ENLT: Courses in English Literature
Department of Languages and Literature
ENLT 215 Introduction to Literature 3 credit
This course will introduce students to the basic reading and analytical
skills needed to understand and appreciate literature. Students will
become familiar with reading different literary genres (prose, poetry,
and drama) and learn to use basic terms and techniques of literary
analysis. They will develop multiple interpretations and responses to
literary texts and support their interpretation and responses with textual
evidence, both in discussions and writing. Also, they will discover how
texts communicate cultural values and ideas through a variety of approaches
to the reading and appreciation of literature. Offerings each
semester range from an overview of literature through conventional
genres to exploration of a limited historical period or topic in literature.
Prerequisite: ENWR 102. This course will be taught every semester.
ENLT 221 Survey of Classical Literature 3 credit
A study of our Greek and Latin literary heritage in translation with emphasis
on classical myths and legends of gods and heroes that continue
to stimulate the literary imagination today. Principal genres include
epic and lyric poetry; the animal fable; and drama (tragedy, comedy,
and New Comedy). Representative authors include Hesiod, Homer,
Aesop, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Catullus, Virgil,
Plautus, Terence, and Ovid. Prerequisite: ENWR 102. Each semester.
Satisfies CORE literature. May fulfill writing intensive requirement.
ENLT 303 Medieval English Literature 3 credit
A study of literature written in Britain during the Old English period
(8th century to 1066) and Middle English period (1066 to 1485), key
periods in the formation of English language and culture. Principal
genres include epic and lyric poetry, romance, tale, and drama. Representative
works include the epic Beowulf, the mystery and morality
plays, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Margery Kempe’s autobiography,
and Arthurian romances. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and ENLE 200.
Fall semester even-numbered years.
ENLT 306 Classic Texts and Contemporary Revisions 3 credit
A study of the contemporary trend of revisionary metafiction. The
course will explore a number of paired texts - one in the pair has been
traditionally identified as a classic text in English literature and the
other is a 20th century revision. The course will emphasize the ways
in which texts are always shaped by other texts and how texts shape,
communicate, and critique cultural beliefs and values. Examples of
texts include the Brother Grimm’s fairy tales and Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Naylor’s Mama Day, Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee’s Foe, Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Rhy’s Wide
Sargasso Sea, Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Cunningham’s The Hours.
Prerequisite: ENWR 102. Fall even-numbered years. Spring semester
odd-numbered years.
ENLT 323 Renaissance English Literature 3 credit
A study of literature written in Britain during the 16th and 17th
centuries, which accompanied the spread of humanism, an emergent
nationalism, and the civil strife of the latter period. Principle genres
include drama and poetry. Representative authors include Sir Thomas
More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William
Shakespeare, Amelia Lanier, the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets,
Lady Mary Wroth, and John Milton. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and
ENLE 200. Fall semester odd-numbered years
ENLT 334 World Literature 3 credit
Critical and comparative study of selected representative literary works
from African, Arabic, Latin American, and Oriental literature. Fall
semster, even-numbered years. Fulfills global diversity requirement.
ENLT 343 18th Century British Literature 3 credit
A study of literature written in Britain from the late 17th to the late
18th century, emerging in conjunction with the rise of rationalist philosophy,
experimental science, industrialization, and empire. Primary
emphasis is on the rise of the British novel and on the emergence of satire
as a key literary mode of the period. Other principal genres include
drama, poetry, and nonfiction prose. Representative authors include
William Congreve, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson,
Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John
Dryden, and Samuel Johnson. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and ENLE
200. Fall semester odd numbered years
ENLT 363 19th Century British Literature: The Romantics 3 credit
A study of literature written in Britain from 1780 to 1830, which
variously celebrated and challenged the social, political and economic
changes that accompanied industrialization and ignited the American
and French revolutions. Principal genres of the period include poetry,
the novel, and the essay. Representative authors include Romantic
poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats;
novelists such as Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley; and
prose writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas DeQuincey, and
William Hazlitt. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and ENLE 200. Spring
semester, even-numbered years
ENLT 367 19th Century British Literature: The Victorians 3 credit
A study of British literature written from 1830-1900, which registers
the hopes and anxieties prompted by industrialization, urbanization
and the growth of individualism. Principal genres include poetry, the
novel and nonfiction prose, all of which were being created for and
read by a larger and more diverse audience. Representative works include
the novels of Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and
George Eliot; the prose of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill; and
the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and ENLE 200. Fall
semester, even-numbered years.
