Course Descriptions

ENGL 201 - Advanced Expository Writing

ENGL 203 - Topics in Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 204 - Topics in Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 205 - Poetic Forms

ENGL 230 - Poetry

ENGL 231 - Drama

ENGL 232 - The Novel

ENGL 233 - Film

ENGL 234 - Children’s Literature

ENGL 234 - Children’s Literature

ENGL 235 - Fantasy

ENGL 236 - The Bible as English Literature

ENGL 237 - The Bible as Literature: Exile and Return

ENGL 240 - Arthurian Legend

ENGL 242 - Individual Shakespeare Play

ENGL 250 - British Literature: Medieval and Early Modern

ENGL 251 - British Literature in an Age of Global Expansion, 1660s-1790s

ENGL 252 - Shakespeare

ENGL 253 - Southern American Literature

ENGL 254 - Jane Austen: The Works and the Phenomenon

ENGL 255 - Superheroes

ENGL 256 - Southern Women Writers

ENGL 260 - Literary Approaches to Poverty

ENGL 261 - Reading Gender

ENGL 262 - Literature, Race, and Ethnicity

ENGL 285 - Reading Lolita in Lexington

ENGL 291 - Seminar

FDR: HL, GE3
Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall, Winter

Topics for Winter, 2010:

ENGL 291A: Seminar: Western Encounters with the Islamic World (1100-1600). A study of medieval and 16th-century Western texts that imagine Muslims sometimes as culturally other and sometimes fundamentally the same as Westerners, sometimes as monstrous or demonic and sometimes as honorable. When Muslims threaten to conquer Europe, texts replay the two great conflicts between Islamdom and Christendom: the invasion of Spain, France and Italy in the 8th and 9th centuries (The Song of Roland) and the First Crusade (an eyewitness history and Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated). By contrast, in the influential travel, chivalric, and pilgrimage literature, Westerners report the achievements of Islamic civilization in the Middle East and beyond. The seminar begins with how medieval Muslims imagined themselves and imagined their relations with Christians, Jews, and other religious communities (the great Arabian story collection, The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights). All texts read in translation. Discussion throughout on the roots of how non-Muslims conceive of Muslim culture today. Craun

ENGL 291B: Seminar: Contemporary Iranian Women Writers. In this course we explore the connections between women’s lives, Iranian cultural and political systems, and human rights struggles as they have been dramatized in contemporary Iranian and Iranian-American literature. Readings, all in English, consider both the potential and the limitations of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry to not only represent the experiences of Iranian women but also to elucidate such broad concepts as “the human,” “freedom of expression,” “political persecution,” and “torture.” While this is primarily a literature course, we often take an interdisciplinary approach to our readings, considering both modern Iranian history and international human rights policy and expanding our discussions with a selection of Iranian documentaries and films. Darznik
Staff.

ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

FDR: HL, GE3
Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall

Topic for Fall, 2009:

ENGL 292: Topics in British Literature: Modern British Poetry (3).This course concentrates on poetry from 1870 through 1950, asking how British poets have pushed the limits of traditional verse. British poets are known for being less innovative than their American and Continental peers. We sample poems by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams before asking: what did “experimentation” mean to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy? And how did Yeats experiment with history in his poems, as opposed to Ezra Pound? We also see how female poets, such as Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, developed highly original voices, and we end by sampling the works of more recent poets, including an influx of immigrant writers. Brodie

ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL, GE3
Credits: 3-4
When Offered: Winter, Spring

Topic for Spring, 2010:

Business in American Literature (4): Intensive study of selections from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and of various stories and films dealing with American business. (HL, GE3)  Smout.

Topic for Winter, 2010:

ENGL 293A: Topics in American Literature: Form and Freedom in Modern American Poetry (3). Robert Frost once said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. This course explores that statement by studying several modern American poets. We examine varieties of free verse from Walt Whitman through Sylvia Plath and compare those writers’ works to poets like Frost and Richard Wilbur, who preferred traditional forms. We also see how individual poets have worked with both form and freedom throughout their careers. In the process, the course studies many verse forms, including sonnets, villanelles and sestinas, and concludes by sampling some contemporary experimental approaches. (HL, GE3) Brodie

ENGL 293B: Topics in American Literature: Literature of the Gilded Age (3). This course investigates American literature written during the historical period that Mark Twain dubbed the Gilded Age (roughly 1865 to 1905). An explosive era of excesses and contradictions, the Gilded Age witnessed Reconstruction, the rise of the modern city, the closing of the frontier, and the celebration of unprecedented wealth. With the major literary developments of realism and naturalism in mind, we practice close reading of individual texts to see how diverse writers created complex, often conflicting representations of American experience and national identity. For instance, we juxtapose Dreiser’s Sister Carrie with L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (both published in 1900), the popular dime-novels of Horatio Alger with the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, and the intensely personal poetry of Emily Dickinson with the publicly censured novel The Awakening. Requirements include thoughtful class participation, short responses, analytical essays, and exams. (HL, GE3) Wall

