English

• Course descriptions are listed in alphabetical order by code and number.
• Only courses for which descriptions are available are listed here; for the full Fall 2012 English Department Course Schedule, see links on previous page.
• If a course in which you are interested is not listed here, please contact the professor for further information.

 

CWR 301 Writing Communities:  This class allows students to explore various career paths in publishing and arts administrations, helps students position themselves for jobs outside the classroom, and gives students crucial hands-on experience. During the semester, we work together to plan and host The College of New Jersey’s Visiting Writers Series. We also do more traditional scholarly work which will engage the shifting terrain of the contemporary literary landscape.   Instructor:  Rosemurgy

CWR 304 Poetry Workshop: This is a course in the analysis and practice of poetry. You will study contemporary poetry, read critical writing about poetry, write and revise your own poetry, and provide your classmates’ with feedback on their poetry.  The goal of this course is for you to become more aware of your options as a writer and reader. You will learn to read carefully and to study technical choices you can then explore in your own work. You will work on developing your own style and aesthetics and on situating your tastes within the context of contemporary poetry.  Instructor:  Rosemurgy

CWR 305 Screenwriting Workshop: This class is about finding your subject as a screenwriter, and learning how to write a shootable screenplay. The course assumes that the writer is essentially a beginner in the craft of planning and writing a screenplay. Unlike the other 300-level writing workshops, CWR 305 does NOT require that you first take CWR 206 as a pre-requisite. The writing proceeds in a step-by-step process, beginning with simple exercises and proceeding to the more complex. Through writing and revisions prompted by work-shops, group discussions and conferences, the beginning screenwriter is encouraged to discover her or his individual voice and subject. While not ignoring the longer, feature-length film, the class will focus primarily on the short film, by screening both animated and live action shorts, and exploring their structure and cinematic techniques. Each student will write and workshop at least three short screen-plays, each of which will be significantly revised. You will also, as part of the collaborative process common to screenwriting, write coverage of each work-shopped screenplay. This course does not count for the CWR minor. Instructor: Hannold

JPW 208 Introduction to Journalism:  Instructor:  Lounsberry

JPW 250 Introduction  to Professional Writing: 

JPW 308 Media Law:  An overview of the First Amendment and related case law as it pertains to the news media.  Among the topics:  Prior restraint, libel, privacy, intellectual property, political speech, commercial speech, obscenity, fair trial versus free speech, protection of sources, and access to government records and meeting.  Instructor:  Shaw

JPW 311 News Editing & Production: Prerequisite:  JPW 208 .  Intensive introduction to modern practices in electronic newspaper editing and production.  Professional orientation.  Instructor:  Shaw

JPW 350 Magazine Writing: Instructor:  Weber

JPW 370-01 Topics in Journalism:  Advanced Computer Assisted Reporting:  Instructor:  Pearson

JPW 370-02Topics In Journalism:  Serious Games:    ”Gaming is more than a source of entertainment. Today, it is a medium for conveying ideas that is as powerful as film, print, broadcast or the internet. Serious games are an emerging vehicle for exploring current events and topical issues using the principles, tools and conventions of game design. This course will introduce students to fundamental concepts of game design and the application of these principles to news gaming. Students will analyze news-related games, and will create a design document and prototype of a serious news game. This course does not require special programming or computing skills.”  Instructor:  Pearson

JPW 370-03 Topics in Journalism:  Political Reporting:  Instructor:  Shaw

LNG 201  Introduction to English Language: LNG 201 focuses on descriptions and explorations of English in its contemporary forms.  Students will learn the basics of linguistic descriptions and be introduced to general linguistic theory.  The course includes large units on Child Language Acquisition as well as language and discourse in social contexts.   Instructor:  Steele

LNG 311 Understanding English Grammar: Understanding English Grammar looks at the syntax of English descriptively and allows students to analyze and describe the patterns of their sentence clauses, and to explore the rhetorical value of alternate syntactic arrangements.  Although LNG 311 expands on ideas about syntax taught in LNG 201 and LNG 202, it assumes no prior linguistic training.  Understanding syntax is very useful for anyone who plans to teach language arts, reading, writing or literary interpretation at any grade level.    Instructor:  Steinberg, D.

