Course Offerings
Department of English
Fall 2017
English Courses (ENG)
ENG 1050
Understanding Literary Language
Sisson
This course could easily be called “Cultivating the Art of Paying Attention”—that is, paying attention to
writing, to language, to literature. As such, it will focus on the elements of literature and the elements of
writing about literature, the details of which make a significant difference in our writing and reading
experiences and our appreciation for these works as acts of creation.
This class will thus encourage you to consider how literature is at once a work of art and an act of
rhetorical significance—in other words, how writing is the carefully crafted result of the specific
strategies employed by writers for particular purposes. The critical texts that you create in this class will
be taken as seriously as the literature we study together, for our aim is to become highly aware of all
aspects of writing—your own as well as published authors. You will also have occasional opportunities
to flex your creative muscles as you try your hand at imitating the writers we are reading by creating
similar works of your own.
Over the course of the semester, you will submit four papers, regular written responses to the readings,
an in-class final exam, and a paper revision. All papers will be developed through the drafting and
revision process. Our reading will cover four genres: the short story, drama, novel, and poetry. We will
begin by reading stories by Katherine Mansfield. The selection of our two plays is pending, awaiting the
unveiling of Belmont’s 2017-2018 season (at least one of our plays will be performed at Belmont so we
can see the staged production). Our novels will be E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Tim O’Brien’s
In the Lake of the Woods, and our poetry will be Mark Jarman’s The Heronry and Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris.
In addition to reading literature, we will make regular use of John Trimble’s Writing with Style:
Conversations on the Art of Writing.
ENG 2000
Critical Reading and Writing
Trout
This course is designed to introduce English majors and minors to the nature of critical reading and
writing. You will be exposed to a number of theoretical approaches that you will practice applying to
several major literary works. You will also concentrate on writing an effective essay on literature. This is
both a reading and writing intensive course. The class will also foster serious critical discussion and
effective oral communication. We will consider several novels, including Atonement, The Bluest Eye, and
1984.
ENG 3000
Junior Seminar in English
Curtis
(Pass/Fail, 0 credit hours). Prerequisite: Students should be in their Junior Year. This requirement for all
English majors, though open to English minors as well, is designed to be taken in the junior year.
Students prepare for their future, considering such issues as preparation for graduate school, teaching,
and writing as a profession. Guest speakers and graduates of the program will help introduce students
to a variety of career paths.
ENG 3960
Internship
Overall
The purpose of the writing internship course is to provide practical application of classroom learning in
an off-campus professional setting. Students enrolled in the course are in the process of performing the
work of an internship designed and approved the prior semester in collaboration with Dr. Overall, the
English Department’s Internship Coordinator. The number of hours you must complete in your work as
an intern at your chosen workplace varies according to the number of credit hours for which you are
enrolled: 3 hours Belmont course credit = 9 hours/week (approximately 108 hours total); 2 hours
Belmont course credit = 6 hours/week (approximately 72 hours total); 1 hour Belmont course credit = 3
hours/week (approximately 36 hours). Class sessions are devoted to discussions of workplace writing
issues and strategies. Students write reflections in which they describe their internship experiences;
complete a series of short professional-writing “cases”; and compose and design a digital portfolio with
documents they produce on the job. Half of the course grade will be determined from the above
assignments while the internship supervisor evaluation will determine the other half.
For more information, see http://www.joeloverall.com/courses/ENG3960/
ENG 4900
Seminar in English Studies
Hodges Hamilton
When you get, give. When you learn, teach.
Maya Angelou
Throughout Senior Seminar, we will reflect on students’ writing, learning, and growth across the English
major. Students will compile a major portfolio with both revised and original writings. We will also study
texts that look at the past, present, and future of English Studies as a way to position ourselves as
members of the field, while paying particular attention to the following questions: Where have you
been? Where are you going? And what can you give and teach as a result?
Course Objectives
* To study literary and writing theories and practices in order to better understand the past and present
of English Studies
* To develop insight into a particular area of English Studies that interests you
* To support your future professional work as a creative writer, writing teacher, and/or scholar
* To create a strong major portfolio
Literature Courses (ENL)
ENL 2895.01
Modern Japanese Literature and Culture
Paine
This course will consider a wide variety of Japanese writers of prose fiction and of Japanese cultural
practices, from the early twentieth century to the present. They will be discussed in the context of a
developing tradition of Japanese and international modernism, as well as in their Japanese cultural and
historical context. The aim of this course is not only to introduce students to modern Japanese
literature, but especially to use this medium as a window into Japanese culture and sensibilities. (This
course is cross listed with HUM and ASN.)
