English (EN)

Basic skills of the English language for special interest students requiring such a course.

Introduction to expository writing with weekly writing assignments emphasizing skills in developing ideas, organizing material, and creating thesis statements. Assignments provide practice in description, definition, comparison and contrast, and argumentation. Additional focus on grammar, syntax, and usage. Students and instructor meet in seminar three hours a week; students are also required to meet regularly with a Writing Center tutor.

This seminar immerses students in the process of producing finished analytical essays informed by critical reading and careful reasoning. Special attention is given to developing ideas, writing from sources, organizing material, and revising drafts. Additional emphasis is on grammar, style, and formal conventions of writing. Students respond to one another's work in workshops or peer critique sessions. Weekly informal writing complements assignments of longer finished papers.

The honors sections of EN 105 offer highly motivated students with strong verbal skills the opportunity to refine their ability to analyze sophisticated ideas, to hone their rhetorical strategies, and to develop cogent arguments. Toward these goals, students write and revise essays drawing upon a variety of challenging readings and critique each other's work with an eye to depth and complexity of thought, logic of supporting evidence, and subtleties of style. The English Department places some students in EN 105H and encourages other students to consult with their advisors, the director of the Honors Forum, or the director of the Expository Writing Program to determine if this level of Writing Seminar is appropriate. Each section of EN 105H focuses on a topic that is listed in the master schedule and described in the English Department's prospectus and on its Web page.

Introduction to the practice of literary study, with a particular emphasis on close reading. This course is writing intensive and will include some attention to critical perspective and basic research skills appropriate for literary analysis.  Prospective English majors are strongly encouraged to take EN 110 prior to enrolling in 200-level courses.

A broad survey of the foundations of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Readings will focus upon theories of language, culture, and embodiment, tracing the developments of structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism and the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, critical race theory, disability studies, and the digital humanities. In studying these movements, students will radically rethink the way that we interpret literature, film, visual art, and digital media.

Designed to enhance the student's capacity to read novels and short stories. Explores fundamental techniques of fiction, such as symbol and myth, irony, parody, and stream-of-consciousness, within both conventional and experimental forms.

Designed to bring the general student into a familiar relationship with the language and structure of poetry. General readings from the whole range of English and American poetry from early ballads to contemporary free forms introduce students to representative poets and forms.

The study of drama as literature. Reading of plays from different historic periods, focusing on modes of comedy, tragedy, romance, tragicomedy, and melodrama. Introduction to the varied possibilities of form, such as expressionism, naturalism, and the absurd.

Study of selected films that demonstrate the development of various rhetorical or expressive techniques in the history of the movies. The course offers practical approaches to film as a medium of communication and as an art by examining a historical and international array of films, both English language and subtitled, by such masters as Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Stroheim, Lubitsch, Murnau, Pabst, Lang, Clair, Sternberg, Renoir, Carne, Hitchcock, Wells, Ford, DeSica, Rossellini, Ozu, Bergman, Antonioni, Ray, Truffaut, Resnais, Tanner, and others.

An introduction to the reading of nonfiction in a rich variety of styles and types, from memoir and lyric essays to reportage, science writing, and cultural critique. Students will explore the form's expressive range, including the relation to and distinction from other genres, its narrative strategies, its means of achieving a distinctive voice, and its reflection of social contexts.

A survey of major authors, works, and topics in Asian American literature and culture. The course aims to provide a sense of the historical conditions out of which various forms of Asian American writing and culture have emerged and changed over time. As a literature course, the class will focus on textual analysis and close reading on how specific texts give representational shape to the social and historical experiences that they depict. Readings consist chiefly of works that have canonical status within the field of Asian American literary studies but also include works that suggest new directions in the field. With regard to genre, these readings will include short stories, novels, memoir, autobiography, poetry, and film.

An exploration of the Victorian illustrated book as it came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century.  This course examines how a genre designed for adults found a home in children's literature at the end of the nineteenth century and gains new expression in our time through the graphic classics, a prescient form of material culture. Students will learn how to evaluate and interpret an illustrated text by "reading" illustrations to decipher meaning and engaging in creative practice to become author-illustrators. 19th century and gains new expression in our time through the graphic classics, a prescient form of material culture. Students will learn how to evaluate and interpret an illustrated text by “reading” illustrations to decipher meaning and engaging in creative practice to become author-illustrators.

