Fall 08 Classes

Lower Division

English 100

Introduction to College Writing

Dennis Clausen

The purpose of English 100 is to strengthen students’ writing skills so they will have a better chance of succeeding at the University of San Diego. Indeed, the course is titled “Introduction to College Writing” because its purpose is to introduce students to the writing standards and strategies they will encounter in all of their college courses.

College administrators and faculty agree that writing is one of the most, if not the most, important skill that students need to master if they are to succeed in our nation’s universities. The evidence is so overwhelming that some universities already base their admissions policies largely on how well students write, and recently the College Board significantly strengthened the writing requirements in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The College Board now requires a written essay and an examination on English grammar. Furthermore, the National Commission on Writing (2003) recommended a dramatic overhaul of K-12 writing instruction so students will be better prepared for college writing standards.

Educators have known for some time that writing plays an essential role in discovering ideas, understanding their significances and relationships and, of course, articulating them to inform and influence others. In short, writing is indispensable in the various stages of our attempts to fully comprehend any subject matter or academic discipline. It is not an overstatement to say, “We do not understand something until we are required to write about it.”

On a more practical level, one can easily argue that never before in our nation’s history has there been more demand for our universities to emphasize writing instruction in all academic courses. Seemingly every day there is another newspaper article or report urging greater emphasis on improving the writing skills of our nation’s students. Employers also consistently bemoan the shocking decline in their employees’ writing skills, even as they assert that writing in most businesses and professions is more important today than it was twenty years ago. Indeed, many employers have started to test the writing skills of potential employees before hiring them.

Addressing this problem, the state of California recently revised its entire K-12 writing requirements; the new K-12 curriculums will be more grammar based and more writing intensive. Similarly, the new Scholastics Aptitude Test (SAT) will focus much more on writing skills because studies have revealed that students who write well have a much better chance of succeeding in our nation’s universities.

The message is clear. The computer age has provided all of us with more information than ever before, but we still need writers to communicate this information clearly and persuasively in our nation’s universities, businesses and professional organizations.

English 121

Composition and Literature

Various Instructors

English 121 is a composition course designed to give you practice in developing skills of close observation, investigation, critical analysis, and informed judgment in response to literary texts.  Since literature has within it the power to cast new light on our life predicaments and humanity, in a very real way, this course is designed to deepen your understanding of yourself.  You’ll get there by developing your ability to read and appreciate literary texts, by challenging yourself to reflect profoundly on human values, by gaining greater sensitivity to language through exposure to its uses in literature, and by strengthening your ability to write clearly and thoughtfully in response to a text. 

English 121

Composition and Literature

Dallas Boggs

The famed Baltimore newspaperman, H.L. Mencken, once wrote that 98% of the American public probably never had an original thought in their entire lives.  He may have been right. It will be the objective of this course to place each of you in that select 2% who not only have an occasional original thought, but who have, as well, the talent to express your thoughts in clear, interesting language. Additionally, we will work on developing our critical and analytical skills, moving from thoughtful discussions of our readings to placing our ideas on paper, a difficult process if done well.  In short, we will work on improving our ability to think and to organize our thoughts in well developed English prose.

With this in mind, our readings will focus on the idea of “displacement.”  That is, we will take a look at characters who, perhaps for reasons beyond their control, have found themselves in situations that are alien to them, characters who might wake up one morning, look about them, and say, “What am I doing here?”  Our texts will include Euripides’ Hippolytus and Medea, Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato.

English 222 Sec. 3 and 4

Poetry

Jericho Brown

The poetry course, “Movement since the Moderns,” will explore a short history of the genre in the United States from the 1920s to the present.  Students will learn the meanings and uses of poetic terms, as well as the work of major American poets.  Each student will have an opportunity to lead class in a discussion of each poet.  Students are expected to attend class having read all required material and prepared to discuss individual responses to the readings.  While students may like or dislike a piece, their responsibility is to examine its language and infer what emotions the poet means for the language to incite.  Students will write three papers.  The first is a short response to the initial reading; the second, a short explication of one poem written before 1973; the third, a short explication of a poem written after 1973.  Students will also memorize and recite the work of poets included in our text.  There is a two-hour comprehensive final exam, and students must take thorough notes during the semester to be fully prepared for it.  As poetry always has, this course deals with material meant for mature audiences and adult discussion.  Students who do not wish to think or study, as well as students with a history of complaining about actually having to do work for a course should reconsider their enrollment in this one.