ENL 2895.02
20th-Century North Africa and France in Literature and Film
Paine
This course will focus on the complex nature of France’s relation to its former colonies in North Africa, as
represented in literary texts and films. It will entail a capsule review of French history and culture since
the Revolution, colonial expansion into Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and developments in the postcolonial period, since 1962. No knowledge of French is required. (This course is cross listed with HUM.)
ENL/ENW 3500
History of the English Language
Monteverde
Recognizing that any description of this course is destined to be off-putting, let me begin by stating that
ideally this course should make your own language come alive for you as a living entity whose current
form is the result of all its childhood experiences and whose future shape though predictable to some
extent is also yet to be determined. We will study the growth of our language from its origin as a
descendant of the Indo-European language family in distant prehistory to its current position as the 2nd
most widely known language in the modern world. Topics covered will include the relationship between
English and other languages, the evolution of modern English grammar, and the causes of the mess we
call the English spelling system (if it can be called that). Tests will be augmented with a variety of
assignments, such as a personal language history, designed to help you appreciate the on-going and
individual process of change that can be experienced in the study of English. An optional service learning
unit can also be taken as part of the course. This course is required for all students pursuing secondary
education licensure in English and students pursing an English Language Learners certificate; it is also
highly recommended (and really should be required) for all students combining an English major with
elementary certification or pursuing a minor or second major in foreign language.
ENL 3800
Topics in World Literature: ExileHomeMemory
Paine
We will examine multiple permutations of the perpetual human condition of exile, the desire to return
home, and the role which memory plays in this drama. In addition to the Book of Ruth and the Parable
of the Prodigal Son, among other texts that may seem helpful, we will consider the following works:
Homer, The Odyssey.
Joseph Conrad, “Amy Foster.”
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory.
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants.
Milan Kundera, Ignorance.
Leïla Sebbar, Silence on the Shores.
Tahar Ben Jelloun, A Palace in the Old Village.
Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans.
Marilynne Robinson, Home.
Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz.
ENL 3895
Home in American Literature
Trout
This special topics course will consider the many ways contemporary American writers engage with the
idea of “home” in their fiction. We will attempt to unpack the layers of meaning associated with the
signifier “home” (hometown, homeland, homeward, homesick, homeless) and how our attachment or
exile affects our identities. We will approach this fiction through a number of theoretical, historical, and
cultural lenses. Please note that this class will be connected to the 16th Annual Humanities Symposium
in the Fall that will take place from September 18-25, 2017. The Symposium theme, “Making it Home,”
will also consider “how making home, physically and metaphorically—on a personal, communal, local,
national, and global scale—illuminates our experience as individuals who are also citizens of the human
race.” Your active engagement in both the class and the Symposium will be expected. This is a reading
intensive course so I encourage you to begin reading in the summer. The reading list includes: Sherwood
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon;
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; Lee Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies; Amy Tan, The Joy
Luck Club; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine; Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides; Russell Banks, The Sweet
Hereafter, and for fun, David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
ENL 4350
Thomas Hardy and “The Nature of Things”
Sisson
Born in 1840, Thomas Hardy lived through World War I and feared, before his death in 1928, that a
second world war was brewing. A Victorian by birth, a Romantic by sensibility, and a Modernist by
disposition, Hardy is classified as a “philosophical” writer who influenced and anticipated British
Modernism; indeed, he is placed in anthologies in the early Modernist period even though he wrote for
over a decade longer in the Victorian period than in the 20th century.
Often regarded as a pessimist or fatalist, Hardy called himself an “evolutionary meliorist,” suggesting
that the world can evolve and improve only if people confront the unvarnished truth about life’s hazards
and perplexities; thus, his writing examines fate, chance, circumstances, and “the nature of things,”
highlighting the natural world, human nature, the cosmos, time, consciousness, and non-human and
human history. In the middle of these contending forces, he depicts a society that inflicts its unnatural
conventions and expectations on “the nature of things.” Consequently, Hardy’s novels are social
critiques that play out against a backdrop of titanic forces, revealing patterns of human and cosmic
happenings, while insisting, as his poem “In Tenebris II” explains, “If way to the better there be, it exacts
a full look at the worst.”