An introduction to the study of women and literature, with particular attention to the various ways literary works have helped construct and also question differences between femininity and masculinity. Matters considered include defining basic terms (character, plot, genre, author, sex, gender) and exploring the relations among those terms.

A study of how writers have used literature to understand and portray the natural world and our relationship to it. The course examines shifting images of nature-as a locus of the spiritual and the sacred, as a projection of the human psyche, and as a dynamic environment worthy of our concern and protection. The course focuses primarily on fiction and nonfiction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American authors, such as Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver; readings may also include myth and poetry.

Selected comedies, histories, and tragedies.

An introduction to the major modes and moments of American literature: the literature of contact between Native Americans and Europeans; mid-nineteenth-century literature of reform and protest; the rise of realism and naturalism; and American modernisms.  

A chronological exploration of literature by African-Americans from the early 1700s to the present, focusing on changes in the content and style and the reasons for those changes, as well as on specific writers.

Introduction to a selected topic in literature and/or language, with an emphasis on questions of form. May be repeated with a different topic.

Introduction to a selected topic in literature and/or language, with an emphasis on questions of form.

Introduction to a selected topic in literature and/or language, with an emphasis on the relation between text and context.

Introduction to a selected topic in literature and/or language, with an emphasis on the relation between text and context.

Acquaints students with the contents of the Bible, introduces them to its history (dates of composition, establishment of canon, history of translations, especially in English), and provides practice in identifying and interpreting Biblical allusion in literary works. Some attention will also be given to doctrines and theological controversy.

A survey of African American literature from the 1700s to the present. We will examine the uneasy relationship between race and writing, with a particular focus on how representations of gender and sexuality participate in a literary construction of race. Though this course examines African American literary self‑representations, we will keep in mind how these representations respond to and interact with the “majority culture’s” efforts to define race in a different set of terms. We will focus throughout on literature as a site where this struggle over definition takes place—where African American writers have re-appropriated and revised words and ideas that had been used to exclude them from both American literary history and America itself.

A study of modern literature from three major sites of British colonialism: India, the Caribbean, and Africa. Students will learn to use postcolonial theory and historical context to analyze literary texts by such writers as Tagore, Narayan, Rushdie, Roy, Carpentier, Rhys, Walcott, Naipaul, Senghor, Achebe, and Coetzee. Literature will be primarily in English; some texts in translation. Students will explore topics like writers' negotiation of native and colonial worldviews and literary traditions; the relationship between ideology and literary form; the politics of anti-colonial nationalism, nativism, exoticism, exile, hybridity, gender, race, caste, class, and sexuality.

A study of literature in the context of contemporary globalization. Students will examine transnational literary dynamics, primarily those forged originally by colonialism, which brought the entire globe into contact. Students will explore three conceptual rubrics: postcolonial revisions of major British canonical novels; narrative attempts by Metropolitan intellectuals to represent indigenous voices; and traveling genres. Students will read works by writers such as Rhys, Salih, Coetzee, Black Elk, Hooper, Adiga, Carpentier, and Césaire. Supplemental readings in theory, history, and journalism will situate these literary texts in broader socio-historical context.

Exploration of children's literature as it evolved over the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, emphasizing the relationship between ideologies of childhood and literature for children and young adults.  Students will learn how to evaluate and interpret a children's text from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Attention will be given to the socio-political context of each work, the rise of gender-specific fiction, and the ways children's literature and young adult fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have responded to race, religion, and sexuality.

An examination of Afrofuturist cultural production across literature, music, film, and visual art. Paying close attention to how speculative, science-fictional, and technological motifs allow for new formulations of aesthetic and social possibility, students will consider how Afrofuturist creators approach questions of power, embodiment, community, and futurity in relation to Black culture and identity.

An exploration of disability as a complex interaction between individual bodies and minds and broader social expectations, categorizations and judgments. We will learn key vocabulary and study the history of oppression and resistance that gave birth to the American disability rights movement. Finally, we will think about what these national issues mean on our own campus. Remembering that college students and college campuses have been major players in the struggle for disability justice, we will consider what it would mean for our campus to be broadly “accessible.”