ENLT 373 19th Century American Literature 3 credit
A study of major currents of nineteenth-century literature of the United
States, from the antebellum period, through the Civil War, to the very
beginnings of the twentieth century. The course may explore any of
the following literary movements: the Romantic movement, including
Transcendentalist writers and philosophers (e.g., Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), as well as the writers of the
Romance fiction (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville);
mid-century domestic fiction (including such writers as Louisa May
Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe); slave narratives (Harriet Jacobs and
Fredrick Douglas, among others); and American Realism, including
major proponents of realism at the end of the century, such as mark
Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, so-called “local color
writers,” such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and
turn-of-the-century naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Theodore
Dreiser. Prerequisite: EN 102. Spring odd-numbered years.
ENLT 383 20th Century British Literature 3 credit
A study of British literature written in the 20th century, shaped by the
critical shifts in thought and literary technique associated with modernism
and postmodernism. Each movement, developing in the wake of
a World War, is characterized by a major break with literary tradition.
Principal genres include poetry, drama, novels, short fiction and the
essay. Representative authors include William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot,
Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, George
Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Iris
Murdoch, Tom Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill. Prerequisite: ENWR
102 and ENLE 200. Spring semester, even-numbered years. Fulfills
writing intensive requirement.
ENLT 393 Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance 3 credit
A study of early twentieth-century American literature (called “modernism”),
from World War I through the 1930s. The course explores
the work of white modernist writers (many of whom were part of the
expatriate community in Paris during the period) alongside that of the
African American writers of the same period who lived in the United
States and participated in the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Among the writers studied may be Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, H.D. William Faulkner, Zora
Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Nella Larson, and W.E.B Du Bois.
Prerequisite: EN 102. Fall odd-numbered years.
ENLT 397 20th Century American Literature 3 credit
A study of American literature from the beginning of the Second
World War (1939) to the present. Particular focus is given to antiestablishment
literature protesting the cultural conformity of the
1950s, the counterculture writers of the 1960s and early 70s and the
post-modern writers of the 1980s and 90s. Includes representative
literary movements such as the Agrarian writers, Beat writers, the
confessional poets, the Vietnam writers, and a wide variety of ethnic
writers producing literature in traditional and experimental forms.
Representative authors include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Eudora
Welty, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor,
Robert Lowell, Tennessee Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath,
Theodore Roethke, Arthur Miller, Tim O’Brien, Nikki Giovanni, Alice
Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Edward
Albee, David Mamet and Maria Irene Fornes. Prerequisite: ENWR
102 and ENLE 200. Spring semester, odd-numbered years.
ENLT 410 Women’s Literature 3 credit
A study of literature written by women, exploring what it means when
women become the center of their own stories. The subtitle of the
course will help define the focus: The course may focus on writings
by British women, American women, women from any ethnic and/
or national group, or a combination of any of the above. The course
may span historical periods or focus on one century or specific period.
Feminist literary and cultural theory may be an added focus. Writers
may include: Jane Austin, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Virginia
Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Louise
Erdrich. Prerequisite: ENWR 102. Offered spring even-numbered
years.
ENLT 411 African American Literature 3 credit
A study of the history of African American literature. The course begins
with early writings by slaves (these may include Phillis Wheatley,
Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs); moves through the nineteenth
century to study the Harlem Renaissance writers of the early twentieth
century (including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora
Neale Hurston); continues into the twentieth century to investigate
post-World War II works (by such writers as Ralph Ellison, Lorraine
Hansbury, and Gwendolyn Brooks); and ends with investigating contemporary
African American texts (these may include novels by Toni
Morrison and movies directed by Spike Lee). Prerequisite: ENWR
102. Offered fall even-numbered years. Fulfills national diversity
requirement.
ENLT 412 Native American Authors 3 credit
A study of literature written by American Indian authors, beginning
with the cultural traditions and influences within oral literature, then
moving through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This
exploration continues through the works of the twentieth century,
surveying poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by authors such as N. Scott
Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Wendy Rose, Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie
Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Louis Owens, Sherman Alexie, Louise
Erdrich, and Montana American Indian authors D’Arcy McNickle and
James Welch. Prerequisite: ENWR 102. Offered spring even-numbered
years. Fulfills National Diversity requirement.