In this course, we will read novels primarily, but also poetry and short stories; in addition, we will read
from Hardy scholarship, including a scholarly biography. Our main texts will be Wessex Tales, Far from
the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Caster-bridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude
the Obscure, and The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy.
Students will write regular Journal Responses; present one individual Launch Essay; present (in small
groups) on a critical article; and submit one individual major interpretive analysis paper, including
research and annotations.
Writing Courses (ENW)
ENW 2100
Digital Literacies
Overall
In this course, students will work to cultivate digital literacies. In order to do so, students will critically
analyze and compose within a variety of multimedia genres such as web texts, video, image creation,
and information campaigns. In addition to learning industry-standard publication and design software
such as Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, InDesign, and HTML/CSS coding, students will work with many
modes (words, image, sound, hypertext, arrangement) of texts. While producing a variety of products
that involve many different media, students will explore some of the most recent theories regarding the
challenges to authorship these types of products invoke. No prior experience with technology is
required.
ENW 2430
Introduction to Creative Writing
McDowell
This course is designed to introduce you to the beginning writing of poetry and fiction. The course will
also be used to develop and foster a community of working writers. Through workshopping and class
discussion of your own work and readings of creative and critical texts, you will learn 1) what makes a
poem or story effective to the audience of your choice; 2) how to manipulate your own life experiences,
even the small, seemingly insignificant ones, into powerful poems and stories; and 3) how to learn about
your own writing through the close reading of your classmates’ drafts. This class will set the groundwork
for future writing by leading you through the motions of writing, revising, and rewriting. You will also
gain insight into the creative process by reading past and present masters of fiction and poetry. With
this new set of skills, you will be ready to embark on further writing away from class with a basic
foundation in how not just to write but how to be a writer. This semester, we will focus on fiction and
poetry.
ENW 2510
Art of the Essay
Stover
In this course students will explore the art of the personal essay by reading essayists ranging from Sei
Shonagon (10th century) to contemporary essayists such as Joan Didion, Scott Russell Sanders, and Lia
Purpura. Students will sample all kinds of styles that emerge as essayists attempt to write down the
thoughts on their minds. True to Michel de Montaigne’s notion of the essay as a trial or an attempt,
students will have the opportunity to make several attempts at crafting their thoughts into an artistically
fashioned form that delights and instructs their readers. We will research, write about, and explore such
concepts as persona, detachment, empathy, zuihitsu, negative capability, and reliable narration, among
others. After reading a roundtable discussion by professors who teach the essay, students will follow
through by researching questions that intrigue them and by designing with their peers a roundtable
discussion that reflects students’ insights on reading and writing the personal essay.
ENW 2895
Intro to Rhetoric: Words, Signs, and Their Persuasions
Lovvorn
This class introduces students to the history, theory, and range of rhetorical studies. As Aristotle put it,
“Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of
persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.” Taking up such ideas, the class encourages students
to broaden their artistic skills as rhetorical analysts and as writers and composers. Students will
encounter Aristotle’s thinking as well as other classical ideas regarding the rhetorical arts, but the class’s
main focus will involve using these foundations to understand the persuasions embedded in modern
communications—surveying landmark speeches, political tracts, media/marketing tactics, and even
everyday symbols. Focusing especially on rhetoric in public discourse, the class will ask students to
consider how persuasion might best serve audiences when it is considerate and responsible rather than
superficial and deceptive. Examples of class texts include well-known treatises such as Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” and “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” and
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” but the class will also examine persuasive texts connected to
more recent popular culture, such as Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” Nike’s “Just Do It”
advertisements, and the ever expanding world of emojis.
ENW 3410
Creative Writing: Fiction
Finch
In his book, Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern describes a creative writing workshop as a place
where “you are learning to articulate your reactions to a story…[while] teaching yourself to look at your
own work with the same critical eye.” The ability to critique is not an innate skill, and instead, writers
must learn how to analyze a short story through practice and instruction. This course strives to
accomplish three primary goals: to expose writers to a variety of styles, story shapes, and authors, to
encourage the critical examination of both published work and workshop material, and finally, to inspire
writers to create a variety of original pieces, working in different points of view and structures, some of
which may exceed the boundaries of the writer’s comfort zone. In order to accomplish these goals, you,
as the writer, must be willing to try different techniques and exercises, and you must be open to
criticism from peers as well as your instructor. The more you are willing to challenge yourself as a writer
(and risk failure), the more you will gain from this class. As Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing.