English 223 Sec. 1

Introduction to Drama

Cynthia Caywood

“Introduction to Drama” is dedicated to analyzing Western drama, a form of artistic and political expression as old as human civilization itself.  From the dark tragedies of the Greek stage to the brilliant outpourings of Shakespeare, from the innovative energy of American comedy to the cutting edge work of England’s National Theatre, drama has given voice to the complexities, miseries and miracles of the human experience.  This section of “Introduction to Drama” will focus particularly on the theatre of ideas.  Arthur Miller, American’s greatest playwright, argues that drama not only has the right but the obligation to be a vehicle for social examination and debate.  The plays selected for study are all provocative, even controversial, as they take on and make theatre out of important social issues.

            Because plays are meant to be seen, not simply read, the course will also focus on the principles of staging, and work in the course is linked to production as much as possible.  The class will also study drama generically, that is, students will focus on the formal elements (such as character, setting, irony, staging, etc.) that distinguish drama as a literary form.  Finally, writing assignments are designed to engage students’ imaginations yet ground their study in the basic elements of drama.

English 223 Sec. 5

Literature of War

Dallas Boggs

            “War! That mad game the world so loves to play.”   Jonathan Swift

The literature of war is as old as literature, itself.  Poets, bards, and minstrels were, in fact, singing songs of war long before the written word.  Our quest this semester will take us roughly from 1200BCE on the plains of Troy, to Baghdad in the 21st century.  Throughout our journey we will examine patterns in this odd genre called war literature.  We will try  and figure out what it is that makes some of us heroes and some of us not.  We will attempt to discover what the word “patriotism” really means.  And we will, perhaps, ask ourselves if there really is a difference between war literature and anti-war literature.  Among the eight or so texts we will examine will be The Iliad of Homer, Shakespeare’s King Henry V,  The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and a couple of books of poetry.

English 225 Sec. 1

Irish America

Joseph McGowan

Too large to be a minority, Irish America doesn’t fit any neat description.  In the academic world, they are either viewed as fully assimilated Euro-Americans who made good in their adoptive country or just glossed over, too messy and contradictory to deal with in terms of current pieties.  Few ethnic groups in America exist so fully in the stereotypical: Irish Americans themselves fall into and cultivate the roles of the Irish drinker, the brawler, the hot-headed politician, the inveterately rebellious, the superstitious Catholic of scapulars, saints’ medallions, and Lourdes water.  Many of the Irish in America have had only an ‘idea of Ireland,’ a picture frozen in time of a famine-starved land bled further still by successive failed rebellions against British colonial rule.

The story of the Irish in America is usually summed up in a few pages in most histories of American ethnicities: initial poverty and discrimination, assimilation, success.  Like all simplistic formulas, it’s too good to be true.  Apart from Native Americans, no other group in America had to resort to violence so often to effect change and struggle toward acceptance: countless riots and strikes, near civil war in Pennsylvania, an invasion of Canada.  The stereotype of the ‘Fighting Irish’ has some historical validity.  And few other groups took so avidly to politics, allegedly bringing the American political system, either out of necessity or opportunity, to new depths of corruption.  This course will consider fiction (such as novels of James Farrell, Edwin O’Connor, Alice McDermott) and non-fiction (William Riordon’s “reportage” of George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall) in an effort to discern the outlines of the tradition, its development and continuities.

English 225 Sec. 2 and 3

Multicultural California

Gail Perez

This course explores the "racial fault lines" that undergird the California Dream. We will begin with the First Nation peoples who lived in the state, focusing on the Kumeyaay on whose land our university stands.  Then, we will explore the cycles of conquest, development, and utopian dreams that continue to this day as California experiments with being a non-majority democratic society.  Key issues like immigration, urban violence, suburban isolation, and ecological crisis will be raised.  Readings vary each term but may include The Tortilla Curtain by T.C Boyle, The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero, Twilight: Los Angeles by Anna Deveare Smith, and Bone by  Fae Ng.  Trends in popular and youth culture are always covered, from skaters to surf culture. As a final project, students are  asked to write an ethnographic essay about any California subculture or site and in this way they can research any aspect of the California Dream that interests them and that is not covered in class.

