Evaluative criterion 1—Program quality Committee: Michael (chair)

The Department also administers two other endowed funds: the O’Donnell/Beymer Memorial Award, used to fund yearly departmental awards to the top graduating seniors and some research awards (approximately $4000 available each year); and the Dr. Cherie Haeger Endowed Fund, dedicated to professional development for graduate students and used chiefly to fund travel to conferences for graduate students (approximately $11,000 available each year).

In this course, we will cross literary borders and build textual bridges. We will pry apart the constructs that define and distinguish the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and will work to repopulate those spaces with our own progeny. This guerilla process will begin with an intense regimen wherein we will study and practice the creative techniques that underlie the foundations of any successful literary work, and then will focus on our amalgamation of those techniques into an individualized vision of literary expression. To succeed in these endeavors, we must come to class, participate in class, and read, write, and revise our works until they stand on their own without props or contextualization. As a unit, we must help each other improve through earnest feedback and constructive criticism. We must study, practice, experiment, and create individually and in groups. We will look inside and outside the confines of our classroom for inspiration and models. We will attend readings and keep a journal. Ultimately, we will learn and build from the confluence of personalities and aesthetic predispositions that make up both our class and society, and will produce works within and across genres that stand as monuments to our own creative efforts. This course is a Creative Arts Theme Area course for the University Core Curriculum.

This course examines selected literary works that testify to the diverse relationships over time between humans and the world around us. The course readings were written at different times, in different countries, and in various genres. What unites them–besides their value as literature–is their authors’ passionate exploration of what it means to be human. In lectures, class discussions, and student writing, we will consider the multiple ways literary works can engage us and our world. Open to students in the Litterae learning community in the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts.

Why has the theatre historically been seen as a dangerous place? How does the theatre reveal, confront, celebrate, and critique social issues and cultural values in unique and immediate ways? In this course we will read a variety of plays in order to explore questions about class, race, gender, love, identity, politics and desire. We will read plays, have lively discussions and debates, and investigate how drama and performance are an integral part of our every day lives. Plays will include Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, Mann’s Still Life, Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter, Loomer’s Living Out, Gien’s Syringa Tree and others. Enrollment restricted to first-semester students enrolled in the Personae Learning Community.

The principal aim of this course is to introduce students to the main currents of cultural thought and production during the turbulent 1960s. The literary focus will be on texts that address three major areas of cultural importance: 1) the civil rights movement; 2) the women's movement; and 3) the anti-war movement. We will also consider some of the major developments in other areas of cultural expression, including pop music, jazz, and the visual arts. Mid-term and final exams. Open to students in the Populus learning community in the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts.

In this course we will read short stories by women and men from diverse backgrounds. We will explore the short story genre by examining the elements of fiction in each story, reading commentaries on the art of writing the short story, viewing film versions of the stories, considering the viewpoints of literary critics on the stories, and by writing critically about the stories. Course Requirements: Midterm and Final exams (essay and objective), position papers, reading quizzes, an oral presentation. Text: Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and Its Writer.

The course will begin with considerations of fundamental conventions of the detective fiction genre established by Edgar Allan Poe, go on to notice how they are elaborated and extended by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, and then undertake examinations of the conventions and permutations found in such representative American genres as hard-boiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and Ross Macdonald; the culturally attuned detective novels of John D. Mcdonald, Tony Hillerman, and Robert B. Parker; and the procedural police novels of James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly. Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, two mid-term exams, and a final exam.

Introducing students to drama from across the centuries, this course will cover a diverse range of dramatic texts from playwrights seeking to explore intersections of good and evil. Various styles of drama will lead to a careful examination of plays as both literary and performance based, and students will engage with chosen texts through intensive reading and discussion. All students in this course will be expected to attend one or more live productions as audience members.

Murders, cheaters, rogues, rakes, and "fallen women" have all (dis)graced the stage in name of love. In this course, we will explore characters who, in the desperate pursuit of their "beloved" (money, fame, wealth, or power), have been driven to the point of insanity and well beyond. The objectives for this course will guide our unpacking of these thematic concerns and are as follows: read and analyze a variety of genres within drama, understand the conventions of the dramatic genre, examine how a dramatic work represents a particular idea/concern/anxiety in its historical context, find connections between different genres and historical periods, and examine the difference between "the page" and "the stage" (printed and performed texts). Texts will include Sophocles' Oedipus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Joanna Baillie's Orra, Isben's Dollhouse, Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire, among others.