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
ENW 3050
Writing & Learning: The Peer Tutor Seminar
Smith Whitehouse
Note: This course is open to Writing Fellows. Applications are due 3/27. See Dr. Bonnie Smith Whitehouse
if you’d like an application or more information; packets are outside her office, Ayers 3031!
Tutoring others in writing heightens our awareness of just how complex the craft of writing is. No
matter how many skills and rules we have mastered, tutoring involves us in human interaction
complicated by unarticulated emotions, expectations, biases, and assumptions held by both tutor and
writer. In other words, in any given tutoring session we tutors must learn to read more than the text
before us. We also learn to read the body language of the student writer; to negotiate silence; to
determine the one issue that will most help the student develop as a writer; to gauge the success or
failure of the approach we have taken; to recognize our own biases and limitations as writers and tutors;
to understand our own writing process; to understand writing processes that differ from our own; and
to quickly scan our store of rhetorical prowess . . . all in 30 minutes!
In this course we will unpack all these complications by reading theories, stories, and practical advice
from experienced tutors and scholars of writing. As we read and discuss theory, you will also engage in
tutoring your peers both in the First-Year Seminar and in the Writing Center. Finally, you will write
extensively to keep in touch with your own writing processes as you help other writers with theirs. We
will share our work in the classroom, gaining even more experience in tutoring by providing feedback,
guidance, and support to one another, and by frankly discussing which tutoring strategies work—and
which don’t.
ENW 3895.01
Style: The Music of Writing
Stover
Virginia Woolf once claimed that “style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you
can't use the wrong words. . . . Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any
words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.” This
course will investigate Woolf’s claim by examining the rhythmic structures of sentences that evolve from
careful attention to what we see and feel. We will focus our study not only on what sentences say, but
also on how they work, and on how the rhythm and music of a sentence go straight to the heart of
meaning. As writers, we will analyze the rhythmic structures of some of our most poetic prose stylists,
but mostly we will practice using rhythmic structures in our own poetic prose pieces. (Counts as upper
division Writing elective in the major or minor.)
ENW 3895.01
Women’s Rhetoric
Blomeley
“She was warned. She was given an explanation.
Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell
When Mitch McConnell censured Elizabeth Warren last month for attempting to read aloud the words
of Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor, he was participating in a long and rich tradition: the silencing
of women by patriarchal forces. Nevertheless, Elizabeth Warren, Coretta Scott King, and women
throughout history have persisted in making their voices heard. In this course we will trace the history of
that persistence from classical Greece to the present day. We will focus heavily on intersectionality as
we consider the ways sex, gender, social class, and race shape women’s rhetoric. Readings will come
from a wide variety of writers and speakers from the past two millennia: from Aspasia to Amy Schumer,
from Queen Elizabeth I to Toni Morrison, from Sojourner Truth to Mindy Kaling, from Gloria Anzaldua to
Samantha Bee.
Required texts will include Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie’s Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s
Rhetorics and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream. Assignments will include an archival
research project and a collaboratively published anthology of contemporary women’s rhetoric.