LIT 226 Genre Studies:  The Film:  The specific focus of this course, The Film, is to introduce you to the fundamental aspects of cinema as an art form, in the context of movie genres, styles and movements.  We will explore the dominant genres of movies produced in the Hollywood studio system, as well as major genres of European and Asian Film.  And using cinematic terminology as well as archetypal story analysis,  we will explore how the film medium gives us powerful experiences similar to those provided by painting, sculpture, literature, music, theater or dance.  Hannold

LIT 227/COMP 227 Global Animated Film: This course explores animation as a modern and post-modern art form, in a global context. The focus will be on animated films from America, Europe and Asia, with a special emphasis on recent Japanese animation. Also, in this course we will appreciate how animation resembles and differs from live action film, and how animation has influenced and been influenced by techniques and themes in live action film, and has embraced subjects ranging from dinosaurs to cyborgs.   Instructor:  Hannold.

LIT 232/CMP 232:  Instructor:  Rao

LIT 280 Lit Film, & Art of American Politics:  This course will examine representations of post-9/11 America in literature and film to ask if and how the nation’s socio-political landscape has changed as a result of that day.  As we read such texts as Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers, and Wim Wenders’s film Land of Plenty, we will consider what America “is” as well as what America says it is to its own people and to the world at large.  Instructor:  Jacobi

LIT 310 Literature for Younger Readers:  An introduction to Young Adult literature.  In this class you will become familiar with works by a diverse set of widely-read ya authors, read across genres (fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction and graphic novels, and discuss and analyze young adult texts using various theoretical perspectives.  Additionally, the course will introduce you to the growing body of critical research being written about literature for young adults.  Instructor: Graham

 

LIT 315 Men and Masculinities:  This course focuses on representations of men and masculinity in literary texts, although we may also look at film, video, television, advertising, and music.  Some of the issues we will be thinking about include:  the construction of modern male identities, the diversity of men’s lives, the complex dynamics of men’s relationships, and questions of power and social justice within the contemporary gender order.  Instructor:  Landreau

LIT 316: Global Women Writers:  This course will explore various literatures from around the world, encouraging students to examine the politics of gender, culture, and nation as well as the intersections of those systems of power.  Common themes include feminist politics, post– and neo-colonialisms, reproductive rights, translation, globalization, and activism. 

LIT 317 The Witch in Literature:  The witch has been a figure in literary history since the beginning of time.  Who is she, and what does she embody?  Who creates her, and to what end?  This course will explore the socio-historical constructions of this figure and trace her through a wide spectrum of literary texts, including legal and historical treatises, fairy tales, short stories, drama, film, children’s literature, poetry, and even cartoons.  Ultimately, we will analyze the literary cultures which have persisted in creating, recreating, and reviving this timeless, powerful, and equally feared character throughout the ages.   Instructor:  Tarter

LIT 321 Shakespeare: Sources and Context: The focus of LIT 321 will be the reconstruction of the literary “horizon of expectations” for Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies at the time of their first performance.  The course will NOT be a course in Shakespeare per se but rather a course in the literary, dramatic, and cultural texts that shaped the literary expectations, perceptions, and the tastes of Shakespeare and his audience.  We will reconstruct what an Elizabethan audience might have expected when it went to the theater to see a play-reconstructing Elizabethan expectations based on the dramatic genres  of the time, familiar plays and stories, and important antecedents.  Instructor:  Steinberg, G.

