Undergraduate Special Topics Course Descriptions

Current English courses are described below. For descriptions of all English courses, refer to the Undergraduate Catalog.

Spring Semester 2010

Past Available Semesters

What is literature? Poems, plays, and works of fiction? Writing that is meant to “delight and instruct”? Writing whose primary function is to give pleasure? Whatever your teacher says it is? This is a question that has vexed writers and readers for centuries, and a question that writers have often explored in their own, well, literary works. In this class we will encounter the answers a number of well-known writers have devised to this question, both in essays that address the question head-on and in poems, plays, stories, and novels that raise the question in less direct ways. Texts may include: poetry by W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Blake, and Seamus Heaney; plays by Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard; fiction by Henry James, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and others. The class will familiarize you with a set of methods for interpreting literature. Assignments will include short response papers; two longer (3-5 page) papers, and a final examination.

Open only to English majors and minors except by permission of the department chairperson.

Intensive study and practice of methods of inquiry, rhetorical and documentation conventions, and terminology associated with critical writing about literature. Develops skills for successful study, discussion, and writing about literature. Includes use of computers appropriate to English Studies.

The students in this class will be responsible for producing the Spring 2009 issue of The Broken Plate, a literary magazine produced by Ball State undergraduates. We will accept submissions from writers around the country, as well as writing from Ball State undergraduates.

Student editors will be responsible for all aspects of magazine production, including soliciting submissions, selecting quality work, designing the magazine, and promoting and selling the issue.

Other requirements include magazine and book reviews, readings and quizzes, software tutorials, and an individual literary editing project. Texts may include literary magazines, Merriam-Webster’s Manual for Writers and Editors, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

This course is an introduction to the study of the Holocaust: the systematic, premeditated, state-sponsored destruction of two-thirds of the European Jewish population by the Nazi government between 1933 and 1945. Engl 299X is a multi-disciplinary course, drawing on the texts and approaches of Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, Literary Studies, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, and Sociology. The only prerequisite is an introductory course in one of the above disciplines, exclusive of English 103 and 104.

The first half of the semester, students will study not only the history and sociology of the victims (Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies, etc.), but also that of the perpetrators (the Nazis), the rescuers (like Arthur Schindler), and certain bystanders (America, England) as well. In the second half of the semester, we will discuss current issues surrounding the holocaust, such as the recent, ongoing debate on its origins, the bogus issues of Holocaust denial, and the politics of holocaust memorialization in places like Auschwitz and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. There will be a midterm and a final exam.

Focuses on theory, research, methods, strategies and program models for teaching writing in the elementary classroom; includes a guided laboratory experience that develops reading/writing connections, and includes listening, speaking, viewing and visual representing.

What is Creative Nonfiction? Are there different types of Creative Nonfiction? How is Creative Nonfiction (CNF) different than journalism? What is a fact? Any different than truth? What is truth? A matter of perspective? And what is Perspective anyway? Who tells the truth? What is a narrator? How is a CNF narrator different than a fiction narrator? Or a poet? How does one put the truth into words that are both artful and honest?

These are just a few of the questions we will take up this semester in this introduction to the literary genre of CNF, which will provide the student with the opportunity to practice writing CNF and to further explore its possibilities by reading and discussing a number of essays. In short, this class asks the student to write and read a lot. Furthermore, the class will introduce the student to the subgenres of CNF and to the key concepts and terms needed to be a part of the conversation that is CNF. The assignments and exercises will challenge students to think critically and creatively to better understand how we use language to make meaning out of our experience so we can think about, express, and discuss what it means to be alive on earth.

ENG 307: Fiction Writing

Writing is an art and craft, creative inspiration blended with very hard work. In this class, we will focus on the work—reading, writing, discussing fiction, both professional examples, and our own personal writing. The goal is to develop technical ability and understanding of craft and technique; and to define and cultivate a personal aesthetic—or, at least, do some serious thinking about it. A portion of the class will concentrate on the development of a critical vocabulary, in-class writing exercises, and the discussion of pieces of short fiction. Obviously, fiction is a massive “world,” and we will analyze the usual and expected aspects: plot, setting, character, and so on. I would like to focus on objects in fiction (as in what is there and why?), figurative language (metaphors, similes, personification, etc.), conflict (locating it and why it’s important), and mood, or atmosphere. Be sure to think about these specific aspects with every fiction piece we read.

We will also focus on a particular structure in this class; THE QUEST. You will be expected to write a quest narrative.

Another portion of the class will be dedicated to workshop, or peer review, of your own original fiction (knowing this, you shouldn’t submit any work that you aren’t comfortable sharing with the class). Every student is expected to thoroughly read their peers’ work, and to give thoughtful and respectful feedback. Although focusing on workshopping student stories at this time, we will continue with exercises and our discussions of published fiction as well.