Time
9:00
Monday
ENL 2220
ENG 1050
ENW 2895
ENL 2110
ENG 1050
ENW 2430
ENW 3050
ENW 2430
Wednesday
ENL 2220
ENG 1050
ENW 2895
ENL 2110
ENG 1050
ENW 2430
ENW 3050
ENW 2430
Friday
ENL 2220
ENG 1050
ENW 2895
ENL 2210
ENG 1050
ENW 2430
ENW 3050
ENW 2430
Time
9:30
Tuesday
ENL 4350
Thursday
ENL 4350
11:00
ENL 3800
ENL 3800
12:30
1:00
ENW 3895
(Style)
ENW 2430
ENW 3895
(Style)
ENW 2430
ENW 3895
(Style)
ENW 2430
2:00
2:00
ENW 3410
ENL 2895
(N.Africa and
France – to
4:30)
ENW 2100
ENL/W 3500
ENW 3410
ENG 3000
3:30
ENG 4900
ENG 2000
ENW 2510
ENL 2895
(Japan)
ENL 3895
(Home)
ENL 2310
ENW 3895
(Women)
ENG 4900
ENG 2000
ENW2510
ENL 2895
(Japan)
ENL 3895
(Home)
ENL 2310
ENW 3895
(Women)
11:00
12:00
3:30
4:00
ENL 2210 (online)
ENW 2100
ENL/W 3500
MA in English Course Descriptions
Summer-Fall 2017
Summer 2017
ENG 6200 Creative Writing Seminar: The Lyric Essay
Dr. Gary McDowell
Thursday 6-9:30pm
Not a poem, not a narrative, not an idea-driven essay, but something other. Outside and/or inside this
post-structuralist definition exists a genre of writing contemporarily vital to our literature. Braided
through image, language, story, rhythm, and mimetic technique, the lyric essay expands upon its
forebears (Creative Nonfiction and New Journalism) popularized in the 1960s and 1970s by the likes of
Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. The lyric essay, however, has pushed beyond
even those gorgeously textured, vibrantly alive texts to include new levels of perception and insight,
music and poetry. In this workshop-style class, we will read contemporarily to discover the lyric essay
(writers will include, among others, Lia Purpura, Jericho Parms, Renee Gladman, James Allen Hall, and
others) and then write our own lyric essays in conversation with our readings.
ENG 5830 Readings in American Literature
Prof. Susan Trout
Tuesday 6-9:30pm
This course will examine the formation of America’s cultural and literary identity from the colonial
period to the Civil War. We will analyze literary texts from a number of historical, social, and critical
perspectives. This course expects that students demonstrate not only a knowledge of the historical
development of the culture from which these texts come, but also an ability to apply analytical and
interpretive skills to the examined texts and contexts through reading, writing, and critical thinking. This
is a reading intensive course, as well as a course that relies heavily on your oral and written
participation.
Fall 2017
ENG 5810 Readings in British Literature I
Dr. Jayme Yeo
Thursday, 6-8:30
This course will examine the early development of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to
Shakespeare. We will explore Arthurian legends, dream visions, travel narratives, life writing, drama,
and poetry. The course will help students understand the development of these texts within their
historical, social, cultural, and literary contexts. Students will also be able to use this knowledge to
analyze and interpret the literature. Ultimately, this course will enable students to get at the heart of
some of the era’s most pressing questions: how do we imagine our local and global communities? How
do we formulate individual agency within the limits of the social order? And most importantly, does Guy
Ritchie’s upcoming film do justice to the original Arthurian legends? The course is reading-intensive and
relies heavily on student participation.
ENG 6100 Genre Seminar: Twentieth-Century Poetry, Pleasure and Pain
Dr. Caresse John
Wednesday, 6-8:30
English 6100 offers both a micro and macro analysis of the content and aesthetics of twentieth-century
American and British poetry. Thus, students can expect close, careful reading of individual poems as well
as exploration of the broader historical and cultural contexts to which and in which poets were
responding and participating. The twentieth-century brought much pain, in the form of two world wars,
technological advances, battles over civil and human rights - the list can go on and on. And yet, we find
some of the most achingly beautiful poetry humanity has ever created in this century - how did these
authors craft such pleasure from such pain? That will be a driving question of our literary exploration.
We will be studying in-depth movements such as Modernism, Postmodernism, the Harlem Renaissance,
Imagism, Confessionalism, and recent trends in the later part of the century. This will be a readingintensive course based heavily upon class discussion and students' oral and written participation, with
the course objectives being twofold: first, to familiarize students with twentieth-century poetry; and
second, to give students the tools with which to read any poem more closely and with greater pleasure.
ENG 5730: Pedagogical Studies
Dr. Sarah Blomeley
Tuesday, 6-8:30
The aim of this course is to prepare students to teach writing and literature at the post-secondary level.
Students in this class will learn about the major conversations and issues in college English teaching as
we read a diverse body of pedagogical theory, practice responding to student writing, teach in large
group settings, tutor in face-to-face settings, and develop assignments. Course requirements include a
literacy narrative; a conference-length research paper and presentation; a teaching portfolio; and
weekly reading responses.