Undergraduate Literature Courses Fall 2008
ENGL 1923. 001-004 Great Works of Literature / Wallen MW 12:30-1:20 / Disc. Group F 10:30 CID 13641, 11:30 CID 13642, or 12:30 CID 13640 or 13643 This is a course for people who would like to know which works of literature are truly great. We shall read a wide array of works from different eras and cultures; and when the class is done, everyone will be able to say they have read some of the very best literature.
ENGL 2413. 001 / 002 Introduction to Literature / Eldevik MWF 9:30-10:20 CID 13644 / 11:30-12:20 CID 13645 Explores a variety of literary forms -- prose fiction, poetry, drama -- in works ranging from ancient Greece to Shakespeare's England to the Samurai era of Japan, with a special emphasis on cultural diversity in America. Two exams, several writing assignments, a team presentation.
ENGL 2413. 701 Introduction to Literature (Honors) / Walker MWF 10:30-11:20 CID 13654 Growing up is hard to do—at any time, at any place, at any age. Find out how hard—by viewing life and death through the comic and tragic lens, seeing how storytellers give shape to great literature (fiction, poetry, film, drama) through their various agents (melodrama, irony, satire, wit, farce, parody) and their use of diverse narrative strategies.
ENGL 2543. 001 Survey of British Literature I / Eldevik MWF 2:30-3:20 CID 13669 Major developments in the first thousand years of British literature -- the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond. Includes Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare and Milton. Two exams, several writing assignments.
ENGL 2543. 002 Survey of British Literature I / Staff MWF 10:30-11:20 CID 13670 British Literary tradition --- about one thousand years of literary foundations. Expect to read and discuss various genres including epic, romance and drama. Texts may include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Behn and Pope. Essays, quizzes and exams.
ENGL 2653. 001 / 002 Survey of British Literature II / Grubgeld TR 10:30-11:45 CID 13671 / 2:00-3:15 CID 13672 England 's literary tradition after 1798. Read works by Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Yeats, Lawrence, and others.
ENGL 2773. 001 / 002 Survey of American Literature I / Staff MWF 1:30-2:20 CID 13673 / TR 9:00-10:15 CID 13674 An interdisciplinary tour through early American culture and history, from the voyage of Columbus to the end of the Civil War. We will read and learn about early colonial encounters, Puritan faith and experience in New England, Enlightenment and Revolution, the struggle to overthrow slavery, and the emergence of distinctly American poetry and fiction.
ENGL 2883. 001 Survey of American Literature II / Leavell MWF 12:30-1:20 CID 13675 A cultural and social history of American literature from the Civil War to the present. Movements from Realism to Postmodernism, fiction from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison, poetry from Robert Frost to Sylvia Plath. 10 quizzes, 4 essay exams, 0 papers.
ENGL 3153. 001 Readings in Literature by Women: White Trash / Mason TR 12:30-1:45 CID 13680 “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1855. This course examines women’s literature and the anxieties surrounding it. To maximize those anxieties, we will focus on the trashiest of them all, working class white women. In addition to fiction by Bobbie Ann Mason, Dorothy Allison, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Shulamith Firestone, Rebecca Harding Davis, Josephine Herbst, and others, we will read non-fiction essays about what it means to be working class and white.
ENGL 3163. 001 World Literature I / Wallen MWF 2:30-3:20 CID 13682 Don your beret, fire up your moped, and put on your best fake accent, for this class is going continental. We'll read works from all across the map, and some from countries that no longer exist, but they will all be good. Exams, class reports.
ENGL 3170. 001 Readings in Literature & Other Disciplines: Literature & Photography / Austin MWF 11:30-12:20 CID 19552 This is a criticism course. Our extended exploration of reading and evaluating photographs will cover the photograph as art, the difference between visual and verbal images, and the narrative function of images. We shall also explore specific ethical issues that have been provoked by photographs, such as who and what should be represented. Students should expect to read some theory (Benjamin, Barthes) and do some writing in class, as well as write two essays and a final.
ENGL 3183. 001 Native American Literature / Smith MWF 1:30-2:20 CID 13684 This class is an introduction to major writers of diverse and varied Native American cultures of the United States. Our study will include samples from early, modern, and contemporary Native literary traditions; we will read selections by authors such as William Apess, Zitkala Sa, Alice Callahan, Ella Cara Deloria, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Susan Power, and Sherman Alexie. Attendance and active participation in class discussions are mandatory.
ENGL 3333. 001 Short Story / Bruner TR 12:30-1:45 CID 13716 In this examination of the short story, students will review the development of the genre, focus on textual touchstones, and proceed with close reading of selected modern, post-modern, and contemporary authors. Two exams, two papers, take-home quizzes, and an oral presentation required. What would Kafka do?
ENGL 3363. 001 Readings in Drama / Jones MWF 9:30-10:20 CID 13718 Exposure to theater going, play making, reading strategies, and often-heard names, places, and story lines. Readings begin with Aeschylus and end with Stoppard. Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov fill the gap. 2 papers, 2 exams, 1 tutorial.
ENGL 3383. 001 Readings in Narrative: Castaways / Mayer MWF 8:30-9:20 CID 13719 This class will explore the nature of narrative by focusing on stories of castaways in fiction, nonfiction, film, and TV. Literary texts will include such works as Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719); Wyss, Swiss Family Robinson (1812); Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838); Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954); and Coetzee, Foe (1986). Visual texts will include such films as Buñuel, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954) and Zemeckis, Cast Away (2000) as well as at least part of the first season of the television series Lost. The class will talk about travel literature, the novel, cinema, what films and novels do, and television. Work will include at least one exam, papers, quizzes, class participation, and one class report.
