Course Descriptions 

Be sure to check the list of course offerings each quarter to determine what is being offered. The descriptions below represent the basic conditions of courses; content may vary depending on who is teaching the course.

ENGLISH 201, SELECTED WORKS OF BRITISH LITERATURE: MEDIEVAL THROUGH 1800, is a literature survey course designed to provide a general understanding and appreciation of the range of literary expression in England from approximately 800 to 1800. Obviously, it's not possible be "cover" a thousand years of literature in a 10-week course, but one can listen to a few of the strongest voices and perhaps get a useful perspective on the overall shape of our shared cultural heritage.

Class discussions and lectures focus on two different but necessary approaches to the texts-formalist and historical. The formalist approach examines how the language itself works: how Middle English sounds, what constitutes a Petrarchan sonnet, how various poetic forms contribute to a text's meaning, etc. The historical approach emphasizes the text's place in a particular historical moment as a significant component of its meaning.

ENGLISH 202, SELECTED WORKS OF BRITISH LITERATURE: 1800 TO THE PRESENT, is a lecture-discussion course focusing on a number of major British authors of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist eras. Emphasis will be placed on understanding of individual works (poems, novels, stories) and on the authors' social and literary backgrounds. In theory, this course surveys English literature from 1800 to the present. In practice, this means we will intensively study selected canonical works from the four literary and cultural movements into which the time span is traditionally divided: Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism and Postcolonialism. By the end of the quarter you should have a strong sense of the traditional definitions and characteristic works of each of these periods, a preparation for more specialized study for English majors and an overview of our literary inheritance for non-majors. You are encouraged to read more extensively in the Longman than the required assignments and to explore your favorite periods and authors on your own and individually with me. You are also urged to recognize the ways in which the readings break with the traditional descriptions of their time periods or defy their own apparent intentions: One of the stories this class details is the arbitrary way literary periods come to be categorized and authors selected as representative.

ENGLISH 220, INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE, provides an introduction to a representative range of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare in order to enable students to become conversant with a body of literary work that history has determined to be a central component of Western civilization. The emphasis will be on learning to read the plays both as literature-the language, the poetry, the imagery, the themes, and the jokes-and as drama-the theatrical elements subject to directorial choices-always remembering that the plays were written not to be read but to be performed. In addition, the more general purpose of the course is to expand interpretive and analytical skills through a meaningful engagement with complex but rewarding literary texts.

ENGLISH 264, READING POPULAR CULTURE, will help students gain a better understanding of our culture through its everyday objects and ideas, through the objects that are mass-produced and the ideas that are spread through mass media. We will explore these elements of pop culture: identity, speed, irony, participation, globalization, and reality/virtuality. 40% lecture, 60% discussion. There will be quizzes, exams, and a few short (2-3 page) papers.
 

ENGLISH 266, WRITING POETRY 1, provides students with an opportunity to read and discuss contemporary American poems, to develop the vocabulary with which to discuss them, and to create within themselves the receptivity to language and experience necessary to begin to make their own poetry. As a workshop, we will form together in this class a community of readers and writers offering thoughtful responses to "model" poems and constructive critiques of each other's work. The course is designed for students who already have some experience writing poetry as well as for those who have never written a poem before.

ENGLISH 271, INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDY, introduces students to both the underlying structure of English and to its many varieties. After studying how we acquire language we'll look at those structural components-what linguists describe as its phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics-which help make such early acquisition possible. In the second half of the course, we'll consider the history of English and its many variations-social, regional, and ethnic dialects and registers-and the attitudes towards each variation.

ENGLISH 276, INTRODUCTION TO RHETORIC
Words affect how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Rhetoric, the purposeful use of words to accomplish our individual and collective goals, is used every day by everyone. In fact, many of the rhetorical strategies we use today have been in play since ancient Greece and Rome, and rhetoric is a key tool not only in daily life but also in diverse fields such as psychology, marketing, law, political science, education, art, business?just about any human activity. To better understand this all-powerful discourse tool, we will become acquainted with some important concepts of rhetoric, learn how and where they are used now, and apply them to our own goals and written arguments. We?ll learn how to become more skilled critics of language and more versatile communicators.

