultural Difference
R Religious Perspectives
Q Quantitative Reasoning
AH Learning Across the Disciplines: Arts and Humanities
HSS Learning Across the Disciplines: History and Social Sciences
MNS Learning Across the Disciplines: Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Except where otherwise noted, all courses carry one course credit.
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English |
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ENGL 12000 - Language, Literature and Culture Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Language Literature and Culture This course introduces students to fundamental issues of literary language and textual interpretation. Each section focuses on a selected topic in literary studies to consider the ways language functions in the reading process and to explore interrelations among literature, culture, and history. Attention is given to the following goals: 1) practicing the close reading of literary texts; 2) understanding the terminology of literary analysis as well as core concepts; 3) introducing a range of genres and historical periods and discussing literature as an evolving cultural phenomenon; 4) increasing skills in writing about literature. This course is required for the major and strongly recommended as the first course in English for non-majors. NOTE: English 120xx can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120xx for College credit only. Annually. Fall and Spring. [AH]
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ENGL 12001 - Imagining America Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
LLC: Imagining America We will compare descriptions of America’s landscape and promises by authors from diverse cultural groups, exploring the changing American dream, the emergence of a multicultural community, and how literature creates narratives of national identity. Such authors as Fitzgerald, Johnson, Whitman, Miller, Kingston, Mukherjee, Hansberry, Cisneros, and Marshall inform our evolving definition of what it means to be American in periods of national transformation, including the Jazz Age, Great Depression, and the Civil Rights era. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120xx for College credit only. Annually. Fall and Spring. [AH]
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ENGL 12005 - Modern Selves Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Modern Selves This course focuses on how the self has been represented over time in poetry, fiction, and drama. The course gives special attention to how literary expressions of selfhood and crises of the self have developed in relation to three contexts: first, to historical shifts in understanding and preoccupations, from the early modern to the postmodern world; second, to such cultural positions as are defined by gender, race, ethnicity, class, and national origin; and third, to the shaping influences of literary language and genres. Works studied may include texts by Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson,Toni Morrison, David Malouf, Marilynne Robinson, and Tim O’Brien. NOTE: English 120xx can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120xx for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12006 - Gods & Monsters Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Gods and Monsters If, as some have claimed, society needs its gods, then it seems to need its monsters as well. But why? In this course we’ll examine early manifestations of gods and monsters (Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Mahabharata, Popol Vuh) in order to uncover the origin of the desire for the monstrous and the divine. We’ll conclude with more contemporary examples (Frankenstein, The Golem, cinematic horror) to discover how and why this desire persists. NOTE: English 120xx can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120xx for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12008 - The Gothic Imagination Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
The Gothic Imagination The Gothic, with roots in the sublime geographies and alienated individuals of the Romantic era, has mutated into new forms today. We will explore the genre’s origins, emphasizing the ways these wild stories of despair, degeneration and desire helped readers to forge national identities, bridge chasms between Self and Other, and negotiate relationships among humans, nature, and technology. Readings may include Walpole, Byron, Mary Shelley, Stevenson, Poe, O’Connor, García Márquez, Benítez Rojo, and Ferré. NOTE: English 120xx can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120xx for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12015 - Animals in Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, ENVS)
Animals in Literature To determine whether authors personify animals, what do readers assume about the differences between humans and other animals? Serving as an introduction to literature and analysis, this course also attempts to identify and transcend literary interpretation’s traditional human-centeredness. Students will learn, for example, how understanding terms like metaphor and allegory can propel them toward controversial interpretations, especially of how animals function complexly in a wide variety of literary works. Featured texts include Høeg’s novel The Woman and the Ape; Vaughan and Staples’s Saga comics; poems by Atwood, Neruda, Angelou, and many others; Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Shaffer’s play Equus. NOTE: English 120xx can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120xx for College credit only. [AH] [AH]
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ENGL 12019 - The Watery Part of the World Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
The Watery Part of the World This course will consider the ocean as a literary subject, with a special focus on its relation to the economic and political history of empire and globalization, and the ecological crises that have arisen from these historical developments. As an introduction to literary and cultural studies, the course will explore a wide array of cultural productions from a variety of genres and time periods, including the ancient epic, renaissance drama, the nineteenth-century novel, and contemporary lyric poetry, as well as essays in environmental philosophy, popular journalism, and documentary film. Topics include: global warming and ocean acidification, animal ethics and the crisis of mass extinction, and the role of the humanities in theorizing our planetary future. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12025 - LLC: Looking Behind Paradise Course Credit: 1
LLC: Looking Behind Paradise The Caribbean is commonly viewed as a tourist’s paradise, where the sun, ocean, and rum meet under a perfect sky: both a static, exotic, eternal place and a site of temporary escape. But the historical legacies of the region include colonialism, plantation economies, slavery, and forced migration-and more recently, political instability, economic underdevelopment, and neocolonialism. How do Caribbean and other writers make sense of these histories? In this course, we will read works by authors who grapple with and connect the past and present, personal and political, to move beyond paradise. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12027 - LLC: Memory & Gender in Caribbean Lit. Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
