SPRING 2013 ENGLISH COURSES

SPRING 2013
ENGLISH COURSES
English Y287 — American Literature
Dr. Eby — HARG 276 — TTH 1:40pm - 2:55pm
Get the BIG picture of American literature—from the
Puritans to the present. This course will introduce
you to the major intellectual movements in American
literature and to such major authors as Emerson,
Hawthorne, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson,
Twain, James, Crane, Frost, Eliot, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Hughes, Faulkner, Plath, Vonnegut, and
Silko. By the end of this course, you should have a
working understanding of the enlightenment,
romanticism, transcendentalism, realism, regionalism,
naturalism, the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, and
postmodernism. You should be able to relate
American literary texts to their cultural contexts and
should be able to relate individual texts to the major
currents of American literary thought.
Required texts & ISBN numbers: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter
8th ed. (978-0393918854); Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (978-0743297332); F. Scott
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (0743273567); Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (0385333846);
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (0140086838).
ENGLISH Y288 — English Literature I
Dr. Kilgore — HARG 204 — MW 3:05pm - 4:20pm
Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free
will…shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. … We have
made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor
immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as
though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion
thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
~ Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)
Who are we, and what can we be? May we shape
ourselves as we wish? Or are we constrained by
limits—by God, by nature, by tradition, by society?
We’ll start with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that asks
these important questions, to get you used to
questions and to an older form of the English
language. And we’ll use these questions of self-making
as a way to think about important texts and writers
from the earliest writings in Anglo-Saxon through the
Eighteenth century. You’ll get the greatest hits: Beowulf, two of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,

More’s Utopia, Renaissance lyrics and sonnets, the metaphysical poems of Donne and Herbert,
Swift’s modest proposal, Gray’s elegy, and the literally heart-wrenching new-world novella by
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko.
By the end of the course, successful students should understand what British literature
before 1800 is like — its concerns, its genres and forms, its verbal styles, and its development
throughout the period (related to this is a general understanding of how this literature differs
from more modern literature). More specifically, students should develop an effective practice
of literary note-taking (in textbooks, in class, and out of class), be familiar with assigned texts,
and have the ability to recall key details about these texts (such as their authors, time period,
genres, characters, plots, themes, etc.), have a basic competence at close reading literary texts
from the period covered (that is, performing sustained and careful analysis of texts, using
basic elements of literary analysis–theme, imagery, verbal style, form and genre, etc.), develop
skills of comparing and contrasting different texts and concepts, develop the ability to create their
own interpretations and understandings of texts and concepts, based on careful analysis,
demonstrate competence of the above through class discussion, writing essays, and effective
responses to a comprehensive exam, have a basic competence at finding and reading
professional literary criticism, and to be able to effectively use criticism to frame and create one’s
own argument, and never, ever refer to Shakespearean language as Old English again. Remaking
yourself as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is purely optional.
Required Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen
Greenblatt, 9th ed. Volumes A, B, and C. (9780393928334); Hamlet by William Shakespeare,
edited by Robert S. Miola (Norton Critical ed. 978039392958-4). The USCB Bookstore may
have a package deal. Online texts are inadequate substitutes for the required texts. For more
details, email me at kilgorer@uscb.edu.
BENG Y289 — ENGLISH LITERATURE II
Exploring Literary Tradition: English Literature from 1800
to the Present
Dr. Hoffer — HARG 276 — MW 1:40pm - 2:55pm
Convention...Legacy...Tradition. Each of these words
addresses the relationship between past and present, and
each suggests a sense of cohesion, a commonality of
patterns, concerns, and styles. All literature is, in a sense,
part of a larger tradition that is built upon, influenced by,
and often reactionary to the texts that preceded it.