ENGL 3410.351 Popular Fiction: Crimes, Criminals, and Mysteries / Batteiger TR 2:00-3:15 CID 13720 We’ll read and watch contemporary mysteries, police stories, and police procedurals. The following list of books, authors, and films is tentative: Joseph Wambaugh, The Onion Field or The Blue Knight; Bonnie and Clyde; Cape Fear; LA Confidential; Ross Macdonald; Raymond Chandler; The Maltese Falcon. Two exams, final, two short papers.
ENGL 3933. 001 Shakespeare / Pesta TR 12:30-1:45 CID 13726 An overview of the plays of Shakespeare designed for beginners. No one understood human nature like Shakespeare. His comedies expose the romance and folly of love, and his tragedies and histories offer profound insights into mortality and probe the depths of human nature. A college degree without a course in Shakespeare is like a degree in medicine without a course on anatomy.
ENGL 4110. 001 Studies in 16th Century British Literature: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels / Pesta TR 3:30-4:45 CID 19558 A course on English Renaissance Drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, focusing on Shakespeare’s great contemporary playwrights, including Marlowe, Webster, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Tourneur, and Ford. Our theme will be the seedy underbelly of Renaissance courts and palaces, and we will study plays that include as central characters rogues, murderers, thieves, malcontents, necrophiliacs, hucksters, charlatans, quacks, poisoners, adulterers, arsonists, blackmailers, and committers of incest. If you like twisted anti-heroes and have a nose for depravity, this course is for you.
ENGL 4160. 001 Studies in 19th Century British Literature: The Victorian Novel / Austin MWF 1:30-2:20 CID 13737 We shall read six novels from the age of high realism, with special attention to the creation of character and the critique of capitalism. Highlights include Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens' Great Expectations, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, and Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Three essays, good reading habits required.
ENGL 4170. 001 Studies in 20th Century British Literature: The British Novel / Walkiewicz TR 10:30-11:45 CID 13738 We will read and discuss eight novels by modern and postmodern English and Irish writers, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Fowles, and Angela Carter.. In addition to examining formal and technical aspects of the texts, we will be concentrating on their attitudes toward order, their approaches to the past, and their treatment of British culture, including matters involving class, gender, and colonialism. Two papers and two essay exams.
ENGL 4200. 001 Studies in Early American Literature / Frohock TR 9:00-10:15 CID 19555 In this class we will study a wide variety of crime and crime narrative, from the beginning of the colonial era to the emergence of crime fiction in the early 19th century. Topics may include the New England witch trials, piracy, religious “crimes” of dissent (figures like Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson), and cannibalism. Readings will include canonical selections ( Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, the stories of Edgar Allen Poe) as well as some less familiar examples of the early criminal biography. In addition to the primary material, we will draw on some theories of criminality and samples of contemporary criticism in our study of legally and culturally transgressive acts. Exams, term paper.
ENGL 4220. 001 Studies in 20 th Century American Literature: Senses of Place in American Lit erature / Smith MWF 2:30-3:20 CID 13739 This course is a seminar on the evocation and insistence of place in the fiction of major writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie. We will identify ways in which these authors create a "postage stamp of native soil" (to use Faulkner's term) as the springboard for themes with local, national, cultural, and global significance. Attendance and active participation in class discussions are mandatory.
ENGL 4310. 001 Studies in Modernism: American Modernism / Walkiewicz TR 2:00-3:15 CID 13741 This semester we will be examining the contributions of American writers to what was once conceived of as an “international” movement, concentrating on those aspects of their work that made it new and those that made it distinctly American. We will be reading fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose, and drama by not only the usual white, male suspects, such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O’Neill but also Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and others. Two papers and two essay exams.
ENGL 4400. 801 Studies in Regional Literature: Southern Women Writers ( Tulsa) / Miller R 4:30-7:10 CID 13743 This course will feature the works of southern women authors who have challenged sterotypical representations of the south--and of women. Featured writers will include Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Beth Henley, Anne Tyler, and Maya Angelou.
ENGL 4600. 001 Studies in Milton / Jones MWF 10:30-11:20 CID 13750 A special garden, a famous haircut, a not so friendly God and a great elegy. Matters such as these as well as free will, divorce, and regicide have long been associated with Milton and his writing. This course will explore them all. 2 papers, 2 exams, 1 tutorial.
ENGL 4710. 001 Single Author/Work Post-1800: Team of Rivals: Mark Twain and His Circle / Walker MWF 11:30-12:20 CID 13751 Mark Twain invented the American voice, and he used that voice to transform himself into an international celebrity. His life mirrored his country’s, as he grew up a Mississippi River boy, turned himself into a wild west journalist during the Gold Rush, and became our nation’s foremost storyteller, who in tandem and often at odds with his circle of talented literary rivals, conveyed in unforgettable humor the brawling, sprawling nineteenth century in America.
English Department
College of Arts & Sciences
Oklahoma State University
205 Morrill Hall
Stillwater, OK 74078
Phone: 405-744-9474
For Information about English Programs: english.information@okstate.edu
Webmaster: engweb@okstate.edu