ENG 307: Fiction Writing

Section 003, TR, 12:30-1:45

Barbara Bogue, Associate Professor

Office: RB 273

Phone: 285-8537

Prerequisite: 285 (not to be taken concurrently)

The course centers on the fundamentals of the short story—original language, three dimensional characters, complex plot—and with an emphasis on the student’s ability to write clearly and dramatically. Writing is revision and close reading—of one’s own work, peers’ and published writers’ works. The course includes free writing exercises and short assignments on elements of the craft during the first half of the semester, full-class workshops on students’ original works during the second half of the semester, and throughout, in-depth class discussions of the techniques of craft employed by authors recognized in the field. Writing exercises and in-class readings of the same encourage and nurture the imagination and the confidence to recreate the fictional dream on the page. The class provides an audience and the opportunity to create a community of writers who respect each other and the art form. The course is designed for those who wish to develop their story writing skills, as well as for those who plan to continue the study of writing fiction in English 407.

Required Text: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (7^th edition only), Janet Burroway, and supplemental materials handed out in class.

Students who have not taken this prerequisite are ineligible to take English 310 and will be asked to drop the course.

English 310 is an introductory course in the theory and practice of screenplay writing. Students will have the option to write two short screenplays or one short screenplay and the first act of a feature-length screenplay. In addition, they will complete a number of screenplay writing exercises, view films, and read material related to the craft of screenplay writing. Much of this course will focus on the workshopping and collective critique of student screenplays and the reading and analysis of screenplays and screenplay excerpts considered from the perspective of craft. Our focus will be on the discussion, analysis, and practice of the techniques and processes of screenwriting. This includes matters of format, content, structure, style, drafting, and revision, among other things. In sum, this course is intended to give students an understanding of what good screenwriting and cinematic storytelling are all about while also giving them the opportunity to apply that understanding to their own screenplays. To this end, student work will involve the following:

· Understanding and manipulating the essential techniques of cinematic storytelling.

· Understanding and utilizing the major structural elements of screenwriting form.

· Developing original story ideas into coherent scenes and/or complete screenplays.

· Receiving and incorporating into their work feedback about structure, content, and style from their professor and peers.

· Reading, evaluating, and offering constructive criticism on the work of their classmates.

· Reading material related to the craft of screenplay writing and screenplayswritten by established screenwriters

The aim of this linguistics course is to raise your awareness of the complex organization and systematic nature of language, the primary means of human communication. In a sense, you will be studying yourself since you are a prime example of a language user. Most of your knowledge of language, however, is unconscious, and the part of language that you can describe is largely the result of your earlier education, which may have provided you with confusing or misleading notions about language. This course is intended to clarify your ideas about language and bring you to a better understanding of its nature by introducing you to the basic principles of linguistic science and the major areas of the field, including, but not limited to, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. This is not a course about just one particular language, but about human language in all its aspects. Some of the data to be analyzed will come from languages with which students are familiar, but students will also work with data from languages with which they have no prior familiarity.

Discourse is language that occurs in meaningful communicative units. This class will help you learn to think critically about and analyze your assumptions about discourse in meaningful context. You will become familiar with basic linguistic analysis techniques, learn how to analyze language grammatically and in context, and discuss various implications of linguistic choices. You will also gain hands-on practical experience in recording, transcribing, and analyzing both written and spoken texts and learn to recognize various patterns in those texts.

Other topics will include cultural variation in gender roles, the use of linguistic resources in constructing identities, the connections between language and sexual orientation, and scholars’ explanations for gender differences in language.

Course requirements will include a research paper and shorter reports on observations of language use. I will do my best to design the course so that class meetings will be learner-centered with a high level of involvement.

Draws on different rhetorical perspectives to read, analyze, and produce public discourse in diverse media for a variety of audiences and purposes. Prerequisite: ENG 210 for English majors.

How to Watch TV News (rev. ed.), Neil Postman and Steve Powers (Penguin, 2008)

Participation, that is, attendance, being prepared for class, discourses analyses, taking part in discussions, Blackboard assignments

Portfolio of papers (at least 3 papers totaling at least 20pp), including those submitted for publication and posting

Group final presentation, that is, did the project fulfill the goals agreed upon during class discussions?

Romantic writers of the mid-nineteenth century are too easily seen as aloof artists disengaged from the great social issues of their day. But not in this class. Together we will read a selection of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction that illustrates the connections between Romanticism and social criticism, focusing on some key issues in the American reformist agenda: the “woman question,” industrialization and technology, war, slavery, the environment, and westward expansion.