Memory and Gender in Carribbean Literature Memory is often dictated by the dominant perspectives of history, but is also a site of preserving alternative interpretations of the past’s relationship to the present. As Caribbean history is marked by genocide, rupture, conquest, and migration, writers must find creative methods to reclaim silenced memories. For example, they often produce counter-histories through the body, environment, and dreams. We will investigate how this process is also deeply gendered, as it impacts how Caribbean masculinities, femininities, and queerness are imagined. By reading novels, poetry, essays, and theory, we will examine how language, race, and gender are related to the treatment of memory in decolonizing the Caribbean. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12028 - LLC: Historical Fiction Course Credit: 1
LLC: HISTORICAL FICTION In this course, we will study four historical novels and a range of short stories, as well as essays about the goals and practices of historical fiction. We will learn about the history of this contested genre and the ways readers and critics have responded to it over the last two centuries. How does historical fiction fit into and illuminate literary history? How do representations of history in fiction differ from putatively factual historical accounts? Can historical fiction really teach us about the past, or is it, according to L. P. Hartley’s much-quoted line, a foreign country whose inhabitants do things differently and whose psychologies are opaque to modern readers? We will consider the cultural contexts in which various historical fictions are produced as well as analyzing the structure, form, and style of these texts. NOTE: ENGL-120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second ENGL-120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12029 - Llc: Ghostly Others in American Lit Course Credit: 1
LLC: GHOSTLY OTHERS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE What (or who) haunts the American national imaginary? What is present but also simultaneously erased? Focusing on African American, Indigenous, Chican@, Caribbean, and Asian American literature, we will consider how writers explore the tension between belonging, exclusion, and histories that just won’t die. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12030 - Mothers & Daughters in Contemporary Lit Course Credit: 1
Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Literature Mother-daughter relationships are complicated. Reflecting on this intergenerational relationship in contemporary literature, we will consider how authors speak back to assumptions about the Mother, and the obligations of the Daughter, to reimagine gendered labor, identity, and sexuality. We will read Caribbean, African American, Chican@, Asian American, and Euro-American authors who approach this gendered dyad to comment on history, culture, and politics. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12031 - Romance Narratives Course Credit: 1
Romance Narratives Romance is often regarded as lowbrow, yet it is a financially successful genre with broad audiences. This course will examine how issues of gender, sexuality, and love evolve over time and for different audiences. By studying romance in literature and media, we can understand how different cultural forms are interpreted and critiqued. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 12032 - Jazz & African American Literature Course Credit: 1
Jazz & African American Literature What did jazz-the central form of black expression in the twentieth century-mean to African American writers and their literary aesthetics? Did the music offer a promise or a snare, a provocation or an example? We will approach that complex question by looking at the myriad ways-thematic and formal-that the genre influenced pivotal figures from the Harlem Renaissance, forcing them into bolder forms of verbal experimentation. We will also examine how the jazz tradition began, by looking at the role of spirituals in slave narratives, and where the tradition persists today, in the poetic dimensions of contemporary hip-hop. NOTE: English 120XX can be taken only once for departmental credit; students may take a second English 120XX for College credit only. [AH]
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ENGL 16000 - Intro to Non-Fictional Writing Course Credit: 1
INTRODUCTION TO NON-FICTIONAL WRITING This course introduces students to major writers and genres of contemporary and classic non-fictional writing-particularly the genres of memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, editorial writing, critical writing, and film review. The course focuses on answering questions such as What is non-fiction? What are the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction? and What is the relationship between reading non-fictional writings and writing about them? Students write and read non-fiction by comparing and contrasting students’ writings in creative non-fiction, the critical essay, and the review essay with those by contemporary and classic essay writers, and with writings by other students in the class as well. Annually. Fall and Spring. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16002 - Autobio Wrtg: Memoir Course Credit: 1
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING (MEMOIR) This course focuses on analysis, discussion, and practice of autobiographical writing, with an emphasis on memoir. The course explores the aims and conventions of the genre, emphasizing course participants’ own writing. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16003 - Nature & Environmental Writing Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
NATURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING This course explores the traditions and current practices of writing connected with the natural world. Along with the exploration of already published works in nature and environmental writing, the course may include off-campus field trips and emphasizes course participants’ own writing and peer feedback workshops. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16004 - Critical/Creative Non-Fiction Course Credit: 1
Critical/Creative Non-Fiction This class introduces students to major writers and genres of contemporary and classic non-fictional writing particularly the genres of memoir, personal essay, literary criticism, and film review. As we consider these texts, we will be answering the questions: What is non-fiction? What is the relationship between reading non-fictional writings and writing about them? And What are the boundaries between creative and critical non-fictional writing? Throughout the semester, students will be writing and reading non-fiction by comparing and contrasting students writings with those by contemporary and classic essay writers. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16007 - Travel Writing Course Credit: 1
