Talib Kweli Quality Review

[Paulette Dzurilla]

Thiscourse will focus on identity through craft. Students are encouraged to write about their experiences, identity, and history, and to bring readings to class that inspire them or inform their work.

This Introduction to Creative Writing course will survey published works of contemporary literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry through a craft lens. We will learn to describe and analyze these works through craft features (voice, POV, image, distance, characterization, plot, structure, etc.). Strategies for revision, reading as a writer, and the workshop process are core components of the class. This course will also introduce students to the literary magazine world. Students will work in small writing groups and compose written work in each genre throughout the semester.

In this introductory Creative Writing course we will focus on gaining a comfort between three genres of creative writing: Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Non-fiction. In addition to reading widely from contemporary publications, students will be given the opportunity to participate in numerous writing exercises, workshop their own material, and gain an understanding of how to talk and think about work as a creative writer.

Introduction to Creative Writing will explore various contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry texts, to learn about and analyze craft features of each genre. Students will learn how to incorporate these skills through the process of writing and revision throughout the semester. Students will write in each genre and share work with their classmates, giving and receiving feedback as a way to improve their writing and the writing of their peers.

Native speakers of any variety of English use the language every day without thinking about grammar rules. In fact, people who have learned English as a foreign language often know the grammar rules of standardized American English better than native speakers. In this class, we will review various parts of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions) and use your linguistic intuitions about how parts of a sentence are put together to create grammatical and complete sentences. And, as languages are rule-governed systems that change over time, we will also look at examples of English language change and we will question commonly held language attitudes. Course work will consist of quizzes, a short paper, readings, and discussion board posts.

English 249 is a one-credit, eight-week class that brings together students majoring in English. It is a required course and must be taken before embarking on the major coursework. Students are introduced to the subfields of rhetoric and professional writing; creative writing; literary studies; and critical theory and cultural studies. Students will be introduced to the life of the department through class visits with faculty members, attendance at departmental events, and a variety of readings and discussions. Some class sessions will include conversations about employment or opportunities for graduate school. The final task will be to craft a letter of intent documenting an intended course of study and future goals.

This introductory course to Chicana/o literature will survey a wide variety of literary genres, such as novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and drama from the nineteenth century to the present day. Students will learn about the role Chicana/o literature plays in the formation of American literature and culture. Furthermore, we will examine the complex and often contradictory processes of Chicana/o identity formation with an eye toward understanding how it is influenced by social and political arrangements of power as well as tensions between Mexican and American cultures. We will also consider key literary concepts that shape and define Chicana/o literary cultural production. Our focus will include issues such as race, gender, class, nationality, language, sexuality, and the act of writing itself. By the end of this class, students will have a comprehensive understanding of the field of Chicana/o literature and the literary and historical formations of Chicana/o identity. Students will also be able to formulate an informed opinion based on the social and cultural contexts that undergird current political issues such as anti-immigrant sentiments, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border.

This is an Intro to Professional Writing course. This class will introduce you to methods of effectively communicating technical, professional, and business information to multiple audiences, in multiple modes. You will develop an understanding of theories of technical communication and will practice technical communication in many forms. With an eye constantly focused on audience needs and expectations, we will plan, organize, draft, revise, and edit documents and multimedia texts. We will learn that the content and appearance of each written document must be appropriate to the intended audience. This course introduces strategies of expository writing style, persuasive communication, and multimodal document design. You will also learn about ethical considerations in the workplace that impact technical and business communicators and the public. Assignments in this course will represent the most common genres of workplace writing, including resumes, informational graphics and data visualization, usability studies, memoranda, business letters, technical reports, white papers, and instructions. In addition, this class will serve as an introduction to the field of professional communication, and will educate you about the history of Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), about career options in TPC and related fields, and about workplace issues in these fields (including analysis of audience, significance of user-centered design and usability, expectations for collaborative work, and the standards of web writing). All projects in this course are designed to help you create some initial materials for a portfolio you can use when looking for an internship or employment in the field. Key components of this course are group collaboration and the engagement (virtually and in-person) with working professionals in the field.

This is the second half of the World Literature Survey that helps you fulfill your diversity requirement. We will start with Aphra Behn's Oronooko and move up to other texts about and by the "Others" in the canon: Tagore, Ghalib, the Haiku poets, Conrad, Achebe, and other "Postcolonial" Writers, in English and in Translation! Come and enjoy "the rest of the world."

In this course, we will explore a diverse selection of works drawn from over a thousand years of English literature, from the earliest surviving texts through the eighteenth century, along with their historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. We will encounter Beowulf, Pearl, and works by Marie de France, Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift alongside lesser-known authors and anonymous popular songs and ballads.

This course covers sample literary texts from 5 periods so that you can get a taste of the issues, styles, and writers of each: Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Postcolonialism. You will also have background essays from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (3 vols; NAEL) as well as my own written and video lectures covering topics and particular literary texts to help you navigate the rich meanings and styles of the texts and how they are interacting with major topics of the day.

This course studies biblical texts within their historical and literary contexts, and it examines how the authors of the Bible utilize literary forms and tools such as the parable, proverb, allegory, and so on to convey particular messages. It additionally stresses the importance of the Bible as a source of English and American literature. Units of study include Narrative, Poetry, the Gospels, the Letter, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament in English and American Literature. There are weekly quizzes and discussions, two exams, and one short presentation.

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, English cultural beliefs that had provided theories justifying the self-interested behavior of the privileged classes were losing their power. More and more, people saw that the ideology of mutual wellbeing between society and the individual did not explain the actual economic and political conditions of the times. The Gothic novel began in this social and political climate, and in it, we may uncover specters of social revolution, constructions of evil in a world ostensibly secular, and architecture that offers no safe haven. We will consider Gothic art of the period as well, for its visual representations of these motifs, and in both fiction and visual art, we will pay close attention to ways that gender is figured. Requirements: 1 analytic report; 2 discussion questions; and one term paper (10-15 pages).

Texts: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; William Beckford, Vathek; Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya; James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Matthew Lewis, The Monk; Ann Radcliffe, The Italian; and Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime & the Beautiful.

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