2018-2019 Academic Catalog 
    
    May 09, 2024  
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2018-2019 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Courses of Instruction

 

Connections
  

  • ENG 259, 260 - Literature & Ecology

    1 course unit
    “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language,” says Raymond Williams in his influential book Keywords.  This course explores the many meanings of “nature” as well as the assumptions, anxieties, and aspirations attached to such terms as “environment,” “ecology,” “conservation,” “resource,” “climate,” and “sustainability.”  This is not a course in environmental literature per se, but rather an exploration of how literature, especially the poetry and fiction of the nineteenth century, engages with and shapes our relations to and within the natural world, and serves as a basis for contemporary ecological thinking.  We further explore how literary study may help us to better meet the environmental crises we currently face.
    Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 259).
  

  • ENG 261 - Literature & The Visual Arts

    1 course unit
    The course will explore the multiple relationships between word and image in a variety of interdisciplinary texts.  We will examine the genres of illustration (poem and novel), composite text, ekphrasis, children’s story, concrete and imagist poetry, the graphic novel, and film.  Historically, the scope of the course is broad, reaching from the classical period to last year.  We’ll move from The Iliad to a comic strip, from a children’s picture book to the revolutionary poetics of Blake’s dynamic art.  The course will trace the increasing sophistication and partnership of the word/image relationship as we move deeper into the digital age.  Texts may include: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794); Jonathan Safron Foer’s erasure novel, Tree of Codes (2010); Robert Frank’s photographic essay, The Americans (1958); Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, Here (2014); Christopher Nolan’s film, Memento (2000); Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1964); and Lynd Ward’s wordless novel, Mad Man’s Drum (1930).
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • ENG 267 - Literature & Sexuality

    1 course unit
    An exploration of the way literature reflects and shapes understandings, attitudes toward, and representations of, sexual identities and practices.
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • ENG 269, 270 - Literature & Mass Media

    1 course unit
    A study of the relationship between ostensibly literary writing and mass entertainment (movies, rock-and-roll, TV) as sometimes competing yet symbiotic constellations of cultural practices that trace their modern institutional form to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the emergence of “Grub Street” and the Romantic idealization of the artist-hero.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 270).
  

  • ENG 279 - Literature as Politics

    1 course unit
    Students in this class will approach narratives, poems, and plays as rhetorical acts and sites of ideological struggle and will address and question widespread arguments that, on the one hand, reduce, literary works to the politics of writers and their times and, on the other hand, claim that as “art,” literary works “transcend” politics.  Writers studied are likely to include Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, W. B. Yeats, W. E. B. DuBois, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, Muriel Rukeyser, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Joan Didion, Mohsin Hamid, etc.
    Meets general academic requirement HU and W.

Ethnic and Regional Literatures
  

  • ENG 229, 232 - African American Drama

    1 course unit
    A study of nineteenth and twentieth century plays addressing the cultural impact of the African Diaspora.  In addition to plays, the syllabus incorporates theoretical and historical writing exploring Africanisms in the work of writers like Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson and the efforts of African American playwrights to remember often unrecorded histories.
    Meets general academic requirement DE and HU (and W when offered as 229).
  

  • ENG 253 - Modern Jewish Writers

    1 course unit
    A study of the narrative, drama, poetry, memoirs and essays produced over the past two centuries by writers who identified with or were identified by their Jewish backgrounds, both secular and religious, and beginning in the nineteenth century, produced work written in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and other European languages.  Foci will include literary enactments of conflicts between heritage and “assimilation”; literary engagement with such ideological developments as Zionism and Socialism; cultural practices associated with Diaspora and cosmopolitanism; the emergence of a distinctive urban Jewish sensibility in the mid-twentieth century; ethnic voicing and ideological conflict; immigrant and immigrant-offspring writers’ contribution to the paradigms subsequently employed in the development of other ethnic literatures.  Writers studied are likely to include Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Emma Lazarus, Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Henry Roth, Joseph Roth, Grace Paley, Ayelet Tsabari, Paul Celan, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Abraham Yehoshua, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Muriel Rukeyser, S.Y. Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Mordecal Richler, Stefan Zweig, Clifford Odets, Mike Gold, Abraham Cahan, Chaim Grade, etc. 
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • ENG 271, 272 - Ethnicity in US Literature

    1 course unit
    A study of the construction and representation of ethnic heritages, affiliations, differences, and commonalities in narratives, poetry, and plays by American writers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, writing in English and adapting and revising established literary practices.
    Meets departmental Transformation approach.
    Meets general academic requirements DE and HU (and W when offered as 272).
  

  • ENG 273 - African American Literature

    1 course unit
    Explores important literary works for what they reveal about the ever-changing status of the Black condition and blackness in the United States and about the unique aesthetic, formal, and ideological innovations developed by African and African descendant writers in the U.S.  Some of the major questions that guide our study include:  What does a work reveal about its historical and social context─e.g., slavery, colonization, reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights, and beyond?  How do power relations and class struggle intersect with aesthetic choice and composition?  How do gender and sexuality shape the production of African American literature?  The course may also consider interactions between African American literary production and the cultural movements of the greater African diaspora, Europe, and the Americas.
    Meets general academic requirement DE and HU.
  

  • ENG 291, 292 - Caribbean Writing

    1 course unit
    Nobel-prize laureate Derek Walcott has called Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad, a “babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, and a writer’s heaven.”  Martinican writer, Edouard Glissant, speaks of the Caribbean itself as “a multiple series of relationships, a sea that exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands.”  This course will explore this range of differences and relationships as they are represented in the work of English, French, and Spanish-language writers from St. Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Antigua, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, and Martinique, concentrating on the work of Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.
    Meets general academic requirements DE and HU (and W when offered as 292).
  

  • ENG 295, 296 - The English Language

    1 course unit
    Today English is the international language of commerce, government, science, and journalism, but do all English users speak and write the same language?  Where and when did English begin?  How has our language changed and why is it still changing?  Hundreds of English dialects exist today; perhaps thousands have come and gone since our language was born in 449 A.D.  Was Standard English just another dialect that happened to be in the right place (London) at the right time (1400)?  To answer these and many other questions, we will examine the phonology, derivational and inflectional morphology, syntax, and semantics of English.  As we understand our language more deeply, we will become more sensitive readers, writers, speakers, and listeners, more aware of the shaping effects of culture on language and of language on cultures.
    Meets the English language requirement for teacher certification in English.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 296.

Medieval and Early Modern Literatures

Note:  All 300-level courses require the prerequisite of a 200-level ENG course.
  