TRAVEL WRITING Travel writing shapes our encounters with specific places; conversely, the encounter with place inevitably shapes the traveller. This course explores the conventions, strategies, and current practices of travel writing, with the goal of connecting course members’ own travels (especially during study abroad) to course discussions and assignments. Our readings and other texts will reflect the specific locations visited by class participants; we may also take field trips as a class. Participants’ own travel writing will be published in an online magazine produced by the class. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16008 - Non-Fiction Wrtg: Creative Nonfiction Course Credit: 1
INTRODUCTION TO NON-FICTIONAL WRITING (CREATIVE NON-FICTION) This course introduces students to the lyric essay, a genre that troubles the lines between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and essay, cultural criticism and imaginative writing, theory and autobiography. We will read, and students will be encouraged to write, on a wide range of topics, which may include the variances of inhabiting gender, media and American selfhood, pretentiousness, and the color blue. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16009 - Women & Politics of Pain Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
Intro to Non-Fictional Writing: Women and the Politics of Pain In this introductory writing course, students will read and practice different genres of non-fiction, including memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, and critical writing. Students will read contemporary work by women that explores the role of gender in suffering, illness, and diagnosis. Readings and assignments will examine the treatment and mistreatment of sickness in women, and the resulting methods of survival, resistance, and transformation. [AH]
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ENGL 16100 - Introduction to Fiction and Poetry Writing Course Credit: 1
INTRODUCTION TO FICTION AND POETRY This course is an introduction to writing in a variety of fictional forms, especially short stories and poems. Participants analyze and discuss both published writing and their own writing. Priority given to English majors. Annually. Fall and Spring. [AH]
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ENGL 19900 - Editing a Literary Magazine Course Credit: 0.25
APPRENTICESHIP IN EDITING A LITERARY MAGAZINE This course provides an opportunity for students to serve as an assistant editor for the Artful Dodge, a nationally-distributed journal of new American writing, graphics, and literature in translation. Students are exposed to the daily operations of editing a professional literary publication, engaging in a number of important activities such as designing and developing the magazine’s web-site, editorial and promotional copy-writing, evaluating manuscripts, typesetting and proofreading, and organizing off-campus literary events. Students read histories of the American literary journal in addition to exploring other currently-published literary magazines. Annually. Fall and Spring. [AH]
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ENGL 20000 - Investigations in Literary Theory and Research Methods–Engl Majors Only Course Credit: 1
INVESTIGATIONS IN LITERARY THEORY AND RESEARCH METHODS This course is a writing course designed specifically for English majors. The course examines reading, writing, and conducting research as interrelated processes enabling one to investigate literary texts and other cultural work. Students 1) become familiar with several literary theories and understand what it means to ground literary investigation in a set of theoretical principles; 2) engage with ongoing scholarly conversations and become familiar with research methods; and 3) develop their own voices within the conventions of writing in the discipline. Priority given to sophomore majors. Juniors, non-majors, and second-semester first-year students with permission of course instructor. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-120xx Annually. Fall and Spring. [AH, W]
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ENGL 21002 - Black Women Writers Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT, WGSS)
BLACK WOMEN WRITERS This course examines the writings of black women from 1746 to the present. Focusing on the major texts in the canon of African American women’s writing, the course considers the distinct cultural possibilities that enabled various forms of literary production throughout black women’s history in America. [AH]
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ENGL 21004 - Empire Boys (pre 1900) Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
Empire Boys This course interrogates gender models in 19th century literature and popular culture, with specific though not exclusive focus on masculinity. British models of manliness proliferated over the course of the 19th century as a result of industrialization, the growth of the mass media, and the rise of Empire; new models included muscular Christianity, the Sahib, the dandy, and the flaneur. Asking whether imperial models of masculinity continue to inflect gender roles today, we will explore a range of genres, including adventure and sensation novels, poetry and drama, popular culture, and literary and gender theory. [Before 1900]. [AH]
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ENGL 21009 - Post Colonial Literature & Film Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND FILM This course examines questions of identity (with particular emphasis on gender, race, and nation) in colonial and postcolonial novels, poems, and film. While acknowledging the problematic nature of the term postcolonial, we will examine paired colonial and postcolonial texts to understand the codes of race, gender, and nation constructed during the imperial era, and echoed, critiqued, and/or subverted in the postcolonial era. Our textual interpretations will be informed by postcolonial and gender theory. [AH, C]
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ENGL 21014 - Religion in Black Film & Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
RELIGION IN BLACK FILM AND LITERATURE This course analyzes the complicated role of religion, particularly Christianity, in black communities during slavery, the Great Migration, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the Post Civil Rights Era. The course considers ways in which religion is shown to empower and/or oppress black people; ways in which the politics of class, gender, and sexuality inflect black religious practices; and strategies by which transcendent, spiritual experiences are represented. Films may include Spencer Williams’ The Blood of Jesus; Stan Lathan’s Go Tell it on the Mountain; Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls; Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust; and T.D. Jakes’ Woman Thou Art Loosed. Texts by Alice Walker, Melba P. Beals, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest Gaines, as well as some visual art, are also considered. [AH, R]
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ENGL 21018 - Sex & Gender in Restoration & 18 Century Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