Part biography, part literary history, part archival detective work, and part interpretation, this course will include some works you have likely heard of (Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and selections from Walden, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and others) and some that may be unfamiliar to you, such as Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World, Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, and stretching the period just a bit, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. We will read a lot.

Requirements, besides the reading and participation in discussion: Quizzes, midterm exam, a final exam, short oral reports, and a short (8-10 page) paper.

In his recent book Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? (Harvard UP, 2008), Nigel Smith argues that few poets so influenced the founding of the United States as John Milton. The founders’ belief in the freedom of conscience (which implies freedom of speech and the press), their association of monarchy with tyranny, and their argument that virtue flourishes in a republic all have roots in Milton’s political liberalism and Christian theology. In this class, we will read Milton’s major poetic works with an eye to assessing his legacy as a revolutionary. Our readings will include Comus, a masque about a lost girl’s woodland encounter with the god of revelry; Paradise Lost, an epic poem about Satan’s fall from heaven and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; and Samson Agonistes, a closet drama about Samson’s destruction of the Philistine temple, and a work that some recent critics have read as an endorsement of religious terrorism. We will also read liberally from Milton’s contemporaries, including Andrew Marvell, Katherine Philips, John Dryden, and John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. Course requirements include two papers and some targeted close readings.

English 395 explores various strategies and issues concerned in teaching language, literature, and visual literacy in the secondary English-language arts classroom. To take this course, you must be a Teaching Major and must have passed Decision Point 2. (Prereq.: ENG 350)

Prerequisite: ENG 311; senior standing or permission of the department chairperson.

Requires students to investigate in depth a problem or issue related to the teaching of elementary English Language arts, reflecting on best practices vs. common practices in relation to the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts.

Students will study selected stories from the collections listed below; compare and contrast techniques of the craft of fiction with particular emphasis on characterization (character revealed through physical description, dialogue, thoughts, actions and sense of place), point-of-view and psychic distance, and theme/idea/concepts revealed in each story. Class discussions will center on “mystery” in the published stories: religious mystery, suspenseful mystery, and structural mystery rendered through language, characterization, and situations. Students will free-write in class and create outside of class short stories that incorporate the aforementioned techniques. These stories will be submitted for full-class workshops. Students will also contribute to in-class discussions and write creative critical essays (hybrid pieces) on Burke and O’Connor, incorporating within the essays matters of Catholic religion, regional settings, and socio-economic and historical in the published works and the intersection of the same with the student’s fiction and life.

Required textbooks: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and Mystery and Manners and James Lee Burke’s Jesus Out to Sea (as well as handouts of Burke’s essays on craft).

This advanced writing workshop will focus on the writing of real lives and the navigation of those slippery spaces between remembering and forgetting, truth and invention, what to put in and what to leave out. Rather than using a thematic approach to organizing this semester’s reading (e.g., childhood, crisis, or nature), we’re going to diversify our reading according to structure and form. We’ll read greedily with a writer’s attention to style and technique as we get in the practice of asking the questions that are essential in the crafting of real-life material. My hope is that when we apprentice ourselves to the books on our list, we will practice the habit of art, honing our technical skills while we locate the memories and patterns in our lives that might have something important to say about the human condition.

In order to write well, we must read, and so we will split our time between workshops of student work and the discussion of published texts. In addition to essays in the contemporary journal of creative nonfiction The River Teeth Reader (May 2009—“best of the first ten years”), our reading list will likely include: Peggy Shumaker’s Just Breathe Normally, Steve Almond’s Candyfreak, Scott Russell Sanders’s The Private History of Awe, Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping: Some Stories from a Life, Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, and Lee Martin’s Turning Bones.

Course requirements will include two long essays or chapters (and a final revision), reading quizzes, regular creative/critical responses to the reading assignments, workshop critiques, and a class presentation.

In this class we will continue many of the concepts of English 307, with an expectation of advanced complexity. The class will focus on student manuscripts in the genre of short fiction. We will give critical feedback on these student texts. We will underscore the necessity of careful and considered revision. Writing is an art and craft, creative inspiration blended with very hard work. In this class, we will focus on the work—reading, writing, discussing fiction, both professional examples and our own personal writing. We will continue our examination of craft and technique. The majority of the class will be dedicated to workshop, or peer review, of your own original fiction (knowing this, you shouldn’t submit any work that you aren’t comfortable sharing with the class). Every student is expected to thoroughly read their peers’ work, and to give thoughtful and respectful feedback (including, typed feedback to writer and instructor, written comments on the actual text, and verbal comments during the class meeting).

This course is designed for writers to practice the techniques of characterization, point-of-view, setting, & conflict so that in any genre or form, language takes on new meaning, intensity, and originality. Students will work with participating social services agencies (Big Brothers Big Sisters, Heritage Retirement Village, Hillcroft Services, Inc. and Motivate Our Minds), meeting at least five times with a partner from one of these agencies in order to develop a broader perspective of the complex ways through which individuals cope with their situations and environments. Through the student’s assistance, an often-unheard voice will shape a story that will be read and heard. Storytelling involves all of the techniques of fiction writing mentioned above and also applies to poetry and creative nonfiction. All written work will be published in Writing Out of the Margins Vol. 8. This immersive experience offers the opportunity for the students to learn about themselves through others and to become more productive citizens of the local and academic communities.

Students who have not taken ALL of these prerequisites are ineligible to take English 410 and will be asked to drop the course.

English 410 is an advanced course in the theory and practice of screenplay writing; therefore, it is critical for students who take this course to have taken the prerequisites. English 410 Students will have the option to write three short screenplays or two short screenplays and the second or third acts ofa feature-length screenplay (providing the previous acts were developed under my direction in ENG 310). In addition, they will complete a number of screenplay writing exercises, view films, and read material related to the craft of screenplay writing. The bulk of this course will focus on the workshopping and collective critique of student screenplays and the reading and analysis of screenplays and screenplay excerpts considered from the perspective of craft. Our focus will be on a higher level of discussion related to the practice and analysis of the techniques and processes of screenwriting. This includes matters of genre, content, structure, style, drafting, and revision, among other things. One of the major goals of this course is to help students develop short scripts for potential production in Ball State’s Cinema Entertainment Immersion program (CEI). Therefore, much emphasis will be given to the development of short screenplays suitable for production here at BSU. This course is intended to build upon the understanding of concepts developed in English 310 while also giving students the opportunity to further apply that understanding to their own screenplays. To this end, student work will involve the following:

Readers today face the difficult challenge of choosing between and making sense of numerous competing texts, in many different forms. In this course we will investigate theories concerning both what we should read as well as how these texts should be read. We will also look at our beliefs concerning the very nature of literature and literacy. For instance, we will consider such questions as the following: What is literacy? How is it acquired? Is their a difference between print literacy and multimedia literacy? How do broader contexts, such as family and community, affect our literacy or literacies? While this is not a course in teaching methods, we will develop practical suggestions for analyzing and interpreting texts, including literary and popular materials frequently used in the English Language Arts classroom. (Prereq. ENG 230 or 150 for teaching majors).

This class is an introduction to critical viewing and analysis of films. You will develop a working vocabulary of terms that allows you to analyze, discuss, and write about various aspects of film, including technical matters (types of shots, sound, lighting, narrative structures) and more theoretical issues, including the relationships between films, their audiences, and their cultural contexts. We will explore the fundamentals of how film as an art form communicates meaning, particularly how story and film style combine to convey ideas and move us emotionally. We will discuss the nuts and bolts of how films are made and marketed. We will raise questions about how films influence us, and how we, as their intended audience, shape them. You should emerge from this class better prepared to watch films carefully, critically, even skeptically, and to write and talk about your responses to them. Films will include: Rear Window, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Casablanca, The Sixth Sense, and more.

According to Technorati, 94 million Americans are blog readers and 22 million are bloggers. The Wall Street Journal estimated that about two million Americans make some money from blogging and that over 450,000 Americans make a living from blogging. Newspaper, corporations, and universities all employ bloggers; bloggers are interviewed on national news programs. In short, blogs have moved from the margins to the mainstream. This course will center on this still emerging genre through an exploration of all things blogs, blogging, and bloggers. Topics considered are

Contact Dr. Grutsch McKinney: jrmckinney@bsu.edu or in RB 279 for more information.

In this senior seminar, students will learn various methods for conducting primary qualitative research including interviewing and oral history research, archival research, and ethnographic research. Students will conduct a major research project using both primary and secondary research. Of particular focus in this class will be the ethics of representation; we’ll ask: what is a fair representation? This course will draw on students’ well-honed English major skills—researching, interpreting, analyzing, storytelling, and persuasion. Yet, it will challenge students to use these skills in ways that will be new for many students either in scope, in method, or in genre.

Contact Dr. Grutsch McKinney at jrmckinney@bsu.edu or in RB 279 for more information.

"Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries."

This three-credit seminar will offer an introduction to the history and sociology of the book in Western Europe and America, tracing the transition from a manuscript-based to a primarily print-based culture. It will explore the development and cultural impact of printing from its invention by Johann Gutenberg through to the age of Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. Consideration will also be given to the later influence of hand printing on the development and design of the modern book, and to the broad question whether the traditional book has a future in a digital age.

The Bracken Library and the Ball State Art Gallery house rare examples of late medieval manuscripts and early printed books (including an original sheet from the Gutenberg Bible, the first printed book in the western world). We shall be learning about the revolutionary effect of the new technology in the era of the Renaissance and of the Reformation, and we shall also be studying the subtle and significant changes to the book as a physical object. Among topics that will be given coverage are the making of illuminated books, incunabula (books printed before 1500), the early texts of Shakespeare, the development of the newspaper and of periodical publications, chapbooks, almanacs, questions of censorship, techniques of book illustration, private press books, the beginnings of printing and the book trade in America, and the present-day textual editing of early modern books. We shall also plan study visits to the Lilly Library (which owns a replica eighteenth-century hand press) and to the Carnegie Library in Muncie. Students will have the opportunity to explore the research being conducted on habits of reading in the Midwest during the 1890s, utilizing Ball State’s pioneering “What Middletown Read” project – see www.bsu.edu/middletown/wmr/ .

The colloquium does not require prior technical knowledge of either bibliography or printing. It is aimed at those who are interested in the interdisciplinary nature of book history and who wish to research the momentous cultural impact of Gutenberg's invention. Those considering a career in areas such as teaching, journalism, publishing, librarianship, bookselling, and the media may particularly benefit from the course. The History of the Book is now an established feature of many undergraduate programs in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic.

The aim of this course is two-fold: 1) to provide students with at least 45 hours of direct teaching experience with English language learners and 2) to provide students an opportunity to reflect on and demonstrate the ways that they are meeting and/or exceeding each of the 13 TESOL standards for PK-12 teacher candidates. To achieve these goals, students build on their experiences in ENG 436 and ENG 437 and work directly with English language learners in both pull-out and push-in classroom situations at the elementary and/or secondary levels.

This course will examine concepts of gender, race, and sexuality as understood, constructed, and contested in the texts produced by Beat Generation writers. Though we will touch on the big three figures of the movement—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs—more attention will be paid to marginalized writers of the Beat experience who have garnered less critical attention. We will contemplate the formation of a Beat aesthetic and a Beat canon while noting the biases and assumptions reified by Beat writers, and we will examine the critical afterlife of Beat Generation texts. Among the writers of fiction, memoir, and poetry we will study are Hettie Jones, Diane DiPrima, Joyce Johnson, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), ruth weiss, Bob Kaufman, Lenore Kandel, Elise Cowen and Edie Parker. Prerequisite: ENG 210 or 150, or permission of the department chairperson. Prerequisite recommended: at least two courses in literature or permission of the department chairperson.

ENG 492: Native American Literature

TR, 9:30-10:45

Dr. Melissa Adams

A survey of classic and contemporary Native American literatures, including oral and written materials. Authors to be studied may include William Apess, Zitkala-Ša, Mourning Dove, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, and Paula Gunn Allen. Students will be expected to research and present on an assigned author’s biographical and tribal backgrounds, complete a midterm and final exam, and write two five page essays.

Have you ever found yourself reading criticism of a work of literature and encountering terms or concepts that are unfamiliar to you? When this happens, do you feel like you’re missing part of the conversation? Do you feel curious about the critic’s vocabulary and about the assumptions that underlie his or her claims? Well, this course will offer you the opportunity to explore some of the various schools of theory that inform literary criticism today and to reach a better understanding of current debates and trends in the critical conversation. In addition, you will practice working with current theories in order to gain the skill and confidence needed to employ them in your own writing. You will also be given the opportunity to examine your own basic assumptions about texts, authors and readers and to position your own scholarship within the world of contemporary theory.

The course will cover an assortment of current theoretical positions, which will include some or all of the following: Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Feminist Theory and Masculinity Studies, Queer Theory, Marxism, New Historicism, Postcolonial Theory, Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Studies, and Reader Response Criticism. Our main text will be The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. We will be reading primarily essays and excerpts from theoretical books, but we will also hone our critical skills on a few short literary pieces.

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Spring Semester 2010

Past Available Semesters

ENG 307: Fiction Writing

ENG 307: Fiction Writing

Section 003, TR, 12:30-1:45

Barbara Bogue, Associate Professor

Office: RB 273

Phone: 285-8537

Prerequisite: 285 (not to be taken concurrently)

English 395 explores various strategies and issues concerned in teaching language, literature, and visual literacy in the secondary English-language arts classroom. To take this course, you must be a Teaching Major and must have passed Decision Point 2. (Prereq.: ENG 350)