Summer Undergraduate Course Listings

It's time to start thinking about summer! Here are the undergraduate listings for both Summer Session I (May 29 - July 2) and Summer Session II (July 9 - August 9). All the courses are online, so if you are planning to get out of the city for the summer, you can still catch up on some coursework.

UNDERGRADUATE FLYER

SUMMER SESSION I

May 29 - July 2, 2012

Eng.  1040: Writing for Business (30703)
Online
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will emphasize the particular skills necessary for clear and efficient communication in business environments. Surveying the diverse forms of professional writing, from emails and cover letters to executive summaries and proposals, students will focus on the role clarity, organization, revision, and research in producing strong and purposeful writing. By the conclusion of the course, students will have collected a portfolio of various forms of business communication. This course will be taught fully online, and will require extensive work with texts and with other students’ writing through peer review exercises.

Eng. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (30193)
Online
Dr. Melissa Mowry
Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719) is one of the most iconic works of imaginative literature written in English.  Upon its publication 1719, it was an immediate best-seller and in the nearly three hundred years since it first appeared, its influence has never waned.  This semester we’re going to take a look at Robinson Crusoe, its influences and its sources in order to think about the ways it established or failed to establish a paradigm for England’s cultural conquest of much of the rest of the world.


Eng. 2210: Study of British Literature (31257)
Online
Dr. Angela Belli
This course surveys the periods and authors that comprise the body of English literature that we claim as our literary heritage. Emphasis is placed on the major writers who have contributed the most significant works of their time, works that have endured up to our time and continue to influence the latest creations. Students in the course will increase their knowledge in a way that contributes to their education in general as well as provides them with the skills valuable in gaining an appreciation of why reading is such a pleasurable experience. Participants are expected to respond to questions relative to the assigned readings, contribute to online discussions and write several short papers and one longer paper.

Eng. 3550: Short Fiction (31843)
Online
Dr. Granville Ganter
This summer session 1 class will trace a history of short stories and novellas from the nineteenth century through the modern period, drawn from both European and American literatures. The readings are designed to be engaging for both English majors and non-majors alike. Principal writers will include Edgar Allen Poe, Joseph Conrad, Zora Neale Hurston, Nathanael West, Franz Kafka, and others.

Eng. 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (31258)
Online
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
Through readings, discussions, and your own creative distillations of poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Ashbery; fiction writers such as Joyce, Hemingway, and Oates; and playwrights such as Brecht, Pinter, and Suzan-Lori Parks, you will learn to write and edit creative writing with both precision and abandon. Your experience might be enhanced by electronically corresponding with published creative writers and exchanging your creative work. Introduction to Creative Writing will make you aware of how you can use language "to know and feel."

Eng. 4992: Seminar in American Literature (30788)
True Blood: Monsters in American Literature
Online
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course will examine how images of vampires, witches, zombies, and monsters throughout American literary history have shaped contemporary cultural discourse.  Together we will read Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter; stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane; and Max Brooks' World War Z.

SUMMER SESSION II

JULY 9 - AUGUST 9, 2012

Eng. 1040: Writing for Business (30048)
Online
T/B/A
An exploration of common business-related writing problems, as well as critical responses to business-oriented readings.

Eng. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (32007)
Online
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Go-betweens, translators, companions, and rebels—these are just some of the roles played by women in the literature of globalization.  This course starts with one of the most famous figures in colonial literature—the Native American Pocohontas—and ends with the contemporary Latina poet and memoirist Gloria Anzaldua.   In between, we discover the ways that women have shaped inter-cultural contact and symbolized globalized lives in the short fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Bharati Mukherjee.

Eng. 2060: Studies in American Literature (31259)
Online
Dr. John LowneyThis course is an introduction to selected American writers and literary movements, with an emphasis on 20th-century literary texts that are concerned with U.S. national and international history.  It will take a comparative approach to texts, writers, and cultures within the United States, drawing connections between literature and its various contexts: historical, social, political, religious, philosophical, etc.  In particular, the course will stress the ways in which cultural mythologies concerning gender, race, and class have affected both the writing of literature and the formation of literary traditions.  Readings will include fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros , Thomas King, and Chang-Rae Lee.         

Eng. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism & Theory (31844)
Online
Dr. Elda Tsou
This introductory level course to literary theory covers the major poststructuralist theorists and their philosophical antecedents. It offers an intensive exploration of the range of texts called contemporary theory, and covers ground in several disciplines: linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology are just a few examples. Beginning with Plato, Saussure, Marx and Freud, the course segues into the recent theoretical schools that have extended or revised these early thinkers, such as postcolonial theory, ethics, and theories of race, gender and sexuality. Other theorists we will cover: Foucault, Spivak, Bhabha, Butler, Hall.

Eng. 3740:  Creative Writing:  Fiction (30332)
Online
Prof. Gabe Brownstein
This is a fiction writing workshop for anyone interested in writing stories.  The course will be broken into two halves.  In the first part of the semester, students will write exercises that emphasize various aspects of writing fiction, such as voice, point of view, dialogue, and setting.  In the second half they will write stories.   We will read work by a varied set of writers, including Jamaica Kincaid, Dorothy Parker, Junot Diaz, and Ha Jin.   Students will present their own work for critique and at the end of the semester present a portfolio of their best, revised work.