Sex and Gender in Restoration and 18th Century Literature A man feigns impotence to cuckold unsuspecting husbands; a male and female couple compete for sexual favors from a male servant; a reformed prostitute recounts experiences with male and female partners. How should we interpret these literary episodes, since Foucault and others have dated the concept of sexual orientation to the 19th century? Posing such questions, this course aims to improve understandings of both the eighteenth century and modernity. Featured authors include Wycherley, Rochester, Behn, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Cleland, and Wollstonecraft. Featured scholars include Foucault, Rubin, Sedgwick, Butler, and Nussbaum. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 21022 - Global Anglophone Literature After 1900 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
GLOBAL ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE AFTER 1900 This course will examine a series of 20th century transnational novelists, essayists, and poets who interrogate questions of home, national belonging, and erotic desire. The writers include: Hisham Matar, Allison Bechdel, Hanif Kureishi, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje, Leila Aboulela, and Marjane Satrapi. [AH]
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ENGL 21025 - Shakespeare to Wilde (pre-1900) Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
QUEER LITERATURE FROM SHAKESPEARE TO WILDE This course surveys literature from approximately 1600-1900 with emphasis on analyzing representations of same-sex friendships, romances, and sexual relationships and on understanding how they were imagined differently than they would later be in the 20th and 21st centuries. Featured texts may include sonnets by Richard Barnfield and William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, poems by Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, erotic fiction by Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 21026 - Lit, Cul & Environment Crisis Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, ENVS)
LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS We live in a world threatened by global warming and mass extinction across the entire web of life. This course, as an introduction to the environmental humanities, will consider a number of ways the arts and humanities might help us understand and respond to this planetary emergency. While the focus of the course will be on what we might think of as scientific phenomena, our materials will range across various disciplines, forms, and genres, from novels and poetry to recent popular journalism, documentary films, and scholarly essays in literary and environmental studies. Topics will include: global warming and ocean acidification, animal ethics and mass extinction, and the role of the humanities in theorizing our planetary future under conditions of ecological emergency. [AH]
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ENGL 21029 - Asian-American Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Within the context of European and American expansionism, a scholar writes, Asians did not go to America; Americans went to Asia. Asian diasporic literatures in the United States thus reflect ethnic resistance against legal, economic, social, and cultural practices of white nationalism and imperialism. Reading 19th-21st century texts by East, South, Southeast and West Asians in America, students will explore the perspectives of immigrants, second generation Americans, transnational adoptees, survivors of war, and activists. [AH]
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ENGL 21030 - Class, Gender, Criminality 18th Cent Lit Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Class, Gender, Criminality in 18th Century Literature In this course, we will survey British literature of the eighteenth century by examining themes of class, criminality, and gender in novels, poetry, and memoir. The eighteenth century loved narratives of crime: stories of hangings and transportations (being sent against one’s will to a colony abroad), seduction and repentance. These texts also demonstrate a profound uncertainty about the shifting landscape of class and privilege, often linked to concerns about appropriate behavior for women in newly public spaces. Could a maid marry her employer and become a respectable woman? Should a penniless poet who claimed to be a nobleman’s bastard son be forgiven for killing a man, on the basis of his talent? We will discuss the historical contexts of these texts and examine how they grapple, both in content in form, with questions of how to define virtue and morality and how to punish crime. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 21031 - Queering Caribbean Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
Queering Caribbean Literature This class explores the intersection between queer theory and Caribbean literary studies. Though colonial legacies still inform Caribbean gender and sexual norms, how might literature excavate stories about queerness hidden in plain sight? We will read Caribbean short stories, novels, memoirs, and scholarship to discuss how Caribbean writers reclaim non-normative behaviors and identities that contest Euro-American histories and definitions of race, gender, and sexuality. The course is open to first-year students without prerequisites. [AH]
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ENGL 21032 - Afrofuturism Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Afrofuturism Afrofuturism–a literary formation where Black writers, visual artists, and musicians shape the future by melding art and technology–has reached a watershed moment in American culture. With increasing attention paid to the work of Octavia Butler, the emergence of futuristic musical stylings from Janelle Monae and Saul Williams, and the cinematic adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther, the form has expanded the boundaries of how we understand Black culture, challenging traditional science fiction to include a wider range of voices. In this course, we will focus on the broader aesthetic tradition of the genre, tracing a trajectory from the nineteenth century to the present across visual art, music, and literature. We will pay particular attention to the formation’s subversive formal features, the lessons its radical politics hold for our own time, and its fluid approach to gender and sexuality. [AH]
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ENGL 22001 - Shakespeare (Before 1800) Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
SHAKESPEARE (Before 1800) This class considers the following questions: How did Shakespeare’s plays come out of the literary, cultural, and political ideas and controversies of his time? How did his plays change and develop over his twenty-year period of writing? How did the major genres he wrote in-Comedy, History, Tragedy, and Romance-reflect his explorations of issues in gender, race and aesthetics? [AH]
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ENGL 22011 - James Baldwin & Toni Morrison Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT, WGSS)
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison James Baldwin and Toni Morrison are certainly two of the most significant authors of the 20th century. This course allows an intense study of their major works, including novels, theatre, short stories, essays, and literary critics’ responses to them all. We’ll explore answers to questions such as the following: What constitutes African American community, as well as larger U.S. and global communities? How are race, class, gender, and sexuality intersecting in our selected texts? In what ways are Baldwin and Morrison using jazz and the blues, critiquing whiteness, and otherwise unraveling societal politics? How are Baldwin and Morrison speaking to or against one another? Texts may include Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; If Beale Street Could Talk; Just Above My Head; Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone; or, Giovanni’s Room, among others, and, Morrison’s Love; Beloved; Playing in the Dark; Tar Baby; or, Song of Solomon, among others. Interviews and documentary films will be analyzed, and some visual art may be considered. [AH]
