Undergraduate Literature Courses Spring 2010

ENGL 1923. 001-004 Great Works of Literature / Price, M.
CID: Various  MW 1030AM-1120AM
The catalog describes this course as “Readings in the great works of the most important writers of Britain and America, such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Faulkner, and others.” For our purposes, Great Books are those that get noticed, and how better to be noticed than to be censored, banned, repudiated, or deemed offensive? In this class, we will be reading novels and plays from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have been challenged in theaters and schools and libraries, and paying some attention to the social mores that they are said to transgress. Evaluation via tests and papers. Lectures and weekly TA meetings.

ENGL 2413. 001- 008 Introduction to Literature / Various Intructors
CID: Various  Various times
Fiction, drama/film and poetry. Written critical exercises and discussion. A major focus of the course is diversity in America.

ENGL 2543. 002 Survey of British Literature I /Jones CID: 12884  MWF 1130AM-1220PM / Eldevik CID: 18778  MWF 0230PM-0320PM
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.

ENGL2653.001 Survey of British Literature II  / Franzese
CID: 12885  TR 1230PM-0145PM
This course will attend to the styles, concepts and cultural context to be identified with significant works from the periods of Romantic, Victorian and Twentieth Century British literature. Thus, the course will endeavor to offer not so much a history of literary events as a literary history of consciousness. We will measure our success by our ability to discern demonstrable continuities and creative departures in the course of our readings as we consider them, in large measure, through the lens provided by John Fowles, a 20th century author.

ENGL 2773. 001 Survey of American Literature I / Flota
CID: 12887  TR 0330PM-0445PM
The Puritans through the Romantic Period. 

ENGL 2883. 001 Survey of American Literature II / Cox
CID: 12888  MWF 1130AM-1220PM
This course aims to expose students to a variety of texts written in America from 1855 to the present. Questions of national identity, shifting social and political boundaries, and literature’s ability to shape and reflect the common and uncommon conflicts within the diversity of the American experience will inform our discussion of assigned texts.  Students will take a special interest in the author-as-artist as well as in writers from historically underrepresented groups. Two shorter papers, one longer paper, and two essay exams.

ENGL 2883. 002 Survey of American Literature II / Flota
CID: 12889  TR 1030AM-1145AM
The Romantic Period to the present.

ENGL 3123.001  MYTHOLOGY / Eldevik
CID: 12890  MWF 0930AM-1020AM M204
Gods and goddesses, warrior heroes and heroines, mysterious phenomena of nature, as personified by the ancient Greco-Roman imagination and depicted by poets such as Homer, Ovid, and Hesiod.  Midterm and final exam; quizzes; short writing assignments, term paper, team presentation.  Max: 27

ENGL 3123.701  MYTHOLOGY (honors) / Wallen
CID: 12891  TR 0330PM-0445PM
Myths, their cultural context, and their place in world literature.

ENGL3153.001 Readings in Literature by Women / Macvaugh
CID: 18788  MWF 1030AM-1120AM
This course explores the ways women have rewritten “herstory” through their journals, poems, memoirs, short stories and novels. We’ll read the work of Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and Louise Erdrich among others. A journal, two papers, presentations and a final exam.

ENGL 3173.001  WORLD LITERATURE II / Prchal
CID: 12893  MWF 1230PM-0120PM
Selected literary masterpieces exemplifying ideals and values in non-Western cultures. Emphasis on the study of non-Western literature available in
English. 

ENGL 3190.001  READINGS IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE: The African Novel / Rizzuto
CID: 12894  MWF 0130PM-0220PM
This course examines works from Nigeria, Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Senegal, and South Africa that have made a significant impact in the history of the African novel.  We will address issues specific to each work’s cultural and historical context, as well as consider how each text speaks to debates about the relationship between literature and history in postcolonial and Africana studies today. Authors to include Tutuola, Ng?gi, Head, Gordimer, Okri, Coetzee, Dangeremba, among others.

ENGL3243.001 Literary Theory & Criticism / Wallen
CID: 12899  TR 0200PM-0315PM
Study of the major works of critical theory and literary criticism.

ENGL 3373.001  READINGS IN NONFICTION / Talbot
CID: 18786  MWF 0930AM-1020AM
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966); Bernard Cooper’s Truth Serum:  Memoirs (1997), Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends (2008);  Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), and The Best American Essays 2009, as well as an anthology of brief personal essays round out the playlist for this course.   Through our readings, we will explore the nonfiction novel, the memoir, the essay, New Journalism, and the briefest of the form, as well as 2009’s best.  Joan Didion claims,   “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”   You will not forget these.

ENGL 3383.001  READINGS IN NARRATIVE / Hall
CID: 12931  TR 1230PM-0145PM
Explore various narratives of transformation! This class will examine various texts that show how the narrator changes--whether it be spiritual, emotional, mental, or even physical. We will read such texts as The Book of Margery Kempe, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood. We will also examine various theories behind the narrative form. 

ENGL 3410.001  POPULAR FICTION: Science vs the Supernatural / Prchal
CID: 12932  MWF 1130AM-1220PM
At least since the Enlightenment, science has vied against belief systems that include the supernatural for a reliable explanation of the cosmos.  This struggle has been reflected in and reinforced by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle.  This class looks at the history of this struggle, starting with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) and concluding with  Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001). 

