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English Course Descriptions

English Course Descriptions – Spring 2006

All three-credit literature courses may fulfill the College of Arts & Sciences literature requirement.
Courses recommended to fulfill the literature requirement for non-English majors are indicated by *

EN 120* 01 3 Approaches to Literature McKenna MWF 9:00 25 None

The Approaches to Literature course offers students an opportunity to explore, discuss and write about a variety of literary genres including novels, short fiction, poetry and drama. Students learn to think critically while enhancing their understanding of the music and the power of language. As we uncover the “mysteries” of literature, students gain new insights into the creative process and into the ways literature links the reader and the writer.

EN 120* 02 3 Approaches to Literature Mihm TR 9:30 25 None

The Approaches to Literature course offers students an opportunity to explore, discuss and write about a variety of literary genres including novels, short fiction, poetry and drama. Students learn to think critically while enhancing their understanding of the music and the power of language. As we uncover the “mysteries” of literature, students gain new insights into the creative process and into the ways literature links the reader and the writer.

EN 160 01 1 Reading Roundtable: Poetry of Rock McKenna M 3:00 SH 407 15 None

This course will provide students the opportunity to explore the poetry of rock lyrics. We will examine the lyrics for meaning, social context, language and rhythm. Along with a look at artists like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Elton John, Carole King the Grateful Dead, the Moody Blues, Jim Morrison in the “classic rock” era, students will be encouraged to identify poets and poetry from contemporary music as well.

EN 170 01 1 Writing Roundtable: Family Legends:Exploring Creative Non-Fiction McKenna W 3:00 SH 407 15 None

Students will explore the process of turning family lore into creative works. The writing will encourage students to look beyond mere reporting of events to enhancing their writing in a variety of creative ways. The course will encourage students who have never taken a creative writing course to use family materials to discover that truth can indeed be as entertaining as fiction!

EN 170 02 1 Writing Roundtable:Round-robin Fiction Brooks F 2:00 Lib Mac 15 None

This is a one credit workshop in which each student will be writing round-robin fiction novellas in small groups. Each student starts with a character sketch, hinting at the genre and general social context. Then we read and imagine possible story lines and related characters for those stories that attract our interest. We plot out possible conflicts and issues, and the original author provides a key incidents report for the story line. Then we go in small teams, adding to each story each week. Join us if you are ready for a collaborative imaginative experience in serial fiction writing.

EN 201 01 3 Intro to Creative Writing Frech MWF 11:00 20

As the department's introductory creative writing workshop, this course will cover the essentials of form and structure (rhyme & meter, figurative language, narrative point of view) with an eye for improving and situating our own writing, whatever it is we wish to write. The expectations of critical writing and class presentation are limited in terms of length, but essential to our developing a vocabulary for talking about work and improving our own. We will write a few assigned creative responses to familiarize ourselves with form as a vehicle for meaning and a model for structure. Every effort in the course will focus on improving the student's own writing.

Fulfills the advanced writing requirement for English majors.

EN 215 01 3 News Writing 1 Meddaugh MWF 1:00 20 IN 151/consent

Focused on print reporting, this course is an introduction to basic methods of news reporting and writing. The course is designed to develop skills associated with gathering and organizing information from a variety of sources and developing stories based on that information. Additionally, students develop a basic knowledge of writing techniques and story types, and learn to apply this knowledge in exercises and writing assignments. The course also examines the modern news industry and media ethics.

Fulfills the advanced writing requirement for English majors.

EN 220 01 3 Literature of Childhood: Dwiggins TR 3:30 10
IN 250 (Mis)Representation of Others 15

In this course we will examine cultural (mis)representations of diversity inside America. We will look at the representations of gender, race, and class. We will explore the meaning of diversity while analyzing picture books, novels, and films marketed to children. Throughout our consideration of these matters, we will discuss, argue, and question. Texts we will examine include a sampling from genres such as folk tales, picture books, fantasy, science fiction, and concept books. We will approach the literature reading with different “eyes,” including an historical approach, a feminist approach, and a psychological approach. We will also view a couple of movies that were created based on these texts or influenced by them.

Counts toward a Gender Studies minor.