  • ENG 247, 248 - Shakespeare

    1 course unit
    A study of Shakespeare’s work in different genres drawn from the full range of his career as poet and playwright and, occasionally, of one or two plays by his contemporaries.  Plays are treated both as literary texts requiring close reading and as scripts designed for theatrical performance in public playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.  Attention paid throughout to questions of gender and sexuality, authority in family and state, and drama as social expression.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 248).
  

  • ENG 313, 314 - Medieval Literature

    1 course unit
    A broad-based study of the literature of the European Middle Ages.  Readings will include selections from the romances of Chretien de Troyes, the lais of Marie de France, Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a representative sampling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that highlights Chaucer’s transformation of romance conventions in the context of emerging bourgeois and mercantile social values.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 314.
  

  • ENG 315, 316 - The Renaissance Imagination

    1 course unit
    A study of the writing and other popular art forms of Renaissance England with attention to the newly articulated stress on self and the emergence of Tudor England as a world power.  Texts include at least one Shakespeare play and plays by some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, poems and songs from the courts of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, and selections from Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene.  We also give attention to sixteenth-century developments in music and the visual arts.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 316.
  

  • ENG 317, 318 - Lyric Traditions

    1 course unit
    The course starts with forms and kinds of lyric poetry written before 1800 and then invites class members to consider how selected poets of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries rework and reinvent these traditions.  We will learn about various lyric traditions by experimenting with writing as well as reading them.  Students can expect to read poems by John Donne, Shakespeare, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, and poems by Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Hart Crane, Adrienne Rich, and others.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 318.
  

  • ENG 321, 322 - Shakespeare Reproduced

    1 course unit
    A study of the reproduction of Shakespeare’s plays on film and television and of the appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays by modern playwrights, concentrating on the most adventurous recent work in these genres.  Particular emphasis throughout on strategies of adaptation, substitution, and transformation.
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Prerequisite(s): THR 100 Theatre & Society: An Historical Introduction  or any 200 level ENG course or permission of instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 322.
  

  • ENG 323, 324 - Renaissance Plays in Process

    1 course unit
    This course will involve students in intensive semester-long research projects focused on the social, political, literary, and cultural conditions that informed the composition, structure, and production of one or two plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.  It will require students to perform hands-on research on subjects such as the status of women in Elizabethan England; established and evolving views on marriage; legal statutes and judicial practices; crime and punishment; the licensing and censorship of plays; attitudes toward homosexual practices; social mobility; and the legal and social standing of citizens, apprentices, foreigners, and masterless men.  The focus will be on plays that are topically or historically oriented, either drawn from the annals of English history, from the news of the day, or from pronounced social anxieties of the time, such as the fear of witches.  Students will be required to develop a broad range of interpretive skills and encouraged to bring their enriched understanding of the plays into the present in the form of research papers, study guides, production histories, black-box performances, set-designs, and video projects.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Prerequisite(s): THR 100 Theatre & Society: An Historical Introduction  or any 200-level ENG course or permission of instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 324.
  

  • ENG 325, 326 - Milton & the Age of Revolution

    1 course unit
    A study of Milton’s major works, especially Paradise Lost, and his impact on later poets, most notably the visionary and revolutionary strain in English Romanticism.  Other readings will focus on contexts for understanding this impact, such as the Bible, epic traditions, civil war, and sectarian strife in seventeenth century England, colonialism, gender, and psychology.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 326.
  

  • ENG 328 - Staging the Restoration

    1 course unit
    This course examines stagings of Restoration England.  The first half of the course investigates Restoration Comedy in historical and theatrical context.  Likely themes include the relationship between theatre and politics, the intersection of nationality and sexuality, and the shift from aristocratic to bourgeois cultural forms.  The second half of the course examines recent theatrical and cinematic representations of the Restoration era.  We will look at contemporary productions of Restoration plays, new plays set in the Restoration era, and feature films.  The Restoration emerges as a period of sex, fashion, class struggle, and nascent imperialism.  What is at stake in these representations for our own historical moment?  Why stage the past to address the present?
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Prerequisite(s): THR 100 Theatre & Society: An Historical Introduction  or any 200 level ENG course or permission of instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement W.

Nineteenth Century

Note:  All 300-level courses require the prerequisite of a 200-level ENG course.
  

  • ENG 277, 278 - Transcendentalism, Abolition, & Emancipation in American Literature

    1 course unit
     A study of the first flourishing of American literature in the generation  preceding the Civil War, focusing on such influential figures as Emerson,  Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 278).
  

  • ENG 329, 330 - Nineteenth Century British Fiction: The Marriage Plot

    1 course unit
    This course will examine how novels in Britain represent and are constructed around the so-called marriage plot: the progression from courtship, through obstacles, to arrive at the altar- or not!  This plot has always been popular for providing a scaffold for novels - witness the proliferation of shoddy romance novels on the shelves of supermarkets today.  In this course, we will concentrate on how the marriage plot is figured during the nineteenth century in Britain, commonly thought of as the great age of the novel.  We will be assuming that marriage is an institution that not only legitimizes and controls heterosexual desire but also guarantees the smooth transference of property and wealth from one generation to the next, the very cornerstone of patriarchal continuity.  Texts may include Austen, Pride & Prejudice; Bronte, Villette; Dickens, Great Expectations; Eliot, Mill on the Floss; Hardy, Jude the Obscure; and a range of secondary readings by Mary Poovey, Nancy Armstrong, David Lodge, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and others.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 330.
  

  • ENG 331, 333 - English Romanticism

    1 course unit
    Explores the English Romantic movement as it develops in the work of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Felicia Hemans, and the Shelleys.  Among other works, readings will include Visions of the Daughters of Albion, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Frankenstein, and a more contemporary novel influenced by the Romantic writers.  The course may also include dramatic readings and performances by guest artists.  Attention will be paid to the relationship between the visual and verbal arts in poets like Blake and Keats.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 333.
  

  • ENG 338, 339 - City, Frontier, & Empire in American Literature

    1 course unit
    The course will focus on U.S. literature produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the post-civil war era to the years shortly after World War I and the enactment of the eighteenth and nineteenth amendments to the Constitution.  Texts studied will include work by such writers as William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca Harding Davis, Abraham Cahan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and others.  Contexts considered will include changes in American identity, and U.S. literary practices in response to immigration, urbanization, the “closing of the frontier,” the triumph of Jim Crow, and U.S. imperial expansion.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 339.
  

