English

Courses

Courses with * fulfill
General Education requirements

(A-AP) = Arts - Applied

(A-TH) = Arts -
Theoretical/Historical

(A-AR) = Analytical -
Abstract Reasoning

(A-QR) = Analytical -
Quantitative Reasoning

(CP) = Comparative Practices

(D-D) = Diversity - Domestic

(D-I) = Diversity - International

(D-L) = Diversity - Language

(ES) = Earlham Seminar

(IP) = Interpretive Practices

(SI) = Scientific Inquiry

(W) = Wellness

(AY) = Offered in Alternative Year

*ENG 150 EARLHAM SEMINAR
(4 credits)
Offered for first-year students. Topics vary. (ES)

*ENG 204 AFRICAN LITERATURE
(3 credits)
Studies in the development of a modern African Literature from "traditional" through "colonial" and "post-colonial" literatures with some attention to indigenous forms (including oral traditions), assimilationist/protest heritages, negritude and issues of audience. Authors may include Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Th'iongo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as AAAS 204. (CP, D-I) (AY)

*ENG 206 JEWISH LITERATURE
(3 credits)
An introduction to some of the most influential works of literature produced by the Jewish people. Some ancient and medieval texts consulted, especially Midrash; most time spent on modern works. Special attention to the ways that Jews have used literature to preserve and challenge their cultural identity in different historical circumstances. Texts may include poetry by Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Nelly Sachs and Yehuda Amichai; novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anzia Yezierska and A.B. Yehoshua; and stories by Nachman of Bratzlav, Sholem Aleichem and Cynthia Ozick. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as JWST 206. (CP, D-D) (AY)

*ENG 245 SEMINAR (3 credits)
Sophomore and junior level seminar. Topics might include European Literature, Russian Literature or Literature of the Middle East. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. (CP) (AY)

*ENG 301 JOURNALISM I: NEWS REPORTING AND WRITING (3 credits)
An introduction to journalism that helps students establish and refine habits of regular news consumption and critique. Explores why journalism is essential to democracy. Practice on three main reporting techniques — observation, interview and document interpretation — and basic news writing. Final class project published online. Also listed as JNLM 301. (A-AP)

*ENG 302 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE (4 credits)
An introduction to the formal study of literature focusing on reading, interpretation and criticism of texts from various genres in the British and American literary tradition. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. (CP)

*ENG 303 WOMEN AND LITERATURE (4 credits)
An introduction to the study of literature by and about the lives of women, written in a variety of genres and periods, from a number of cultural traditions. Explores ways in which a study of a writer's ideas and techniques and a text's background (e.g., biography of the author, political climate, religious tradition) can lead to greater appreciation and understanding of a work, a writer, a reader and a time. A variety of critical points of view with particular attention to Feminist and Womanist theories. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as WMNS 303. (CP, D-D)

*ENG 304 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (4 credits)
An introduction to the study of literature focusing on the works of Americans of black African ancestry, with possible attention to works of African Caribbean and African Hispanic Americans. Special attention to major developments in form and themes, major writers and the evolution of an African American literary tradition. Introduction to issues of black literary theory and criticism. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as AAAS 304. (CP, D-D)

*ENG 305 AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY (4 credits)
A study of American environmental literature and its imaginative forms in relation to environmental philosophy, including changing ideas of nature and wilderness; representations of space and place; the deep ecology, ecofeminism and environmental justice movements; and the overall relation between human language and value and the non-human world. Attention also to cultural issues of ecology, such as how our ecological understandings affect our sense of identity and our social and economic practices. May include writers such as Thoreau, Abbey, Muir, Snyder, Aldo Leopold, Terry Tempest Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko and Mary Oliver. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as ENPR 305. (CP) (AY)

ENG 306 THE NOVEL (4 credits)
Studies in the development of the novel in Britain and the United States with some attention to great novels of other traditions. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. (AY)

*ENG 307 DRAMA (4 credits)
A study of the common aspects of dramatic form and significant variations. Theories and application. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as THEA 307. (A-TH)

*ENG 308 POETRY (4 credits)
Studies in the nature, techniques and appreciation of poetry approached through the reading of selected poems written in English between the Renaissance and the present day. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. (A-TH)