EN 222 01 3 Adolescent Literature: Home Dwiggins TR 2:00 15
IN 250 is Where the Heart Is 10 Sophomore

“Home” is an important part of the lives shared by adolescents of all cultures, whether they embrace that home or reject it. This course will explore works that portray teenagers in a wide variety of home settings aiding to our exploration of the role that “home” plays in the lives of the characters. Questions of gender, race, and culture will be addressed. Through reading, writing, and class discussions, students will come to a better understanding of different literary genres highlighting this theme.

Counts toward a Gender Studies minor. Recommended for future middle school teachers.

EN 232 01 3 American Lit of the 20th Century O’Conner MWF 10:00 15
IN 250 10

This course surveys a wide range of modern American writers from around 1900 to the present. It examines these writers in the cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts of the 20th Century. Units include Regional and Social Realism, Early 20th century Poets, Modernist Portraits, the Southern Renaissance, the Literature of Liberation and the Search for Identity, among others. Along with close readings and examinations of the literature, we will look at a broad range of the cultural contexts that influence this literature including the fine arts, history, material culture, religion, politics, music, cultural geography, folklore and anthropology.

Fulfills the English core Literature in the 20th Century requirement and American Lit requirement of English Education majors.

EN 270 01 3 Computer Aided Publishing Frech MWF 12:00 Lib Mac 20

This course is an introduction to layout and design as well as computer tools that assist designers in their tasks. The course will revolve around Adobe InDesign 2.0. In addition, you will work with image software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. By the time you finish this course you will be able to:

· Use InDesign to design a variety of professional materials
· Know the key concepts of layout and design
· Know how to adapt rhetoric for a business-oriented audience
· Have fun doing all of the above

Class sessions will be a combination of presentation and discussion, followed by workshop time for you to practice what we covered that day.

Fulfills a publishing requirement for English majors, but does not fulfill advanced writing requirement.

EN 280 01 1 Journalism Workshop Meddaugh TBA 15 IN 215/consent

Staff members of the Decaturian, Millikin’s campus newspaper, receive credit for writing and other staff responsibilities. This course can be repeated each semester for up to eight credits.

EN 300 01 3 Advanced Creative Writing Braniger MWF 2:00 20

The workshop will focus on collecting, revising, polishing and preparing your poems for publication. There are two major projects for the course. The first involves researching current poetry publications and choosing appropriate places for submitting your work. The second is to organize and prepare your poems as a portfolio, collection, chapbook or book. Along the way you will workshop poems, write cover letters for submission and write a reflective introduction to your poetry collection. This course is for advanced writers who are experienced in the craft of poetry, and who are serious about continuing to write and publish poems. You should already have a good group of poems you are excited to revise and polish, and should be prepared to write poems throughout the workshop.

Fulfills the advanced writing requirement for English majors.

EN 301 01 3 Web Publishing O’Conner TR 9:30 Lib Mac 20

Web Publishing is a workshop on writing and publishing web sites. Are you ready to expand your mind into cyberspace? Will computer screens shape your thoughts? Or will you shape computer screens to create and project your cyber-self into the virtual world of the web? This workshop examines web publishing and takes you from reflective interaction to critical creation of new hypertexts. You will learn how to critique web site designs and how to create web pages for campus and off-campus clients. This is an advanced writing course, with extended individual projects ranging from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literary criticism, bibliographical web resources, technical writing, educational resources and web reference collections.

Fulfills the advanced writing requirement for English majors or the publishing course requirement.

EN 301 01 3 Rhetoric & Feminism in Writing Zhao TR 3:30 20

Women’s voices have been collectively silenced and erased from the Western Rhetorical Tradition. This course discusses how such a silence has been challenged by some women writers and feminist scholars whose writing and theories have not only rewritten the western rhetorical history but also challenged us to reinvent ourselves through listening to their voices. This course provides a historical review of women rhetors and scholars from ancient times to nineteenth century to contemporary times, examining how they have created a feminist rhetoric that is disrupting the masculinist rhetoric. This course expects you to bring readings of your own choice as a supplement to the core readings. Through readings, writings, and discussions, this course encourages you to reflect on and challenge your own and other’s assumptions toward rhetoric, history, epistemology, and writing. This course will be helpful for junior and senior English majors to develop a new perspective in understanding rhetoric and writing. It is also helpful for those who are planning to go to graduate school.

Fulfills the advanced writing requirement for English majors and counts toward a Gender Studies minor..

