ENG 140 Reading Literature is a required foundation course in the English major that satisfies the General Education Cultural Interpretation requirement. It emphasizes close reading of texts from different historical periods and introduces students to literary conventions and terminology as well as to library and Internet resources available for research. It is a prerequisite for ENG 245 and all other 200-level and higher courses. This course does not count as credit toward the English major.
Aye . . . Revenge. It’s a tale as old as Beowulf and as recent as a major narrative in the 2024 election cycle. In this prerequisite class to the English major, we’ll learn the mechanics of literary analysis through familiarization with library resources and deep close reading. To achieve these results, we’ll take a ghastly tour through some of literary history’s major revenge texts. Our tour begins with early canonical revenge plays by Seneca, Shakespeare, and Milton. Then, we’ll proceed to the 19th century, exploring how authors including Shelley and Poe adapted elements of the revenge story to shape the Gothic. Finally, we’ll end with diverse 20th and 21st century texts that further adapt and amalgamate revenge tropes in various ways. By the end of class, you’ll understand that revenge narratives often interrogate systems of justice. Specifically, they depict instances of vigilantism to mark points of inequity and corruption perverting the system. We’ll explore this concept and its offshoots through work that prepares you for the English major, including 3-4 major essays and a multimedia presentation that combines design software and class reflection. Be prepared to read . . . or else! Muahaha!
TEXTS: In addition to shorter works posted on Brightspace, course texts will include the Penguin Classics edition of Phaedra and Other Plays (edited by R. Scott Smith), the Penguin Classics edition of Five Revenge Tragedies (edited by Emma Smith), the Broadview edition of Shelley’s Frankenstein (edited by MacDonald and Scherf), and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
ASSESSMENTS: 3-4 essays of 5-8 pages and an end-of-semester multimedia presentation that combines design software with class reflection.
ENG 140 introduces students to the principles, techniques, concepts, and vocabulary of literary analysis and emphasizes close reading of several literary genres in their historical context, focusing in particular on the literature of the founding of the United States. The course will examine how meaning(s) in literary texts are related to formal devices, ideological paradigms, and historically/culturally particular uses of language.
TEXTS: Most of the required readings will come from the Norton Anthology of American Literature that students will access via e-reserves. Additionally the professor will post his own templates and models related to MLA and forms of academic writing in the course brightspace shell. Readings will include excerpts from Franklin, Wheatley, Paine, Whitman, Stowe, Hawthorne, Achebe, Kincaid, Plato, Woolf, and Shakespeare.
ASSESSMENT: three 5-7 page essays; a critical glossary; student led discussions
This course is an introduction to the principles and practices of writing fiction and poetry; other genres may be added at the discretion of the instructor. Students will be exposed to a variety of writing modes through exercises and engagement with literary texts. Emphasis is on using imaginative and precise language, on developing critical skills through workshops, and on assembling a portfolio of revised student writing.
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
NOTE: ENG 201 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
| Professor | |||
| Bendzela | MW | 9:30 – 10:45 | Gorham |
| Bendzela | MW | 12:30 – 1:45 | Gorham |
| Cheung | TR | 11:00 – 12:15 | Gorham |
| Cheung | TR | 12:30 – 1:45 | Gorham |
| Kelly | Online | ||
| Menting | W | 5:00-7:30 | Portland |
| Sruoginis | Online (2 sections) |
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Engaged Learning Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
NOTE: ENG 204 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
This career-oriented writing skills course explores how professional writers accomplish business goals through text. Most often, these goals require writers to craft strategic emotional appeals that prompt a particular demographic to complete a call to action, such as buy, subscribe, schedule, or vote. Specifically, we will complete the responsibilities associated with various professional job titles – including newswriter, content writer, marketer, and job seeker – ultimately learning how to craft text that supports sales and branding objectives. Our guiding concept will be “economy,” which works on two levels. First, we will learn sentence-level composition strategies for economical writing, so that we can write streamlined and digestible prose that produces maximum effect. Second, we will deploy this economical writing to achieve results within a business economy, where organizations make pitches to their audiences to achieve a call-to-action. This class is taught by a professor who worked as a marketer in a past life and should be helpful to any students who want guidance adapting their writing skills to occupational opportunities.
TEXTS: Online resources will include examples from the USM Library Ebooks: Gunelius, Writing the Parts of an Email Message, 157-166 and Handley and Habeshian, Writing for Email, 219-225. Other resources will be assigned by the instructor.