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ENGL 22013 - Chaucer Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Chaucer While we will focus primarily on The Canterbury Tales, we will also examine a number of cultural documents from the period. Our purpose will be to reconstruct a portrait of the poet and his milieu that will enable us to come to terms with the work which has more or less constituted Chaucer’s legacy. In evaluating this legacy we will consider whether (in the absence of an authorized text) we can talk in terms of a single text of The Canterbury Tales, or whether we should see the extant versions of the work as a multitude of texts which responded to various socio-historical and textual pressures even as they shaped the culture which produced them. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 23002 - Survey of African-American Literature Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT)
SURVEY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE This course is a historical study of the development and change of black themes and consciousness as manifested in poetry, fiction, autobiography, and essays, and of their correspondence with the literature produced by other ethnic groups in America. [AH]
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ENGL 23007 - 19th Century British Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
The Way We Live Now: Nineteenth-Century British Literature With its anxieties about shifting views of gender, race, and class and its failing imperial adventures, British culture of the nineteenth century uncannily resembles Anglo-American culture of the twenty-first. The nineteenth century ushered in an age of transformation; people struggled to absorb astonishing scientific and technological change, terrifying though exhilarating social experiments, and rapid globalization. This course will focus on four of the central transitions of the nineteenth century - industrialization, escalating class conflicts, shifting views of gender, and the growth of Empire - and explore some of the major authors of the period, including Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23012 - Poetry Since World War II Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
POETRY SINCE WORLD WAR II During his acceptance speech for the 1970 National Book Award for Poetry, Robert Lowell characterized the state of American poetry as involving a schism between the raw and the cooked, a division between poets (and readers of poetry) who expected new poetry to follow the fixed forms of the past, and those who thought this new poetry should be free. A major focus of this course on American, British and other English-speaking poetries in the years after World War II will be to consider this tension, looking at the early fractures between the New Critics and the Beats, the rise of organic verse in the 1960s, the Neo-formalist poetry of the 1980s, and the rise of rap-connected poetry in the 1990s. We will also explore how these spats within poetry might reflect wider cultural dynamics, be they ones influenced by the Cold War, by mass media, or by changing perspectives on what constitutes artistic tradition and authority. We will also explore the boundaries of the genre, looking at prose-poetry, spoken word poetry, song and rap lyrics as well as the presence of poetry in advertising and film. [AH]
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ENGL 23029 - American Literature to 1865 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
American Literature to 1865 This course surveys American literature through the Civil War. Readings span a range of genres and cover the major movements that shaped U.S. literary history: the culture of colonial settlers, Puritan and evangelical religiosity, Enlightenment epistemology, the Haitian and American revolutions, nationalism, reformist literature, the rise of the black public intellectual, and Transcendentalism. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23041 - Modernist Literatures Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Modernist Literatures This course addresses the history of prose fiction and poetry roughly at the point at which the novel and poetics start to become a self-conscious and problematic literary form. We begin with an overview of the literary philosophies with which and against which modernist writers worked (Romanticism, Social Realism, Naturalism) and then proceed to more radical and complex formal experiments of great high modernists, such as Joyce, Woolf, Elliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Hemingway, Toomer, Hesse, and others. We consider the question of what is now called postmodernism, particularly through reading excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses, and in important recent theorizing about problems of narrative and representation. Throughout, the course pays close attention to the social and political meanings of both experimental narrative techniques and theories of fiction, exploring the multi- and transnational aspects of this movement alongside other modernist endeavors such as painting, drama, and photography. [AH]
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ENGL 23042 - British Literature to 1800 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
British Literature to 1800 The course introduces students to British literature from its beginnings (Caedmon’s Hymn, Beowulf) to the late eighteenth century. Proceeding chronologically, units of the course will cover the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 17th century (sometimes overlooked in English literary history and periodization), and the Enlightenment. Students can expect to leave the class with deeper understandings of each period’s characteristic styles and genres and of historical contexts shaping literary production, such as the rise of colonialism and the English Civil War. Providing a foundation for further reading, this course is ideal for both majors and non-majors who wish to learn more about the early periods of British literary history and their enduring influence on global literatures. [Before 1800] [AH] [AH]
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ENGL 23043 - Noir Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
NOIR Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit. This comment, from the film Asphalt Jungle, encapsulates the cynicism and moral decay inherent in the sub-genre called film noir. Viewing films from the 1940s and 50s such as Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia, Out of the Past, and Leave Her to Heaven, we’ll explore the dark worlds of cinematic noir. We’ll interrogate the origins of the stylish sub-genre, and we’ll investigate how and why classic noir was adapted by Hollywood to produce films like Chinatown, Blade Runner, Blood Simple and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. [AH]