*ENG 321 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING (4 credits)
An introduction to creative writing and the writing workshop process, focusing on the genres of poetry and short fiction but also occasionally exploring other genres (such as playwriting or creative non-fiction). Includes intensive writing and discussion of the craft and process of writing. Prerequisite: An Earlham Seminar, an Interpretive Practices course or consent of the instructor. Also listed as JNLM 321. (A-AP)

ENG 351 MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE (4 credits)
A study of Old and Middle English literature, from the 8th- to mid 15th-century. Examines different genres such as dream visions, romances, plays, lyric poetry, epic and estates satire in the context of medieval philosophy, religion, science and politics. Explores how different contemporary critical theories approach medieval texts and different ways of viewing literature of the past. Authors may include the Beowulf-poet, the Gawain-poet, other anonymous poets including Arthurian poets, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, William Langland, Julian of Norwich, Marie de France and Gower. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 352 RENAISSANCE ENGLISH LITERATURE (4 credits)
A study of late 15th- to mid 17th-century British literature, focusing on the Tudor-Stuart era. Uses a range of poetry, prose and drama to explore literary, religious, social and political debates of the period. Emphasizes reading historically, reconstructing as far as possible a culturally distant world and putting findings in dialog with a sense of our own time. Authors may include Thomas Wyatt, Thomas More, Philip, Sidney, Mary Herbert, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Ben Jonson and George Herbert. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 353 RESTORATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT LITERATURE (4 credits)
A study of late 17th- and 18th-century British literature, which may include Restoration comedy, the origins of the novel, Neo-Classical poetry and poetic theory, Augustan satire, periodical essays, literary criticism and literary biography. Examines this literature in political and cultural context, with attention to issues such as religion, gender, social class, liberty and the slave trade, British imperialism, the development of modern sciences, the public sphere, publishing and reading practices, and Enlightenment culture. Authors may include Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Behn, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Heywood, Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Gray, Goldsmith, Burney and Austen. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 355 ROMANTICISM (4 credits)
An examination of the literature of the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries, in relation to the political, social and cultural conditions of the period. Topics include responses to the French Revolution; issues of gender, class and race; authorial identity; the Romantic Self; and the relation between literature and the environment. Authors may include: Blake, Wollstonecraft, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary and P. B. Shelley, Byron, Keats, Clare, Hemans and Austen. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 356 VICTORIAN LITERATURE (4 credits)
Explores literature of the Victorian period, or as Henry James put it, the age of the "large loose, baggy monster," the Victorian novel. Topics may include realism, the gothic and the bildungsroman; the construction of "Englishness" and its racial "others" in the context of Empire; the "Woman question"; social and cultural criticism; the rise of industrial capitalism and class conflict; debates over science and faith; and the literary marketplace. Readings may include the novels of Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Hardy, Collins and Wilde. May also include poetry by Tennyson, Arnold, the two Brownings and Christina Rossetti, and prose and drama by other authors. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 357 AMERICAN LITERATURE: MAKING CULTURES (4 credits)
Explores aspects of the genesis of early American literature up to the 19th-century Romantic question of "What is an American?" Authors may include novelists, essayists and poets such as Bradstreet, Mather, Paine, Adams, Whitman, Jacobs, Alcott, Melville, Franklin, Douglass and Thoreau. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 358 AMERICAN LITERATURE: SOCIAL LIVES (4 credits)
Rooted in the 19th-century, explores the growth of an American literature concerned with its national character in an international and rapidly changing domestic context. Topics may include abolitionism and reconstruction, women's rights, industrialization and immigration. Authors may include Dickinson, James, Jewett Cahan, Dubois, Chesnutt and Zitkala-Sa. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 359 MODERN LITERATURE (4 credits)
A study of British and American literature from around 1910 to 1965, as expressed in a variety of genres including non-fiction prose. Writers studied both as individuals and as members (or consciously non-members) of groups devoted to certain aesthetic or political principles. Groups or movements explored include Nihilists, Existentialists, Imagists, the Harlem Renaissance and Southern regionalist writers. Authors may include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer and Richard Wright. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 360 SEMINAR IN AMERICAN AUTHORS (4 credits)
Close study of more than one work by a few American writers often chosen from the 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Authors may include Frost, Twain, O'Neill, Hurston, Cather, Faulkner and Harper. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