LIT 334 Lit By Latinas & Latin American Women: A comparative study of Latina and Latin-American women’s literature in English.  Open to a wide range of literary traditions, nations, time periods, and genres, including those specific to non-Western and post-Colonial cultures.   Instructor: Ortiz-Vilarelle

LIT 346 Romanticism:   This course will offer a comparative study of the literary phenomenon which has come to be known as “Romanticism.”  Readings include the British Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley) and French, German and Russian writers (Rousseau, Hugo, Goethe, Tieck, Kleist, Pushkin and Lermontov). Instructor:  Hustis

LIT 354 Middle English Literature:  In a sense, Middle English literature, as a coherent body of texts, does not exist.  Medieval English culture was very diverse; surviving  documents from the period tend to be unconnected to one another; and the English court was Francophone rather than English in outlook.  We’ll begin the semester by looking closely at one genre (romance) in order to examine the fragmentary nature of that genre’s Middle English manifestations, and then groups of students will divide up the Middle English period by genre in order to choose representative readings for their classmates from each genre (in order to explore the fragmentary nature of medieval English culture further).  Readings will all be in the original Middle English.  Steinberg, G

LIT 362 Victorian Era:  A study of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose of Victorian England. Of particular interest to this course will be literary representations of madness, murder, necrophilia, vampirism, world conquest, big game hunting, lust, longing, and, of course, true love.  Poets include: Tennyson, the Brownings, and  Christina Rosetti.  Fiction by Dickens, Bronte, Stoker, and Lewis Carroll, among others.  Instructor:  McCauley

LIT 370-01 Studies in Literature—US Satire:  Twain, Mencken, Vonnegut:  Satire points out human imperfections and has fun doing so.  Satirists Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Kurt Vonnegut wrote about many human vices, stupidities, and absurdities in ways to make us laugh or sneer or guffaw.  We will read and compare some of their works of satirical art and laugh with the authors at people’s faults (never, of course, at our own-even if we have any-which we don’t—do we?)  We will explore their techniques and perhaps imitate them.    Instructor:  Bearer

LIT 370-02 Studies in Literature   -  Springsteen as Narrative Poet:  Springsteen is one of the most literary of the singer-songwriters who emerged in the 1970s; many of his song lyrics may be analyzed as poems and short stories employing the usual poetic and fictional techniques, and his albums may be analyzed as unified works.  In addition to reading the lyrics and listening to the songs on albums ranging from Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey (1973) to Magic (2007), students will be assigned readings in secondary sources such as Jim Cullen’s Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and The American Tradition.  This course is open to students of any major interested in studying Springsteen’s lyrics.  Students who took the Springsteen FSP are not eligible to take this course. Konkle

 

LIT 374 American Literature  to 1800:  This course will explore the ever-expanding canon of early American literature written between 1450 and 1800.  We will study such texts as Puritans’ sermons, poetry, and their fascinating body of dissent literature; Indian captivity narratives; witchcraft trial records; slave narratives; spiritual autobiographies of Quakers; literature from the Great Awakening and its revivalism; letters and autobiographies of the Republic; 18th-century manuscript colonial American diaries; and the rising genre of seduction novels in Revolutionary America.  Instructor:  Tarter

LIT 376 U. S. Literature Since 1900: U. S. Literature, 1900 to present: Intensive reading in twentieth-century US literature. The syllabus will include works by such authors as Wharton, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Faulkner, Morrison, Frost, Eliot, Cummings, Hemingway, Welty, Vonnegut, and DeLillo.  Instructor:  Friedman

LIT 377 African-American Literature to 1920: A study of selected African American Literature from the colonial period through Reconstruction, this course will build students’ knowledge and confidence as readers and critics of African American culture and society in the United States. We will look at these texts through a lens focused on the effects produced by struggles with American fictions of race, class and sex and their intersections with categories of gender, ethnicity and nation. The course will also explore the canon of African American Literature, its literary traditions, and the connection to and diversions from the canon of American Letters.  Instructor:  Williams

LIT 421 Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories: Intensive study of Shakespeare’s comedies and histories with special focus on figurative language, dramatic structure, and cultural, political, and religious contexts.  Texts to be read include:  Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night.  Venturo