ENGL 3410.701  POPULAR FICTION (honors): Science Fiction / Walkiewicz
CID: 18785  MWF 0230PM-0320PM
Surveying the genre of science fiction from the early 19th century to the recent past, we will concentrate on such things as gender and class issues as we analyze the ways various writers have examined what it means to be human. Along the way, we’ll encounter aliens and androids and explore a variety of dystopias and post-apocalyptic landscapes

ENGL 4170.001  STUDIES IN 20th-C BRITISH LITERATURE: Bleeding
London / Walkiewicz
CID: 12941  MWF 1230PM-0120PM
We will examine the concept and depiction of The City in twentieth-century British fiction, poetry, drama, and film. Along the way, we will take up such matters as technical innovation, class and gender issues, and the impact of science and technology. Works by Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, Virginia Woolf, and others. Two papers and two essay exams. 

ENGL 4210.001  STUDIES IN 19th-C AMERICAN LITERATURE: Bestsellers and the Book / Walker
CID: 12942  TR 1030AM-1145AM
Seduction, betrayal, murder, moral outrage, mystery, and romance are the narrative engines of American’s most popular stories, nineteenth-century bestsellers often published as series, as serials, as sequels, as subscriptions, and as bestsellers turned into blockbusters. What texts were popular and why? What can our reading of bestsellers (a historie du livre) tell us about the society that produced and then by the millions, consumed them? Papers, presentations, and a final exam.

ENGL 4220.001  20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE: Reading the Five Senses / Bruner
CID: 12943  TR 1230PM-0145PM
How did the American dream become the American scream?  In this course we will explore the sensual and psychological aspects of intense experience through reading with attention to the five (or six or seven) senses.  The literature is roughly divided into a look at both urban and rural flesh, including authors such as William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and Edward Estlin Cummings.  Smell the dung of the Great Depression; observe decay in the streets; taste the sweet potato of memory; cough your way through smoky bars to hear the jazz go down.  As you indulge in the sensual, you will write two papers, take two exams, and read, read, read!  Presentations, occasional essay quizzes, attendance and participation required.  You gotta feel it.

ENGL 4300.001  STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM: Darkness in US
Antebellum Lit / Decker
CID: 18777  TR 0200PM-0315PM
This will be a study of Dark Romanticism, American style. We will begin with C. B. Brown, progress to Poe at his most warped, Whitman at his most morbid, and Dickinson in pierced-Goth phase. We will also read Moby-Dick. Naturally the course would not be complete without Captain Ahab and I guarantee that you will read and enjoy this long, verbose, and troubled narrative. Three papers, one inclass presentation, and final exam.

ENGL 4320.001  STUDIES IN POSTMODERNISM: Gender, space, and
time / Mason
CID: 12945  TR 0900AM-1015AM
Landscapes as photography, beauty as surgery, terrorism as fashion, events as television, facebook as family, iPod as iRaq: you wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world. Someplace exotic like Oklahoma City, where the orgy is over, liberation is over. It is not sex one is looking for but one’s gender.  I mean genre. 

ENGL 4400.001  REGIONAL LITERATURE: Contemporary Ireland / Grubgeld
CID: 12947  TR 0330PM-0445PM
Contemporary Ireland This course in the literature, film and culture of Ireland since 1975 focuses on the seismic changes in the family and the position of women and children in society, the now largely resolved civil war in the North, and the impact of globalization and new immigrants from distant parts of the globe. We’ll read two collections of short stories (Roddy Doyle and Emma Donaghue), a series of plays (Christina Reid), a novel (Bernard McLaverty), a memoir (Nuala O’Faolain), and Seamus Heaney’s iconic collection of poems, North.  We’ll also study three films from the period. One paper, written homework, midterm and final.

ENGL 4520.701  PROBLEMS IN ENGLISH (honors): Remembering the
1960s / Decker
CID: 12952  TR 1030AM-1145AM
This class will preserve a double emphasis: the famously turbulent 1960s and the act of remembering this decade. Reading works by Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, and Tim O’Brien, listening to various latter-day covers of sixties songs, examining portraits of sixties life such as the wildly popular AMC series Mad Men, considering ways in which a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey anticipates us, and keeping a sharp eye for T-Shirts that make reference to Che Guevara  and Woodstock, we will proceed on the premise that we all remember the sixties, whether we were alive in that decade or not. Three projects on self-directed themes, two class presentations, and a final examination. 

ENGL 4700.001  SINGLE AUTHOR OR WORK PRE-1800: The Bible as Literature / Jones
CID: 12958  MWF 0130AM-0220AM
A look at influential Hebrew, Christian, and Gnostic texts.  The class will attempt to discover their significance through a secular approach.  The class should not be considered "religious study" or a forum to discuss matters of personal faith, testimony, revelation, or the like.  Textual analysis and discussion will look instead at cultural contexts and literary features and techniques.  2 papers, 2 exams, one tutorial.

ENGL 4723.001 STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE: Shakespeare's
Romances / Wadoski
CID: 18787  MWF 0230PM-0320PM
This course focuses on the romances with which Shakespeare concluded his career: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Two Noble Kinsmen and The Tempest. These plays are the culmination of Shakespeare’s achievement as a literary craftsman, reimagining and bringing together many of the issues that drove his earlier comedies and tragedies. They are also a return to a set of forms and conventions that were seen by his peers as primitive and simplistic, derided by Ben Jonson as “moldy tales.” Shakespeare gives us a world of magicians, prophets, and witches, long-lost children, pastoral havens, wicked stepmothers, and statues coming to life. In this fairy tale setting, he also gives us some of his profoundest reflections on his own work as an artist. We will situate our readings in the broader context of Renaissance romance, examining the texts and literary traditions on which Shakespeare drew in fashioning these works. In addition to these five plays, we will read Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” several of the late classical romances popular in 16th-century England, and brief selections from Sidney’s “Arcadia,” Lyly’s “Euphues,” and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Assignments will include several short response papers, an individual tutorial, a 10-12 page research-based paper, and a final exam.

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