A course on the history of the future. Readings survey utopian and dystopian fiction from the nineteenth century  to the present, with strategic excursions into both film and journalism. The course's final weeks turn to issues that both energize and trouble today's attempts to imagine what lies ahead: What and who will be our future?

An examination of the nexus of politics and science that has informed science fiction from its inception until the present day. This course explores the history of the genre and its approach to religion, race relations, gender, totalitarianism, and a host of distinctly modern phenomena. Readings will vary from year to year but may include writers like H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Asimov, and James Tiptree Jr.

An exploration of the relationship between race, gender, and genre in U.S. literature and media by and about Asian American women from the twentieth century through the present. The course examines how Asian American women have been figured by interconnected modes of power, injustice, identity formation, representation, and knowledge production, as well as histories of U.S. wars, empire, immigration, and labor. Questions that the course addresses include: why have realist novels and autobiographies by women been the dominant genre of Asian American literature? What happens to the figure of the Asian American woman in more experimental and extravagant genres? How and to what end have various genres figured Asian American women as national, transnational, and/or diasporic figures? The course introduces students to major concepts and developments in Asian American literary and cultural studies and gender studies.

An intensive study of the Brontes, arguably the greatest English literary family of the nineteenth century. A madwoman in the attic, deathless love, and spousal abuse are some of the sensational themes that define the Bronte canon. Readings include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), biography, and poetry. We will distinguish between the Brontes’ lives and literary myths and explore why their works are read as a canon and their lives are retold collectively.

Focus of the course is on the major plays (The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, etc.) and stories of this prolific and influential Russian writer, with supplementary reading from his letters. A biographically-inflected exploration of the work of a generous, engaged person of letters who was also a public health pioneer, early environmentalist, and critic of Russian politics and society during its famous turn-of-the-century “twilight,” on the verge of revolution.

Introduction to various forms and styles of creative writing, with reading and writing assignments geared to the beginning writer. Workshop format with substantial class time devoted to discussions of student writing. Sections may focus on a range of genres, on one specific form, or on a particular theme.

An exploration of major graphic narratives from the past thirty years, focusing on how authors intertwine text and image in ways that create new approaches to narrative, new perspectives on social and cultural issues, and new ways of reading. Topics for consideration may include how authors explore questions of power and politics, memory and trauma, identity and embodiment, and time and space through this hybrid form.

Prose Boot Camp offers highly motivated students an opportunity to refine their expository writing skills. In weekly copywriting and ghostwriting assignments of increasing complexity, students are exposed to and strive to meet the standards of professional editors. Close attention to style, grammar, and mechanics at the level of the sentence. Counts as a prerequisite for EN 378.

An introduction to the writing of nonfiction. Writing and reading assignments are geared to the beginning writer of nonfiction prose. Sections may focus on a range of nonfiction genres or on one specific form, such as the personal essay, travel writing, literary journalism, cultural critique, science writing and the arts review.

An introduction to the writing of short stories. Writing and reading assignments are geared to the beginning writer of fiction. Workshop format with the majority of class time devoted to discussions of student writing.

An introduction to the writing of poetry. Writing and reading assignments are geared to the beginning poet. Workshop format with the majority of class time devoted to discussions of student writing.

A course that interrogates questions of identity, power, and justice as students learn to tutor in the Skidmore College Writing Center. Students learn the foundation–and interrogate the justice–of rhetoric, grammar, and composition theory in academic writing, collaborative learning, and peer tutoring. Students analyze assignments and critique sample student essays. Weekly writing assignments and a term project explore and evaluate composition theory and establish best tutoring practices. Students participate in a weekly supervised peer tutoring practicum with Writing Center tutees.

Studies of selected works of fiction published since the 1960s, with particular reference to the expanding possibilities of the genre. The readings feature authors such as Donald Barthelme, Heinrich Boll, Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, John Gardner, William Gass, Gabriel Garciá Márquez, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Study of generic, thematic, and cultural relationships among selected novels of early twentieth-century writers such as Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, and Huxley.

A study of major British, Irish, and American poets as exponents of modernity: Yeats, Lawrence, Moore, Frost, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens.

A study of British, Irish, and American poets since the 1930s: Auden, Thomas, Larkin, Heaney, Lowell, Berryman, Plath, and Rich.

