The course is a critical reading of selected modern poems, both artistic and rhetorical, to explore differences between modern and postmodern styles, methods, and attitudes in the Twentieth century. The course will analyze the often fractious but nourishing dynamics of formation and counter-formation in literature which govern the development of distinct schools and trends in poetry. In the process, it will look at poetics and different literary movements such as imagism, vorticism, open, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, performance poetry.
Course Catalogue
Course Code: ENG 523
Course Name:
Modern Poetry and Theory
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
Course Code: ENG 524
Course Name:
Contemporary Literatures in English
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
Contemporary Literature in English will be an examination of literary texts in the wider context of social, historical and political circumstances from which they emerge. Topics will include modern and contemporary fiction, drama and poetry and examination of classic and contemporary critical texts on literature. The texts will be selected in relation to ideas in larger contexts, such as history, the visual image, gender, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism.
Course Code: ENG 525
Course Name:
Representing Gender: Women Writers
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
The course looks at women’s lives and reflects on what it means to be a woman and a feminist from various sexual, racial, class, and national perspectives. It also gives students an understanding of a variety of feminist theory, use of feminist theory in literary texts, and on the changing aspects of women’s writings over time, circumstances, and social/cultural contexts. The students will examine a variety of different genres; e.g. criticism, novel, poetry, short story, autobiography and attempt to understand the context and complexity a woman writer faces while writing. In this course, we seek to examine how inequalities of class/caste, race/ethnicity, community/religion, nation and sexuality intersect with gender to produce particular politics of visibility and invisibility.
Course Code: ENG 526
Course Name:
Old and Middle English Studies
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course will study the original Beowulf and other selections from Anglo-Saxon literature as well as Chaucer and other selections from Middle English literature. Students will learn to read critically, write analytically about what they read, and gain insight on how to write original pieces effectively through class discussions and assigned papers/essays.
Course Code: ENG 527
Course Name:
American Renaissance
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course will examine the literary and cultural history of "America" with particular reference to a range of texts ranging from colonial times to the emergence of the new republic. Based on the foundational American assumption that the future can be better than the past through imagination and effort, the Transcendentalists could foresee a culture that would shape a mindset and a community in which the individual would be liberated and a way of thinking would in effect become a way of doing.
Some of the questions that this course will attempt to answer include the connections between writing and culture and the cultural-historical claims and interpretations of the prescribed texts.
Course Code: ENG 528
Course Name:
Readings in 17th Century Literature
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course will allow students to work with major genres of seventeenth-century English literature including lyrics, elegies, epics, essays, masques, and pamphlets. Works by Ben Jonson, John Milton, the Metaphysical Poets, and others will be considered.
Course Code: ENG 529A
Course Name:
Literature and Ideas (Religion)
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
The course addresses questions such as how religion has influenced the creativity of writers differently in different times and cultures and how writers have responded to religion both in its institutional and spiritual forms. The discussion will pivot on different types of literature from the English Renaissance period through the American Puritanical-Calvinistic era to the present time in both the East and the West. The focus will be on how literature expresses major religious themes such as identity and purpose of humanity, death and immortality, divine will and justice.
Course Code: ENG 529B
Course Name:
Literature and Ideas (Travel)
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
Using journey as a metaphor, this course will focus on literature dealing with travel and examine nationalism, identity, economy and politics.
The objective of this course is to focus on English-language women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Whatever the definition we decide to take for granted, there are two terms in the phrase travel writing which might be re-worded as writing about travel. Carl Thompson in his Travel Writing (2011), suggests, “To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. Possibly this journey is epic in scale, taking the traveller to the other side of the world or across a continent, or up a mountain.” This course will explore how and why people travel and how all these affect their persons, culture and broader perspective.
Course Code: ENG 529C
Course Name:
Folklore
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
“We do not know to whom a proverb, a tale, a custom, a myth owes its origin. [so we are going to say] it originated among the folk.” –Joseph Jacobs.
The course explores folk narrative and its transmission across time and space. In particular it will focus on the stories involving a character who is known for his magical powers; as a culture hero he can be located at the origin of life. Then again, he is an eternal shapeshifter getting involved in all sorts of pranks. One label assigns to him characterizes him as a trickster who is simultaneously an omniscient creator and an innocent fool. He is a destroyer and a preserver. We will consider this character as a folkloric scapegoat onto which our fears, failures, and unattained ideals are projected.
The course interrogates the trickster figure to further ask: Why do we need to experience the deception of a trickster and his tricks? Do we need a “lie,” the trick” to know the “truth”? Is being tricked essential to our survival? How does this survival motif form an archetype? What is trickster archetype?
Course Code: ENG 529D
Course Name:
Literature and the Environment
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course looks at how concepts of nature have been presented in literary texts over time with a view to understanding the contemporary issues of climate change and environmental sustainability. Students will examine major trends that have influenced how writers have been affected by their natural environments and how they have adapted these to their writings.