EN 310 01 3 Apply Writing Theory Zhao TR 2:00 25

Applying Writing Theory introduces you to major contemporary writing theories and offers you opportunities to apply these writing theories both to your own writing and to the teaching of writing. This course walks you through major theories on composing processes and provides an overview of important elements of the writing process—invention, arrangement, argument, audience, style, and grammar. This course asks you to apply theories into the writings for your journals, response papers, blackboard discussions, research projects, grammar presentations, and into the development process of your own writing theory and writing pedagogy.

This course is helpful for junior and senior English majors who intend to choose writing as a major, who plan to teaching writing in the future, or who plan to go to graduate school.

Fulfills the Applying Writing Theory course requirement for writing majors and English Education majors.

EN 322 01 3 Major English Authors II Mihm TR 12:30 25

An introduction to major writers and literary movements in English literature from 1750 to the present (especially the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary eras). Longer works in fiction, drama, and/or film include E. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Dickens’ Great Expectations, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Shaw’s Pygmalion, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Throughout the course we’ll (1) interpret readings in historical and cultural contexts, (2) study how individual writers experiment with literary forms and styles, and (3) and discuss a wide variety of themes, from ideas of women, marriage, gender roles, and social convention to ideas of war, art, nature, colonialism, and the Self.

Fulfills the English major requirement for British Traditions II.

EN 325 01 3 Shakespeare’s Globe Poitevin TR 11:00 10
IN 350 15

After taking in his fair share of plays in England, the Swiss traveler Thomas Platter remarked in 1599 that “the English pass their time learning at the play what is happening abroad, since… [they] for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.” This course will investigate what precisely the English might have learned about “foreign matters” and foreign peoples by going to plays. We may consider some of the following: Scottish history and Macbeth; American Indians, the Irish, and The Tempest, foreign trade and The Merchant of Venice; Africans, Ottomans and Othello, immigrants in Sir Thomas More. Dramatic readings will be supplemented with readings from English (and other) travelers’ writings and other descriptions of foreign peoples circulating in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Fulfills the Shakespeare requirement for English majors as well as the dramatic literature requirement for Theater majors.

EN 331* 01 3 Global Literature & Film Banerjee T 5:50 & K 128 10
IN 350 R 5:00-7:30 15 Junior

As Timothy Mo’s protagonist puts it in An Insular Possession, “Under the different veneers of varying laws, institutions, and civilizations . . . the Old Adam is the same. His nature contains the same admixture of bad and good . . . whether subsumed under an integument which is yellow, black, red, white, coffee, or any combination of fleshly tints.” Drawing inspiration from this sense of commonalities and affinities that exists among writings on both sides of cultural hegemonic divides, this course will cover short fiction, nonfiction, novels and some poems from different regions of the world. This material, however, is linked by the common language of English, imposed by British imperial expansion. In many instances, the language has acquired local linguistic features, but the various versions retain some affinity with each other and with the British English. The writers we will read in the course have had to define themselves in relation to current or residual imperial presences and/or dominant cultures in their own cultures. The course will teach basic principles of close reading and literary analysis as well as feature discussion of the social and cultural contexts of the texts. The theoretical problem that will preoccupy us through the course is the nature of the relationship between post/colonial nation[ality], race, class, politics, exile identity, language, aesthetics, and gender. The geographical regions that we will cover in this course are: (1) Africa (2) Caribbean (3) South and South East Asia (4) South Pacific (5) North America (6) United Kingdom. Additional critical readings will be regularly assigned. Also, students will be required to attend weekly film screenings.

Fulfills the English core Literature in the 20th Century requirement and international literature course requirement of the Global Studies major.

EN 340* 01 3 American Midwestern Poetry Braniger MWF 12:00 10
IN 350 15

From the quiet observations of James Wright to the powerful jazz poetry of Langston Hughes, we will spend the semester immersed in poetry originating in the Midwest. Since Walt Whitman celebrated the life and spirit of the new west, we will start with Leaves of Grass, and then focus on the development of Midwestern poetry in the twentieth century. We will look at the way the culture of the Midwest—its landscape, history, politics and economics—shaped the poetry of those who were born, raised and or resided in the Midwest and Great Plains states. All along the way, we will want to question the whole notion of Midwestern poetry as we study its origins and traditions. Poets we may study include, but are not limited to Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, James Wright, William Stafford, Carl Sandburg, Judith McCombs, David Wagoner, David Baker and others.

Fulfills the English core Literature in the 20th Century requirement or Studies in Poetry requirement for literature majors.