A generic, thematic, and cultural consideration of selected romances and novels by Behn, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Burney, and Austen. The study begins with the formulae of fictional romance and examines the development of the more sophisticated, psychological novel as it rises to eminence in English literature.

A generic, thematic, and cultural consideration of selected novels by Austen, the Brontes, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and others.

Investigation of a topic in American literature in the context of the sometimes competing social, economic, racial, political, and nationalist attitudes of the century. Students may study various topics including nature and the environment, gender and relationships, slavery and abolition, and protest and reform; and may draw upon letters, diaries, travel writing, poetry, novels, personal narratives, and political essays by such writers as Brown, Irving, Cooper, Wheatley, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Twain, Poe, Stanton, Truth, Douglass, and Stowe.

A study of realism as both a late-nineteenth-century literary movement and a style with continuing influence in the U.S. Students will examine not only the classic stage of realism (through writers that may include Twain, Howells, Dreiser, Wharton) but also the emergence of realism at other points in American literary history, including the socialist realism of the Great Depression and the appropriation of realism by minority writers in the late twentieth century.

A study of major American novels in their literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts, with an emphasis on the literary construction of "America" as both idea and place. Readings will vary from one year to the next, but may include works by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Wharton, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison, Morrison, and Silko.

A consideration of the multiple literary expressions of the American Modernist period (roughly 1900-1940), with particular attention to the aesthetic issues that preoccupied leading writers and critics, as well as the cultural formations and controversies that marked these years. Topics will include "high" modernism, modernist uses of realism, the Harlem Renaissance, Depression-era radicalisms, and "middlebrow" paradigms (e.g., magazine fiction or hard-boiled detective fiction).

Topics, genres, and authors selected from U.S. literary and cultural history after 1945. Course content will vary but could include contemporary U.S. literatures, popular culture, new media, and/or critical theory. Matters considered include social and historical contexts (race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, digital culture, technology, globalization) and relations between these contexts and U.S. literature and culture after 1945.

Topics, genres, traditions, and authors selected from African-American literary history. Topics will vary from one year to the next, but could include the literature of slavery: African-American domestic fiction; the Harlem Renaissance; African-American realisms, African-American poetics; contemporary African-American writing; single author studies.

An exploration of the work of one of the defining writers of the early twentieth century, James Joyce. This course focuses in particular on one of the most celebrated and despised novels in the English language, his 1922 novel, Ulysses . Famously difficult, Ulysses  often defeats even the most hardcore readers. The majority of this class focuses on the process of analyzing Joyce's audacious novel and understanding how it became for many the paradigmatic expression of a modernist sensibility. This class may include Joyce's short story collection, Dubliners (1914), and his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915).

A study of the way that Shakespeare stages embodiment, with a particular emphasis upon categories of gender, race, sexuality, and ability. To that end, the course begins with a survey of queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and posthumanism in order to give students insight into the ways that bodies are constructed and contested. Readings then include Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as several scholarly works that will help students to think about the history and politics of embodiment in the early modern period.

A course on the literature, arts, and culture of the 1890s in England. Oscar Wilde is the course's presiding genius (as he was for the decade), but such figures as Arthur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, Aubrey Beardsley, and H.G. Wells will also be discussed. A wide range of genres-from the detective story, the feminist novel, and the fairy tale to poster art, apocalyptic and Gothic fiction, and radical journalism-facilitates this course's examination of an era's preoccupations: gender and sexuality, theater and performativity, empire and power, morbidity and degeneration, the city and decadence, socialism and aestheticism.

racing this central theme of Western art from its classical origins (Hesiod, Theocritus, Virgil) to its flowering in 16th and 17th century English poetry (Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marvell, Herbert, Milton), to later versions in Romantic and Environmentalist poets. Final research papers will explore Pastoral concerns in such 20th and 21st century writers as Hardy, Frost, Grahame, Snyder, Oliver, Merwin, Gander, et alia.

The continental novel as an expression of social, intellectual, and artistic problems; not an historical survey. Readings may vary from one year to the next but will include major authors such as Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Gide, Mann.