ENGLISH 280, THE ENGLISH BIBLE, focuses on the Bible in English translation, with special attention to its literary qualities, conceptual content, and development within history. This will be a lecture-discussion course, with emphasis on close reading and student participation in active discussions about the texts and historical contexts.

ENGLISH 290, COLONIAL AND U.S. LITERATURE TO 1865, is a survey of some of the most significant and enjoyable American literature written up to around 1865.  The reading load is relatively heavy; the writing load is relatively light.  We spend a short amount of time with colonial literature (poems by Bradstreet, Taylor, and Wheatley), then slow down to enjoy the first flowering of American fiction, beginning in the 1790s (prose texts by Rowson, Brown, Irving, Sedgwick, Poe, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Jacobs, and Alcott; poems by Freneau, Bryant, Poe, Longfellow, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson).  Also required are weekly quizzes, a short essay on a poem, and a medium-length final essay.  The syllabus does not change significantly from term to term.

ENGLISH 291, U.S. LITERATURE: 1865 TO THE PRESENT, examines literature written in the United States between 1865 and 1945. In it, we address a number of questions. Is there such a thing as an "American" style of writing, let alone an American "tradition"? If so, what does it consist in? Whose voices have traditionally been privileged, and whose marginalized or even silenced? How are issues like slavery, women's rights and World Wars I and II articulated in the texts of this era? Can we make sense of terms like romanticism, realism, naturalism and modernism, or are definitions of these terms inevitably compromised when they are applied to individual works?

ENGLISH 398, CRITICAL WRITING, is an intensive writing course required for the English major and minor. It is designed to provide instruction in close textual reading and analysis in various literary genres and in the composition of good critical essays, including the effective use and proper citation of secondary materials. The course provides a good preparation for later work in upper-level English courses. The texts will include poetry, drama, and novels.

ENGLISH 467C/193C, WRITING AND LEARNING, is about the manifold relationships between writing and learning. There is a double agenda for every one of the activities in which you will engage: learning the material and the collaborative consulting skills which are central to the course and will allow you to become a tutor in the Writing Lab, and working on your own writing skill, writing style, and writing confidence. You will read around in writing theory and pedagogy, discuss your thinking about these theories and pedagogical practices and, through your own writing projects and the 2-credit practicum dimension of the course (193C), begin to build a repertoire of insights and techniques of your own.

The intensive way in which you will work with other people, in class or through your practicum, will be useful in any career in which you deal with people, from human resources or marketing to teaching, hospitality services, sales, or international diplomacy (not to mention graduate school). So there are a lot of ways in which this course is clearly not just for English majors.
NOTE: Be sure to sign up for both English 467 and English 193C, for a total of 7 credits.

ENGLISH 520, SHAKESPEARE, is the "advanced" Shakespeare course, which means that the class is expected to spend less time going over what the texts actually say than the introductory Shakespeare course does in order to spend more time exploring what they mean. Students are responsible for reading the plays carefully prior to class so class time can be spent discussing some of the more interesting critical and theoretical approaches to the plays. The course is also usually organized thematically in order to show connections between Shakespeare's works. Previous themes have included "Shakespeare's Roman Plays," "Shakespeare's Problem Plays," and "Shakespearean Metadrama." Course work will include short response papers on each play and one longer research paper.

ENGLISH 521, SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE, is designed to encourage an understanding of and appreciation for the literature of the English Renaissance (specifically the sixteenth century) through close readings of a few seminal texts both as literary works and as historical documents reflecting and responding to contemporary concerns, assumptions, enthusiasms, and anxieties. The goal is to read each piece not as an isolated work of art but as a text participating in the life of its historical moment. Typical authors studied include Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and others.

ENGLISH 522, EARLY 17TH-CENTURY LITERATURE, is designed to encourage an understanding of and appreciation for the literature of one of the craziest periods in English history. During the 57 years covered by this survey, England went through enormous political upheavals including a civil war and the execution of a king. The written record of this period includes a flood of the most ephemeral pamphlets and "newspapers" as well as some of the greatest literature in English, including one of the most monumental poems in our (or any other) language, Paradise Lost. In addition to the political revolutions of the period, the seventeenth century also saw revolutions in science and philosophy that directly contributed to the modern age.

Selected readings will focus especially on the canonical work of major figures like John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Milton, but will also include some of the less familiar works of the period. Most of the readings will be in verse, but there will also be two plays, and brief selections from prose works.