*ENG 381 SHAKESPEARE (4 credits)
A study of the poetic and dramatic art of Shakespeare through an examination of six to 10 plays, including tragedies, comedies, histories and romances. Approach varies between attention to the written text and the text as performance. Prerequisite: ENG 302 or consent of the instructor. Also listed as THEA 381. (A-TH)

ENG 382 EARLY LITERARY CRITICISM (4 credits)
An introduction to some of the influential ideas in early literary criticism. All concepts examined in relation to works of drama, poetry and fiction. Sample critics are Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth, Fuller, Poe, A.J. Cooper and James. Prerequisite: ENG 302. (AY)

*ENG 463 TOPICS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (4 credits)
Topics determined by the instructor might consider particular writers or literary movements as well as interdisciplinary or thematic concerns. For example: an exploration of the Slave Narrative and its influence on contemporary Black fiction; a close study of the Harlem Renaissance; an examination of contemporary literary critical debates in and about African American writing; attention to the nonfiction prose of DuBois, Morrison, Lorde and Baldwin. Prerequisite: ENG 302. Also listed as AAAS 463. (D-D) (AY)

*ENG 464 POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE (4 credits)
An examination of the widely-debated term "post-colonialism" and its relation to other intersecting terms and critical concepts, such as the "Commonwealth," "Third World," "imperialism," "Orientalism" and "neocolonialism." Uses literatures from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia to explore questions such as: How have writers from the previously colonized world used literature to respond to the economic, political and cultural realities of (de)colonization? What does it mean to "write back" to the Empire? Authors include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Jean Rhys, Mahasweta Devi and critical essays by Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, among others. Includes attention to issues of empire, nation, race, class, gender and sexuality. Prerequisite: ENG 302. (D-I)

ENG 466 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE (4 credits)
An exploration of the contemporary literary scene in America and Britain with attention to the works and influences of other literatures, particularly those written in English, and with some attention to genres such as science fiction and fantasy, autobiography or mystery. Considers contemporary literary theory and the cross-disciplinary impact of critical theory. Prerequisite: ENG 302. (AY)

*ENG 468 EMERGING LITERATURES (4 credits)
Studies in culture-making, focusing on groups of literature of particular cultures and sub-cultures, exploring the genesis and development and the cultural and political uses of those literatures. For example, a contrasting study of the earliest period of American literature and the more contemporary development of a self-conscious gay and lesbian literature, or a study of latina/o literature in the United States compared to the study of a post-colonial literature. Prerequisite: ENG 302. (D-D or D-I) (AY)

ENG 469 CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM (4 credits)
An introduction to some of the major trends in contemporary literary criticism, such as Marxism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Reception Theory and a variety of Feminist approaches. All theories applied to works of poetry and fiction. Sample critics are Freud, Bakhtin, Gates, Eagleton, Showalter, Christian, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva and Iser. Prerequisite: ENG 302. (AY)

*ENG 470 WRITING WORKSHOP (4 credits)
An intensive writing experience in one or more genres, chosen by the instructor and for the serious writer who has gained admission to the class through a successful portfolio. Much individual work with class time spent in a workshop setting. May be taken more than once. Prerequisite: ENG 321 and consent of the instructor. (A-AP)

ENG 481 INTERNSHIPS, FIELD STUDIES AND OTHER FIELD EXPERIENCES
(1-3 credits)

ENG 482 SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE (4 credits)
Selected topics determined by the instructor, either of an interdisciplinary nature such as Psychology and Literature or Philosophy of Literature; or a thematic study such as "time," or a study of an individual writer such as John Milton, Henry James or Toni Morrison. Prerequisite: ENG 302.

ENG 483 TEACHING ASSISTANTS (1-3 credits)

ENG 484 FORD/KNIGHT RESEARCH PROJECT (1-4 credits)
Collaborative research with faculty funded by the Ford/Knight Program.

ENG 485 INDEPENDENT STUDY (1-3 credits)
Intended for the advanced student. An investigation of a specific topic conceived and planned by the student in consultation with a faculty adviser.

ENG 488 SENIOR CAPSTONE EXPERIENCE (4 credits)
An exploration of a literary theme or subject matter with cross-disciplinary dimensions, and at a level which requires the student to bring an accumulation of literary and analytical skills and value judgments to bear. Subject determined by the instructor in consultation with the Department. Prerequisite: Senior standing and ENG 302.