  • ENG 378, 379 - The Death of the Sun

    1 course unit
    The Victorian social and cultural imagination was charged by the advent of two new sciences: energy physics and evolutionary biology.  Together, these formed the basis of modern ecology, but among Victorians, they fueled and were shaped by the hopes and fears of a nation coping with change.  Fears regarding the death of the sun competed with deeply held beliefs about conservation as well as with the hope for unlimited progress.  This course explores the ways Victorian literature wrestled with and helped shape the way we understand ourselves and the natural world, evolving modern conceptions of energy, conservation, and entropy, from the roots of the term “energy” in Romantic poetry and in social thought to the late century fixation on inevitable decay.  Authors read include Tennyson, Wells, Dickens, Hopkins, Gaskell, Stoker, and others.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 379.
  

  • ENG 391, 392 - Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s

    1 course unit
    England in the 1890s was a place of great anxiety about a number of explosive issues.  The power of the old imperial regime - and the stability of the Victorian ethos - were increasingly threatened by colonial insurrections; advancements in science, technology, and psychology; the collapse of a puritanical sexual order and the emergence of new sexualities; the political and social empowerment of women; various social and economic uncertainties; and the radically new aesthetic politics of the “art for art’s sake” movement.  The course will focus on cultural texts such as Max Nordau’s Degeneration and various tracts about the “New Woman,” popular novels like Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, as well as more canonical literature like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds; and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 392.
  

  • ENG 393, 394 - Literary Remix

    1 course unit
    It is perhaps ironic that so many of our contemporary ideas about “intellectual property” were developed by “landscape” poets like Wordsworth, who argued that the descendants of a poet should be able to live off his “intellectual property” just as the heirs to a landed gentleman could derive a living from his “estate.” Today, issues of copyright and intellectual property are in radical flux as IP regimes tighten even as “the remix”- the adaptation, transformation, or other use of culture is used to make new culture-becomes perhaps the defining art form of the twenty-first century. While most discussion of remix culture tends to focus on mass media-music mashups, video remix, YouTube and Napster, etc-remix culture, like intellectual property, has its roots in the literary. This course will examine the nineteenth-century emergence of intellectual property regimes in the arts and consider the ways in which the historical transformation and adaptation of stories is in conflict with increasingly rigid IP regimes. Texts will change radically from term to term, but might include such adaptations as West Side Story, Wicked, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Ahab’s Wife, March, The Wind Done Gone, Shylock, Lo’s Diary, Moulin Rouge, and other adapted works.
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 394.
  

  • ENG 397, 398 - Gender, Sensation, & the Novel

    1 course unit
    The 1860s saw the widespread circulation of the “sensation novel” ─ a widely popular and somewhat scandalous genre whose common themes included kidnapping, theft, adultery, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction, and murder.  These novels were “sensational” both in their extreme popularity and their appeal to the senses ─ their habit, as one Victorian reviewer put it, of “preaching to the nerves.”  As these novels fictionalized the seamy underside of Victorian life, they often engaged with some of the most disturbing social issues of the day.  The first part of our course will investigate five such novels in their Victorian context:  Oliver Twist, The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret, East Lynne, and The Moonstone.  The second will consider the remaking of sensation fiction in the film and fiction of the 1940s and from the 1990s onward.
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 398.

Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

Note:  All 300-level courses require the prerequisite of a 200-level ENG course.
  

  • ENG 263, 264 - Postwar British Theatre & Film

    1 course unit
    This course explores what has been called the “second renaissance” of British drama - “the new drama” of 1956 and after - and the parallel British New Wave of cinema.  We will begin by examining the cultural and social influences leading up to the “annus mirabilis” of 1956.  We will then trace the emergence of John Osborne and other “Angry Young Men” and the development of a drama overtly engaged with issues of class, gender, and sexuality.  We will then look at the ways these plays helped to revitalize the British cinema of the postwar era, creating a cinematic scene in which the free cinema and “kitchen sink” films of the 1950s gave way to the bold, taboo-breaking movies of the 1960s.  Playwrights may include John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Edward Bond, and Shelagh Delaney.  Films are likely to include Billy Liar, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Alfie, Tom Jones, The Servant, The Knack and How To Get It, and A Hard Day’s Night.
    Meets department Text/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 264).
  

  • ENG 293 - Living Writers

    1 course unit
    This team-taught course focuses on the work of six well-known writers (of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry) who visit Muhlenberg to discuss their work, meet with students, and give a public reading.  The class meets as one group on a weekly basis, either for a lecture or for a presentation by one of the visiting writers, and again in sections for discussions of each writer’s work.  Writers who have participated in this course include Peter Carey, Jonathan Franzen, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Andrea Barrett, Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Forche, Paul Muldoon, David Bradley, Alice Fulton, and Jay Wright.
    Offered every three years.
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • ENG 340, 341 - European Novel in Translation

    1 course unit
    A study in the development of the modern European novel that ranges from the groundbreaking work of such nineteenth-century writers as Balzac and Flaubert, to the later formal experiments of twentieth century authors like Kafka, Duras, and Kundera.  Texts in question are assembled around the unifying focus of “parables of authority and desire.”
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 341.
  

  • ENG 343, 344 - Irish Literature

    1 course unit
    An exploration of representative works in Irish literature by Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and Anglo-Irish, and canonical and non-canonical writers.  Selection of texts will vary from semester to semester, sometimes sampling works, sometimes concentrating in a single genre.  Topics will include the impact of British colonialism, nationalism and its appropriation of Irish myth, representations of gender, and colliding definitions of “Irishness.”
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 344.
  

  • ENG 345, 346 - Contemporary Irish Drama

    1 course unit
    This course focuses on contemporary Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh in the context of the history of Irish drama as a vital national cultural tradition.  From the Celtic Revivalists’ plays at the founding of the Abbey Theatre, drama in Ireland has exerted shaping influence on the state as it has also provided a sensitive respondent to tumultuous events in Irish history.  More than many cultures, the Irish are haunted by the past, and so we will be viewing the contemporary works as conversations that Irish writers today are staging with their own historical and more specifically their own theatrical ghosts (Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett at the least).
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Prerequisite(s): THR 100 Theatre & Society: An Historical Introduction  or any 200 level ENG course or permission of instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 346.
  

  • ENG 347, 348 - Modern British Fiction

    1 course unit
    A study of British modernist fiction and formal experimentation from 1900 to 1950: stream of consciousness, open form, mythic plot patterns, poetic prose, alienation, and self-conscious and fragmented narration.  Texts may include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India; and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 348.
  