ASSESSMENTS: 3-5 portfolios consisting of smaller documents that work together to complete professional writing goals, including a job application portfolio, a newswriter portfolio that includes a news roundup and various articles, and an advertising campaign portfolio that combines strategy with social media content
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
NOTE: ENG 204 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
NOTE: ENG 205 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
Knowing how to write, revise, and shape sentences will help you negotiate the varied writing contexts you will encounter as a student and as a professional. You can use this knowledge to shape your style according to audience and genre, so that your sentences contribute to clear, effective communication. Being able to identify and manipulate sentence structures and types will prepare you for new writing situations that call for particular styles of writing.
TEXTS: Bacon, Nora, The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013; Hacker, Diana, A Writer’s Reference, 6th Ed. New York and Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. [An earlier edition from College Writing or another course will serve for this class.] Other readings will be available on Brightspace.
ASSESSMENT: frequent quizzes, style imitation exercises, personal style reflection, genre exercises
Please note: This course is an alternative to, and not a prerequisite for, ENG 305 Rhetoric, Syntax, and Style.
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
NOTE: ENG 205 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
ENG 220 World Masterpieces I is a required course in the English major that will cover the major works of Western and non-Western literature from the classical, medieval, and early modern eras and provide an historical foundation for subsequent coursework in literature and theory.
Fulfills Elective Requirement (Requirement Term Spring 2015 or prior)
Fulfills English Major Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2015 or later)
In this survey, we will study some of the most enduring works of early global literature through the lens of storytelling. What stories endure from these earlier cultures, and what do these stories have to teach us about the cultures in which they were produced? We will trace the emergence of epic heroes across the world, seeking to understand the cultural conditions that lead disparate cultures to produce similar figures. Likewise, we shall consider how genres are informed by sociopolitical contexts in both classical and medieval texts.
TEXTS: Our reading will include excerpts from ancient and medieval epics, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ramayana, the Iliad, and Beowulf; classical drama and lyric poetry; and stories about creation and storytelling from cultures around the world.
ASSESSMENT: short analytical essays; engaged participation in class discussion and writing activities; a semester-long commonplace book and reading journal; and a sustained research project
ENG 220 World Masterpieces I is a required course in the English major and will cover the major works of Western and non-Western literature from the classical, medieval, and early modern eras and provide an historical foundation for subsequent coursework in literature and theory. Readings will be drawn from ancient lyric poetry, the epic traditions of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, religious writings from the Bible, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and the Qur’an, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The course will emphasize the continuity of these early figurative forms in literary history in the emergence of English literature.
TEXTS: Readings may include The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, and selections from the Bible and the Qur’an.
ASSESSMENT: four response papers (two to three pages) and two five-page essays
This course introduces students to the terminologies, methodologies, and writing strategies necessary to pursue a major in English. Through readings of both critical essays and literary works, we will study and compare a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to textual analysis and explore the relationships between literature and culture. There will be a strong emphasis on writing assignments that teach skills necessary both for effective critical thinking and for writing a literary research paper. Ideally, you should take this course with other 200-level major requirements, such as ENG 220 World Masterpieces. As this course prepares you for reading and research, you should take it before any 300-level literature or theory course. It is a prerequisite for the capstone seminar and is a required course for English majors.
This course introduces students to the practical methods and procedures of literary research and interpretation and the techniques of effective critical writing. It also familiarizes them with several significant theoretical and pedagogical approaches to literary and cultural studies and demonstrates how these critical approaches can be applied in literary interpretation. We will read and discuss a number of literary works from a variety of periods, but there will also be a strong emphasis on writing.
TEXTS: M.H. Abram’s A Glossary of Literary Terms; Stevens and Stewart’s A Guide to Literary Criticism and Research; Shelley’s Frankenstein (Bedford/St. Martin’s); and DiYanni’s Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay
ASSESSMENT: four short (2-3 pages) papers and two 5-page papers
This course teaches students advanced critical writing skills, guides them in learning sophisticated concepts of literary and cultural theory, and introduces them to the kinds of interpretative methods and practices they can expect to encounter in advanced 300-level English courses.