This course is based on the assertion of Cardinal Newman, that Catholic literature is not religious literature, but “includes all subjects of literature as a Catholic would treat them, and as only he can treat them.” Such literature often seems far removed from theological dogma, but assumes that all human experience takes place in a world in which God is present. Readings will concentrate on twentieth-century fiction by British, American, French, and Japanese authors. This course satisfied the World Literature Requirement for English Education Students.

Ah, horror literature, the maligned genre. Though much horror literature is indeed dreadful, the genre has a long and distinguished history, and the best of horror literature is exceedingly good, and intellectually sophisticated. The genre often intersects with other popular genres – such as mystery, fantasy, science fiction – but in this class we’ll be reading the works that locate horror in the supernatural, works that posit that there is indeed a reality beyond the one we can see, and that it’s not always kind and gentle. We’ll be reading both chronologically (starting with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and ending with selections from a recent anthology edited by Peter Straub (2008)) and relatively (noticing such groups as “Bad House” – Hodgson’s House on the Borderland (1908), Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), King’s The Shining (1977) – or “Vampires” – le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872), Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1973) – for instance). Daily reading quizzes, midterm, final, class discussion.

This course will explore the African-American literary tradition, the historical context in which it emerged, and the dialogue between black literature, politics, and music. In this introductory course, students will acquire a general understanding of African-American literary forms and theories such as the oral tradition, the slave narrative, and the centrality of double consciousness. The reading list will include nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by such authors as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and others.

In this course we will examine how American writers and, to a lesser degree, filmmakers have represented and responded to American popular music from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with slave songs and their adaptation by America’s first hit songwriter, Pittsburgh’s own Stephen Foster, we will examine the aesthetic and social dimensions of popular music, trace its power to both shape and reflect social vision, and survey the uses to which it has been put in American literature and film.

The course will be divided into thematic units, including, but not limited to the following: Race, Slavery, and the Old South (19th-century slave songs, minstrel shows, Frederick Douglass, Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles W. Chesnutt); The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston Langston Hughes, and the “blues aesthetic”); Workingman’s Blues: The Great Depression (John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, James Agee, and folk traditions in white and African-American communities); Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox: Bebop and the Beat Generation.

Other units will focus on more recent developments in music, literature, and film, with special attention to racial and generational identity from the 1960’s to the present.

This introductory course will explore the connections between imaginative literature and politics. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” wrote Shelley. But, according to Yeats, authors “have no gift to set a statesman right.” Yet, throughout history, writers of imaginative literature in English have disputed whether artists have any special insight into the practical affairs of the world. And they have done so while commenting upon the world they lived in, offering celebrations, critiques, satires—and alternative visions.

This is a new course, covering children's and adolescent literature, and will cover a range of genres and periods, including but not limited to picture books, children’s and adolescent novels, nineteenth-century classic fairy tales, short stories, and film. The literature will take a multicultural perspective with an emphasis on teaching in American public schools to a broad racial/ethnic audience. For example, classics such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe may be read along with works like Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Course requirements include one short paper, a reading journal that will be submitted periodically, and a storytelling presentation.

The course aims to introduce the predominate conventions and thematic concerns of Western literature and movies in relation to the cultural contexts out of which they were produced and the historical contexts which they ostensibly intend to represent—and all of this in relation to the mythical and ideological values of the Western hero and, by extension, of “America.” Students will be evaluated on the basis of two mid-term exams, a final exam, and frequency and quality of participation in class discussion. The likely course materials are:

Texts:

Owen Wister, The Virginian (Penguin)

Louis L’Amour, Hondo (Bantam)

Jack Schaefer, Shane (Bantam)

Edward Abbey, The Brave Cowboy (Avon)

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Vintage)

Movies:

Hondo. Dir.: John Farrow. Starring John Wayne.& Geraldine Page.

Shane. Dir.: George Stevens. Starring Alan Ladd & Van Heflin.

High Noon. Dir.: Fred Zinnemann. Starring Gary Cooper & Grace Kelly.

Lonely Are the Brave. Dir.: David Miller. Starring Kirk Douglas & Walter Matthau.

The Unforgiven. Dir.: Clint Eastwood. Starring Eastwood, Morgan Freeman.

Fulfills an English major survey requirement for Film Studies students