  • ENG 349, 350 - Modern American Fiction

    1 course unit
    A study of representative fiction published in the United States between the World Wars, including works by Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Attaway.  Contextual questions will focus on legends of “the Lost Generation,” the Depression-era radicalization of cultural production, the impact of immigration and Nativism, and relations between European and American modernisms in various arts.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 350.
  

  • ENG 352, 353 - Modern Poetry I: 1889-1945

    1 course unit
    The Modernist turn in poetry parallels that in the other arts ─ the change from Yeats’ Wind in the Reeds to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Pisan Cantos is a sea-change in the forms, rhythms, and narrative techniques in poetry.  But what is “modernism” ─ is it truly new, or is it a shift within the larger movement called Romanticism to a ‘harder” rhetoric?  What is “the occult” in poetry?  The emergence of women’s poetry?  Poets may include Yeats, Pound, Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and others publishing poetry in English between 1889-1945.
    Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 353.
  

  • ENG 354, 355 - Modern Poetry II: 1945-2000

    1 course unit
    This course will look closely at some poets who began to publish in the 1950’s and came of age later - after the passing of the generation of heroic modernists, Pound, Williams, Moore, Stevens, HD, Eliot - in the 1960’s and 70’s.  Most of the class work will consist of intense discussion and close reading of poems and will tackle such themes as the function of poetry in the contemporary world, public and private language, formalism and “free” verse, poetic voice and its relation to the self, issues of gender, and sexual politics.  Poetry will be considered as a special kind of thinking.  Poets read might include Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Jay Wright, Philip Levine, and Carolyn Forche.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 355.
  

  • ENG 365, 366 - Contemporary Poetry

    1 course unit
    The American poets and poetry of now - its roots, its various directions, transformations of previous work, and its diverse nature from the last decades of the twentieth century to the present.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 366.
  

  • ENG 373, 374 - The Literary Marketplace

    1 course unit
    This course examines literary texts as a form of mass media and considers their circulation in the marketplace.  We will trace how and why fiction was commodified in the nineteenth century and book publishing exploded in profitability and prestige in the twentieth.  Lastly, we will look at the exciting (and terrifying) developments of the twenty-first century, which are continuing to unfold every day.  Will the book as we know it survive?
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 374.
  

  • ENG 375 - Postcolonial Literature

    1 course unit
    A study of English language literatures in former British colonies - in Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and the Indian subcontinent and its Diaspora - and of literature in translation from former French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, focusing on the work of such writers as Assia Djebar, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Ben Okri, and Wole Soyinka, among others.  The course is variously taught as a survey of these literatures or as a more concentrated study of the literature of one or two nations or regions.  Alternate years.
    Meets departmental Transformations approach.
    Meets general academic requirement DE.
  

  • ENG 395, 396 - Literature & Film of the Cold War

    1 course unit
    The course focuses on how fiction, poetry, plays, and movies produced in the second half of the twentieth century responded to - sometimes promoting, sometimes resisting - the global ideological, diplomatic (and occasionally military) conflict that came to be known as “the Cold War.”  Writers likely to be studied include Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, John Le Carré, Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Don Delillo, E. L. Doctorow, and James Baldwin, along with movies such as On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause, North by Northwest, and Dr. Strangelove.
    Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 396.

Tutorials and Seminars

Admission to these courses requires prior arrangement, instructor permission, or advanced class standing.
  

  • ENG 297, 298 - Writing Theory

    1 course unit
    A required course open only to students who have been selected to serve as Writing Center tutors and Writing Assistants.  The course will focus (1) on writing, reading, and evaluating analytic and literary essays and (2) on theoretical essays in the field and how these theories translate into classroom and one-on-one tutorial practice.  In addition, students will spend an hour a week in the Writing Center, first observing tutorial sessions, then co-tutoring, and finally tutoring students one-on-one.
    Prerequisite(s): Instructor permission.
    Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 298.
  

  • ENG 400-449 - CUE: Seminar in English

    1 course unit
    English Department seminars are offered once or twice a semester by different members of the department on a rotating basis.  They are required of all senior English majors and may also be taken by juniors with instructor permission.
    Meets general academic requirement W.
  

  • ENG 970 - English Independent Study/Research

    Each independent study/research course is to be designed in consultation with a faculty sponsor.

Introductory Writing Courses
  

  • ENG 205 - Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Writing

    1 course unit
    The course will focus on creative nonfiction writing.  Students will spend an equal amount of time writing and reading essays and longer works of nonfiction.  Class discussion will focus on craft and rhetorical issues, such as narrative voice, story, exposition, scene, imagery, and dialogue.
    Meets general academic requirement AR.
  

  • ENG 207 - Introduction to Playwriting

    1 course unit
    Students will learn the rudiments of dramatic writing through lecture, readings, and weekly assignments dealing with structure, characterizations, dialogue, and other areas of the playwright’s art.  Students’ works will be shared and critiqued by the class, operating as a playwrights group.  Each student will complete at least a ten-minute play and a 30-minute one-act play during the semester.
    Meets general academic requirement AR.
  

  • ENG 219 - Solitary Voice: Theatre/Creative Writing-Ireland

    1 course unit
    This team-taught MILA course focuses on creative writing (creative nonfiction and dramatic) and Irish literature, culture and history. The class meets during the spring semester and culminates in an 18-day intensive experience in the west of Ireland. During the spring semester, we will spend our time reading and discussing Irish plays, fiction, poetry and nonfiction, in order to develop an understanding of the cultural identity that informs a contemporary sense of Irishness. We will also work to build an ensemble, learn the basics of creative writing, and develop the needed analytic skills demanded of revision in the arts. The course will weave together the arts of performance and writing by focusing on the first person point-of-view in fiction, poetry and nonfiction writing and stage drama. In Ireland, we will turn our attention to the development of original work. The course will culminate in a public performance of original writing in the Aran Islands. During our stay in western Ireland, we will, in addition, attend performances, readings, literary events, films, and engage with other embodied cultural practices. We will also engage with the landscape and unique histories of the country through a number of excursions. No previous experience in creative writing or theater required.
    Meets general academic requirements AR and DE.
  

  • ENG 221 - Introduction to Poetry Writing

    1 course unit
    In this introductory course students will learn to create, shape, and hone their own poetry, and in the process learn to savor the pleasure of poetry and interrogate how and why it affects us.  The focus will be on the process of writing, including finding inspiration, experimentation with form and content, drafting, active de-familiarization, imaginative play, and the re-envisioning of one’s ideas.  By studying the modus operandi of great writers, students will discover multiple ways of poetically expressing themselves.  There will be weekly reading and writing assignments that focus on various aspects of poetic craft, such as imagery, figurative language, lineation, and rhythm.  One goal of the course is to teach students to foster a writing practice: keeping a writer’s journal, engaging seriously with contemporary poetry, giving and receiving articulate peer feedback, and talking “shop” (i.e., about stylistic, technical, and philosophical considerations).  This course will build up to and culminate in a final portfolio.
    Meet general academic requirement AR.
  