TEXTS: Shakespeare, Macbeth; and several selected short stories and essays dealing with such topics as apartheid and South African fiction
ASSESSMENT: a combination of quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Fiction is a limitless form. There is no one style or shape that fiction must take, and the choices the fiction writer faces are myriad. We will study the craft and technique available to writers as they make those choices. We will consider how to match a story’s shape, language, and perspective to its ambition. We will do all this through the semester-long development of a story—from conception to revision. The goal is not to produce a great work, but to better understand how to produce any kind of work, to illuminate the pitfalls and opportunities that await the fiction writer, and to discover which questions the tools of fiction can best answer.
TEXT: Assorted stories and essays by various 20th and 21st century writers, including Carmen Maria Machado, Deesha Philyaw, James Wood, Maile Meloy, George Saunders, Eileen Myles, Wells Tower, and others.
ASSESSMENT: weekly writing assignments; semester-long development of a short story over multiple drafts; Students will provide periodic updates to the class on their progress and process. Students will workshop each other’s stories, providing written and oral feedback. Class participation
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
This course will acquaint students with the basic elements of poetry writing. Class is structured around poetry writing, reading, discussion, and workshop. Students will submit poems to the class as a whole for comment and critique. Emphasis will be on the study and imitation of contemporary writers, exercises that stress the elements of poetry, and the development of personal approaches.
TEXTS: We will study poems by modern and contemporary poets, texts on style, craft, technique and form, as well as various articles on poetics.
ASSESSMENT: discussion and the workshopping of poems; the completion of writing exercises and response-reflections; feedback on peers’ poems; a brief project and presentation; and the quality and effort put into the final portfolio
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Prerequisite: ENG 300 or instructor’s permission
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
This is a writing intensive workshop class for fiction students. In addition to reading and discussing published stories, students will be writing and revising two longer works of their own. Over the course of the semester, students will write and revise more than thirty pages of fiction.
TEXT: handouts provided by the instructor
ASSESSMENT: class attendance, participation, peer critiques, writing assignments and subsequent revisions
Prerequisite: ENG 300 or instructor’s permission
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Fulfills Writing Requirement (Requirement Term Summer 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW ENG 305 Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
This course enables students to strengthen writing skills at the sentence-level and to develop a theoretical grasp of rhetoric, syntax, and style as a basis for editing and revision. We will focus on sentence-level writing as a specific skill and as the foundation for larger structures, developing knowledge of theory and style as well as expertise in editing. This course aims to conceptualize writing as form, skill, and convention as well as an iterative process. Specifically we will work on the following objectives: 1) to understand syntax as rhetoric, that is, to see grammar and sentence-level writing as central to meaning rather than as arbitrary rules, 2) to develop an understanding of grammar and syntax as a range of choices to cultivate style, 3) to understand these choices as possibilities for meaning rather than as a way of avoiding error, and 4) to use these skills to write rhetorically effective prose.
TEXTS: Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Graphics Press); Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle (Modern Library); Plato, Gorgias (Oxford World’s Classics); Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference (any edition); additional readings to be uploaded to Brightspace
ASSESSMENT: short assignments, quizzes, class participation, and three essays
This course treats writing as both content and practice. Focusing on discursive, critical prose, students will develop a theoretical grasp of rhetoric, syntax, and style as a basis for effective writing, editing, and revision as well as enhanced clarity and grace. We will focus on sentence-level writing as a specific skill and as the foundation for larger structures, developing knowledge of theory and style as well as expertise in editing. Specifically we will work on the following objectives: 1) to understand syntax as rhetoric, that is, to see grammar and sentence-level writing as central to meaning rather than as arbitrary rules, 2) to develop an understanding of grammar and syntax as a range of choices that allow complexity as well as clarity and style, 3) to develop an understanding of these choices as possibilities for meaning rather than as a way of avoiding error, and 4) to use these skills to write a full essay that is rhetorically effective, stylistically sophisticated, and intellectually distinctive. Anyone who signs up for this course should be interested in writing and in becoming a better writer.
TEXTS: Tufte, Artful Sentences; electronic reserves; remaining books TBD.
ASSESSMENT: assigned readings; class writing assignments and exercises on sentence structure, style, and paragraph forms; term paper developed in sequence over the semester that demonstrates ability to use course concepts. Because this is a workshop, attendance is crucial. Class time will consist primarily of discussion, writing, and joint editing of student writing; be prepared to share and critique your own and classmates’ work.