Today’s best-selling authors and literary prize winners
(even TV and film writers!) are all a part of the literary
tradition. Exploring it can thus allow us a fuller, deeper
understanding of the stories we tell—and how we tell
them. English 289 is designed to offer you a survey (a
broad overview) of major writers and works in the English
literary tradition from 1800 to the present. Along the way, we will learn about major literary
and cultural movements as we discover the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary
periods. In addition to gaining experience recognizing the formal techniques and devices of
poetry, drama, and prose fiction, we will contextualize the literature we read by discussing the
philosophical and artistic movements, revolutions and wars, scientific and technological
advancements, and social issues such as race, class, and gender that have informed literature in
prior centuries as in our own. Students will improve their ability to read, interpret, discuss, and
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write about important texts in the English Literature tradition and will demonstrate their
comprehension of the material through two exams (mid-term and final) and two essay
assignments. The books required for this course are: The Broadview Anthology of British
Literature, Vol. B (ISBN 9781551118697), the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary
Theory (ISBN 9780140513639), as well as Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Broadview edition: ISBN
9781551111315).
BENG Y402 001—Tudor Literature
Dr. Kilgore—HARG 204—TTH 12:15pm-1:30pm
Writing the Queen
In 1588, Queen Elizabeth, leading her troops into battle
against the Spaniards, conceded she had “the body but of
a weak and feeble woman,” but insisted she had “the
heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.”
If the Renaissance is an international movement of arts
and letters, then the flowering of arts of letters in England
under Elizabeth is a nationalistic enterprise. It also is
gendered. The virgin queen, Elizabeth, is the author,
subject, or object of much of the writing we’ll read,
leading to the bizarre circumstance that poems about
shepherds singing to shepherdesses are very often poems
about domestic and foreign policy. But they’re also really
good poems.
In this course, you’ll become familiar with the
major non-dramatic genres and modes of Renaissance
literature: treatise, lyric, pastoral, romance, and epic.
You’ll sample from a variety of important sixteenthcentury
prose writings (including Machiavelli, Castiglione,
and Tyndale), and then focus on the poetry of Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Philip
and Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer — all of which have Queen Elizabeth inspiring and
haunting their pages. We’ll also read the poetry of Elizabeth herself and the love letters her dad
(Henry VIII) wrote to her mom (Anne Boleyn). Longer readings include Book One of Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies,
Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (don’t worry, it’s in English), but even these longer readings
are relatively short: we’ll need to read them carefully.
Attendance mandatory, discussion encouraged, presentations given, frequent writing
designed to lead to a researched argumentative essay of 9-10 pages, final exam, sense of humor,
and spirit of inquiry essential.
Required texts with ISBNs: Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (Oxford UP, 2002,
9780199538416); Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations (Penguin, 2007,
9780143104957); Edmund Spenser’s Poetry (Norton, 1992, 9780393962994); Renaissance
Women Poets (Penguin, 2001, 9780140424096); Elizabeth I and Her Age, edited by Felch and
Stump (Norton, 2008, 9780393928228). Online texts are inadequate substitutes for the required
texts. For more details, email me at kilgorer@uscb.edu.
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English Y422 001 — American Literature, 1860-1910
Dr. Eby — HARG 276 — TTH 10:50am-12:05pm
American Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism
Explore American literature during the Gilded Age—the age
dominated by literary realism, regionalism, and naturalism. In
addition to a few shorter works by writers such as Stephen
Crane, Jack London, and Charles Chesnutt, we’ll read Mark
Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Henry
James’s A Portrait of a Lady, William Dean Howells’s The Rise
of Silas Lapham, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. We’ll try to place these texts
against a historical background of explosive industrial growth,
the emergence of vast wealth and terrible poverty, the
urbanization of America, rampant political and corporate
corruption, the failure of Reconstruction in the South, the
closing of the frontier, and the emergence of the U.S. as a
global (some would say, imperial) power. We will also
explore the intellectual influence on American literature of
Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and William James.
Required texts with ISBN numbers: Mark Twain, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (978-
0520268166); Henry James, A Portrait of a Lady (978-0393966466); William Dean Howells,
The Rise of Silas Lapham (978-0140390308); Edith Wharton The House of Mirth (0451527569);
and Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (978-0140188288). Please be especially careful to get the
correct editions of A Connecticut Yankee and A Portrait of a Lady!