  • ENG 226 - Introduction to Screenwriting

    1 course unit
    Examination of screenwriting fundamentals: story structure (theme and plot), character, dialogue, scene description and development, and script formats.  Students will prepare character profiles, treatments, and at least one screenplay.
    Meets general academic requirement AR.
  

  • ENG 227 - Introduction to Fiction Writing

    1 course unit
    In this course students will be introduced to the art of writing short fiction.  The focus will be on the process of writing, and students will be encouraged to explore new terrain, to experiment with narrative form, and play with words, sentences and paragraphs.  By studying great writers, students will create a ‘tool box’ of techniques which they will use in their own work.  There will be weekly reading and writing assignments that focus on various aspects of craft, such as character and scene development, imagery, psychic distance, point-of-view, and dialogue.  The goal of the course is to create a writer’s community - where students are actively engaged in the writer’s project: writing fiction, sharing their work with their peers, receiving helpful peer feedback, always talking about issues of craft and aesthetics.  The course will culminate in a final portfolio.
    Meets general academic requirement AR.

Advanced Writing Courses
  

  • ENG 301 - Writing Children’s Literature

    1 course unit
    In this workshop course, we will focus on writing for children. While we will emphasize fiction, we will also write creative nonfiction, poetry and dramatic pieces. We will pay special attention to issues of character, story structure and language. An equal amount of class time will be spent on student writing and published works. Readings will include recent Newberry and Caldecott Medal Award winners, along with classics by writers such as C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), E.B. White (Charlotte’s Web), Antione De Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince), Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, Matilda), Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), Ezra Jack Keats (The Snowy Day), Katherine Peterson (Bridge to Terabithia), Pam Munoz Ryan (Esperanza Rising), Jacqueline Woodson (Locomotion), John Steptoe (Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale), Virginia Hamilton (The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales), Mildred D. Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry), among others.
    Prerequisite(s): Any 200-level creative writing course.
  
  
  

  • ENG 307 - Advanced Playwriting Workshop

    1 course unit
    An intensive course in the craft of playwriting in which writers comment on each other’s work, focusing on the elements and structure of a play (character, action, spectacle, diction, “music”, thought), dramatic forms and conventions (monologue, farce, melodrama, comedy, tragedy), selected published plays, and attending theatrical performances, all culminating in staged readings of selected student work and submission of a portfolio.
    Prerequisite(s): ENG 207 - Introduction to Playwriting  or THR 250 Acting I: Process .
  

  • ENG 309 - Advanced Poetry Workshop

    1 course unit
    An intensive course in the craft of poetry.  Poets will comment on each other’s work in a workshop setting.  The problem of poetic form and its relation to the tradition and the issue of the self and self expression will be explored in terms of linguistic theory, poetic tradition, and poetics.  The course will culminate in a portfolio submission.
    Prerequisite(s): ENG 221 - Introduction to Poetry Writing   or ENG 245, 246 Poetry & the Imaginative Process  
    Meets general academic requirement AR.
  

  • ENG 364 - Advanced Screenwriting Workshop

    1 course unit
    Students will conceptualize, outline, and write a feature-length screenplay, focusing on story structure, character development, conflict, dialogue, and resolution.  Writers will comment on each other’s work in a workshop setting.  Students should start conceptualizing their ideas well in advance of the start of the semester.
    Prerequisite(s): ENG 226 - Introduction to Screenwriting  or permission of instructor.
  

  • ENG 370 - Living Writers Workshop

    1 course unit
    An advanced workshop in writing.  Students will read the work of, participate in Q & A sessions with, and attend readings by the writers in our Living Writers Reading series.  In class, student writers will comment on each other’s work in a workshop setting and commit to the process of drafting, active de-familiarization, imaginative play, development, and serious revision.  The course will culminate in the submission of a portfolio.
    Prerequisite(s): ENG 293 - Living Writers  or any 200-level creative writing class.
  

  • ENG 960 - Internship in Writing

    Each internship is to be designed in consultation with a faculty sponsor and an on-site supervisor, and will include an academic project to be defined by and submitted to the faculty sponsor for evaluation.  Will be graded pass/fail.
  

  • ENG 975 - Writing in the Prisons

    .5 course unit
    Students in this course will help facilitate a creative writing class in a minimum security unit at Lehigh Valley County Corrections Center or Northampton County Prison, both in Bethlehem.  In addition to facilitating weekly workshop sessions, students meet periodically with the professor to discuss assigned readings and discuss drafts of a required writing project.  At the end of the semester, students will also be required to edit an anthology of the prisoner’s work and help organize a public reading for the inmates at Muhlenberg College.  Signature of professor required.  

Environmental Science
  

  • ESC 111 - Topics in Environmental Science

    1 course unit
    Environmental science is an interdisciplinary subject area that draws on biology, chemistry, geology, and ecology to study the earth’s natural systems.  Students learn how science is conducted and study the earth’s natural environments, interactions of organisms with each other as well as their physical surroundings, and the sources and effects of environmental stress. Three hours of lecture/discussion each week.
    This course is open to non-science majors only.
    Prerequisite(s): Science majors wishing to enroll require permission of the instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement SC.
  

  • ESC 113 - Environmental Science I

    1 course unit
    An introductory environmental science course that investigates the functioning of earth’s natural systems.  Topics include the cycling and flow of water, energy, and nutrients; biodiversity; the basic principles of ecology; and the interrelationships between organisms and their environments.  The causes and effects of, as well as possible solutions to, several environmental problems are also covered.  Human population growth, agriculture, and energy utilization are discussed in detail.  Laboratory exercises and field trips teach basic techniques for collecting and analyzing ecological and environmental data and reinforce topics discussed in the lecture. Three hours lecture/discussion. Three hour laboratory meets every other week.
    Meets general academic requirement SC.
  