Fulfills Elective Requirement
The Anglo-American ghost story emerged as a distinct genre in the early 19th century and reached its zenith in the Victorian era, where it became one of the (if not the) most popular literary forms in the period. Our topics will include the development of the ghost story as a distinct genre; ghost stories and the representation of gender; women writers and the ghost story; literary ghosts and cultural ideals of male friendship (especially as those ideals are defined in relation to the social institutions of work, business, and empire).
TEXTS: Novels and short stories by, among others, Scott, Gaskell, Le Fanu, Dickens, Bierce, James, Kipling, Wharton, and Jackson.
ASSESSMENT: a combination of in-class writing, quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This course investigates the relationship between modern subjectivity and political power in 20th century dystopic fiction. Utilizing theories of Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan, course discussion and assignments will address questions concerning individual freedom and the common good, sexuality and subversion, religion and the state, and ideology and psychological identity.
TEXTS: Works to be considered include Eugene Zamiatin’s We; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
ASSESSMENT: three 5-page papers and one longer research paper
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement
Colonialism. Settler colonialism. Land acknowledgement. Revising history. Contesting literary traditions: these terms describe a diversity of political positions, historical frames, and cultural attitudes towards the phenomenon of colonialism.
The history of the West is a story of science, liberal democracy, and modernity, but it is also a history of conquest and empire. Taking British colonialism as a primary reference point, including Western powers that extended their reach into the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and the Caribbean, this course theorizes colonial experience from the perspective of the colonized and the colonizer. In this sense, the course has a distinct post-colonial orientation; however, it focuses on postcolonial studies less as an accumulated body of knowledge about colonialism and more as an uneven terrain on which the literary, cultural, and historical arguments about colonialism, globalization, and empire are often contested.
We will study the power of Orientalism and Occidentalism to construct enduring ideas about the East and West; aboriginal experience at the turn of the 20th century in Australia; the formation of subaltern subjects and the challenges of biographical narrative and translation in India; creole as language and as culture; modernity as dam-building and how tribal movements brought global attention to the struggle for indigenous and environmental sustainability.
TEXTS: Some writers and critics we will focus on include Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Parry, Arundhati Roy, Mala Sen, and Samuel Huntington.
ASSESSMENT: several writing responses, one midterm, and three essays
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement (Requirement Term Summer 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Fulfills General Education Culture, Power, & Equity/Diversity Requirement
In the age of digital connectivities (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X), we are constantly encountering and engaging in transnational circuits of ideas and knowledge production. How do we see the connectivity that happens on digital sites such as Facebook and X happen in literature? How do we see the production of identity that occurs on YouTube occur in literary texts? This course will focus on fictional, dramatic, and poetic accounts of the experiences of gender and sexuality as seen through the eyes of different writers. In reading literary texts written throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—and written from various parts of the world—we will interrogate how knowledge about gender and sexuality gets produced and circulated through writing and textual representation. We will address questions such as: How are writers defining femininity and masculinity? How do gender roles and ideas about sexuality get performed, negotiated, and subverted in these texts? How do ideas about gender and sexuality “move,” as some of the characters within the texts migrate across national borders? How do we understand gender and sexuality within the interlocking systems of race, class, and nationality? And finally, how might we understand gender and sexuality within the context of a transnational, global world constituted by histories of colonialism and racism?
TEXTS: Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (ISBN 0156628708); Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand (ISBN 0140183957); M. Butterfly – David Henry Hwang (ISBN 0452264669); E-mails from Scheherazade – Mohja Kahf (ISBN 0813026210); Other course texts (short stories, supplemental articles, pop culture pieces) will be provided as electronic documents/links.
ASSESSMENT: three major papers; an oral presentation; discussion posts; class participation and peer response; generative/in-class writing
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement (Requirement Term Summer 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Fulfills General Education Culture, Power, & Equity/Diversity Requirement
Fulfills English Major Requirement – Elective (Requirement Term Spring 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Gothic literature, known for mystery, monsters, and ghosts, emerged in the late 18th century. It had its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it continues today in genres such as science fiction and horror, and in postcolonial and postmodern literatures. Frequently portraying pursued heroines, suffering bodies and tortured minds, the Gothic is a fascinating place to explore intersections of literature, medicine, and gender.
This course will focus on how Gothic fiction from the 19th century depicts women as both regulated by and resistant to medical discourses of hysteria, contagion, madness, and reproduction. It will explore Gothic representations of how medicine, science, and technology classify bodies in the service of controlling disease, healing the sick, and civilizing the world. In particular, it will study how female characters intervene in this nexus of knowledge and power. A focus on the formal elements of fiction, including setting, symbolism, narrative structure, and themes, will help students understand how fictional texts work.
