English Courses

Program | Faculty | Master's | Doctoral | Courses

All courses carry 3 credits unless otherwise specified.

502 Old English

Basic course in the Old English language; attention to grammar and reading early great poems.

505 Beowulf

Intensive study of the Old English epic, including questions of interpretation, prosody, and oral presentation.

521 Old Irish

Basic course in the Old Irish language. Class time divided equally between translation and grammar.

699 Master's Thesis

May be repeated by M.F.A. candidates for a total of 18 credits.  Credit, 3-9.

706 Middle English Literature

Representative poems, verse plays, and selected prose, exclusive of Chaucer.

708 Chaucer

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the critical problems implicit in his works.

709 The Works of Chaucer's French  and Italian Periods

The complaints, the dream-visions, the later short poems,  Boethius, and Troilus as combinations of medieval art and thought with pre-Renaissance motifs.

711 Technical Writing

Prepares students, trained in literature and rhetoric, to teach the communication skills essential to technical writing.

712 Writing and the Teaching of Writing

Methods, theories, and techniques of teaching prose composition.

713 Studies in Film

The uses of film in an English Department. The application of film terminology, theory, and aesthetics. The rhetorical elements of film and their relationship to other forms of communication. The relationship of film to print literature. Procedures for setting up film-related courses, obtaining films, and teaching film as film and as an extension of traditional literature.

721  The 18th-Century Novel

Readings in the English novel to the late 19th century, from Richardson to Conrad, with attention to some ten representative novels.

730 Literature of the 16th Century

Christian and humanist ideals reflected in the poetry of Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Sackville, Raleigh, Sidney, and Spenser.

731 The English Bible as Literature

The several main genres of Biblical literature in their historical setting. Principles in interpretation; the literary influence of the Authorized Version.

732 Shakespeare

Close examination of Shakespearian plays representing the characteristics of his dramatic art.

734 Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

Representative plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, 1580-1642; emphasis on works by Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford.

737  Literature of the 17th Century

Readings in 17th-century prose and poetry from Donne to Marvell; analysis of the more significant areas of thought and style.

738 Milton

The major and some of the minor works; related studies in Milton scholarship and criticism.

740 Literature of the Restoration  and 18th Century

Readings in English poetry and prose from Dryden to Burns, emphasizing the major writers and including representative plays.

745  Literature of the Romantic Period

Readings in the major poetry, representative essays, and selected critical writings, including Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Hazlitt.

746 Literature of the Victorian Age

Readings in the chief poets and prophets of the Victorian Age. Emphasis on Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater.

747  19th-Century British Novel

Major novelists in 19th-century Britain from Scott through Hardy.

750 Early American Literature

The major writers and intellectual movements in America during the 17th and 18th centuries.

753 American Romanticism

The development of American romanticism under European influence, stressing Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville.

755 American Realism

The development of American realism from 1865 to 1914, stressing Twain, Henry James, Howells, and Henry Adams.

758 Afro-American Literature

Autobiography, poetry, and fiction by black Americans. Attention to the developing literary tradition embodied in the works of Douglass, Du Bois, Johnson, Hughes, Toomer, Brown, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Brooks, Baldwin, Baraka, and Morrison.

761 Literary Criticism

Critical theory and practice with emphasis on the major philosophical critics beginning with Plato and Aristotle.

767 British Contemporary Fiction

British fiction from 1939 to present.

770 Contemporary Drama

British and American drama from 1950 to the present.

771  Contemporary Fiction

British and American fiction from 1945 to the present.

772 Contemporary Poetry

British and American poetry from 1945 to the present.

775 Modern Drama

Modern British, Irish, and American dra-ma from 1890 to 1950. Emphasis on ma-jor figures: Shaw, Synge, O'Neill.

776 Modern Fiction

Intensive study of important works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and other masters of the modern novel between about 1900 and 1940.

777 Modern Poetry

The growth and development of modern poetry in English from 1912 to WWII, including Yeats, Stevens, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Williams; also Cummings, L. Hughes, Moore, Ransom, Auden, Crane, Robinson. Brief background materials from Hopkins, Dickinson and Hardy.

780 Imaginative Writing: Poetry

Writer's workshop with emphasis on poetry. May be repeated by candidates for the M.F.A. for a total of 24 credits.

781 Imaginative Writing: Prose

Writer's workshop with emphasis on fiction. May be repeated by M.F.A. candidates for a total of 24 credits.

784 Literature and Psychological Criticism

Introduction to the theory and practice of psychological literary criticism. Basic Freudian and Jungian theory and the application of that theory to literary analysis.

789 Folklore

Folk narrative: tale, myth, and legend in relation to written literature.

891 Seminar

Eight to twelve seminars per semester offered by professors in their areas of expertise.

899 Doctoral Dissertation

Credit, 18.