  • ESC 114 - Environmental Science II

    1 course unit
    This is a continuation of ESC 113 .  Students study a number of human activities that can alter natural ecosystems and adversely affect human health.  Topics include waste management, resource exploitation, and the behavior of pollutants in soil, air, and water.  The science of controversial political issues, such as global climate change, ozone depletion, and acid rain are explored and debated.  In addition, the basic principles of human and environmental toxicology, risk assessment, and environmental impact analysis are covered.  Laboratory exercises and field trips reinforce topics discussed in the lecture. Three hours of lecture and three hours of laboratory per week.
    Prerequisite(s): ESC 113 - Environmental Science I .
    Meets general academic requirement SC.
  

  • ESC 201 - Environmental Geology

    1 course unit
    Organisms are inextricably bound to their physical environments.  An understanding of the interactions between the earth’s geology and biology is therefore fundamental to a study of environmental science.  This course examines earth’s physical environments as they relate to environmental science.  Topics will include the basic principles of geology, natural hazards such as volcanoes, earthquakes, mass wasting, flooding, and the global hydrologic cycle.  Global water resources will be examined with an emphasis placed on groundwater supply, movement, and pollution. Three hours of lecture/discussion and three hours of laboratory per week.
    Offered alternate years.
    Meets general academic requirements SC and W.
  

  • ESC 301 - Environmental Microbiology

    1 course unit
    This course is a study of the functions and activities of microorganisms in natural and artificial environments.  Microbial diversity and ecology will be discussed as a basis for understanding the interactions among microbial species in soil, air, and water.  The effects of environmental stressors on the growth and distribution of microorganisms, interactions among microorganisms and multicellular organisms (e.g., plants and animals), and applications of microbiology to industrial, agricultural, environmental, and medical practices will also be described.
    Prerequisite(s): BIO 151 Principles of Biology II: Cells & Organisms  and CHM 104 General Chemistry II  
  

  • ESC 310 - CUE: Environmental Chemistry

    1 course unit
    The behavior of chemical pollutants in earth’s natural systems is critical to a study of environmental science.  This course will examine the chemistry of soil, air, and water; the interactions and cycles of elements among them; and the pollutants that can adversely affect these important resources.  Topics will include an overview of the physical chemistry of soil’s reactions and fates of pollutants in soil, reactions and movement of pollutants in water, wastewater treatment, and chemical reactions in the atmosphere, including the mechanisms of smog production, ozone depletion, and global warming.  The chemistry of power generation involving fossil fuels, radioactive isotopes, solar energy, fuel cells, and other resources will also be considered. Three hours of lecture/discussion per week.
    Offered alternate years.
    Prerequisite(s): CHM 104 - General Chemistry II  or permission of the instructor.
  

  • ESC 312 - CUE: Toxicology

    1 course unit
    Toxicology is in broad terms the science of poisons.  This course will provide an overview of the many branches of toxicology and examine the effects of poisons or toxins on individual organisms and ecosystems.  Of specific interest will be the uptake (ingestion), metabolism, storage, and excretion of toxins and the adverse effects experienced by organisms exposed to toxic substances.  The mechanisms by which substances induce cancer, birth defects, and nervous and immune system damage will be studied.  Additionally, fundamental principles of toxicology, such as dose-response and selective toxicity, will be described.  The sources, chemical properties, environmental fates, and regulation of toxins will be addressed. Three hours of lecture/discussion per week.
    Offered alternate years.
    Prerequisite(s): CHM 201 Organic Chemistry I  or CHM 203, 205 Organic Chemistry IA  or any 200 level course in Biology or permission of the instructor.
  

  • ESC 960 - Environmental Science Internship

    1 course unit
  

  • ESC 970 - Environmental Science Independent Study/Research

    Each independent study/research course is to be designed in consultation with a faculty sponsor.  
     

Finance
  

  • FIN 105 - Family Finance I

    0.5 course unit
    This course will explore several broad areas of family finance: taxes, banking, money management, credit, personal loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, and insurance.  Specific topics will include the Federal income tax return, checking accounts, electronic banking, money market funds, CDs, debit and credit cards, car leases, fixed rate vs. adjustable rate mortgages, refinancing, auto and homeowner’s insurance, HMOs and PPOs, disability insurance, term vs. whole life insurance, and reading the financial press.  Students will develop a subject mastery through assigned readings, class discussion, and completion of assigned exercises.
  

  • FIN 106 - Family Finance II

    0.5 course unit
    This course will explore several broad areas of family finance: saving and investment, retirement planning, and estate planning.  Specific topics will include risk preferences and tolerances, risk-return tradeoffs, the stock market, bonds and their features, diversification, mutual funds, open-end and closed-end funds, load vs. no-load funds, index funds, asset allocation, pension plans and vesting, the defined benefit plan, the defined contribution plan, the 401(k), traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, wills, trusts, and gifts.  Students will develop subject mastery through assigned readings, class discussion, completion of assigned exercises, and participation in workshop-style presentations.
    Prerequisite(s): FIN 105 Family Finance I  or permission of the instructor.
  

  • FIN 144 - Introduction to Portfolio Management (The Investment Society)

    0.5 course unit
    The course offers students the opportunity to participate in the active management of a portfolio of assets which was originally funded by a loan from the College.  Students will study current financial markets, lead discussions, arrange for speakers, and monitor and analyze current portfolio holdings.  The primary goals are to learn how to manage a portfolio and to promote an understanding of financial assets and markets.
  

  • FIN 237 - Corporation Finance

    1 course unit
    This course develops the major propositions of modern financial theory and the guidance that they provide to the corporate financial manager.  The focus is primarily on two major decision making areas: the investment decision and the financing decision.  The exposition of these two areas requires that the following topics be covered: time value of money, valuation, portfolio theory, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, capital budgeting, and the cost of capital.  The use of EXCEL is emphasized.
    Prerequisite(s): ECN 101 - Principles of Macroeconomics  and ECN 102 - Principles of Microeconomics , or INE 201 Business Plan Development ; and MTH 119 - Statistical Analysis . 
  

  • FIN 241 - Current Topics in Financial Markets: Investment Strategies

    1 course unit
    This seminar course will explore the role of financial intermediaries, e.g. the Federal Reserve, institutional investors, hedge funds, private equity partners, and investment banks in domestic and foreign markets.  Based on anticipated actions of these intermediaries, various investment strategies will be formulated.
    Prerequisite(s): ECN 101 - Principles of Macroeconomics  and ECN 102 - Principles of Microeconomics  and Junior or Senior standing.
  