ENGL 293C: Topics in American Literature: Recent American Literature (3). This course examines significant works of the past quarter century. Writers will likely include: Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, and more. (HL, GE3) Crowley

ENGL 293D: Topics in American Literature: American Short Story (3). We explore the roots of this distinctly modern genre through the work of American, French, and Russian masters while also sampling a wide range of contemporary writers, from minimalists to magical realists. Among the authors included: Poe, Hawthorne, Chekhov, Hemingway, Lawrence, Mansfield, Cheever, O’Connor, Carver, Oates, and Boyle. (HL, GE3) Oliver
Staff.

ENGL 294 - Topics in Environmental Literature

ENGL 295 - Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies

ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL, GE3
Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall, Winter

Topics for Winter, 2010:

ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Western American Literature (3). The American West is one of the great battlegrounds in world history, a place where many ethnic groups have come into contact with each other and have fought for their land, their economic livelihood, their culture, their families, their names, their ethnic identities, and virtually everything else human beings can fight for. We study some key Western writers representing these different ethnic groups, analyzing their competing stories of who won the West and who ought to own and shape it now. These writers include Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Maxine Hong Kingston. We also study some Western films in order to understand the amazing power of stories to create the realities we live. (HL, GE3) Smout

ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Ethics and Reading: Spenser and Chaucer (3). A study of how Shakespeare explores the classical/Christian virtues of justice, equity, and mercy in The Faerie Queene, especially Book V. A parallel study of how Chaucer explores the multifaceted basic good of medieval secular culture, honor in men and women, in several of the Canterbury Tales (“The Knight’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Physician’s Tale,” etc.). Alongside the literary texts, brief sections of philosophical texts on justice, honor, and the ethical basis of human action; also discussion of some recent theory on reading imaginative literature as an inherently ethical activity. Students may write the research paper, to be developed in stages over the last third of the term, on either writer. (HL, GE3) Craun

Topics for Fall, 2009:

ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Becoming Jane (3). This course examines Jane Austen’s early novels in the context of other writers who influenced her development. We sample large excerpts from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela, before examining Austen’s use of the epistolary form in Lady Susan. Next we read Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to appreciate Austen’s comic use of that novel in Northanger Abbey. Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling shows the culture of sensibility behind Sense and Sensibility, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman outlines ideas about women’s education that Austen explores in Pride and Prejudice. The course ends by jumping forward to Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion, to conclude an ongoing discussion of the influence of Romanticism on her work. (HL, GE3) Brodie

ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Ways to Greatness: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (3). This course gives an in-depth reading of the two greatest American poets of the 19th (or perhaps any) century. How did they achieve greatness, and what constitutes greatness? We place both poets in their historical context, and we also consider the critical context of the century since their deaths. We find many opportunities for close reading, for scholarly research, and for critical discussions. The double goal of the course is to introduce prospective English majors to the kind of work they are expected to do in upper-division courses and to develop their skills as readers and writers. (HL, GE3) Warren

ENGL 307 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 308 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 309 - Advanced Creative Writing: Memoir

ENGL 311 - History of the English Language

ENGL 312 - Chaucer, Dante, Langland: Vision and Life

ENGL 313 - Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

ENGL 317 - Fantasies of Untamed Nature

ENGL 318 - Medieval and Renaissance Drama

ENGL 319 - Shakespeare and Company

ENGL 320 - Shakespearean Genres

ENGL 326 - 17th-Century Poetry

ENGL 330 - Milton

ENGL 333 - Studies in Restoration and Early 18th-Century Literature

ENGL 334 - Studies in Later 18th-Century Literature

ENGL 335 - 18th-Century Novels

ENGL 341 - Romantic Poetry and Prose

ENGL 342 - Modern Epic

ENGL 345 - Studies in the 19th-Century British Novel

ENGL 348 - Victorian Poetry

ENGL 350 - Postcolonial Literature

ENGL 351 - World Fiction in English

ENGL 352 - Modern Irish Literature

ENGL 353 - 20th-Century British Poetry

ENGL 354 - Contemporary British and American Drama

ENGL 355 - Studies in British Fiction Since 1900

ENGL 358 - Literature by Women Before 1800

ENGL 359 - Literature by Women of Color

ENGL 361 - Native American Literatures

ENGL 362 - American Romanticism

ENGL 363 - American Poetry from 1900 to 1950

ENGL 364 - American Poetry from 1950 to the Present

ENGL 365 - African-American Literature

ENGL 367 - 19th-Century American Novel

ENGL 368 - The Modern American Novel

ENGL 369 - The American Novel from World War II to the Present

ENGL 370 - Literary Theory

ENGL 373 - Hitchcock

ENGL 380 - Advanced Seminar

FDR: HL, GE3
Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall, Winter

Topic for Winter, 2010:

ENGL 380: Advanced Seminar: 20th-Century American Immigrant Literatures (3). An introduction to the comparative study of American immigrant literatures. Beginning with literature from the early decades of the 20th century and ending with writing produced in the post-9/11 period, we read novels, memoirs, and poetry by a diverse group of first and second generation immigrant writers, considering their connections to both mainstream American and imported literary traditions as well as historical, legal, and cultural debates about immigration, assimilation, and citizenship. Individual traditions represented include Jewish-American, Latino, and Asian-American literature. (HL, GE3) Darznik

Topic for Fall, 2009:

ENGL 380: Advanced Seminar: Flannery O’Connor (3). An examination of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor employing her stories, novels, letters and lectures, as well as a sample of critical perspectives and the recent best-selling biography by Brad Gooch. We focus on the genre-bending aspect of her fiction, which orchestrates the conventions of 20th-century realism, allegory, lyricism and the gothic, and we try to place her in the overlapping constellation of mid-century Southern fiction and the American short story. Assignments include critical papers, journal/blog, group presentations, and one creative writing exercise. (HL, GE3) Smith

ENGL 385 - Preparatory Reading for Study Abroad

ENGL 386 - Supervised Study in Great Britain

ENGL 387 - Supervised Study in Ireland

ENGL 388 - Exploring the West of Ireland

ENGL 403 - Directed Individual Study

ENGL 413 - Senior Research and Writing

Credits: 3
When Offered: Fall, Winter

Topics in Winter, 2010:

ENGL 413A: Senior Research and Writing: Literature and Human Rights (3).  A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. Contemporary literature is riddled with stories of genocide, war, and the mass migration of peoples across international borders. What can novels, memoirs, and creative non-fiction contribute to our understanding of such human rights crises? What ethical and aesthetic challenges inhere in an author’s choice to speak on behalf of individuals, communities, and nations threatened by civil war, revolution, and foreign occupation? And to what standards of truth and art do we, as readers, hold this writing? In considering these questions, we spend the first half of this course reading contemporary literary dispatches (both fiction and creative non-fiction). Documentaries, visual art, and readings about international human rights policy enrich our classroom discussions. The second half of the course is devoted to individual research and writing projects, and students have the choice to expand their inquiries in a longer research paper. Darznik

ENGL 413B: Senior Research and Writing: Gender, Class and Sexuality in American Literature (3). Prerequisites: A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. This capstone course studies gender, class and sexuality and their multifarious lives in the world of literature, represented here by works of selected authors predominantly writing in the last fifty years. Though this is not a theory course, we discuss key theoretical concepts necessary to the reading and evaluation of the assigned literary texts. We also look into the political, historical, cultural, theoretical, and literary concerns of these writers. As a literature class, we zero in on the styles, themes, modes, writing techniques, and literary devices embedded in the texts, and how these elements relate to and reinforce the identity politics of the texts and authors. Our goal is to see the power of literature to make interventions in critical discourses and to transform the many lives it seeks to represent and inevitably refashion. Possible authors include Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Ursula LeGuin, Carla Trujillo, Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, Junot Diaz, Tony Kushner. Miranda

ENGL 413C: Senior Research and Writing: Ritual, Religion and Drama (3). A collaborative group research and writing project for senior majors, conducted in supervising faculty members’ areas of expertise, with directed independent study culminating in a substantial final project. Is drama inherently ritualistic, even religious? While scholars speculate that ancient Greek drama evolved out of religious rituals, post-Reformation drama (including Shakespeare’s) often actively worked to minimize its religious content to avoid accusations of idolatry. The role of the body, especially the senses, in dramatic performance (and spectatorship) fosters much of the controversy surrounding its ritual elements; divergent attitudes towards those ritual elements continue even into modern and postmodern drama. The course begins with theoretical readings about ritual, performance, and religion. We then turn to examples of dramas from several religious traditions and from a wide chronological range in order to analyze the relationship among ritual, religion, and drama. Readings may include plays by Euripides, Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Eliot, Soyinka, Shanley, and others. Pickett

Topic in Fall, 2009:

ENGL 413A: Senior Research and Writing: Memoir (3). This course has two major parts, one historic and one creative. We begin with readings related to the rise of the autobiographical voice in English literature. We study early autobiographical texts, especially Augustine’s Confessions, and other self-writing of the early modern period, such as heresy trial accounts, spiritual autobiographies, diary entries, and travel narratives. As we read through these texts, we consider what experiences, as well as potential audiences, authorize writers to speak about themselves. Is it religious conversion, mistreatment by peers or authorities, prophetic revelation, observation of another culture, the desire to vindicate oneself before accusers, the need to account for one’s belief, or a privileged viewing of the bizarre or marvelous? We then move to modern autobiography and the personal essay, sampling a range of writers, such as George Orwell, Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, and Frank McCourt. We focus more on writing strategies with these authors - what voice they use, what part of their lives they focus on, how they avoid complaint while still describing their suffering. At the same time, we work on our own autobiographical material, doing free writing based upon a series of exercises (i.e., recalling a first memory; recounting an experience of unjust treatment; recollecting events or feelings related to family photographs, etc.). A short research paper is required along with either a research paper on a chosen autobiographical text, either early or modern, or a creative, autobiographical piece.  Gertz