ENLT 416 Myth in Literature 3 credit
This course is designed to introduce students to the study of mythology
as a major source of meaning in literature. It begins with a comprehensive
definition of myth and moves on to explore its characteristic
features, the functions it serves in different societies, and the major
archetypal myths that human societies, ancient and modern, have developed
- creation myths, the hero/heroine myth, the quest myth, the
initiation myth, myths of paradise and the underworld, and so on in
Greece, the Middle East, Japan, Egypt, the Americas, Africa, Nothern
Europe, and the Pacific Islands. Representative works studied include
The Orestia, The Odyssey, Native American folktales, The Mabinogi,
The Ramayana, The Poetic Edda, Amaterasu, Central American myths,
and African folktales. Prerequisites: ENWR 102 and ENLT 215. Offered
spring semester even-numbered years. Fulfills Global Diversity
requirement.
ENLT 423 Shakespeare 3 credit
A study of the dramatic and poetic art of William Shakespeare. Plays
from both the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will be selected to
illustrate the development of the author’s style and theatrical conventions,
with representation from the histories, the comedies, the Roman
plays, the tragedies, the problem plays, and the late romances. Students
will develop their critical faculties by applying a variety of recent approaches
to Shakespearean scholarship. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and
ENLE 200. The ENLE 200 requirement is waived for Performing Arts
majors and minors of junior or senior status. Spring semester.
ENLE: Courses in English Language, Criticism, &
Education
Department of Languages and Literature
ENLE 200 Literary Studies 3 credit
Required of all majors and minors in English, this course acquaints
students with literature as both an academic discipline and an art by
developing the analytical and critical skills required for more sophisticated
readings of literary works. By studying the literary techniques
of exemplary authors, students also discover ways in which attentive
reading might stimulate and guide their own writing. Along with introducing
students to the vocabulary and methods of reading literary
works from psycho-analytic, feminist, historicist, reader-response, and
other critical perspectives, the course provides training and practice in
writing literary exposition. Does not satisfy CORE. Prerequisite: EN
102. Fall Semester.
ENLE 332 English Grammar 3 credit
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the emphasized.
Three lectures per week plus two hour seminar. Preemio of traditional
grammar, it also focuses on both structural and transformational grammar.
Topics include parts of the simple sentence, word classes, the
structure of phrases and clauses, sentence types, aspect, mood, voice
and style as well as the strengths and weaknesses of particular kinds of
grammatical description. Prerequisite: ENWR 102 and ENLE 200.
The ENLE 200 prerequisite is waived for TESOL majors of junior and
senior status. Fall semester, even-numbered years.
ENLE 333 Introduction to the English Language 3 credit
The study of the origins, development and linguistic structures of
Indo-European languages as cultural phenomena. Special attention is
devoted to the linguistic, semantic and cultural history of the English
language as it has evolved from an obscure Germanic tongue to a prominent
world language. Topics include the design features of language,
linguistic variation, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics,
pragmatics, and the major historical forms of English. Prerequisite:
ENWR 102 and ENLE 200. ENLE 332 is strongly recommended.
The ENLE 200 prerequisite is waived for TESOL majors of junior and
senior status. Spring semester.
ENLE/ED 365 Young Adult Literature 3 credit
A study of literature written for young adults. Students will read, listen
to and evaluate a wide variety of literature published for or enjoyed
by young adult readers, including traditional folk tales, myths, and
legends; fantasy and realistic fiction; biography and autobiography;
and poetry. Students will also study techniques for teaching and using
literature in the 5-12 classroom. Prerequisites: ENWR 102 and ENLE
200. Spring semester, odd-numbered years.
ENLE 404 Literary Criticism 3 credit
A study of diverse types of literary criticism by means of reading primary
texts in traditional and current theory and by applying these interpretive
and evaluative strategies to specific literary works and authors.
Representative theoretical positions include formalist, archetypal, psychoanalytic,
structuralist, feminist, deconstructionist, reader-response,
historicist, linguistic, semeiotic, and textual criticism. Prerequisite:
ENWR 102 and ENLE 200. Fall, odd-numbered years.
ENLE/ED 411 Teaching English on the Secondary Level 3 credit
A study of the theories and methods for teaching the communication
arts in the secondary schools with special emphasis on teaching
literature and composition, as well as contemporary issues within
the profession. Prerequisite: a grade of “C” or better in ED 309. Fall
semester, odd-numbered years.
ENLE 425 Studies in Rhetoric and Composition 3 credit
Especially recommended for students preparing for high school teaching
or graduate studies, this course surveys theories and practices of
writing instruction. Includes the study of rhetoricians and educators
such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian, George Campbell, Kenneth
Burke, Stephen Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, Mina Shaughnessy,
Peter Elbow, and Patricia Bizzell. Prerequisite: Two advanced writing
course or consent of instructor. Fall semester, even-numbered years.