  • FIN 311 - Mathematics for Financial Analysis

    1 course unit
    The study and application of the mathematical tools needed for making financial decisions.  Present value and future value are reviewed in preparation for more advanced topics, including mortgages, bond valuation, yields, duration, and convexity.  Bond immunization strategies are covered.  Other topics include foreign currency futures, the optimal hedge ratio, gap analysis, interest rate swaps, pension funding, and advanced issues in capital budgeting.  Teamwork is emphasized through a team research project and team presentations.  The use of Excel is integrated throughout the course.
    Prerequisite(s): ECN 101 - Principles of Macroeconomics  and ECN 102 - Principles of Microeconomics  and MTH 119 - Statistical Analysis  and MTH 121 - Calculus I .
  
  
  

  • FIN 365 - Mergers & Acquisitions

    1 course unit
    A seminar course covering selected financial topics, focusing on acquisition, mergers, and business combinations facing senior business managers.  The course will review and build upon materials presented in prior courses.  Numerous readings, class discussion, presentations, and case analyses will be required.
    Prerequisite(s): FIN 237 - Corporation Finance .
  

  • FIN 367 - Derivative Markets

    1 course unit
    This course will explore the economic rationale for and benefits of the derivative markets.  Coverage will include stock options, commodity, financial and foreign exchange futures, as well as the investment strategies that make use of these instruments.  The roles of hedgers, speculators, and arbitragers will be examined, along with risk management, portfolio insurance, program trading, the regulatory setting, and other related topics.  Special emphasis will be given to issues of interest to the corporate financial manager.
    Prerequisite(s): FIN 237 - Corporation Finance .
  

  • FIN 490 - CUE: Advanced Topics in Financial Management

    1 course unit
    The practical aspects of financial management are stressed.  The course is a blend of applications, case studies, and theory.  Topics include the bond refunding question, capital budgeting under conditions of uncertainty, the theory of capital structure, dividend policy, leasing, mergers and corporate restructuring, bankruptcy, pension funding, and international financial management.
    Prerequisite(s): FIN 237 - Corporation Finance .
  

  • FIN 960 - Finance Internship

    1 course unit
    Under faculty supervision, students will be placed in internship positions with local business and other related organizations in order to gain experience in the application of the theories and concepts learned in the classroom.  Students will be required to document their experiences in a written journal, to share their experiences with others in a classroom setting, and to prepare a significant term paper or project report.
    Open to juniors and seniors only. Pass/fail only.
  

  • FIN 970 - Finance Independent Study/Research

    Each independent study/research course is to be designed in consultation with a faculty sponsor.   

Film Studies
  

  • FLM 201 - Film History I: 1895-1950

    1 course unit
    An exploration of the international history of film from its invention through the silent era, the rise of Hollywood, and the development of sound to 1950.  The course focuses on major directors, technological developments, and the surrounding social, cultural, and commercial contexts from which film emerged.  Screenings will include works from Hollywood, international cinema, documentary, and the avant-garde.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • FLM 202, 204 - Film History II: 1950-Present

    1 course unit
    An exploration of the international history of film from the end of the War through important European developments (for example, the French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism, and New German Cinema) and dramatic changes in production and viewing in the United States (through the Sixties and Seventies), as well as the recent emergence of strong national and regional cinemas in countries all over the world.  The course focuses on major directors, technological developments, and the surrounding social, cultural, and commercial contexts within which film continues to flourish.  Screenings will include works from Hollywood, international cinema, and the avant-garde.  In addition to the historical survey, the course provides further training in film and textual analysis with an emphasis on writing and an introduction to film theory.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Prerequisite(s): FLM 201 - Film History I: 1895-1950  or permission of the instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement HU (and W when offered as 202).
  

  • FLM 225 - The Western Film

    1 course unit
    This course will examine the Western as the American film genre par excellence.  Numerous theoretical approaches will be used to study the rise and fall of the Western’s popularity, its role in shaping popular myths about the United States, and its representation of masculine identity.  By going chronologically from early classical to more contemporary films, students will learn how ideology and socio-historical conditions lead to the making of certain films at certain times.  In addition to looking at the classical Western, the course will analyze how the so-called spaghetti Western and political events such as the Vietnam War have transformed the genre.  Students will learn how to read and discuss films by analyzing the various cinematic codes (lighting, editing, camera angles, sets, music, the three gazes, etc.), the significance of the star system, and theories of spectatorship and scopophilia.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • FLM 227 - Melodrama

    1 course unit
    Melodrama is a form of popular storytelling that puts its characters in dramatic situations in which the stakes are nothing less than the victory of good over evil.  This course will focus on the prominence of melodrama in narrative film, particularly popular American film, to reveal the flexibility of what some scholars argue is more than a genre but is actually one of the dominant modes of filmmaking from its inception.  The course focuses on films that are often classified as “women’s films” and “social problem films” but also includes films that could be classified as action films or “men’s melodramas” -  and so there will be a lot of discussion about issues of gender and race.  We will also consider how these topics are illustrated through melodrama’s aesthetics, such as music, dramatic editing, and symbolic use of setting.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • FLM 229 - Travel & Cultural Encounters in Film

    1 course unit
    This course looks at narrative and experimental films that thematize the act of travel as a trigger for cultural encounters, which often result in conflicts, power differentials, and individual senses of displacement or disorientation.  The cultural encounters depicted include those in colonial Africa, India, and the Americas, as well as post-colonial encounters in new relationship configurations such as migration and tourism.  The course also considers as a sub-theme the “road movie” in American culture and what it says about the relationship of dominant American culture to the land and the indigenous inhabitants.  As a theoretical lens, students will consider the cinematic medium as a vehicle for virtual travel and read accounts of film spectatorship that consider particular travel experiences.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement DE.
  

  • FLM 250 - Contemporary World Cinema

    1 course unit
    This course offers a selective survey of some of the most cutting-edge films produced around the world in the last 10-20 years, including those that offer sustained insight into specific national cultures and those that are more global in orientation and address the worldwide mixing and mingling of people and cultures.  Films explored in this course will likely include Bad Education (Spain), Amores Perros (Mexico), Code Unknown (Austria/France), Chunkging Express (Hong Kong/China), The World (China), A Separation (Iran), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Turkey), The Best of Youth (Italy), Waltz with Bashir (Israel), The Class (France), and District 9 (South Africa), among others.  Special attention will be paid throughout to contemporary developments in film style, evolving cultures of film taste and reception, and film art as cultural expression.  Open to all students at all levels.
    Attendance at weekly film screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement DE and HU.
  