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ENGL 23044 - The Novel & Its Secrets Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
THE NOVEL & ITS SECRETS. The novel abounds with secrets. Blackmail plots, illicit love affairs, and stolen inheritances. In this course we will peek into the guilty heart of the nineteenth century, learn about the formation of the modern concept of privacy, and discuss how suspense, misdirection and revelation shape the unfolding of narrative. We will read detective stories, ghost stories, and spy novels, but we will also examine how even the realist novel collects, encodes, and circulates information–novels like Austen’s Mansfield Park, Dickens’s Great Expectations; and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23048 - Global Media Course Credit: 1
GLOBAL MEDIA This course examines the role film, television, and digital media play in our globalized culture. We will think of global media in three ways: texts that move across national borders, audiences for these texts, and industries that produce these texts. Our goals are to interrogate the origins of global media and the influence technologies like the internet have had, and to develop frameworks for analyzing and understanding this media. [AH]
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ENGL 23049 - Procedurals Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Procedurals American and British popular culture is saturated with procedurals: stories that focus on the process of solving a criminal case, usually though not always a murder, and revealing its secrets. These procedurals may appear in serial form, as did many early mystery novels, but our idea of the murder mystery is deeply linked to the novel form. In this course, we will discuss the history and development of the procedural, including both police procedurals and stories featuring independent investigators. We will read many variations on this form from its 19th-century antecedents to contemporary novels, and will also address adaptations (The Killing, Gracepoint, etc.), cultural appropriation, and creative responses to popular procedurals (paintings of Law & Order characters, novellas that foreground the strangeness of the subgenre). We will aim to investigate, ourselves, what makes this form so popular and what cultural purposes its continual variations suit. [AH]
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ENGL 24003 - The Odyssey of James Joyce’s Ulysses Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
THE ODYSSEY OF JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES This course explores the formation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, focusing on Joyce’s composing process, identifying and analyzing historical, cultural, social, literary, and personal contexts that he used in his artistic decision-making processes. Students will read the entirety of Ulysses as well as related secondary and primary sources and excerpts from Finnegans Wake. [AH]
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ENGL 24017 - The American Film Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
THE AMERICAN FILM The course samples the range of American film history from the silent film to the rise of Hollywood to postmodern and independent filmmaking. The course introduces basic strategies for the interpretation of visual style, narrative, and ideological coding in the cinema and is organized around the study of such genres and concepts as comedy, the musical, the western, the hard-boiled detective, film noir, the auteur, and the reflexive film. Students should be prepared to attend evening screenings each week. [AH]
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ENGL 24018 - Fidelity and Betrayal Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM, WGSS)
FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL - NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL ON FILM In this course, we will investigate both 19th century fictions and their contemporary film adaptations, debating the cultural work performed by both genres: what purposes did these novels serve for their first readers, what drives our own culture’s obsession with an imagined Victorian past, and how do discourses of nostalgia and of fidelity to the original shape adaptations of canonical novels? Readings will include 5-6 novels by authors like Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll, William Thackeray and Bram Stoker, as well as literary and film theory; students should also be prepared to attend 8-10 evening screenings.[Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 24019 - The Living and the Dead in Medieval Lit. Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Medieval beliefs in the afterlife were diverse and dynamic. Uncertainty about the nature of what came after death is reflected in the written output of the period. In this course, we will look not only at major literary works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Poor Heinrich, but also at chronicles in which zombies and priests meet in churchyards, and tales in which the dead haunt and revisit the living. [Before 1800]. [AH]
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ENGL 24027 - Mimic Forms in 18th Century Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
MIMIC FORMS: IMITATIVE LITERATURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY In the eighteenth century, it was common for writers to compose literature by imitating or mocking the forms of other works, including ancient as well as recent models. For instance, Pope’s Rape of the Lock adapts conventions of epic poetry; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels poses as an authentic travelogue; and Fielding’s Shamela parodies Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela. Are such mimic works inauthentic, derivative, or otherwise inferior to their originals, or might it be possible to understand mimicry as an innovative mode of literary production? In addition to exploring such questions in class discussions and analytical essays, you will also deepen your understanding of imitative literature by composing your own creative piece mimicking the form of another work. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 26100 - Advanced Fiction Writing Course Credit: 1
ADVANCED WRITING IN FICTIONAL FORMS Analysis, discussion, and practice of writing in one or more fictional forms, such as short stories, poems, or plays. Courses explore the aims and conventions of the specified written discourse and emphasize participants’ writing. May be repeated for credit as offerings vary. May be repeated. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26102 - Advanced Writing in Fictional Forms Course Credit: 1
ADVANCED FICTION WRITING: THE STORY CYCLE This course focuses on studying collections of linked short stories. Participants analyze several complete story cycles and discuss the techniques authors use to connect the stories in each collection in order to create cohesive book-length narratives. The emphasis during the first half of the semester is on studying published story collections. The class then shifts into writing and workshopping during the second half of the semester. As a class, students write and revise one complete story cycle, with each student contributing one story to the collection. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26103 - Advanced Poetry Writing Course Credit: 1