English 225 Sec. 4

Modern U.S.Literature

Irene Williams

Literature of the mid-twentieth century primarily, by white and black authors grappling with our national legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism. Literature by Stein, Wright, Faulkner, Baraka, Hansberry (some, all, or others).  Emphasis on patient scholarship--close reading and incisive, engaged writing.  Not a class for note-takers, but for students who want to demonstrate their capacity for thoughtful inquiry.  Emphasis on how to formulate useful questions, do thorough literary analysis, tolerate uncertainty when investigating vexing problematic texts and issues.

English 225D Sec. 5 and 6

Interracial Literature

Carlton Floyd

The long history of interracial relationships in the United States has indicated a kind of illicitly configured and often implicit or private longing for such relationships, even considering particular kinds of interracial relationships as necessary for assimilation into American culture, while simultaneously impeding or prohibiting certain interracial relationships, and thereby impeding or prohibiting assimilation.  Prohibitions against interracial relationships were so strong that their very existence was often denied, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  This has made interracial relationships a kind of open secret in U. S. discourse; they are public and private events that are simultaneously promoted and derided, revealed as they are concealed, and often made alluring as they are made illicit, if not illegal.  A subsequent anxiety has accompanied interracial relationships, and extended to the offspring of interracial unions.  In this course, we will trace the theme of interracialism throughout the history of the United States, and while we will leave much undone, one should leave this course with a sense of the significance of interracial relationships in this nation in terms of our laws, our language, and our literature.

English 228 Sec. 1

Modern Italian Literature

Eren Branch

This course will focus on Italian literature written about World War II and about Italy’s time under Fascism.  Our authors come from all parts of Italy, from San Remo and the industrial city of Turin in the north, to the island of Sicily in the south, all with very different relationships to Fascism and to the war – from fighting with the Partisans against the Fascists, to being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, to collaborating secretly with the Fascist government.     We will read novels, short stories, and essays by writers such as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Dacia Maraini, Giorgio Bassani, and Ignazio Silone. We will try to come to an understanding of that difficult period in Italian history through our readings and also through films – some made during the exhilarating years right after the war and some made from the vantage point of the late twentieth century.   (Our readings will be in English translation, and the films will have English subtitles.)

English 228 Sec 2

South Asian Literature

Atreyee Phukan

In the late twentieth century and now in the twenty-first, literature from the South Asian subcontinent ranks as among the most prolific in the global literary market. This modern trend has privileged anglophone South Asian literature, especially those that portray South Asian identities that are cosmopolitan and/or in diaspora in Europe or America. Often obscured are canonical South Asian texts that have not been translated into western languages or introduced into the global literary market, but which have played an instrumental role in the construction of modern South Asian identity and literature. This introductory course will examine modern anglophone literatures of South Asia in combination with lesser-known regional fiction. We will cover a diverse range of fiction from the subcontinent to examine definitions of gender, ethnicity, and culture in the local and global contexts. Throughout the semester, supplementary theoretical readings on South Asian history and politics will be included.

English 280

Introduction to Shakespeare

Peter Kanelos

This course will introduce you to the work, life, and times of William Shakespeare.  Although we will focus primarily on Shakespearean texts, we will begin by looking at the age in which Shakespeare lived, attempting to situate the writer and his works historically.  We will engage as well in a number of reading exercises and learn strategies to best prepare for tackling his plays.  The greatest share of this course will be taken up with intense study and close reading of seven of Shakespeare’s greatest works: two histories, two comedies, two tragedies, and one late romance.  By the end of the semester, we will all have become better interpreters of Shakespeare, capable of reading, watching, listening to, and understanding one of the world’s most exquisite authors.

Upper Division

English 306W

Advanced Composition for Educators

Chris Dickerson

Advanced Composition for Educators is a special section designed for senior Liberal Studies majors planning to teach in grades K-12.  As the capstone course in composition, it will be a place to fine-tune your own writing skills, both analytical and creative.  As a literature and education course, it will be a place to approach texts as students of composition, as students of literature, and as teachers.  Thus we will have the rich opportunity of considering not only how a text is structured—how it works as a piece of literature and fits into the literary canon—but why it’s important, especially why it might be important to read and share with our students today.  We’ll discuss how these works might be adapted to a classroom and/or how they might be used to teach or enrich instruction in areas outside the categories “language arts” or “literature.”  We will also be reminded of how various literary theories can be useful in opening a text for new and interesting readings and understandings.