  • FLM 325 - French New Wave Cinema

    1 course unit
    This course explores the very rich period in French Cinema during the 1950s and 1960s that is known as the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague).  Spearheaded by a group of young directors who also wrote their own screenplays (Truffaut, Godard, Malle, Chabrol, Resnais, among others), this movement gave rise to “Le cinema d’auteur” as an innovative and influential way to produce films.  To understand this very important film movement, we will study the uses of script, image, and sound in the films themselves with special emphasis on storyline, subplot, and character.  We will also pay considerable attention to the cultural and economic contexts in which the films were produced and the biographies of the directors themselves.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
  

  • FLM 330 - New Asian Cinemas

    1 course unit
    This course surveys contemporary cinema in Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines.  Though the course addresses seminal developments in national cinematic traditions, such as the postwar Japanese nuclear-horror film Godzilla and the avant-garde Face of Another, it concentrates on films produced in the last 10-15 years.  These will likely include the cyber revenge fantasy, Tetsuo Iron Man, from Japan; Hong Kong “new wave” films such as Chungking Express; Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin and 24 City, and experimental docudrama on the effects of China’s rapid urban re-development; films that explore directionless Asian youth subcultures (The Power of Kangwon Province and Goodbye South, Goodbye); the pleasantly bewildering Uncle Bonnmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives from Thailand and the relentlessly shocking Oldboy from S. Korea, among others.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement DE and HU.
  

  • FLM 332 - Film Cultures of North Africa & the Middle East

    1 course unit
    This course will focus on the development of national cinematic traditions in Egypt, on the struggle for cultural self-definition in the former French colonies of Algeria and Tunisia, on cinematic representations of post-revolutionary Iran, and on how Arab and Israeli filmmakers address the so-called “question” of Palestine.  In order to provide students with a grounding in the film cultures in question, the course will also explore literary works and the commercial, social, and political conditions that inform film production, distribution, and reception.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement DE.
  

  • FLM 334 - Bollywood: Indian Popular Cinema

    1 course unit
    India’s Bombay/Mumbai-based cinema is one of the world’s few challenges to the influence of American film.  This course examines the world’s largest film industry with the aim of understanding the place of popular cinema outside of the Hollywood model.  We will consider the role of popular film in the development of Indian nationhood, its influence on notions of gender and caste, and its function as a binding influence on the Indian Diaspora.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement DE.
  

  • FLM 336 - African American Cinema

    1 course unit
    This course surveys African American filmmaking from the silent era to the present, along with a few films that represent the broader African Diaspora.  In addition, readings put all the films in the context of theoretical discussions concerning what constitutes “black,” “African,” or “Third Cinema,” politically and aesthetically.  As the course proceeds chronologically, it briefly demonstrates images of African Americans in mainstream Hollywood films but focuses primarily on how filmmakers of African descent have sought to respond to mainstream representations and create their own narratives and styles.  The emphasis is on narrative films, with some attention to experimental films.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement DE.
  

  • FLM 348 - Cinema’s Altered States

    1 course unit
    From the avant-garde to Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix and Inception, the cinema provides a fertile ground for playing at the edge of narrative and for testing credibility by constructing alternate logic.  When films provide the rules of their own reality, spectators and their surrogate characters grope for a foothold of understanding and sanity.  This course explores the phenomenon of film experience within the experience of film’s poetic manipulation of “reality”.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
  

  • FLM 349 - Film Reviewing

    1 course unit
    This writing-intensive course focuses on the art of reviewing films for both popular and scholarly outlets.  Students will write reviews of classic and contemporary films in a variety of lengths and formats, for different intended audiences.  The course will also include extensive practice in editing and re-writing and include weekend trips to local cinemas to review films on short deadlines.  Students will create an online archive of all finished work and learn about ways to develop and market their own critical voice.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement W.
  

  • FLM 354 - Film Noir

    1 course unit
    Dark shadows, low-key lighting, unusual camera angles, flashbacks, a sense of paranoia, and males manipulated by sultry, cigarette-smoking, seductive femme fatales characterize film noir, the only typically American film genre after the Western to emerge from Hollywood.  Created during the 1940s and 50s, many by Jewish émigrés from Central Europe, film noir is usually considered a combination of German Expressionist cinematic style and the American hard-boiled detective story.  This course will examine classic works of the genre within their sociopolitical context and investigate why they were so popular among audiences and were able to violate some rules of the Production Code, why certain actors are inextricably linked to the genre, and why neo-noirs are still being made.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Meets general academic requirement HU.
  

  • FLM 360 - Major Filmmakers

    1 course unit
    This course focuses on one or two major filmmakers and considers repeated and/or developing themes in his or her body of work.  While the filmmakers under consideration vary, the course deals with similar questions each time: the validity of the auteur theory as a way of understanding film, the relationships between filmmakers and their art, and the nature of our ideas about art and artistic production.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
  

  • FLM 450 - CUE: Film Studies Seminar

    1 course unit
    Advanced study and analysis of selected areas in film studies designed for majors and other qualified students.  Topics may include auteur studies, genre or form studies, national or regional film studies, film theory, or explorations of film and popular culture.  Special emphasis is placed on advanced textual and film analysis, scholarly discussion, and writing.
    Attendance at weekly screenings is required.
    Prerequisite(s): FLM 202, 204 Film History II: 1950-Present  and senior film studies major or permission of the instructor.
    Meets general academic requirement W.
  

  • FLM 970 - Film Studies Independent Study/Research

    Each independent study/research course is to be designed in consultation with a faculty sponsor.  

French
  

  • FRN 101 - Elementary French I

    1 course unit
    An introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary as well as communication skills in French within its cultural contexts.  Students will use a variety of authentic text and media resources to acquire and enhance linguistic skills.  The first semester is designed for students with no knowledge of or with a weak background in French, the second for students with limited but residual previous exposure to French.  Assignment by placement test.  Four class hours per week.
  

  • FRN 102 - Elementary French II

    1 course unit
    An introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary as well as communication skills in French within its cultural contexts.  Students will use a variety of authentic text and media resources to acquire and enhance linguistic skills.  The first semester is designed for students with no knowledge of or with a weak background in French, the second for students with limited but residual previous exposure to French.  Assignment by placement test.  Four class hours per week.
  

  • FRN 203 - Intermediate French I

    1 course unit
    An accelerated review of basic French grammar through speaking, reading, writing, and other linguistically appropriate activities.  The introduction of more advanced grammatical structures and a variety of authentic text and multimedia resources will enhance the students’ linguistic skills and sociocultural awareness of the French speaking world.  The development of functional skills and communicative ability is emphasized.  Students also acquire the linguistic tools needed to continue learning French as it pertains to their fields of interest.  Assignment by placement test.  Three class hours per week.
 

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