ADVANCED POETRY WRITING This course looks at a number of different contemporary poets and approaches to poetry, including writing in various fixed as well as open forms. Students explore (and experiment with in their own poetry) a number of traditional and contemporary techniques as well as consider prose-poetry, spoken word poetry, and other artistic threads prominent in the contemporary poetry landscape. Along with the reading of published works of poetry, students explore aspects of craft and style in their own writing as well as provide constructive feedback for their fellow writers in weekly workshops. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26107 - Advanced Writing in Fictional Forms Course Credit: 1
Advanced Writing in Fictional Forms: Short Forms In this workshop students will do advanced work in the short story form. In addition to considering aspects of style, voice, thematic development, and craft-based elements, students will also be encouraged to experiment, and try a range of narrative strategies. Four widely recognized and influential contemporary short story collections–Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Junot Diaz’s Drown, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior–will provide reference points for discussing literary craft, as well as inspiration for writing exercises and longer story assignments. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26108 - Adv Fictional Wrtg: the New Short Story Course Credit: 1
ADVANCED FICTION WRITING: THE NEW SHORT STORY The landscape of contemporary fiction is vital, and constantly changing. This course will focus exclusively on short fiction published within the last few years (two of the course texts will be released in early 2017), discussing in detail the specific ways in which these works impact and enlarge literary form, and influence our perception of ourselves and our socio-cultural moment. Students will be encouraged to participate in the evolution of the form by applying these narrative techniques and strategies to their own short fiction, which will then be discussed in formal workshops. Course texts may include What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours-Helen Oyoyemi, Vertical Motion-Can Xue, A Manual for Cleaning Women-Lucia Berlin, Homesick for Another World-Ottessa Moshfegh, Counternarratives-John Keene, Wait Til You See Me Dance-Deb Olin Unferth Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26109 - Advanced Writing: Poetry & Prose-Poetry Course Credit: 1
Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26110 - Advanced Short Story Writing Course Credit: 1
Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26111 - Adv Memoir & Creative Non-Fiction Wrtg Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
ADVANCED MEMOIR & CREATIVE NON-FICTION: NATURE & ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING This class will explore what can be found in creative writing when we lose ourselves in the wilderness of imagination and nature. Students will read stories that track beasts, chase myths, and challenge the limits of survival in search of answers, while journeying into the wild with their own creative work. This class will also consider the role and responsibility of nature writing in the midst of environmental decline and climate change. Students will share writing in a workshop setting, with the goal of generating several new pieces during the semester. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26112 - Advanced Poetry Writing: Looking Outward Course Credit: 1
Advanced Poetry Writing: Looking Outward In this advanced poetry workshop, students will read and write poems that reckon with the larger world through poetic investigations of historical and contemporary concerns and events. Students will abandon the inward gaze by incorporating research, facts, documents, politics, and history into their poems. During the semester, students will read several exemplary poetry collections and create original work with writing prompts and exercises. Students will workshop original poems and provide constructive criticism, with the goal of generating several new pieces during the semester. Course texts include The Art of Daring by Carl Phillips, Holey Moley Carry Me by Erika Meitner, Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith, Whereas by Layli LongSoldier, Sycamore by Kathy Fagan, and poems by C.D. Wright, Camille Dungy, Phil Metres, and Claudia Rankine. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-16100; Or permission of instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26113 - Writing the Novella Course Credit: 1
Writing the Novella In this creative writing course students will work on building and completing their own original novella-length works, while studying numerous examples of the contemporary novella to see what makes it tick. Special attention will be given to novellas that use unconventional approaches to content and structure, including cross-genre and hybrid works that are lyrical, formally experimental, or incorporate graphics. Authors studied will include Anne Carson, Justin Torres, Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Ondaatje, Sandra Cisneros, Max Porter, Claudia Rankine, and Italo Calvino. [AH]
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ENGL 27001 - The Politics of Language Course Credit: 1
THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE How do grammar and language norms reflect social, racial and national identities? How and why are some forms of English privileged over others? How do speakers and writers use language to delineate social and political groups? This course will seek to answer these questions by examining the connections between language, power, identity and culture. [AH]
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ENGL 27003 - Writing Tutoring Methods Course Credit: 1
TUTORING METHODS This course introduces students to the theory and practice of one-to-one composition instruction. Students explore theories from psychology, sociology, and English studies. Students also learn about the history of peer instruction and its place in a composition program. [AH]
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ENGL 29901 - Serials and Social Justice/ Digital Age Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
SERIALS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE DIGITAL AGE This team-taught writing seminar will begin by surveying serial storytelling techniques as well as the history of the form, beginning with Dickens’s nineteenth-century novels and moving through the wide range of media-art, comics, film, television, podcasts, twitter and so on-that have adopted and adapted the serial form. What functions do serials serve for consumers? For producers? How are plots configured to extend across time while meeting the (perceived) needs of diverse audiences? How does the genre, and the ways in which it is constructed, represent social diversity and engage with questions of social justice? Students will develop a critical vocabulary to assess the serial genre while analyzing the economic and cultural issues surrounding serial production and consumption. In the last half of the course, students will apply their learning by writing and producing a serial narrative of their own. [AH, C]
