Courses

• CAS EN 506: Poetry Workshop
  A workshop in the writing of poetry. Manuscripts read and discussed in class. Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students.
• CAS EN 507: Seminar: Creative Writing, Fiction
  A workshop in the writing of fiction. Manuscripts read and discussed in class. Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students.
• CAS EN 508: Seminar: Creative Writing, Poetry
  Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students.
• CAS EN 509: Playwriting 1: Analysis to Inspiration
  A seminar in the fundamentals of dramatic form, structure, characterization, and theme. Students read and discuss playwrights such as Brecht, Chekhov, and Shepard and, through written exercises, develop their individual plays.
• CAS EN 510: Playwriting 2: Writing Short Plays
  A seminar in the writing of short, original plays, addressing structure, language, and theme. Students read and discuss the masters of modern drama, and writing exercises are assigned to stir the imagination and develop craft.
• CAS EN 512: Readings for Writers: Contemporary Literary Nonfiction
  Intensive reading seminar for students interested in literary nonfiction, a wide-ranging, sometimes controversial genre in which writers use techniques associated with fiction and poetry to make meaning of facts. Explores the wealth and breadth of contemporary literary nonfiction -- memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, travel, science, and medical writing -- with an eye toward helping students think about their own nonfiction writing practices.
• CAS EN 513: Modern English Grammar
  A systematic analysis of English, applied to the reading of literature and the writing of essays.
• CAS EN 515: History of the English Language I
  How do the social and cultural experiences of young adults contribute to development of the English language? From early American English to current times, we examine how they learned and changed their native tongue at home, in schools, and in neighborhoods.
• CAS EN 516: History of the English Language II
  Dryden said that few in England could read Chaucer. How did English change radically in three hundred years, from 1400 to 1700? Social, cultural, and linguistic dynamics of this change.
• CAS EN 518: Linguistic Problems in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language
  Application of linguistic concepts to the teaching of English as a foreign language. Includes description of contemporary English grammatical structures that pose problems for learners and teachers.
• CAS EN 519: Drama in Theory and Practice
  May be repeated for credit as topics vary. Topic for Fall 2012: Social and Political Theatre. A seminar in the social/political role of theatre addressing writers who have dramatized the pressing issues of their times (Aeschylus through Nottage). Theatrical forms are explored to help students deal forcefully with issues that illuminate the present. Topic for Spring 2013: Solo Performance: Theory and Practice. A survey of contemporary one-person plays and analysis of the form, including confessional, historical, documentary. Also monologuists and performance artists. Time is dedicated to creating original one- person plays, with a performance workshop at semester's end.
• CAS EN 520: Drama in Theory and Practice
  May be repeated for credit as topics vary. Topic for Fall 2012: Structure and the Contemporary Script. A comparison and analysis of the design of plays from the last decade, encouraging students to imitate the form, character, and plot from these plays while experimenting with their own narrative structures.
• CAS EN 521: Literature of the Middle Ages I
  Topic for Fall 2011: Medieval Romance and Origins of Love. Romantic love in medieval romances; how does love relate to gender, sexuality, marriage, family, empire? Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gottfried of Strassbourg, Havelok the Dane, Floris and Blancheflour, Sir Orfeo, Morte D'Arthur.
• CAS EN 522: Literature of the Middle Ages II
  Topic for Spring 2011: Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. History, legend, tragedy, comedy, poetry, and fiction in the major medieval Latin, French, German, and English Arthurian texts, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Layamon, and Chaucer.
• CAS EN 525: Literature of the Seventeenth Century I
  Topic for Fall 2010: Poetry and Song in Shakespeare's Time. The interactions of some of the greatest poets and song-writers in English during the decades around 1600 (including Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Dowland, Campion). Grounded on texts, scores, and recordings.
• CAS EN 527: Literature of the Eighteenth Century I
  Dryden, Behn, Swift, Pope, Astell, Defoe, Haywood, and others, read in their historical contexts. Literary structures understood in conjunction with social, political, institutional, and intellectual structures of the age.
• CAS EN 530: The Romantic Age
  Studies in British literature from 1789 to 1832. Romanticism considered in light of social, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical issues. Authors may include Blake, Burke, Wollstonecraft, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Cobbett, Scott, Clare, Mary and Percy Shelley, Keats, De Quincey, and Hazlitt.
• CAS EN 531: The Victorian Literature I
  The literature of the Victorian period with an emphasis on poetry and non-fictional prose, as well as at least one major novel. Writers include Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning, Arnold, Wilde, Eliot, and Rossetti, among others.
• CAS EN 532: The Victorian Literature II
  1850-1900: Ruskin, the Rossettis, Arnold, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Wilde, Hopkins, George Eliot, and others.
• CAS EN 533: American Literature: Beginnings to 1855
  American literature from the beginning to the brink of the Civil War. Puritan origins, print culture, American poetic taste, entertainment, and the debate over slavery. Works by Bradstreet, Jefferson, Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Jacobs, and Melville.

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