A study of twentieth-century gay and lesbian literature, with a focus on British and American authors. Students will explore a literary tradition in which the invisible was made visible-in which historically marginalized sexualities took literary shape. Questions to be considered include: What strategies have lesbian and gay authors used to express taboo subject matter, and how have these strategies interacted with and challenged more traditional narrative techniques? How does the writing of queer sexuality recycle and revise notions of gender? What kind of threat does bisexuality pose to the telling of coherent stories? In what ways do class, race, and gender trouble easy assumptions about sexual community?

An overview of foundational texts and significant ideas in the field of gender and sexuality studies, focusing on the interplay between theory and praxis in the struggle for queer liberation. Our readings will be focused on key U.S.-American writings from the past half century. Students will gain familiarity with major thinkers and important concepts for LGBTQ+ life and critique today, including: gender and sexual norms and nonconformity; queer intersections with race, ethnicity, and nationhood; LGBTQ+ aesthetics, sociality, and world-making; dissident forms of desire and identification; solidarities and protest. As an advanced English Department seminar, we will also devote special attention to queer literary critique and contemporary LGBTQ+ fiction, poetry, and drama. The course will culminate in students designing and executing a mid-length independent research project. Involves several practice-based/application components, including special guest conversations, service learning events, and creative writing assignments.

Investigation of a special topic in medieval English literature with special attention to medieval literary conventions and to the cultural context in which they developed. Topics studied may draw on the works of the Gawain-poet, Langland, Malory, and others, and may focus on a genre, a theme, or a period.

Chaucer's dream visions and The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1370-1400). The social, economic, religious, and literary background of the High Middle Ages will clarify the satiric aspects of individual tales. Chaucer's innovative handling of the conventions of frame and link-between-tales leads to speculation about the structure of the fragment as a competitive sequence and about the formal correlatives to a justice if not judicial at least poetic.

Study of the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, exclusive of Shakespeare, but including such writers as Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

Topics, genres, traditions, and authors selected from the wide range of sixteenth-century non-dramatic literature, poetry, and/or prose. Topics studied may draw on such authors as More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth. Selections will vary depending upon the area of interest emphasized in a given semester.

A study of selected comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.

A study of ten tragedies.

Topics, genres, traditions, and authors selected from the non-dramatic literature of the seventeenth century, poetry and/or prose. Selections will vary depending upon the area of interest emphasized in a given semester. Topics studied may draw on such authors as Donne, Jonson, Bacon, Burton, Locke, Newton, and others.

Milton's English poetry, the vision it expresses, and its stylistic range. The course focuses on a measured, close examination of Paradise Lost especially noticing its heritage, its structural genius, and its psychologizing and indicates the ways in which this epic anticipates the succeeding ages of great English fiction.

Literature in the ages of Dryden, Congreve, Swift, Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Sheridan. Plays, essays, and the tradition of derivative-epic poems, studied with regard to major social and intellectual dispositions of culture: humanism, the new science, individualism, psychology, mercantilism, urbanization, and sentimentality. The study appreciates the vigorously renewed dramatic tradition from the reopening of the theaters in 1660. It also recognizes the shift from patrician verse toward bourgeois prose manner in literature.

Studies in English romanticism, its philosophic and psychological departures from neoclassic poetry, and its consequences for modern literature. Emphasis on the major works of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley.

A study of nineteenth-century English literature and thought, featuring such principal prose writers as John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, and William Morris, and such poets as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti. Emphasis is given to a wide range of topics including political reform, evolution, the rise of liberalism, the hero in history, the meaning of literary ideas, and conceptions of beauty.

An examination of the novels of Jane Austen, a keenly satiric writer whose work, deeply rooted in her time, resonates in our time. Beginning with biography, students will read Austen's six published novels in the order they were published-Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818), and Northanger Abbey (1818).  Students will enter Regency ballrooms, country estates, and domestic parlors to examine Austen's voice and pressing issues of her day that she actively critiqued-e.g. the economics of marriage, social class stratification, primogeniture, entailment, and slavery.  Assignments will help students to situate Austen in her historical moment and prepare them to read critically, participate actively, research deeply, and write analytically.