EN 360* 01 3 City in Modern American Novels Matthews, Anne TR 3:30 10 IN 151
IN 250 15

This course will examine works by Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, West, and Wright in their literary, historical, and cultural contexts, with special emphasis on the problems urbanization, industrialization, materialism, and determinism create for personal identity. Students will keep weekly reading journals, write two 7-8-page interpretive essays, and give a presentation.

Fulfills the English core Literature in the 20th Century requirement or Studies in Fiction requirement for literature majors.

EN 366 01 3 Decolonizing Modernism Banerjee M 6:00-6:50 & K 128 10
W 6:00-7:40

When Virgina Woolf wryly declared, “On or about December 1910, human nature changed,” she offered an influential (and self-aggrandizing) pronouncement about how Modernism changed the world. We shall begin this course by re-examining Modernism, but cut a much wider swath of swath of cultural material by studying “high” and “low” Modernism together. We will be reading many canonical texts of high modernism—principally novels and poems by Woolf, Joyce, Forster, Eliot and Yeats—against popular forms, such as the Grub Street literature. The theoretical problem that will preoccupy us through the course is the nature of the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and gender.

Besides reading widely in the literature of the period, we will also use this course to provide us with grounding in critical writing methods. My preference (as always) is cultural materialism, which asks us to see written texts as actively engaged in shaping social attitudes in addition to offering us partial and mediated images of their historical moment. Such a method requires us to learn as much as we can about the period, about its social histories as well as larger economic and political developments—this will be one major focus of student journals, papers, and presentations throughout the semester. Student work will be centered on particular moments and events which offer us an opening onto significant debates and issues of the day. In addition to social histories and materialist cultural criticism, we would also learn how to read and integrate feminist and queer theory, which has provided some of the most vibrant analyses of the modernism in recent years, with the analysis of form.

Fulfills the English core Literature in the 20th Century requirement or Studies in Literary History requirement for literature majors.

EN 366* 03 3 Sex and Gender in Renaissance Lit Poitevin MWF 1:00 25

This course will explore the construction of gender and sexuality in English Renaissance literature and culture. We look at the ways in which conduct manuals prescribe roles for men and women, and consider the ways gender roles are represented in poems, plays, and prose by both male and female authors including Elizabeth I, John Donne, Amelia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, John Milton, and others.

Fulfills the English core English Traditions to 1700 requirement or Studies in Literary History
requirement for literature majors and/or counts toward a Gender Studies minor.

EN 380 01 3 Troubles in Journalism Meddaugh TR 12:30 20

The Troubles of Journalism: A Critical Look at What’s Right and Wrong With the Press is a course that offers students a critical examination of the press in contemporary society. The American press has been an integral part of the history and development of our nation. How? Why? Issues include the global impact of the American media, freedom of the press: theories and values, news as a “business,” the role and responsibility of a free press in our democracy, foreign affairs reporting, and the fading American newspaper.

Fulfills the advanced writing requirement for English majors.

EN 382 01 3 Art of Publishing Brooks MWF 1:00 Lib Mac 15

The Art of Publishing course provides an integrated learning experience based on active participation as an editor, designer or manager for the just-being-born Millikin University Blue Connection Press publishing company. This course focuses on strategies and issues of running a small publishing company, with a practical production experience of developing a major publishing project of the Blue Connection Press. Come join in the effort of developing a publishing house at Millikin and be part of the start-up team as they develop a first new publication project for the Blue Connection Press. This course will be co-taught in the Media Arts Center by professors Randy Brooks and Ed Walker.

Fulfills a publishing requirement for English majors, but does not fulfill advanced writing requirement.

EN 420 01 3 Decolonizing Modernism Banerjee M 6:00-6:50 & K 128 10
W 6:00-7:40

See the course description for EN 366 above. As a seminar, EN 420 requires a major research project.

Fulfills the 420 literature seminar required of all English literature majors.

EN 480 50 1-3 Professional Writing Internship Brooks tba

Professional Writing Internship is a chance for you to gain experience using your writing skills in the workplace. Work as a writer a few hours a week for local organizations writing and designing brochures, web sites, books, newsletters, grant proposals, and other documents. Establish a network of contacts for future job referrals and build up a portfolio of successful documents. You must complete a learning contract including (1) site supervisor contact information, (2) task description, (3) learning goals, and (4) professional expectations. See Dr. Brooks for further details and help getting placed.