English 326

Renaissance Poetry

Abraham Stoll

A careful study of the rich poetry of 16th and 17th-century England, with some attention to continental models. We will in particular consider the period’s fascination with poetic form, including learning to scan and discuss meter. Poets include Petrarch, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Behn, Rochester, Dryden, and Finch.

English 336

Development of the Novel

Mary Hotz

“No book comes into the world altogether naked, new, or alone.”

                                                                        -- J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels

What is a novel anyway, and how did it come to be? This course will explore the emergence (in fits and starts) and the development (sometimes in major leaps) of the novel in England as a distinct literary genre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since, as Terry Eagleton has written, “the novel is a mighty melting pot, a mongrel among literary thoroughbreds,” we will read a variety of them, from works by Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe to Matthew Lewis and Jane Austen.

English 352

U. S. Literature to 1900

Dennis Clausen

This class will analyze the development of American fiction and poetry from the beginnings to 1900. The emphasis will be on poems, short stories and novels, although occasional films and essays will also be used to reinforce major themes and issues in the course. Various interdisciplinary approaches—especially from history, philosophy and art history—will be used to give students a broader sense of the development of the history of ideas that provides the foundation for American literature.  The course will focus on various tensions that develop early in our nation’s history, and how they are reflected in our art, culture and literature. The course will also address the technical development of the American short story, novel and poetry as works of art.

English 355D,W

Poe & Douglass

Irene Williams

We will be studying the writings of two giants of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, both of whom lived the dark side of the so-called American Dream.  They were vigorous, determined, angry men who turned their anger into energy and literature.  They were daring, outspoken, contentious, ambitious, political. This course challenges you to approach their writings as a patient scholar, reading with attention to nuance and ambiguity, and sensitive to subtle shifts of tone and focus.  Writing and revision is ongoing, and will demonstrate your capacity for diligent, incisive, time-consuming analysis of the literature.

English 358D

Asian American Literature

Joseph Jeon

This upper division course is an introduction to Asian American Literature.  We will read texts that explore issues of race, identity, and culture in the context of American social upheaval and dramatic global change.  Along with papers of various lengths and a final exam, students will be responsible for oral presentations.  Class participation will also count toward the student’s final grade.

English 364

Postcolonial Studies

Atreyee Phukan

As defined in the 1980s, “postcolonial literatures” are those that “write back” against the epistemological violences of western colonialization (Ashcroft, Tiffin, & Griffiths). More recently, writers have moved beyond (and past) this paradigm and tried to supplant the socio-political agendas of early postcolonial literature and criticism. In this course, we will examine both the positive and negative influences of history and politics in the development of a literary genre that has provided invaluable challenges to Euro-centric modes of representation favoring western identity and culture. Students will be introduced to both early and recent postcolonial fiction and become familiar with the formal styles, themes, and issues associable with this genre. The broad impact of colonization will serve as the main frame for our examination of 20th century literature (post-1960s) from Africa, the Caribbean, North & South America, and South Asia. In addition to the fiction, we will read excerpts from key postcolonial theorists.

English 368

Modern British Literature

Fred Robinson

A survey of British literature from 1900 to now, emphasizing the British experience of colonialism and war.  We will read fiction, drama and poetry.  Authors will include Yeats, Conrad, Lawrence, Shaw, Woolf, Auden, Thomas, Caryl Churchill, Pinter, Lessing and McEwan.  Weekly short papers.

English 372D

Interracial Film

Carlton Floyd

This course explores the ways in which interracial relationships and the children of such unions have been imagined in film.  A concern for interracial relationships is a central feature of public discourse in the United States.  Given the ascent of film to center stage as a method of promoting and shaping cultural messages about appropriate social relationships, film is a productive site for excavation and analysis.  Our work will require gaining some sense of the history of interracial relationships in the U. S., developing some methods of analysis relevant to film, and then applying these methods to the films selected for this course.  Our selections will be chosen for their historic or cultural value, and for the ways in which they express some feature of interracialism deemed of value.  Please note that you will be purchasing DVDs for this course along with a either a course pack or books.

English 375

Introduction to Creative Writing

Jericho Brown

In this course, students will generate new work while helping to engender in one another new ideas about writing.  As there is a profound relationship between reading poetry and writing it, we will read, discuss, and even recite the work of several poets whose example might lead us to a further honing of our craft. We will read each other's work, giving and receiving the kind of feedback that binds any community of poets.  We will also make use of writing exercises that keep our ears open and our fingers moving.  Each student will have at least three poems workshopped.  In each workshop, we will read and discuss students’ poems in order to examine the relationships between the poet's intentions and ideas and the phrases and images used to embody them.  Students will also write two personal essays discussing their poetics.   