BENG Y427 001—Southern Literature
Dr. Malphrus—HARG 204—MW 12:15pm-1:30pm
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a
penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able
to recognize one.”
~ Flannery O’Connor
Who are the writers that have shaped Southern Literature?
When did Southern Literature emerge? Where does the South
begin and end – is it all about the Mason-Dixon Line? How
can we tell if a particular text is Southern or not? Why do
readers, writers, scholars, and the general public around the
world continue to be fascinated by all things Southern? . . .
These are some of the initial questions we’ll address in this
senior level seminar on Southern Literature. In addition to top
guns such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren,
Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and the like, we will focus our attention specifically on
South Carolina writers – from William Gilmore Simms to Henry Timrod to Mary Boykin Chesnut
to Julia Peterkin to DuBose Heyward to James Dickey to Percival Everett to Josephine
Humphreys to Dorothy Allison to Nikky Finney to Pat Conroy to Ron Rash – for starters.
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Literary roots run deep in the Palmetto state, and we’ll spend the semester digging around in
them. As for textbooks, we’ll use The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology,
edited by William L. Andrews, published by W.W. Norton (ISBN:10: 0142001473); James
Dickey, Deliverance (ISBN: 0-385-31387-X); William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (ISBN: 0-679-
73217-9); Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (ISBN: 0-679-72181-9); Ron Rash, One Foot in Eden (ISBN:
0-312-42305-5); Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (ISBN-10: 0553268880)
BENG Y437 001—Women Writers
Madwomen Beyond the Attic: Sense, Sensibility &
Madness in Literature by Women
Dr. Hoffer—HARG 276—TTH 9:25am-10:40am
“The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as
she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the
heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s
double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.”
~ Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
Sense and Sensibility: These concepts, paired
famously in the title of Jane Austen’s first
published novel, have been the source of much
attention since the 18 th century. The Age of
Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason,
prized sense above all else, defining it in terms of rationality and empiricism. Romanticism
brought with it a backlash that privileged sensibility, or acute, emotional perception and
responsiveness, over sense. For the Romantics, sensibility was linked to the imagination as well
as spirituality and involved a heightened level of sensitivity to nature, art, and other beings.
These terms were not only tied to these historical-literary movements, however; they were also
understood to be guiding principles through which to understand the differences between the
sexes. While sense has been traditionally associated with men, sensibility was thought to be a
defining quality of women. Because of this, another concept associated with women since
medieval times has been madness. When women’s innate knack for emotion strayed out of
control, as it was thought to often do, a woman was deemed “hysterical” (defined as an
unmanageable excess of emotion, from the Greek root hystera, meaning uterus). In this course,
we will study how British and American women writers from the early 19 th century through the
late 20 th centuries have responded to and interrogated these shifting ideologies in their work.
We will examine both the historical background that informed these writers’ thinking as well as
the landmark scholarship that has theorized these women’s depictions of reason, emotion, and
madness. Through our explorations of sane and insane female characters, and the authors who
created them, we will be able to trace how cultural concepts regarding gender have shifted over
time—and how they have stayed the same.
Texts to include: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Broadview, ISBN 9781551111254),
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Broadview, ISBN 9781551111803) , Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
(Norton, 9780393960129), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (Norton, ISBN 9780393960570),
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark. **NOTE: Those
texts for which publishers and ISBNs are provided indicate editions in which students will be
assigned specific readings in addition to the primary text. Students who do not wish to buy these
particular versions of the text will be responsible for obtaining the secondary readings by other
means!
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English Y462 — Technical Writing
Dr. Kremers — LIBR 243 — MWF 9:00am‐9:50am
In this course, students will balance practice and theory to lay
the foundation for a career as a technical writer. Students will
complete writing projects that develop practical skills that
professional writers use on the job. Activities will include
conducting research for audience analysis; techniques of
document design; fundamentals of the visual display of data;
rhetorical principles of prose style such as correctness, clarity,
coherence, cohesion, shape, and elegance; and practice in the
use of virtual meetings, which requires command of oral and
written communication.