An internationally comparative study of authors and artists key to the development of drama from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Emphasis on tensions between realism and formalism; between classical, textual drama and new modes of theatricality; and between dramatic and literary modernism. Students will investigate the history of significant art movements such as naturalism, absurdism, and epic theater, among others. Readings will vary from year to year, but may include works by Luigi Pirandello, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Advanced studies in selected women writers. Students will read a group of women writers in the context of recent literary criticism and feminist theory. Issues addressed may include the relations among gender and style, psychological constructs, genre, literary history, audience, and social context.

An examination of modern literary methodologies, including new criticism, structuralism, archetypal criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism. The course explores both the theories and their practical application, with a concentration on a particular literary problem of significance, such as the question of meaning, the nature of the text, or the contribution of reader response.

Studies in one or two authors of the British and American traditions, or in a specific literary topic, genre, or question in literary history or theory, prior to 1800.

Studies in one or two authors of the British and American traditions, or in a specific literary topic, genre, or question in literary history or theory.

Advanced study of a selected topic in literature and/or language. May be repeated with a different topic.

Research in literature and special projects in creative writing. Independent study provides an opportunity for any student already well grounded in a special area to pursue a literary or creative writing interest that falls outside the domain of courses regularly offered by the department. The student should carefully define a term's work which complements their background, initiate the proposal with a study-sponsor, and obtain formal approval from the student's advisor and the department chair. Application to do such work in any semester should be made and approved prior to preregistration for that semester or, at the very latest, before the first day of classes for the term.

A seminar in which students explore a topic, author, or text while progressing through the stages of writing a research paper. Common discussion of individual projects and reading of published scholarship emphasize research as a process of shared inquiry. Students practice research methods, present work in progress, and complete a substantial paper.

This offering allows a senior the opportunity to develop a particular facet of English study that they are interested in and have already explored to some extent. It could include such projects as teaching, creative writing, journalism, and film production as well as specialized reading and writing on literary topics. Outstanding work may qualify the senior for departmental honors. All requirements for a regular independent study apply. May be repeated once for credit.

Combines study of literature in a specified genre with related creative writing assignments in a workshop format. Students examine literary models, contexts, and methodologies for reading that emphasize craft and specific genre concerns of practicing creative writers.

Intensive practice in writing nonfiction. May be repeated once for credit. As with the Introduction to Nonfiction Writing, sections may focus either on a range of genres or on a specific nonfiction form.

Intensive practice in the writing of poetry. Workshop format with most class time devoted to discussion of student writing. Reading and weekly writing assignments aimed at increasing the poet's range and technical sophistication.

Intensive practice in the writing of fiction. Workshop format with most class time devoted to discussion of student writing. Readings and weekly writing assignments aimed at increasing the fiction writer's range and technical sophistication.

Workshop format concentrating on discussion of projects. The instructor determines whether the course will be offered in fiction [F], poetry [P], or nonfiction [N]. Preparation of manuscript to be considered for departmental honors, in support of application for graduate writing programs, and/or for publication.

Workshop format concentrating on discussion of projects. The instructor determines whether the course will be offered in fiction [F], poetry [P], or nonfiction [N]. Preparation of manuscript to be considered for departmental honors, in support of application for graduate writing programs, and/or for publication.

Workshop format concentrating on discussion of projects. The instructor determines whether the course will be offered in fiction [F], poetry [P], or nonfiction [N]. Preparation of manuscript to be considered for departmental honors, in support of application for graduate writing programs, and/or for publication.

Required of all second-semester junior or first-semester senior English majors who intend to write a thesis (EN 390). Under the direction of a thesis advisor, the student reads extensively in primary and secondary sources related to the proposed thesis topic, develops his or her research skills, and brings the thesis topic to focus by writing an outline and series of brief papers which will contribute to the thesis.

Intensive writing and revising of a senior thesis under the close guidance of the student's thesis committee. The thesis provides an opportunity for English majors to develop sophisticated research and writing skills, read extensively on a topic of special interest, and produce a major critical paper of 40 to 80 pages. Not required for the English major but strongly recommended as a valuable conclusion to the major and as preparation for graduate study.

Professional experience at an advanced level for juniors and seniors with substantial academic and cocurricular experience in the major field. With faculty sponsorship and department approval, students may extend their educational experience into such areas as journalism, publishing, editing, and broadcasting. Work will be supplemented by appropriate academic assignments and jointly supervised by a representative of the employer and a faculty member of the Department.