Prerequisites: Suggested WGS 101.
TEXTS: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “The Yellow Wallpaper” in The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories; LeFanu, Sheridan, Carmilla, In A Glass Darkly; Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Stoker, Bram, Dracula; Many required readings for this course will be available on Brightspace.
ASSESSMENT: 5-6 short papers (2 pages); two longer papers (7-9 pages); final exam; reading quizzes and class participation
Fulfills English Major Requirement – Elective (Requirement Term Spring 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
What is the New World? What historical events unfolded that led to the rise of the New World and changed the course of world history and culture? This course will study travel writing about the exploration and settlement of the New World. It re-imagines the New World as frontier zones of contact; in these zones, peoples and cultures meet, interact, collide, cross-pollinate, and engender new identities, histories, and habits of being. We will study the pictorial, graphic, and textual forms and narratives concerning the discovery of new worlds in the Americas. We will begin with the Viking Sagas of Erik the Red and Leif Erickson, which predate Columbus’ American journeys by several hundred years and set the critical and methodological framework to examine voyagers, including Columbus, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Jean de Léry, Bartolome de las Casas, and writers like Guaman Poma de Ayala and Olafur Egilson, and modern writers like Carlos Fuentes’s creative revisionary narratives about Old World-New World contact.
A unique and exciting feature of this course is multimodality: students will use digital tools to generate content that includes images, videos, text, etc. The focus will be on learning to think as writers and designers; we will do traditional humanities research while using digital tools creatively to enhance our work. We will learn essential concepts of multimodal theory and use digital tools like WordPress, Tumblr, Instagram, iMovie, and StoryMap, among others. No advanced skills necessary.
TEXTS: John Gillis’ The Human Shore; Christopher Columbus’ Letters; Hernan Cortes’ Letters; The Saga of the Greenlanders; Erik the Red’s Saga; Ari Þorgilson’s Íslendigabók; Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s The Conquest of New Spain; Jean de Léry’s Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise called America; Guaman Poma de Ayala’s New Chronicle and Good Government; Ólafur Egilson’s The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilson.
ASSESSMENT: several writing responses to the readings; active class participation; using digital tools to create projects; writing analytical, research-driven essays; using materials from the Osher Map Library on the Portland campus: learn about New World cartography and incorporate Osher library materials into multimodal class projects
Fulfills English Major Requirement – Historical Period Courses Before 1800
Fulfills the General Education International Requirement
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
The Romantic period, one of the richest and most varied in English literary history, witnessed profound changes in how literature was written and read. The course is dedicated to understanding that richness and variety. Topics include both the revolution in literary language and the written response to the social and political revolution in France; the emergence of women writers and their impact on the nature of literature and perceptions of gender; the Romantic propensity for the sublime and visionary; and the Romantic opposition to the slave trade.
TEXT: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries (Longman)
ASSESSMENT: a combination of quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This course will examine the development of the novel in the U.S. from the late 18th through the 19th century. In particular, it will focus on the relation of aesthetic innovation to cultural milieu and on the novel as an especially apt index for significant cultural debates during the post-revolutionary, antebellum, and post-Civil War periods. We will address many of these in the context of 1) questions of genre, including the early novel’s relation to autobiography and “true” narratives, as well as the major 19th century forms: Gothic, romantic, sentimental, and realist; and 2) changing definitions of the “self,” “success,” and “freedom,” particularly as these are reflected in cultural anxieties about gender, race, and national unity and the roles of women and African-Americans in the new country.
TEXTS: Foster, The Coquette; Brown, Wieland; Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Melville, Benito Cereno; Wilson, Our Nig; Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; James, Daisy Miller; Norris, McTeague
ASSESSMENT: a combination of critical papers and exams
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
Fulfills Elective Requirement (Requirement Term Spring 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Instead of treating America as a homogenous nation-state with a common, stable culture, this course examines it as a composite of borderlands, trans-national territories in which the interaction among diverse peoples led to new cultural formations. After considering how culture can be defined and theorized, the course takes David Armitage’s The Declaration of Independence: A Global History to understand why America has a powerful global appeal, as an exemplar of liberal democracy and an imperial power.