ENGLISH 535, LITERATURE OF THE 18TH CENTURY

The novel dominates 21st century literature, yet the form came haphazardly into being, a literary love child born late in life to a culture facing a mid-life crisis. We will investigate the crisis and the genre it spawned, attempting to retrace the strange prose adventures that led to the novelty we now call the novel. As the authors and titles on the reading list suggest, our analyses often will focus on conceptions of gender, asking why so many early novels were by and/or about women. We will give equal weight to the shifting sands of class, taking particular note of the intersections of class and gender ideologies at a time when both were radically but fitfully evolving.

ENGLISH 541, VICTORIAN POETRY & POETICS, "Study of Victorian poetry and poetics; readings in Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, and Hardy." In this course we will read extensively in the three most important poets of the period: Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Arnold; selected poems of other significant Victorian poets, as represented in the assigned anthology, will be read as well.

ENGLISH 543, 20TH-CENTURY BRITISH FICTION, provides "A study of the development of British fiction after 1900, with emphasis on such major novelists as Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf."-(OSU Bulletin) I always include at least one living author, and I try to maintain a balance between canonical writers such as Lawrence or Woolf and contemporary authors recognized (for instance, winners of the Man-Booker Prize) as pre-eminent in the Anglophone world of today.

Recent authors/titles include the following: D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers and Women in Love; James Joyce, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse; Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head; Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; J. M Coetzee, Disgrace; and Ian McEwan, Atonement.
 

ENGLISH 550, AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1830, takes various forms, sometimes following a focused thematic interest, other times taking a broader, historical survey of this formative period in the American literary imagination. Students are required to submit a weekly journal and to write two medium-length essays.  For Autumn 2006, this course focused on the early national period and we read our most captivating captivity narratives (Equiano, Tyler), our finest sentimental novels (Foster, Sedgwick), our most ambitious Indian romances (C.B. Brown, Cooper), as well as dreamy tales both dire (C.B. Brown) and delightful (Irving).
 

ENGLISH 551, AMERICAN LITERATURE 1830-1865, takes various forms, sometimes following a focused thematic interest, other times taking a broader, historical survey of this crucial period in the flourishing of American literature.  Students are required to submit a weekly journal and to write a significant final essay.  One version of this course would follow the idea of transcendentalism in American literature, from its German origins with Kant and Schiller, through its British purveyors, Coleridge and Carlyle, to its American practitioners like Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Melville, and Poe.

English 564.04, Special Topics

Author: William Faulkner-Life and Selected Works examines the life and major works of William Faulkner, regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest American writers. We will read and discuss the following novels: Light in August, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Sound and the Fury. In addition to participating actively in class discussions, students will post their interpretive observations in our Carmen discussion board.

ENGLISH 567C, RHETORIC AND COMMUNITY SERVICE, is an undergraduate seminar in which you will have the opportunity to extend your critical and rhetorical skills beyond the classroom into the world of community action and service. By writing for a local nonprofit community service agency for at least two hours each week, you will learn about the nonprofit world and do research into a specific community issue or problem. Community partners have included the Red Cross, Sharon Glynn elderly housing, the Child Development Center, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and the United Way. Because this is a service-learning course (as opposed to a field experience or internship), you will spend time onsite with your community partner and time in the classroom. As in all good service learning experiences, your work with your community partner should be mutually beneficial. Your community partners will help you learn about contexts for writing different from the ones you've become familiar with in academic classrooms. They will also help you learn about their own non-profit organizations. And you will produce at least one piece of writing that your community partner will be able to use (a grant proposal, a brochure, needs statement, etc.).

To be successful in this course, you should have a schedule that is flexible enough to work with your community partner's needs. Although I have worked with the community partners for the course to outline specific kinds of projects, it will be your responsibility to make initial contact with your partner, to arrange for transportation to the site, and to write a contract that will outline the specific tasks you will complete as well as their deadlines. You will also spend time in the classroom, preparing for the writing you do for your community partner and reflecting on that work through informal journal assignments and through formal academic papers.

ENGLISH 569, DIGITAL MEDIA AND ENGLISH STUDIES, will investigate how digital technologies influence and challenge our understanding of literacy, of how we read and write and make sense of the world. We will read about literacy studies, technological developments, and the related ideas that we should consider as learners, language experts, and citizens.

