Courses

• CAS EN 492: Independent Study
  Application forms available in CAS Room 105.
• CAS EN 495: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Fall 2017: Time and Literature 1800-1930. From 1800-1930, momentous changes in technology (railway, telegraph, photography) and science (geology, Darwin, Einstein) inspired a re-conception of time.Course examines narrative time in Byron, Wordsworth, Hardy, Woolf, and Proust in relation to these strange new ideas about time.
• CAS EN 496: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Spring 2018: Fables and Tales. Stories have designs on you. How the "grammar" of storytelling shapes meaning in stories from Aesop's Fables, The Arabian Nights, the Grimms' Household Tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boccaccio's Decameron, and some contemporary sources.
• CAS EN 502: Crafting a Nonfiction Voice Workshop
  A writing workshop that explores the notion of voice on the written page. Through reading, analysis, writing exercises, and independent projects, students become familiar with techniques for recreating the voices of others and for shaping a distinctive nonfiction voice (or voices) of their own.
• CAS EN 509: Playwriting 2: Writing the Social/Political Play
  Explores the dramatist's response to political and social events over 2,000 years from the Greeks through the modern period. Examines how playwrights dramatized the pressing issues of their times with a focus on content, historical context, and theatrical forms.
• CAS EN 510: Playwriting 1: Writing of 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. 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 and Style
  This course shows how to systematically analyze grammar and style of sentences and longer units of discourse. Explores academic and popular debates on grammar and grammar instruction and helps the student become a better speaker and writer.
• CAS EN 516: History of the English Language 2
  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 517: Drama in Theory and Practice 1: Structure and the 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 519: Drama in Theory and Practice 2: Experiments with Character and Form
  The reading and analysis of dramatic works; experimentation with the full-length monologue and small cast plays giving attention to dramatic structure and style. Students present their own work in a workshop format. Students also write critiques of professional productions.
• CAS EN 520: Drama in Theory and Practice 3: Adaptation and the Theatre
  A seminar on translation versus adaptation, comparing the two, and culling material from other writing genres. Focus on tone, imagery, stage design, and language. Students write their own stage adaptations and read various texts translated from the World Theatre.
• CAS EN 535: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
  Close reading of balladic, lyric, and longer poems by Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Auden, Rosenberg, Mew, Loy, MacDiarmid, Gurney, Douglas, Larkin, Hill, Harrison, Prynne, others. Poets' essays and opposed schools and approaches. Reference to other arts, and times of political tragedy.
• CAS EN 536: Twentieth-Century American Poetry
  Modernist and later twentieth American poetry, including selected long poems and shorter lyrics, with attention to poets' prose, collaborations. Crane, Williams, Stevens, Stein, Loy, O'Hara, Olson, others. Some emphasis on unusual forms and persistence of visionary poetry despite anti-romantic stances.
• CAS EN 537: Black Thought: Literary and Cultural Criticism in the African Diaspora
  An introduction to literary and cultural thinking in African-America and the Black Diaspora. The course hones in on specific trends, themes, and characteristics of this work and assesses its relationship to broader political and social contexts. Also offered as CAS AA 591.
• CAS EN 538: Teaching American Literature
  This course focuses on teaching American literature at the high school level. Goals include building a knowledge base in American literary history, modeling deep learning with selected texts, addressing theoretical questions in English Language Arts pedagogy, and learning practical classroom skills.
• CAS EN 546: The Modern American Novel
  Topics vary from semester to semester but this course may be taken only once for credit. Topic for Spring 2019: The Modern American Novel, from 1900 to 1950. Works by Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others.
• CAS EN 568: Studies in British Literature
  Topic for Fall 2018: Shakespeare and Film. Study of Shakespeare's tragedies, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, in multiple film versions of each play by such directors as Olivier, Welles, Nunn, Eyre, Branagh, Luhrmann, Taymor, and Kurosawa. Previous study of Shakespeare recommended. Also offered as CAS CI 590 A1.
• CAS EN 580: Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Spring 2017: Faulkner. Principal novels and short fiction, including The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet. Considerations of biographical, social, cultural contexts. Relations to regionalism, Southern Renaissance, modernism. Influence and status as world writer.
• CAS EN 582: Studies in Modern Literature
  Topic for Spring 2018: Joyce and After. Readings in transatlantic modernism (Irish, British, American) from 1922 forward. Joyce's Ulysses is central. Other readings from authors such as James Baldwin, Allison Bechdel, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Virginia Woolf.

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