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ENGL 29902 - Networked Lives, Networked Bodies Course Credit: 1
ENGL/COMM-29902: Networked Lives, Networked Bodies The course will provide a survey of theories of cultural and media studies from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first, in tandem with a survey of the rise of the mass media. Focusing on the direct impact of media technologies on human ways of knowing, the course aims to help students-often typecast as digital natives-think critically about the technologies that surround us. Through humanistic training, students can learn to see media through fresh eyes, considering other possibilities for their own interactions with technology, as well as for the processes through which texts are composed and circulated and for technology’s role in shaping, and being shaped by, human cultures. [AH, C]
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ENGL 30010 - Post/Colonial Lit. & Film Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM, WGSS)
POST/COLONIAL LITERATURE AND FILM This research seminar investigates questions of identity in colonial and postcolonial novels, poems, and film. We will read paired colonial/postcolonial texts while considering the theoretical debates surrounding them, with particular focus on gender, race, national identity and narrative form. We will choose from authors like William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Jean Rhys, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith, and directors such as Patricia Rozema, Euzhan Palcy, Tim Greene, and Gurinder Chadha, and apply gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzalda, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Raka Shome. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-20000, and 2 literature courses; or permission of instructor. [AH]
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ENGL 30014 - Sem Lit/Cul St: Narrating Our Pasts Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Seminar in Literary and Culture Studies: Narrating Our Pasts The research seminar investigates narrative as a way of knowing by exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century fictional representations of the past in relation to the conventions of storytelling and assumptions about fiction and nonfiction. Focusing on novels that represent contested historical events, we examine how narrative both makes sense of our perceptions of the world and shapes those perceptions, including how experience and identities may become indistinguishable from story. Possible texts include William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, Toni Morrison, Beloved, Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer, Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods, Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, and D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel, as well as readings in narrative theory. The course fulfills the requirement in the English major for Junior Independent Study. Prerequisites: English 200 and at least two literature courses. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-20000, and at least 2 Literature courses [AH]
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ENGL 30015 - Sem/Lit/Cul St: Early American Novel Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Seminar in Literary and Culture Studies: The Early American Novel Research seminar on the history of the novel in the United States from the nation’s founding to the Civil War. The course will examine the American novel within the contexts of the emergence of the genre in English across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the social, economic, and geopolitical history of the United States. Authors may include Hannah Webster Foster, Charles Brockden Brown, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Wilson. Secondary readings will include foundational scholarly texts in the history and theory of the novel, as well as recent work in the fields of literary and cultural studies. The course fulfills the requirement in the English major for Junior Independent Study. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-20000, and 2 Literature courses [AH]
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ENGL 30016 - Sem Lit & Cult Studies: Bad Romance Course Credit: 1
Bad Romance [Before 1800] Medieval romance has a terrible reputation. Critics have maligned the authors of chivalric romances as hack writers who narrated preposterous stories in galloping meter. Geoffrey Chaucer parodied these romances in his own Tale of Sir Thopas-a tale so awful that the Host insisted he stop because his drasty ryming was nat worth a toord! But romance was one of the most popular forms of literature in the later Middle Ages. One critic even named it the pulp fiction of its day. Why did people read romances? Are they really aesthetically challenged? What do they say about the world in which they were written? Can they tell us anything about our world? In our quest to answer these and other more theoretical questions, we will read purportedly bad romances like Sir Isumbras and Erle of Toulouse, weird romances like Sir Gowther (a knight who is half devil), horrifying romances like Richard Coer de Lyon (cannibalism) and so-called good romances as well, such as Sir Orfeo and Gawain and the Green Knight. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-20000, and two literature courses; or permission of instructor. [AH]
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ENGL 40000 - Tutorial Course Credit: 1
TUTORIAL May be repeated.
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ENGL 41000 - English Internships Course Credit: 0.25
Maximum Credit: 1
INTERNSHIP A structured, usually off-campus experience, in which a student extends classroom knowledge to a work position within a community, business, or governmental organization. Student interns work and learn under the joint guidance of a host organization supervisor and a College of Wooster mentor. The student must arrange the internship in advance through the appropriate department or program. No more than six internships, and a maximum of four Wooster course credits, will count toward graduation. The form for registering for an internship and the Internship Learning Plan are available in the office of the Registrar. May be repeated.
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ENGL 45100 - Independent Study Thesis Course Credit: 1
SENIOR INDEPENDENT STUDY–SEMESTER ONE This is the first semester of the Senior Independent Study project, in which each student engages in creative and independent research guided by a faculty mentor and which culminates in a thesis and an oral examination in the second semester. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-40100 or ENGL-300xx Annually. Fall and Spring.
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ENGL 45200 - Independent Study Thesis Course Credit: 1
SENIOR INDEPENDENT STUDY–SEMESTER TWO This is the second semester of the Senior Independent Study project, which culminates in the thesis and an oral examination. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-45100 Annually. Fall and Spring.
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