"English" is a little word for lots of things. Is it literature you want today, or creative writing? film? theater? journalism? debate? Maximum English introduces you to all these areas and to our unique resources for studying and enjoying them—the full range of "English" here at UR. So you'll learn the fundamentals of reading and viewing from the department's own creative writers, its literary and film critics and historians, and its theater directors. You'll enlarge the experience of reading literature and criticism by listening to writers read their own original work and then discussing it with them. You'll experience plays not only as written scripts but as living theatrical events by attending performances and talking to actors, directors, and designers about what they do to bring a play to the stage. You'll encounter works in different media, from the live human voice to printed books, from the stage to film and electronic hypermedia. Maximum English will launch you into real English—newly expanded. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008], Novels [H1ENG009], Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011], Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012], Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
This course will take in ancient myth and mythological figures, archeological backgrounds and historical contexts, art in various media, philosophical and intellectual traditions, and, in general, Large Questions (Love, Death, War, Sex, Law, Gender, and more). Above all, however, this is a course in literary study and appreciation: we will read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, some dialogues by Plato, a selection from the Greek drama, and a large selection of Hebrew and Christian scriptures as challenging imaginative attempts to confront the possibilities of life. We will aim to understand and enjoy these texts in their own distinctive terms, but we will be concerned as well to see why readers over several thousand years have continuously returned to them, and how we are to make sense of them in the twenty-first century. The readings are astonishingly rich and rewarding, and we will try to do justice to them within the limits of a semester's work. Students will write one shorter and one longer paper. Applicable English Clusters: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]; Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010]
This course immerses students in the most challenging, influential, and engaging texts from the earlier periods of English literature, from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries. Our aim will be to enjoy and understand these texts in themselves, while also examining their relation to each other and to their larger historical contexts. Although the texts vary from epic to lyric to drama to prose narrative, we will find ourselves returning to a set of recurring questions, such as how to define the literary, how texts make meaning, and how the reader can best render such meanings into interpretation. While keeping these larger themes in mind, we will nonetheless begin our discussions each week by focusing on the specific wording, structure, texture, and tone of each text, considering such authors as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Milton, Behn, and Pope. Applicable English Clusters: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]; Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010]
As an introduction to the art of film, this course will present the concepts of film form, film aesthetics, and film style, while remaining attentive to the various ways in which cinema also involves an interaction with audiences and larger social structures. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
This class provides an introduction to the writing of poetry and fiction. Students will experiment with different poetic and literary forms, and will engage in writing exercises to develop and refine their use of images, characters and descriptive language. We will begin by studying the basic components of poetry and the short story. The course will conclude with a workshop in which every student will present material to be reviewed by the entire class. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
This class will be structured as a writing workshop, with students sharing their own fiction and participating in critiques. We will read and discuss stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by influential writers, including Poe, Melville, Chekhov, Flaubert, Dinesen, Faulkner, Baldwin, Angela Carter, and Welty. Students will have the chance to experiment with different styles and structures as they learn about literary invention. We'll consider techniques for shaping fictional characters and the related issue of point of view, the possibilities of narrative design, the role of setting and description, and the process of revision. Permission of instructor required. Applicable English Clusters: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]; Novels [H1ENG009]
Poetry writing and reading workshop introducing students to various elements of the craft including image, metaphor, line, syntax, meter, and rhyme. Open by permission only. To apply, email 3-5 poems and a list of previous creative writing courses, if any to the instructor. Applicable English Clusters: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
Credit: 2 hours. A course devoted to the understanding and execution of dramatic writing that is unique to the theater. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
Reporting and Writing the News introduces the student to journalistic writing and reporting. Through a variety of classroom exercises and through out-of-class reporting, students learn to prepare accurate and balanced news stories. Assignments progress from single-source interviewing to news profiles, speech-and-meeting coverage, and feature stories. Additional experience is gained through rewriting assignments, as directed by editing comment. Attention is also paid to First Amendment issues such as libel, as well as to the challenges and opportunities presented by new media. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
Reporting and Writing the News introduces the student to journalistic writing and reporting. Through a variety of classroom exercises and through out-of-class reporting, students learn to prepare accurate and balanced news stories. Assignments progress from single-source interviewing to news profiles, speech-and-meeting coverage, and feature stories. Additional experience is gained through rewriting assignments, as directed by editing comment. Attention is also paid to First Amendment issues such as libel, as well as to the challenges and opportunities presented by new media. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
Basic public speaking is the focus of this course. Emphasis is placed on researching speeches, using appropriate language and delivery, and listening critically to oral presentations. ENG 134 contains two quizzes, a final exam, and four speeches to be given by the student. The speeches include a tribute, persuasive, explanatory, and problem-solving address. The course utilizes instructor Curt Smith's experience as a former White House presidential speechwriter. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
The purpose of this course is to give students an appreciation for and knowledge of critical thinking and reasoned decision-making through argumentation. Students will research both sides of a topic, write argument briefs, and participate in formal and informal debates. Students will also be exposed to the major paradigms used in judging debates. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
The purpose of this course is to give students an appreciation for and knowledge of critical thinking and reasoned decision-making through argumentation. Students will research both sides of a topic, write argument briefs, and participate in formal and informal debates. Students will also be exposed to the major paradigms used in judging debates. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
This course introduces the basic aesthetic and technical elements of video production. Emphasis is on the creative use and understanding of the video medium while learning to use the video camera, video editing processes, and the fundamental procedures of planning video projects. Video techniques will be studied through screenings, group discussions, readings, practice sessions and presentations of original video projects made during the course.
An introductory course to the theories, methods, and practice of set construction, power tools, rigging, stage lighting, drafting, sound, and scene painting. Lab participation in theater program productions required. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
The course undertakes to introduce students to the various elements of theater design. Lighting techniques, sound design, and set design are all covered from time to time. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
Training in the techniques by which individual actors set forth the characters recorded in dramatic texts. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
An introductory course on voice and movement for the actor, concentrating on the ability of the actor to maximize the use of the body and voice to express emotion and character. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
What is it about Beowulf that lends itself to so much retelling? Why is it so hard to receive it? What has the curriculum done wrong in presenting it? Why must everyone give Beowulf a sex life? Why did Woody Allen hate it? How did Seamus Heaney transform it? How does it lurk on the edges of popular culture, but can't seem to make it in the ranks of high literature without toil, and groan, and much apology? And, what is the nature of translation—not just of words, but a whole ethos? This multimedia class will examine older and newer translations of Beowulf, read Scandinavian literature relevant to Beowulf (Hrolfskraki Saga etc.), look at comic books based on Beowulf, watch the three major movies made about Beowulf in the past ten years, listen to Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf, and read articles about translation theory. Minimal instruction in Old English vocabulary and the problems of translating some of the harder passages in Beowulf. Applicable English Cluster: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]
Early English Drama is essentially a course in religious tragicomedy —bawdy, pious, salvific, threatening, exemplary, and pedagogically vital plays that interface with the humanistic plays of the sixteenth century. After a brief look at Christian liturgical drama, we will trace the origins of vernacular folk drama through the Corpus Christi mystery cycles that begin with Creation and conclude with the Last Judgment. We then examine the less scripturally oriented morality plays, and conclude with the university wits and the secular pedagogy of spectacular ethics in representative Tudor drama. We will examine the plays in terms of their stagecraft, their message and performative values, their comic genius, and their cultural significance. The course satisfies a pre-1800 departmental requirement and fits well into the Theater major or minor. It is also well-suited to studies in Christianity in the Department of Religion and Classics. Applicable English Clusters: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]; Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]
We will read an array of texts that recapture the lives and desires of late medieval women and men, and that continue to capture the imagination of living readers. These will include stories of zombies and ghosts who bridge the world of spirit and flesh, tales of reanimated corpses and souls rescued from hell, knightly combats and romantic affairs, and intense spiritual forays into inner and outer worlds. Readings will include the unsurpassed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the out-of-body experience of Pearl, Piers Plowman (the autobiographical vision of a frenzied layman seeking Truth on the still-recognizable streets of London), varied excerpts from Gower's Lover's Confession, and readings on divine love, spiritual discipline, religious dissent, the dangers of reading, and the pleasures and perils of urban life. Our purpose is to enrich our sense of the present in feeling the power of early English writings. Students will offer presentations, write short responses/analyses, and a longer final paper. Applicable English Cluster: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]
The course aims at familiarizing students with one of the most significant texts in Western Culture. Through Dante's text, students will gain a perspective on the biblical, Christian, and classical traditions as well as on the political, literary, philosophical, and theological context of medieval Europe. The course will also provide students with an avenue of investigation on the problems of knowledge, and guide them in developing critical tools and research skills. The first part of the semester will be devoted to the creation of a historical and intellectual frame of reference in which to locate The Divine Comedy. The second part will focus on Inferno and a few cantos of Purgatorio. Lectures and class discussion will be complemented by a weekly recitation session. Students enrolled for the upper-level cross listings will be assigned a separate complementary reading list with additional primary and secondary sources.
The class will explore the full range of Shakespeare's theater, including examples of history plays, comedy, tragedy, and romance. We will be approaching the plays from many angles, looking at their stark and extravagant language, their invention of complex, conflicted human characters, their analyses of the worlds of politics and war, their self-conscious theatricality, as well as the ways that they join together play and seriousness, the the tragic and the comic. We'll discuss the plays' fascination with madness and delusion, the work of dreams, as well as their interest in ghosts, witchcraft, and magic. This course can fulfill the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Applicable English Clusters: Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010]; Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]
This course introduces students to some of the major British novelists during the nineteenth century such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. The course will situate these novelists within the aesthetic and historical concerns of the period and cover an array of topics (e.g., the rise of the novel, the marriage plot as a narrative device, capitalism, gender, sexuality, race, and empire). Applicable English Cluster: Novels [H1ENG009]
The course covers the period roughly between World War I and World War II, dealing with the rich creativity we associate with Modernism. We will read and discuss such writers as Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, etc., studying not only the works but some of the major trends in art, culture, and knowledge that make the modern period so important and exciting. The method will be a combination of close reading, lecture, and discussion with (probably) one short paper and one longish paper. Not open to freshmen. Applicable English Clusters: American and African American Studies [H1ENG006]; Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
The explosion of black culture during the early twentieth century known as the "Harlem" or (more broadly) "New Negro" Renaissance included the emergence of some of the most important works of the African-American literary tradition. This course will provide a survey of the literature and culture that reflect the spirit of that era. In addition, the course will consider recent African-American fiction in order to ascertain what the Harlem Renaissance has meant for subsequent writers and artists. Special attention will be paid to the following topics: migration, jazz, the Blues, literary modernism, theories of black identity, and difference within black America. Readings include works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and more. Requirements include class participation, six 1-page reading responses, and two 6-8-page formal writing assignments. Applicable English Clusters: Literature and Cultural Identity [H1ENG001]; American and African American Studies [H1ENG006]
Fiction is a genre defined by its falseness. It is made up of invented material and stands in opposition to fact. In this study of modern British and American fiction (1890-1950), we'll be examining the ways that some of the most influential writers of the past century have foregrounded the action of imaginative invention. As we set out in search of the paradoxical truths expressed by the masquerade of fiction, we'll be looking at strategies of deception, exaggeration, and contradiction. Writers we'll be studying include Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
A study and exploration of the major movements of twentieth-century drama—naturalism, expressionism, surrealism, epic theater, absurdism. Possible author list: Anton Chekhov, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Yasmina Reza. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
This is a course about how to read a poem. We'll be thinking about the startling ways that poets use language, metaphor, and verbal gesture, how they appeal to our ears and minds. We'll investigate lyric poetry's ways of telling a story, its means of shaping time and memory, its styles of verbal play and verbal ambiguity, its forms of enchantment, its way of both revealing truths and keeping secrets. We will also consider the formal tools of lyric poetry—meter, rhyme, sound-shape, and line, among others. Readings will include a wide variety of types of lyric—love poems and metaphysical hymns, nursery rhymes and mourning poems, poems about places and poems about objects—focusing on the work four or five particular poets overall, from the Renaissance to the modern periods. Applicable English cluster: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012]
What is an author? This course begins with the premise that the answer to this question is anything but self-evident. Does the idea of the author as solitary genius correspond to the actual practices of ordinary writers? And does it correspond to the practice of even the "great" authors like Shakespeare? Was such an ideal ever anything but a myth? What role do editors play in the practice of authorship? Should they count as co-authors? How do market factors and modes of publication affect what and how an author writes? How has our understanding of authorship changed in a world of virtual authors and virtual texts? Looking at a wide range of examples, we will examine a number of sites of debate: collaborative authorship; ghost writing; forgeries and hoaxes; plagiarism; celebrity authorship; best-sellers; film, electronic and digital media; self- and on-demand publishing; copyright. Students will have the opportunity to do original research on topics of their own choosing. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
What is America? A country? A continent? A political ideal? A culture? This course traces the development of ideas about America from its historical beginnings to our own time, from European fantasies about the New World and its possibilities to the experiences of settlers and citizens facing its realities. We will explore competing and even contending narratives of America in a wide variety of cultural documents, from sermons and political tracts to novels, photographs, and films. The course is open to all interested students and is required for all American Studies majors. Readings will likely include works by John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Theodore Roosevelt, Mary Antin, Richard Wright, John Updike, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jean Baudrillard, and Barack Obama.
Why has memoir become one of the most popular literary genres of the past few decades? This class will examine the development of our "confessional culture" while also charting a historical trajectory of American memoirs from the mid twentieth century to our current moment. Discussions will also highlight the relationship between the narrating "I" and the development of national mythologies that present American identity as defined by specific distinctions of race, class, gender and sexuality. Students will explore various modernist and postmodernist innovations apparent in contemporary memoirs as well as changing conceptions of the self. Authors to be studied include: Barack Obama, Malcolm X, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez, Alison Bechdel, and others.
Introduces the Russian theater in its cultural and political context, with close readings of plays from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century by Catherine II, Griboedov, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kharms, Bulgakov, and others. In English.
As part of a long tradition dating back to classical Rome, and in forms ranging from poetry to plays to essays to visual art to prose fiction to films, satirists have taken aim at the foibles and follies of their societies. This course, international and multigeneric in scope, will introduce students to some of the richest periods in the history of satire, while also exploring larger questions of how satire can be defined, how it operates, and whom or what it targets. Texts include the work of Horace, Juvenal, Donne, Rochester, Wycherley, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Gay, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Graffigny, Flaubert, Wilde, and Brecht. Visual satire—including work by Hogarth, Cruikshank, Rowlandson, and Daumier—will also figure into the course, as will a handful of films (Capra, Sturges, Hal Ashby). Applicable English Cluster: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012]
Comic books have recently proven themselves capable of astonishing artistic achievements and of infiltrating Hollywood and academia. This course features a formal analysis of the combination of text and image to tell a story and generate a variety of aesthetic effects and responses, and a cultural history of comic books, from their modern origins during the Great Depression to World War II, attacks on the genre in the 1950s, the "British Invasion" of the 1980s and '90s, and representations of race, gender and sexuality. Primary texts include Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, Will Eisner's A Contract with God, The Sandman: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman et al., Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and David Gibbons's Watchmen, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and more. Critical and historical sources include Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation. Course requirements include a mid-term exam, five 1-page reading responses, and a 5-page formal paper. Applicable English Cluster: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012]
Globalization, war, animal rights, mass media, consumer culture, eco-tourism, the rise of the megacity, and the conquest of indigenous peoples—these are just some of the issues raised in the selection of American environmental literary works surveyed in this course. Reading a diverse range of "green" texts, from slave narrative and nature writing to novels and political essays, we will study how writers imagine relationships to place and environment amidst accelerating social, economic, and technological change.
This 4-credit intersession course will be conducted in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, from Saturday, December 29, 2012, through Saturday, January 12, 2013. We will have a full range of theater experiences in venues as diverse as theater-in-the-round at the Orange Tree to the multiple stages of the National Theatre, from intimate fringe productions and experimental theater to the extravaganzas of West End. See the Theater in England website for descriptions of the program and syllabuses from the past 20 years. This year we will see the best of what is available (twenty or so plays). We will have seminar discussions of the productions which you will then write about in your journals. The fee for the course is $2,750, which includes tuition, tickets to all plays you see, 15 nights housing at the Harlingford Hotel, and transportation to Stratford-upon-Avon and return. The fee does not include transportation to London and back from the US. Instructor's permission required to register. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
An introduction to the history, technology, and cultural significance of motion pictures of the "pre-sound" era, with screenings of 35mm prints accompanied by live music in the Dryden Theatre. Special attention will be paid to the major pioneers, Dickson, Porter, Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, but the course will include a variety of internationally produced films selected from the world-famous archival film collection of George Eastman House. Discussion sessions will cover the origins and development of the motion picture industry and its leading genres up to the general introduction of movies with pre-recorded music, sound, and dialog beginning in 1927. Broad issues relating to the transformation of American and world popular entertainment forms and traditions, in relation to the established performing arts of the period, will also be covered. Relevant connections to preserving the world's film heritage will be highlighted, and the film restoration facilities of the Motion Picture Department will be visited in the course of the semester. Students will be expected to take a midterm exam and write one paper. Enrollment limited to 20. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
This course introduces students to the poetics of television. We will explore the ways that television tells stories and how it constructs worlds; the significance of genre, style, and form to those stories and worlds; and the relationship between television and the horizons of social, historical, and aesthetic experience that television opens up as one of the most important culture industries of the last 100 years. Much of our class will be devoted to watching TV and discussing what we watch, from the sitcom, news, reality TV, domestic melodrama, soap operas, and crime procedurals to advertising, animation, mini-series, sci-fi and fantasy, the Western, "art television," and live drama. Students will also come to understand poetics as an approach useful to the study of any medium, especially when combined with the more speculative and conceptual projects of media and critical theory. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
The course will deal with a selection of films directed (and some also written) by the highly regarded contemporary director, Martin Scorsese. We will proceed in roughly chronological order, examining the growth and development of his career, his characteristic manner and matter, his successes and failures. We will also discuss the concept of the auteur as it applies to his work. Applicable English clustered: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]; Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010]
This course contests its title. There is language and literature/film that records how language has failed as a means of (human) species adaptation toward conflict resolution in domestic and international contexts. This course, following the observations of Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1939), tries to document the language/literary connections between domestic violence and war making. In domestic situations, violence is protected by traditions of privacy and male governance of households; in public situations, there has been an inertia throughout recorded history in enacting the ideal announced in Isaiah: "[nations] shall not learn war any more." In our own society genres of popular and elite culture teach the necessity and glory of war through literature, film, toys, sports, and ideals of heroic behavior. Our normal ways of speaking still presuppose violence and war as a "last resort" in solving domestic and international antagonisms.
This course investigates technical theater beyond the realms of Eng 170/171 (Technical Theater). It focuses on work related to the scenic design and technical production of the semester's Theater Program productions. Working in small seminars and one-on-one tutorials, the instructor will assist students in learning more in the chosen technical areas and about problem-solving scenic and technical questions raised by the set/s being built. Course work will consist of supervisory responsibilities, one major, and several smaller research projects. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
This workshop is for advanced fiction writers who have completed ENG 121 or have permission from the instructor. The course emphasizes the development of each student's individual style and imagination, as well as the practical and technical concerns of a fiction writer's craft. Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of modern and contemporary writers. Students will be expected to write three original short stories as well as to revise extensively in order to explore the full range of the story's potential. Applicable English Clusters: Creative Writing. Novels [H1ENG009], Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
Poetic Forms is a creative writing workshop dedicated to the practice and exploration of writing in form. Previous experience in writing in form and meter is not required, but previous coursework in creative writing is suggested. Open by instructor permission only and limited to fifteen students. Email instructor with a poetry sample of 3-5 pages. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]
From The New Yorker to the blogosphere, successful feature writers bridge the gap between news and commentary, shedding light on people, places, and perplexing issues. We'll study their methods and put them into practice as we write our own articles. Among the feature forms we'll explore: profiles, trend pieces, investigations, science and travel stories, and color pieces. Among our topics: finding and developing ideas; researching; interviewing and quoting effectively and ethically; achieving the right structure and tone; fact checking; revising and pruning; and getting published. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
Prepares sophomores, juniors, and seniors enrolled in five-year programs, from the humanities, sciences, and the social sciences for work as writing fellows. Course design facilitates the development of a strong, intuitive writer and speaker in order to become a successful reader, listener, and responder in peer-tutoring situations. Ample writing and rewriting experiences, practice in informal and formal speaking, and the critical reading of published essays and student work enhance students' ability to become conscious, flexible communicators. Before tutoring on their own, students observe writing fellows and writing center consultants conduct tutoring sessions. On completion of the course with a B or better, fellows should be prepared to accept their own hours as peer tutors.
Presidential Rhetoric, taught by former presidential speechwriter Curt Smith, helps students critically examine the public rhetoric and themes of the modern American presidency. Particular attention will be given to the symbolic nature of the office, focusing on the ability of twentieth-century presidents to communicate via a variety of forums, including the press conference, inaugural and acceptance speeches, political speech, and prime-time television address. Smith will draw on many of his experiences in Washington and with ESPN/ABC Television to link the most powerful office in the world and today's dominant medium. Applicable English Cluster: Language, Media, and Communication [H1ENG016]
This course will introduce students to the theoretical backgrounds, practical challenges, and creative activity of literary translation. We will survey appropriate theories of language and communication including semiotics, post-structuralism, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. We will consider varied and conflicting descriptions by translators of what it is they believe they are doing and what they hope to accomplish by doing it; and we will study specific translations into English from a variety of sources in order to investigate the strategies and choices translators make and the implication of those choices for our developing sense of what kinds of texts translations actually are. Finally, students will, in consultation with the instructor or with another qualified faculty member, undertake exercises in translation of their own. By the end of this class each student should have a working knowledge of both the critical backgrounds and the artistic potentials of translation.
Each student in Plays in Production participates fully in the exciting behind-the-scenes world of theatrical production. Students build sets, create and make props and costumes, hang and rig lighting and sound equipment, and create and distribute publicity materials for the plays currently in production in Todd Theater. The class comprises a once-weekly lecture and a series of practical labs. This 4-credit course meets for the entire semester. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
Plays in Performance is a class made up of actors, assistant directors, and stage managers working on the current production in Todd Theater. Actors are cast after auditioning at the beginning of each semester. Students wishing to stage manage should approach the director of the production either at the time of auditions or before the beginning of the play's rehearsal process. Although there is no written component for this course (the performance of the play constitutes a final "exam"), a significant time commitment is required of actors and stage managers, both on weekday nights and over weekends. This class meets during the first half of the semester. Permission of instructor required. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
Plays in Performance is a class made up of actors, assistant directors, and stage managers working on the current production in Todd Theater. Actors are cast after auditioning at the beginning of each semester. Students wishing to stage manage should approach the director of the production either at the time of auditions or before the beginning of the play's rehearsal process. Although there is no written component for this course (the performance of the play constitutes a final "exam"), a significant time commitment is required of actors and stage managers, both on weekday nights and over weekends. This class meets during the second half of the semester. Permission of instructor required. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
Students in Stage Management I and/or II (fall/spring) will get an in-depth introduction to and immersion in stage managing a theatrical production. In addition to class work covering all areas of management skills, safety procedures, technical knowledge, and paperwork, students will be expected to serve as an assistant stage manager or production stage manager on one (or both) Theater Program productions in their registered semester. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
This is an independently designed course, focusing on specific theater or theater-related projects, and demanding significant skill application or acquisition, independent and self-motivated research, including advanced written work, if appropriate. Topics may include elements of theater related to production, management, and/or design. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]
Once it was invented, television realized a desire to transmit and receive visions simultaneously across space and time. Beginning with a literary prehistory of this desire, we will focus largely on how literature and television converge and compete in the post-1945 era. What happens to the institution of literature after the TV industry takes hold? Can we see beyond adaptation as the relationship of TV to literature? How does TV become a metaphoric resource in post-1945 literature? How does that resource compare to televisual figurations before 1945? How are different generations of writers influenced by TV? What can TV do that literature cannot, and vice versa? Do social dynamics such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and age play a role in the fate of literature after TV? Possible writers include: Ruth Ozeki, Karen Tei Yamashita, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, Haruki Murakami, Jersy Kosinski, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Richard Price, Tom Carson, James Cain, and George Pelecanos.
An intensive study of the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century, with special attention to the variety of formal procedures that make the poems so thrilling (line, stanza, syntax, meter, rhyme, diction, figure, etc.). Some attention will also be paid to Yeats's plays and prose (autobiographical, critical, fictional) and to the various contexts (literary modernism, Anglo-Irish history) that Yeats's work engaged.
This seminar examines what film and television comedy can tell us about the social construction of gender and sexuality in American culture during different historical periods. Comedy is frequently rooted in modes of bodily performance and transgression, and offers a vital avenue for exploring ideologies of gender and sexuality as well as potential sites of subversion. Readings for the course will include foundational philosophical and theoretical examinations of laughter and comedy, including the work of Freud, Bergson, and Bakhtin, as well as critical essays on comedy, gender, and sexuality in film and television studies. Topics to be covered will include the male body in silent film and slapstick comedy, cross-dressing comedies, "gross-out" comedy and bodily transgression, homosociality in the "buddy film," gender in television sitcoms, etc. We may also discuss some stand-up comedy and read writings by comedians.
In this course we will consider some major critical statements that help define the imaginative act of critique in fields like literary and media studies. We will consider the emergence of theory in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the redefinition of art and the question of commodity, the work of Russian formalists and American New Critics, of the Frankfurt School and the Post-Structuralists, feminists and queer theorists, the emergence of "new" media and other questions. Topics will include aesthetic pleasure and hermeneutic desire, social constructionism and the nature of truth, intention and form, what we mean by textuality and what we mean by reading, the question of the political and the ethical as it relates (or fails to relate) to media and aesthetics. We will work with texts by Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Schlovsky, Adorno, Wellek, Warren, Derrida, Butler, Sedgwick and others. We will consider how these texts themselves constitute something of a critical tradition and how they differ among themselves. This course should be of interest and use to students in all tracks of the English Major.
A number of internships are available through the UR International Theatre Program. One of the most popular is our semester-long PR Internship. Theater PR Interns help create all publicity materials for events in Todd Theater or events sponsored by the Theater Program, including drafting press releases, planning marketing campaigns, etc. They distribute publicity materials both on and off campus. Finally, PR Interns staff the box office during productions, interacting with the public and the theater personnel. The PR Internship is an excellent way to get a hands-on introduction to all the basic elements of public relations and marketing. You'll also interact with artists, directors, journalists, and public relations professionals as part of the internship. Interns should have good writing skills and be willing to work creatively. Skills in graphic design are a plus.
Special application required and/or instructor's permission required.