ENGL 413B: Senior Research and Writing: Lyric Poetry (3). Lyric poetry has been variously described as the “utterance that is overheard” (Mill), the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth), and an “intensely subjective and personal expression” (Hegel). One of our oldest and most productive literary genres, the lyric is nevertheless notoriously difficult to define on account of its long and diverse history in Western literature. This course introduces students to the chief interpretative questions of contemporary lyric studies and surveys the function and construction of English lyric in several major historical periods. Particular attention is paid to the Metaphysical poets (e.g., Donne and Herbert) and the Romantics (chiefly Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads). At midterm, students commence independent research projects on lyric poets of their choosing and thereby direct our investigation of the genre’s changing face in both literary history and criticism.  Jirsa

ENGL 413C: Senior Research and Writing: Poetry and Community (3). How do people use poetry? How does poetry resist being useful? We read a series of poems and critical statements, mostly from the past fifty years, that investigate poetry’s role in education, in medicine, and in healing damaged communities. Students are required to volunteer two hours per week in a poetry-related service placement arranged by the Service Learning Coordinator. Student research projects, commenced at midterm, may spring from our joint readings, the service placements, or related topics in American, British, or Irish poetry. Wheeler
 

ENGL 453 - Internship in Literary Editing with Shenandoah

ENGL 493 - Honors Thesis

ENV 110 - Introduction to Environmental Studies

ENV 111 - Environmental Service Learning

ENV 210 - Biogeography and Sense of Place

ENV 211 - The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Service Learning

ENV 250 - Ethics, Ecology and Economics in Land-Use Practices

ENV 295 - Special Topics in Environmental Studies

Credits: 3
When Offered: Offered when interest is expressed and departmental resources permit.

Topics in Winter, 2010:

ENV 295A: Special Topics: Landowners and Water Quality: Stories of Changing Relationships (3). Prerequisite: ENV 110. This seminar investigates relationships between local landowners and waterways in Rockbridge County in the context of a political mandate to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Students learn about the natural and human history of the area, the development and implementation of the Chesapeake Bay Act, and the current residents’ changing relationships with the land and water in Rockbridge County. Henry-Stone.

ENV 295B: Nature and Place (3). Students may not also register for REL 295. This course explores a variety of ideas about and experiences of nature and place through a consideration of work drawn from diverse disciplines including philosophy, religion, literature, art, and anthropology. What is the nature of place in our societies, and is there a place for nature in our cultures? How have human beings made places for themselves to dwell in or out of nature? What might make a place a sacred place? Kosky.

Topic in Fall, 2009:

ENV 295: The World Is What We Eat (3). Prerequisite: ENV 110 or permission of instructor. This seminar involves probing the aesthetics, ethics, and ecology of eating–the interconnections between how people think about eating, what people consume, how they produce their food, their health and well-being, and the workings and conditions of nature–soils, waters, air, plants, and animals. It focuses on the Chesapeake Bay watershed within its global context. It includes considerations of industrial and organic farming, how globalization has influenced local food supplies, the slow food and fast food movements and “the new agrarianism,” which includes not only techniques of food production and practices of rural living, but a wide constellation of cultural ideas, loyalties, sentiments and hopes. Warren J L

ENV 381 - Global Environmental Governance: Law, Policy, and Economics

ENV 390 - Special Topics: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Issues

ENV 395 - Special Topics in Environmental Ethics

ENV 397 - Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies

ENV 401 - Directed Individual Studies

Credits: 1
When Offered: Fall, Winter, Spring

Topic in Fall, 2009:

ENV 401: Sustainable Development in Rio Solimoes Communities (1). This course entails the writing of a plan for the development of markets for sustainably produced fiber products in ribeirinho communities in Amazonas, Brazil. Kahn

ENV 402 - Directed Individual Studies

ENV 403 - Directed Individual Studies

ENV 493 - Honors Thesis in Environmental Studies

FREN 111 - Elementary French I

FREN 112 - Elementary French II

FREN 161 - Intermediate French I

FREN 162 - Intermediate French II

FREN 172 - Supervised Study Abroad: Intermediate French

FREN 212 - Supervised Study Abroad

FREN 213 - Atelier de conversation

FREN 261 - Conversation et composition: Cours avancé