As we explore the genre in the United States, students will learn the meanings and uses of poetic terms, as well as the work of major American poets.  Each student will have an opportunity to lead class in a discussion of each poet.  As poetry always has, this course deals with material meant for mature audiences and adult discussion.

English 376

Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

Peter Kanelos

Let me stress this upfront: this is not an introductory creative writing course.  We will not take walks in open fields and write little verses on the pretty little flowers.  We will not write confessional stories about our “feelings” or “experiences” over summer break.  There will be no refrigerator magnets involved in the crafting of poems.  This is an upper-division writing course, or, as I prefer to call it, Writing Boot Camp.  Every week for the next three months of your life you will write both a short critical paper and a draft of a story.  You will learn about form and structure.  You will read aloud.  You will critique one another’s work. The pace will be exacting; there will be no turning back for the wounded along the way.  You need not have much, or any, experience with creative writing to do well in this course; you do need, however, to be committed fully to learning about the process of writing and to engaging in that process with dedication and vigor.

English 494W Sec. 1

Poetry Speaks to Painting

Mary Quinn

In this course we will study poetry that addresses the visual arts, especially painting. This type of poetry is called ekphrasis after classical ekphrasis grounded in Greek and Roman studies. We will begin with a brief introduction to aesthetic criticism concerning poetry and painting, studying a few early modern manifestations of this aesthetic. The majority of the course will focus on the kinship between poetry and painting that flowered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and America. A major influence for this was a result of contact with Chinese and Japanese scrolls and individual art pieces in which poetry and painting are combined.

Students will learn strategies for reading poems and paintings as “texts” in conversation with one another. You do not have to have background in art history in order to take this course. In the first weeks of the course we will spend considerable time engaging in the practice of mindful seeing. Beginning with some classical examples of ekphrasis, we will move to a chronological study of Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post-modern poets writing in response to paintings and, in a few instances, sculpture and other art forms. A surprising number of poets have been practicing visual artists; and painters and sculptors have tried their hand at poetry. Poets we may study include Blake, Keats, Robert Browning, Rossetti, Baudelaire, Rilke, Mallarmé,  D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Anne Sexton, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, Natalie Goldberg, Jorie Graham, Sharon Dolan, Cole Swenson, Ann Carson, among many other possibilities.

English 494 Sec. 2

Old English

Joseph McGowan

This course will serve as an introduction to Old English (c. 500-1100) and the earliest tradition of writing in English.  We will gain an understanding of the fundamentals of Old English to enable a reading of selected poetry and prose of the period; this will include examples of heroic poetry (Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, extracts from Beowulf), religious poetry (The Dream of the Rood), perhaps the earliest love lyric in English (Wulf and Eadwacer), the chronicles and histories (Hengest & Horsa and the migration to England, the coming of the Vikings, Arctic exploration & the whale hunt, the poetic transformation of Caedmon), and selections from laws, charms, riddles, and Runic inscriptions.  We will also investigate the culture that produced this literature: the architecture and archaeological discoveries, inscriptions and sculptures, metalwork and manuscript illumination (Lindisfarne Gospels, illustrated Genesis and Wonders of the East).  Besides offering a glimpse of the beginnings of literature in English, the study of Old English is of interest as well in strengthening one’s knowledge of how modern English and the language of poetry work.

English 494XL Sec. 4

US Women of Color and Spirituality

Gail Perez

This course will explore how and why religion and spirituality  are at the core of the experiences of many US Women of Color.  Their history of triple oppression--race, class, and gender--creates a vexed relationship with religious institutions; often such institutions are the site of both oppression and resistance.  In addition, many women of color bring alternative traditions of spirituality, traditions that can create resistant identities and liberatory visions of new social arrangements.  Our readings will cover African American, Chicana/Latina, Native American, Muslim American and other authors.  Our intent is not to embrace any one tradition, but rather to understand the varieties of experiences and how they are rooted in historical and social realities.  Students will write critical essays, do an interview project, and also do creative writing in response to the readings.

English 495

Senior Project

Joseph Jeon

Students write a term-long research paper.  Recommended for students interested in graduate school.

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