metropolitan college academic courses undergraduate courses
english

English Undergraduate Courses

composition literature

Composition

Note 1: All students enrolling in MET EN 101 are required to take a placement examination. The Department of English reserves the right to assign students to sections based on the results of this examination. Note 2: MET EN 101 and EN 102 fulfill the same composition requirements as EN 103 and 104. Note 3: For full-time and additional part-time courses in English for international students, contact the Boston University Center for English Language and Orientation Programs (CELOP), 890 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215; 617-353-4870.

MET BC 101 Basic Writing Skills

Logic and techniques of writing, with review of grammar and mechanics. For students who wish to improve their basic writing skills in preparation for further academic work, professional growth, or personal enrichment. Classes limited in size to ensure individual attention. Does not provide College of Arts and Sciences credit. (2 cr.)

MET EN 104 English Composition

Required for all undergraduate degrees. Reinforces basic skills in communication necessary for college work. Instruction and practice in fundamentals of critical writing, reading, and thinking. Lectures combined with seminars on vital current social, political, psychological, and philosophical issues. Students choose their seminars. Frequent papers; individual conferences. (4 cr.)

MET EN 201 Intermediate Composition

Prereq: MET EN 104 or equivalent, or exemption. Does not give concentration credit. Practice in writing exposition, argument and persuasion, the critical essay, and the research paper. Related readings offered in humanities or business writing orientations. Individual conferences. Limited enrollment. (4 cr.)

MET EN 202 Introduction to Creative Writing

Designed mainly for those with little or no experience in creative writing. An introduction to writing in various genres: poetry, fiction, and plays. Students' works discussed in class. Limited enrollment. (4 cr.)

MET EN 305 Advanced Writing of Fiction

Competitive admission, limited enrollment. Note: Obtain syllabus at Creative Writing Program Office (236 Bay State Rd.) before end of fall semester. Intensive study of American writers and of writing by participants. Students write and present at least one story or chapter and read writings of others. (4 cr.) Stamped approval for non-MET students. Writing sample required. See English Dept, Rm. 211

Additional Course

MET MG 310 Business Communication

Literature

Note: Prerequisite for all 500-level courses is at least 8 credits from the following: MET EN 121-199 or EN 220-223.

MET EN 121, 122 Readings in World Literature

MET EN 121 is not a prerequisite for EN 122. Representative fiction, poetry, and drama by selected major figures in world literature. Primarily for students not concentrating in English. (4 cr. each.)

MET EN 125 Readings in Modern Literature

Representative fiction, poetry, and drama from modern Continental, British, and American writers. Primarily for students not concentrating in English. (4 cr.)

MET EN 127 Readings in American Literature

Selected American writers from the Colonial period to the present. Prose and poetry representative of the American tradition. Primarily for students not concentrating in English. (4 cr.)

MET EN 141 Literary Types: Fiction

Representative English and American novels from the eighteenth century to the present. Required papers. Primarily for students not concentrating in English. (4 cr.)

MET EN 142 Literary Types: Poetry

Critical reading of representative English and American poems. Primarily for students not concentrating in English. (4 cr.)

MET EN 143 Literary Types: Drama

Critical reading of representative plays from the ancient Greeks to the present. Primarily for students not concentrating in English. (4 cr.)

MET EN 220 Religion in Literature

All of the texts in our syllabus grapple with the fundamental questions of human experience from a religious or spiritual perspective. Some Biblical works (such as The Song of Songs and Job) will be included; however, the focus will be on how religious ideas and concerns have informed an enormous diversity of literary productions drawn on a variety of traditions (including non-Western and non-monotheistic ones.) Our syllabus will include fiction (Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Illych"), drama (Marlowe's Doctor Faustus), lyric poetry (Donne's "Holy Sonnets," Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"), and a native American memoir (Black Elk Speaks). (4 cr.)

MET EN 322 Survey of British Literature I

Prereq: MET HU 221. British literature from its beginnings to the Restoration. (4 cr.)

MET EN 323 Survey of British Literature II

Prereq: MET EN 322. British literature from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century. (4 cr.)

MET EN 355 Modern Drama

A century's transformations of drama and stage. Reading and discussion of plays from early realism and expressionism to the theatre of the absurd and present trends: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, and others. (4 cr.)

MET EN 356 Modern Drama II

Modern to contemporary drama since about 1950. Beckett, Genet, Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Arden, Stoppard, Durrenmatt, Grass, Weiss, Handke, Albee, Miller, Williams, Shepard, and others. Related readings in predecessors, such as Kleist and Artaud, and in less well known contemporaries. (4 cr.)

MET EN 363 Shakespeare I

Six plays chosen from the following: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV (Part 1), Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Tale. (4 cr.)

MET EN 364 Shakespeare II

Six plays chosen from the following: Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. (4 cr.)

MET EN 373 Detective Fiction

Origins and development of the detective and crime genres in England and America, including works of Collins, Poe, Dickens, Doyle, Christie, Sayers, and Chandler, among others. (4 cr.)

MET EN 525 Literature of the Seventeenth Century I

Emphasis on Bacon, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Crashawe, Browne, and other authors. (4 cr.)

MET EN 529 The Romantic Age: English Literature in the Age of Revolution

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Emphasis on readings, but the course deals with romanticism both as a historical movement and as a cultural category significantly connected to modernism. (4 cr.)

MET EN 530 The Romantic Age II

Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Emphasis on readings, but the course deals with romanticism both as a historical movement and as a cultural category significantly connected to modernism. (4 cr.)

MET EN 535 Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry

Study of selected poets: Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Lawrence, Larkin, and Heaney. (4 cr.)

MET EN 536 Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Study of five or six poets from the following: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Ammons, Ashbery, Plath, Ginsberg, and Merrill. (4 cr.)

MET EN 543 The Nineteenth-Century English Novel

The novel from Scott to Hardy. Among the works to be discussed: Scott's Waverley, Austen's Emma, Dickens's Bleak House, Eliot's Middlemarch, Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure. (4 cr.)

MET EN 544 The Modern British Novel

Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford, Forster, Beckett, and other novelists of the period 1895-1956. (4 cr.)

MET EN 546 The Modern American Novel

From 1900 to the present, including Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and selected contemporary novelists. (4 cr.)

MET EN 547 Contemporary American Fiction

Study of American postmodern fiction and culture since 1950; includes works by Atwood, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, DeLillo, Nabokov, Pynchon, and others. (4 cr.)

MET EN 552 English Drama from 1590 to 1642

The heritage of Marlowe and Shakespeare: the collapse of a historic world; Jacobean pessimism and decadence in the plays of Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford and others. (4 cr.)

MET EN 597 Medieval Lyric

A survey of sacred and secular lyric poetry composed from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries in Latin, Provencal, Old and Middle French, Old and Middle English, Middle High German, and Icelandic. Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina Burana, Archpoet, Hugh Primus, Walter von der Vogelweide, Rutebeuf, Villon, and others. (4 cr.)

MET HU 210 Art in an Authoritarian Age

Notes from Underground: Major developments in the arts since the Romantic era and their relation to authoritarian trends in modern society. Writers, artists, and composers studied will include: Blake, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, Pynchon, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Brahms, Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinksy. Museum trips and musical selections. (4 cr.)

MET HU 221 Major Authors I

Introduction to major works of ancient and medieval European literatures that influenced later Continental, English, and American literature: the Bible, Homeric epic, Greek Tragedy, Virgil's Aeneid, and Dante's The Divine Comedy. (4 cr.)

Additional Course

MET RN 243 Myth and Religion in Literature