Most important, we will all consider how we read, write, and make sense of the world as we read these texts, as we pay attention to our media experiences outside of class, and as we create our own texts--brief response papers, a Photoshop image, and a video. (No prior experience needed). I want you to become more aware of your own literacy practices as you use different technologies. The nature of literacy is central for teachers of writing and literature, but it should be of concern to anyone who cares about education and an informed public.
 

ENGLISH 572, TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR AND USAGE, is designed to expand your understanding and repertoire of stylistic moves and to enable you to write the finely crafted, rhetorically sensitive prose that Cicero called eloquence. Oddly enough, although we tend to think of prose primarily as a visual entity, its effectiveness often substantially depends on developing an ear for words, for the melody and rhythm of language. We'll work on developing what one writer calls "voices we want to listen to" (Joe Glaser, Understanding Style). This course is also designed to introduce you to modern language theories, which posit that language is inherently ideological (or rhetorical). It shapes the way we think and feel, and changing style changes meaning. We'll analyze the role of style in persuasion and try to strategically employ elements of style in our own arguments.

ENGLISH 573, RHETORICAL THEORY AND ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE, explores the field of written discourse analysis: how does a text (fiction or non-fiction) direct readers? attention to particular concerns? What resources (linguistic and graphic) does it use to create meaning, and how does it rely on other texts? How do texts influence people?s beliefs and actions? How do people actually produce different kinds of texts? And how do social systems depend on?and promote?particular texts? In other words, we?ll be looking at what texts do and how texts mean in a hands-on study in which one day will be spent discussing together a new analytical method and one day presenting the results of our own ?mini-analyses? practicing that method. This is a seminar course?that means I won?t lecture; I will work together with you to make meaning of our topic.

ENGLISH 574, HISTORY AND THEORIES OF WRITING
We are in a transitional period for reading and writing. In this course, we will examine different technologies of reading and writing throughout history to gain perspective on the current situation. We will explore how these changes influence personal identity, education, and an informed public. Some of the questions we will consider include the following: How have reading and writing changed? How do technologies affect how we read and write? How are technologies tied to cultural and historical change? What gains and losses come with modern technology?

ENGLISH 576.01, THE HISTORY OF CRITICAL THEORY: FROM PLATO TO AESTHETICISM, is a survey of literary theory and aesthetics up until the dawn of the twentieth century.  We spend a week and a half in the classical period, with Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, and Plotinus, and then skip ahead fifteen hundred years to the Enlightenment and nineteenth century, with Hume, Burke, Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Holderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, Hegel, Shelley, Emerson, Gautier, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Arnold, and Pater.  The readings are sometimes challenging, but the course is an enjoyable one for English majors and for those interested in questions like: What is art? What is beauty? Why do we call a given work of art good or bad?  What is the relation of art to truth? to reality? to the divine?  What are the essential differences between a novel, a poem, a painting, a film, a piece of sculpture, a work of music?  Students read one essay per class period, are required to submit weekly journals and, according to the student?s wishes, to either write a final essay or else take a final exam.  The syllabus does not change significantly from term to term.

ENGLISH 576.03, ISSUES AND MOVEMENTS IN CRITICAL THEORY, is likely to focus on a single trend in literary theory and aesthetics since 1930.  Although this course will be challenging, English majors will also find themselves engaged and interested from beginning to end.  Students are not expected to have had significant prior exposure to this kind of writing or this end of intellectual history.  Students read one essay per class period, are required to submit weekly journals and, according to the student?s wishes, to either write a final essay or else take a final exam.

One version of this course would examine key French and German considerations of art between 1950 and 1990; its focus would be on the phenomenological and Lacanian trends of post-structuralism.  We will read essays by Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida, Irigaray, Foucault, and Deleuze.

A different version of this course might focus on the next wave of continental writings on art, from 1980 (more or less) to the present.  We would open with foundational readings by Benjamin, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, and/or Levinas, and then would move to essays by important contemporary writers such as Agamben, Badiou, Bourdieu, Certeau, Derrida, Laclau, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Nancy, Ranci?e, and/or Zizek.