LIT 497 Literary Theory: A broad-based introduction to the discipline of literary theory including reader-response criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, post colonialism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, cultural studies and New Historicism.  By reading and analyzing a variety of selected texts of literary theory from a range of cultures, historical periods and intellectual perspectives, students will become familiar with contemporary critical and theoretical practices in the field of literary study, and learn new ways of examining (and even defining) literary texts and the very concept of textuality itself.”   Instructor:  Ortiz-Vilarelle

LIT 499-01 Seminar:  Faulkner & Modernism: I consider Faulkner to be the greatest American novelist.  In the course, we will study  five of his novels (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalam, Absalam, and The Hamlet).  In the process, we will explore specifically the South of Faulkner’s time and the artistry of his novels.    Instructor:  Bearer

LIT 499-02 Seminar:  Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, Home, will be released May 8, and we will devote the entire semester to examining this one novel through key themes that recur in the other nine novels—memory, ancestry, African American cultural traditions,  empowered women, ghosts, rebels.  This course assumes that every student will have read Beloved before entering the class.  It will also be helpful if students have read other works, such as Song of Solomon, because we will be reading essays about Toni Morrison’s various novels in order to provide models for analyzing Home.   Instructor:  Bennett

LIT 499-03 Seminar: Once Upon A Narrative Tradition:  Despite the efforts of popular culture to trivialize the fairy tale, this is a genre that has invited careful scrutiny from a wide range of literary theorists.  We will look carefully at the aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural aspects of this lively tradition with the help of Bakhtin, Barthes, and Foucault, among others.  Authors include Italian Renaissance writers Basile and Straparola, seventeenth-century women writers of the French salon, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme.  Instructor:  Carney

LIT 499-04 Seminar:  Violence, Visuality & Race: This course will examine literature by African-American writers and visual art that depicts African-Americans.   Our focus will be on the representation of violence in these works. Reading literature and images as texts, we will consider the ways in which visual and literary art illuminate and in some cases speak to each other.  We will question the representational possibilities and limitations that each medium encounters.  While we will read visual theory, you will find that these works integrate familiar theoretical lenses, including psychoanalysis, new historicism, and deconstruction. This course is intended to be exploratory, an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of disciplines in order to experience African-American artistic expression in light of broad historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic issues. Texts will include, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We will also view a wide array of images that span from the nineteenth century to the present.   Instructor:  Jackson

LIT 499-05 Seminar:  Ecocriticism:   The emerging field of ecocriticism began with a  primary focus on nature and environmental writing but has broadened to encompass, in Stephanie Sarver’s words “ a range of approaches to the study of literature that share a common concern with the relationship between humans and the non-human world.”  This course will begin with 19th-century constructions of “nature”  (Wordsworth, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson) and include much recent literature—- some with overt environmental themes (Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang and Barbara  Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer).  Students will complete the course by writing a major research paper applying ecocritical practice to a work or author beyond the course reading.    Instructor:  McCauley

 

LIT 499-06 & 07:  Seminar:  Gothic Fiction:  This course will focus on texts of “gothic” fiction by five writers: Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.   In particular, we will look at the ways in which the  texts of these authors address and problematize acts of reading and writing and their effects.  What does it mean to create a sensational” or “frightening” text?  What makes it terrifying, and why?  Can aesthetics and horror work together–or are sensational stories and novels always generated for a “popular,” “low-brow,” “non-academic” audience?  How can we know for sure?  Instructor:  Hustis

LIT 499-08:  Seminar:  Political Narratives in the United States:  Just in time for the presidential election, this seminar examines what stories can tell  us about politics and what politics can tell us about stories.  Readings may include works by Robert Penn Warren, Anna Deveare Smith, Norman Mailer, Henry James, Malcolm X, George Saunders, Muriel  Rukeyeser, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Barack Obama.  Leading theorists (or should we call them ‘pundits’?) include Benjamin, Debord, deTocqueville, Jameson, Lippman, and Virilio:  Instructor:  Blake