Students who are successful in this course will be able to
do the following: conduct systematic research on issues in
technical communication; organize technical content in reports, memos and other documents;
prepare reports and memos using computer-assisted text and graphics; explore document design
problems in correspondence, reports and proposals; develop an effective writing style for a
variety of audiences and rhetorical intentions; acquire an analytical understanding of audience in
theory and practice; develop skill in working collaboratively on team projects.
Required Textbooks: Pearsall, Thomas E. The Elements of Technical Writing. 3rd ed.
Longman, 2009 (ISBN 0205583814); Williams & Colomb. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
10th ed. Longman, 2010 (ISBN 0205747469).
English Y463 — Business Writing
Professor Duffy — HARG 204 — MWF 10:00am‐10:50am
This course is designed to introduce students to strategies
and techniques they can use to write functional, useful
documents in business. The goals of the course are to
develop those communication and writing skills for efficacy
in the workplace. As no single strategy or formula can be
used in all occasions or at all times, audience analysis,
critical thinking, and investigation of rhetorical situations
will be important for devising methods for building situational responses. Students will learn to
be flexible with style and content within the somewhat strict forms of professional
communication. Students will conduct library research and learn to use it persuasively and
argumentatively in long-term group and short-term individual projects, generating professional
quality information in letter and memo (correspondence), and technical report formats. The
course will culminate in the presentations of feasibility studies and business plans for hypothetical
projects.
Required Textbook: Alred, Gerald, et al. The Business Writer’s Handbook, 10th ed.
Bedford/St. Martins, 2012. (ISBN-10: 0-312-67943-2)
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English Y465 001 — Fiction Workshop
Dr. Malphrus — LIBR 147 — TTH 4:30pm-5:45pm
“The purpose of fiction is to help us answer the question we must
constantly be asking ourselves: who do we think we are and what
do we think we’re doing?” —Robert Stone
If this two part question makes your fingers twitch, then pack
up your pen and paper (muses too!) and join us for a writing
workshop that is designed to expand a student’s awareness of,
appreciation for, and ability to create works of fiction. The
class is writing intensive with the goal of improving all writing
and critical thinking skills. In addition, this course offers global
perspectives by focusing on writers from around the world.
Students will receive feedback from both professor and peers as
we establish a community of writers in an intimate classroom setting. With permission from the
instructor, BENG 465 (like BENG 464) can be taken twice for credit. Texts for the course are:
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner (ISBN-10: 0679734031), On Teaching and Writing Fiction by
Wallace Stegner (ISBN-10: 0142001473), and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (ISBN-10:
0385480016).
Also of Interest:
English Y190 — Introduction to Journalism and Media Studies
Professor Duffy — SCIE 123 — MWF 12:15pm - 1:30pm
(Course counts as a humanities or liberal arts elective, but not for
credit in the major)
This course will introduce students to the skills, principles, and
ethics involved in designing and producing content for various
media outlets. Students will also become familiar with the terms,
concepts, paradigms, and debates that inform media studies. In
the course of the semester, students will analyze and study types
of journalistic writing (news, editorial, features, sports stories) and
the conventions of AP style. The goals of the course are to develop professional writers and
editors, and portions of the course are dedicated toward the design, creation, and publication of
regular issues of The Tidal Tribune. Required Textbook: Brooks, Brian, et al. Working with
Words, 7th ed. Bedford/St. Martin's 2009. (ISBN-10: 0-312-56079-6)
Also of Interest:
English Y191 — Journalism and Media Studies Lab
Professor Duffy — SCIE 123 — F 12:15pm - 1:30pm (1 credit)
(Course counts as a general elective, but not for credit in the major)
This course will introduce students to the skills, principles, and ethics involved in designing and
producing a student newspaper. Through editorial meetings, strategic planning and development,
students will determine the best methods for developing USCB-specific content, and establish an
organizational structure that will sustain the student newspaper. The goals of the course are to
develop professional writers and editors, dedicated toward the design, creation, and publication
of regular issues of USCB’s student newspaper, The Tidal Tribune. No Required Textbook.
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