ENGLISH 578.01, SPECIAL TOPICS IN FILM AND LITERATURE, is designed to broaden students' knowledge of American film and 20th century American literature and culture and to enhance their ability to write as effectively about film as they do about other kinds of literary texts by introducing them to the terms and concepts generally used in film analysis. The theme will be "The Family in American Film"; under this general rubric, the class will consider such issues as the idealization of the family of the past and the concomitant fear of the contemporary "crisis" of the family; the alternative family, including the criminal "family"; the immigrant family; and the impact of changing political and social mores on the traditional family.

ENGLISH 579, SPECIAL TOPICS IN NONFICTION: TRAVEL WRITING
In his essay "Why We Travel," Pico Iyer writes, "Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction or ideology." Commenting on this in the first edition of Best American Travel Writing, series editor Jason Wilson noted: "Having a travel writer report on particular things, small things, the specific ways in which people act and interact, is perhaps our best way of getting beyond the cliches that we tell each other about different places and cultures, and about ourselves." As Spinoza wrote, "The more we know of particular things, the more we know of God." It is perhaps travel writing's particular gift to the field of creative nonfiction in general that it focuses so exclusively on the little things that are peculiar to a particular place and time. It is also travel writing's legacy to be tied to the larger metaphoric sense that our lives are themselves journeys?thus travel in general brings out the desire for self-discovery in each of us, or it can, nourished, perhaps, by the skillful narrative of a travel writer. This class will explore--through travel essays, formal and theoretical studies, films, and class writings--this rapidly popularizing genre, consider its critical implications, and dream some travel dreams of our own, both far away and in our own backyards.
 

ENGLISH H591 SPECIAL TOPICS IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

H591.01, RHETORIC OF SATIRE

This is not just a course about humor, but about humor with a critical edge. Recent examples of successful satires include Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," the newspaper "The Onion," and "South Park." We will examine these and other examples by Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Jonathan Swift, H.L. Mencken, Lenny Bruce, Monty Python, P.J. O' Rourke, various cartoonists, etc. How does satire work? What can it achieve? We will not only study how the humor works, but we will also explore the historical and cultural contexts. Assignments will include brief response papers, your own satirical pieces, and an exam.

H591.02, RHETORICAL COMMUNITIES

This course will focus on the rhetorical concepts of coax, the opinion forged among a community, and identification, the process of forging commonality out of difference.  How do we form an image of ourselves in online, print, and personal encounters, and how do these constructed images, in turn, shape ongoing community debates?  Students will be exposed to historiography and use archival, multimedia, and ethnographic research methodologies to better understand the ancient Sophistic concept of doxa and the modern rhetorical concept of identification in the local community.  Through the examination of the processes involved in forging community and communal opinion, students will also be exposed at a practical level to some of the key understandings of symbol use in modern rhetorical thought.

ENGLISH 582, SPECIAL TOPICS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE: DISCOURSES OF AUTHENTICITY IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL, will consider the multiple discourses of "authenticity" in a selection of African-American novels and critical texts, investigating not only how African-American identity is posited, depicted, constructed and deconstructed in fiction, but also how critical theory has contributed to ongoing questions of what constitutes "black writing." List of texts: Primary texts will include The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson), Quicksand (Nella Larsen), Another Country (James Baldwin), Tar Baby (Toni Morrison) and The Intuitionist (Colson Whitehead). Secondary readings will include work by Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks, and J. Martin Favor, among others. Responsibilities of students: Regular attendance and participation; short response papers (1-2 pages) for each novel read in the course; a final project (10-12 pages). Students will develop individual projects in consultation with the instructor.

ENGLISH H598, HONORS SEMINAR: SELECTED TOPICS IN LITERATURE AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION
Selected problems (themes, movements, genres, and styles) emphasizing continuity and development in English and American literary and linguistic history; topic varies quarterly. Prerequisite: CPHR of 3.00 or better with a 3.50 or better in English, and permission of the department. Repeatable to a maximum of 10 credit hours.

ENGLISH 662, LITERARY PUBLISHING, is a course for advanced undergraduate students (that?s you), and its primary responsibility is the production of Taproot, Ohio State-Newark?s annual literary journal. As a student in this course, you will study the history of literary editing, publishing, and design. You will also put your newfound knowledge to practical use as staff members of Taproot, participating in every aspect of the production process: soliciting submissions, selecting and editing them, and even designing the final publication using graphical and desktop-publishing software. Additionally, we will have visiting speakers enhance our understanding of the work, thought, and care that goes into the craft of literary publishing.