Next, the course takes up Maine writer Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, which complicates the traditional narrative of English settlement as the foundational principle to historicize America. We will look at a range of texts and digital content, including J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (plus the film versions directed by Ron Howard and George C. Wolfe, respectively). We will also study O.E. Rolvaag’s novel, Giants in the Earth, and Roberta Fernandez’s Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories. The course ends with a segment on subcultures (Dick Hebdige) and examines deaf and digital cultures.
Themes: Birmingham School of Cultural Studies; high/low culture; hegemony and culture; relationship between knowledge and power; critiquing rigid, homogenous racial codes to explain variable social and cultural behavior; blues music and culture; Appalachian regionalism; subcultural resistances; diaspora and exile.
Assignments
Regular discussion posts/reflection posts/leading class discussions
Three term projects
Thesis-driven multimodal digital content that incorporates research
Engage in writing and content creation as revisionary, recursive practices within rhetorical contexts
Writers/Directors: Clyde Kluckhohn, Matthew Arnold, Richard Hoggart, James Clifford, Edward Said, bell hooks, Antonio Gramsci, Mary Louise Pratt, Stuart Hall, Marjane Satrapi, Paul Oliver, Dick Hebdige, Ron Howard, and George C. Wolfe
Course texts/materials (abbreviated)
MET Museum, Visions of the East in Orientalist Dress
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/orie/hd_orie.htm photorientalist.org
Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Photography
http://www.photorientalist.org/about/orientalist-photography/
Fulfills Elective Requirement (Requirement Term Spring 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Students work one-on-one with an advisor to complete a thesis comparable to an MFA application portfolio. Typically, students revise 10 to 15 poems or 25 to 40 pages of fiction. May be completed concurrently with second workshop course.
Must be completed for student to receive Creative Writing Minor.
Prerequisite: ENG 302, 303, 304, or 306
Requires: Permission of Advisor
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Engaged Learning Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor Elective
This internship is an opportunity for qualified English majors to gain experience in professional writing outside the classroom. Duties may include researching, drafting, and editing articles or press releases while learning other technical aspects of professional writing. Students have held internships with businesses, non-profits, and a wide variety of publishers, including Alice James Books, The Bangor Daily News, The Gorham Times, and many others.
PREREQUISITES: Serious interest in professional writing and an application filed with the Coordinator of Internships are required. Guidelines for the application are on the Department’s website or in hard copy in the English department office. The application should be submitted to the Coordinator during pre-registration, or, at the latest, before the end of the current semester.
ASSESSMENT: Completion of the semester’s work at internship site. An internship report supported by published work of the semester is required for a Pass/Fail grade. Guidelines for the final report are available from the Coordinator.
A seminar is a small class (limit of 15 students) designed to encourage independent thinking, intensive student participation, and in-depth research on topics of the student’s choice related to the seminar topic. Typically, seminars allow a professor to teach a focused subject of special interest, one on which the professor has done recent research and/or scholarly writing.
Fulfills Capstone Seminar or Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This seminar focuses on the rise to, and fall from, fame of Truman Capote, an American writer from the latter half of the 20th century, who was considered to be one of the most gifted stylists of his generation. We will examine Capote’s work in a variety of genres—Southern Gothic fiction, the “non-fiction novel,” experimental reportage, and the social-realist novel. Our goal will be to better understand Capote’s genuine talents—especially the immense success and legacy of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood—as well as the way that he parlayed fame to create a self-aggrandizing mythos that, along with drug addiction, ultimately resulted in his undoing. Through Capote’s work we can see the movement of American literary realism as it develops from 1940s through the 1970s, slowly becoming more and more influenced by journalism, especially as the writing became increasingly cinematic in technique. We will also devote time to Capote’s performance of self not only as a pioneering figure for gay men but also in terms of his connections to theatre, television, and film—the last continuing well after his death.
TEXTS: Capote: A Tree of Night and Other Stories; Other Voices, Other Rooms; The Muses Are Heard; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; In Cold Blood; “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor”; The Dogs Bark; Answered Prayers (published posthumously and unfinished); Music for Chameleons. Screenings of excerpts from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), In Cold Blood (1967), Murder By Death (1976), Capote (2005), and Infamous (2006). Miscellaneous essays and chapter excerpts on Capote and interviews of Capote.
ASSESSMENT: long research paper; two presentations; and other written assignments
Fulfills Capstone Seminar or Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement