This course introduces students to some of the most significant literature from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern literary periods. Beginning with the outbreak of the French Revolution and ending with World War I, the years covered by this course represent a time of dramatic political, economic, and cultural change. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of industrialism, rapid imperialist expansion, religious crisis, increasing democracy, and shifts in gender and class identity. In exploring this tumultuous time period, the course will focus on an array of novelists, poets, and essayists who will serve as touchstones for the key political, intellectual, and aesthetic problems of their times (e.g. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Dickens, G. Eliot, Browning, J. S. Mill, Arnold, Ruskin, Yeats, and Woolf). Students will not only gain a greater appreciation for individual authors, but they will also be able to situate them within a larger framework of ideas and historical currents.

Survey of American literature in English from its origins in colonial British America to the late-nineteenth-century U.S. We begin with the fascinating diversity of colonial writing (explorers' accounts, sermons, captivity narratives, religious poetry) and end with the canon of “classic American literature” in the second half of the nineteenth century (prose narratives, novels, lyrics). Alongside this process of literary development, we see British America gradually unified around a new national identity—one which must constantly shore itself up against the threat of fracturing under internal and external pressures. Our focus will be the literary side of the story, but we’ll remain mindful of its relationships to that larger history. Authors will likely include John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman.

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 both 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.

Conducted in a workshop format, this course will introduce the young poet to the art of reading as a writer (both his or her work as well as the work of others) and the application of such discoveries into one's poetry. Essential elements of poetic craft will be explored and practiced through weekly reading and writing assignments. Permission of instructor required. Please submit 3-5 poems to the instructor (email: jennifer.grotz@rochester.edu) before the first class since space is limited. Applicable English Clusters: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics; Creative Writing.

A course devoted to the understanding and execution of dramatic writing that is unique to the theater. Students will analyze and discuss selected readings while writing an original one-act play to be completed by the end of the semester. Meets during one half of the semester only. Contact the Theater Program at 275-4959 for details. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing

The study and practice of longer, more complicated newspaper and magazine stories, such as investigations and profiles. Emphasis will be on the consideration of the various techniques of non-fiction writing. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

Basic public speaking is the focus of this course. Emphasis is placed on researching speeches, using appropriate 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, a problem-solving address. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication. The course utilizes instructor Curt Smith's experience as a former White House presidential speechwriter.

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: Media, Culture, and Communication.

Students will build their knowledge of debate theory and practice through varsity level intercollegiate competition and research. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

The study and analysis of a few high-impact news stories. Through readings and interviews with the reporters and editors who worked on the story as well as interviews with the subjects of the stories, the class will gain an understanding of the issues involved in covering major news events.

An introduction to Technical Theater and Theater Technology: its materials, techniques and equipment. Focuses on the principles and practice of set construction; the nature and use of electricity; lighting and sound equipment; tools; production organization and management; and the importance of safety in all areas. Course will include both lecture and significant hands-on experience. Practical laboratory work in association with the productions of the International Theatre Program is included. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance.

Acting Techniques focuses on the student's ability to analyze texts from a performer's viewpoint; on heightening the actor's sensitivity to language; on developing the actor's physical and vocal technique; on building awareness of character and characterization; and on engaging and actively developing creativity and imagination. This is done by constant investigation, rehearsal, and presentation of assorted texts ranging from poetry to contemporary and classical scenes and monologues. No prior acting experience or classwork is required. Applicable English Cluster: Theater.

Voice and Movement for the Actor aims at helping all students (irrespective of their degree—or lack—of actor training or theatrical experience) explore the full range and expressiveness of their speaking voice, and expand their capabilities for expressive movement. The course explores the relationship between text and vocal expression, and provides the student with a descriptive system for understanding movement and meaning. Students analyze their own movement profiles as performers, creating characters through clear movement choices, and learn how to embody these characters fully through vocal technique and physicality. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production.

Chaucer is one of the wittiest, most insightful, and intellectually alert of all English poets. A marvelous craftsman and social commentator, he quite rightly deserves the accolade of "first" among modern writers. A master in the subtleties of cognition and philosophical voicing, he has amazed readers for six hundred years with his range of empirical, speculative, and observational psychology. We will study the basic works of Chaucer—his dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Canterbury Tales, with some background reading in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose. Emphasis will be put on the performative components of his writing and reading theory. Students will write two papers, do occasional in-class writing, and take a final examination. All Chaucer readings will be in Middle English. Class attendance is required.

The literature for this course, written mostly in Middle Welsh and Old Irish of the ninth to fifteenth centuries, will be taught in translation. We shall focus on two powerful myths—that of the euhemerized "goddess" (Aranrhod, Cerridwen, Morgana, Medb, the Morrigan, Rigantona) and her encounters with the knight, the male magician/poet, and the "warrior" (Arthur, Cuchulain, Finn, Gwydion, Pwyll). We will be looking at the Welsh "Mabinogion" for its insights into male and female relationships; at "The Tain" and the legend of Cuchulain, whose martial "warp-spasm" could only be cooled by vats of water and the sight of naked women; at the "Fianna," which tells of Finn and his mannerbund of misbehaving warrior-boys; at selected poems in Old Irish and Middle Welsh. Applicable English clusters: Medieval Studies; Gender and Writing. It will fulfill the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

A survey of English Renaissance writers, with an emphasis on poetry and fictional prose. The course will focus on major authors of the period (including Bacon, Deloney, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Lodge, Marlowe, Milton, More, Shakespeare, Sidney and Spenser) with some attention to other authors, both male and female, who influenced their writing. Renaissance writers and their audiences were trained to recognize a number of literary conventions that are not always familiar to modern readers. We become familiar with those conventions and spend quite a bit of time in careful analysis of style and form in order to appreciate why Renaissance audiences found these authors so compelling and to understand how their writing responded to readers' cultural, literary, political, and religious concerns. Please note that the English Department has defined this as a course in nondramatic Renaissance literature. The department also offers a number of regular courses (Renaissance Drama, Introduction to Shakespeare, Shakespeare) and elective courses for students interested in Renaissance drama. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the major.

This course will examine representations of “dissimulations” over a wide range of historical periods and literary genres. We will ask: how does role-playing (or secrecy, or tale-telling, or outright lying) inform personal identity? how do group delusions constitute or maintain social hierarchies? what are the connections between illusions, delusions, and literature? between literature and lies? Authors will include Orwell, Plato, Montaigne, Bacon, Wilde, Nabokov, and Shakespeare. (We will read at least four early modern texts so that you can use this course to satisfy your pre-1800 requirement.) Course requirements: attendance, exams, and two five-page papers.

What does it mean for fiction to offer a realistic portrayal of the world? This course will consider American literature from 1865 to 1914 with a special emphasis on the concept of literary realism. Focusing on prose fiction (novels and short stories), we will explore how American writers understood and represented "reality" during a time of social and cultural upheaval at home and abroad. The class will touch on formal concerns, including literary techniques for depicting interiority and urban environments, and will also examine realism in the context of changing ideas of labor, race, gender, and democracy. Several questions will motivate us: is it possible to portray reality objectively in fiction? Why did nineteenth-century American writers value objectivity over other literary possibilities? What makes realist novels such compelling reading? Our texts will include novels by Howells, James, Chopin, Wharton, Twain, Chesnutt, Crane, Dreiser, and Du Bois.

The course covers, in roughly chronological order, the history of the English novel in the twentieth century; we will read and discuss the works of such major figures as Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Greene, Huxley, etc. We will also examine some of the history of the novel, its protean and elastic shape, its reaction to the artistic experimentation of the time, the ways in which the modern novel reflects developments and innovation in the form, as well its traditional relationship to the social contexts from which it springs. Assignments: Two papers, occasional quizzes, a final examination.

The course will deal with some twentieth-century American and European (especially East European) poets in a manner that foregrounds the transfer of particular styles beyond the languages in which the poems were originally written. We will pair some names together and through that discuss how post-1945 poetry translations inspired or influenced the ways of writing and the ways of thinking about poetry, both in the USA and in Europe. Through close reading of poems written in English and translated into English we will also talk about how some of the local cultural contexts become part of the contemporary international tradition. The poems discussed will include work by C. P. Cavafy, Derek Mahon, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat, W. H. Auden, Miron Białoszewski, Wisława Szymborska, Miroslav Holub, Charles Reznikoff, John Cage, Bertolt Brecht, D. J. Enright, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery.

This is a course about how to read a poem. We will examine poetry's extreme uses of metaphor, its use of language that is by turns more raw, more plain, and more ambiguous than ordinary prose. We'll be thinking about the force of poetic gesture and poetic voice, about poetry's way of telling a story and its way of keeping secrets, about poetry's immense playfulness, its attention to particularly charged moments of passion and knowledge, and its way of animating the inanimate. We will look closely at the formal tools of lyric poetry—meter, rhyme, sound-shape, line—and the use of traditional genres such as riddle, ballad, hymn, ode, and elegy. Readings will concentrate on the work of a small group of poets, including William Shakespeare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. No prerequisites, no final exam. Applicable English cluster: Major Authors; Poems, Poetry, and Poetics.

Blending clear-eyed social commentary with a faith in romantic love, festooning mordant satire with enchantedly happy endings, Jane Austen's novels subsist on contradiction and enjoy more popularity than ever. This course will place Austen in the context of her times while also analyzing her continued appeal. Readings will include Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, as well as works by Alexander Pope, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley.

Toni Morrison has emerged as one of the most influential writers and critics in contemporary American culture. This course will approach her work from a broad range of critical perspectives including black feminist thought, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, biblical exegesis, postcolonial analysis, and critical race theory. Although this class will emphasize rigorous study of her literary work, we will also pay close attention to her contributions to literary criticism, her role in public life, as well as her forays into political and national debates. In our study of her novels, we will explore such issues as the importance of history and myth in the creation of personal identity, constructions of race and gender, the dynamic nature of love, the role of the community in social life, and the pressures related to the development of adolescent girls.

This course explores ways in which myth functions to create psychological and social identities within cultural frameworks. We will explore tales, graphics, musicals, opera, poetry, and cinema. The texts concentrate primarily on a constellation of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast adaptations, along with Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, and some of the Jack stories. Our concern will be with the action/adventure plots, paradigms of exile and return, and the ideologies underlying the dynamics of oppression, pain fetishes, aspiration, and recovery. We will examine didactic issues of childhood, adolescence, midolescence, and the aged as people use myth to address the requirements of life. We will be particularly interested in historical implication of perspectives as societies revise and perpetually revitalize their visions of themselves through the rewriting of their own mythologies.

Samuel Beckett is one of the most profound and influential voices in twentieth-century literature. He created worlds of immense fullness and desolation, extending the possibilities of drama and fiction while simultaneously stripping away the traditional narrative forms. This course will study Beckett's major works and then explore his influence, both thematically and stylistically, on such contemporary writers as J. M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Harold Pinter, Donald Barthelme, John Banville, Lydia Davis, and others.

Taking place for roughly two weeks in between semesters during the latter part of Christmas break, "Theatre in England" is an English class open to undergraduates in all disciplines and graduate students in English. This year's seminar meets between December 28, 2010, and January 9, 2011. Past students describe this course as "an incredible experience, unlike any other," "one of the best of my life," and "the richest exposure to contemporary theater imaginable in a two-week time frame." English 252/452 is conducted in London and Stratford-upon-Avon ("Shakespeare Country") in late December and early January, varying in dates slightly each year. Web site: http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/england/.

We will study the career of a highly regarded contemporary American director whose work, most of it of the more or less violent genres of horror, crime, and suspense, displays both a highly self-conscious experimentalism and an acknowledgement of film tradition. In the course we will attempt to discover those particular attributes that define a De Palma film. We will also discuss those directors who most influence his work, especially Alfred Hitchcock, and touch on some of the individual motion pictures that lie behind certain De Palma films. In this course we will screen a large selection of the director's films, in roughly chronological order, concentrating especially on the best known and most successful titles, including Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Body Double. The syllabus will include some of the literary texts that provide the sources for some of his films and at least one critical study of the De Palma canon. Assignments will include critical papers and a final examination.

This course examines diasporic Chinese media—including film, video games, and television—to better understand how these works participate in the dissemination, or globalization, of Chinese culture. Most of the class focuses on Chinese language films from the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC), Hong Kong (HK), and films from the U.S. that are set in China. We pay special attention to the migrations of individuals—actors, actresses, directors, cinematographers, and others—and of the films themselves. We cover a wide variety of cinematic genres, including epic, martial arts, action, thriller, comedy, and romantic drama. We will also play and analyze video games that use China as a setting. The broadcast of the Beijing Olympics will be one element of our television unit. Applicable English cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

Course examines the histories, presents, and futures of digital media, particularly video games, computer generated images (CGI), and the Internet (including convergences with the media of sound recording, radio, television, and film). One of the underlying concepts we will explore is the relationship between digital media and globalization. We will also investigate how communities are constructed and transformed by their participation in digital media. Some experience with media studies is helpful but not required. Students will write blogs, academic essays, and have the option of producing an audiovisual mashup or other digital creation in lieu of one written assignment.

The course aims to understand the social psychology of modern and contemporary Western/American family experience, and especially its means of abetting the concealment, repression, and suppression of people's emotional lives. Study of the films combines with the readings to develop critical understanding of the nuclear family (and versions of it) and the conditions it may create for child-rape, racism, homophobia, murder, and self-destructive behavior such as substance abuse, self-mutilation, and suicide. Sometimes the violence is arbitrary, sometimes it is inevitable, sometimes it is incomprehensible. In each case the course's attention is on the personal and collective machineries of repression, the resulting rage in many individuals, and the frequent (and now often familiar) violent results. Readings in the course include those by Nancy Chodorow, Alice Miller, Kristin Kelly, and Stephanie Coontz. Films are to be taken from the following list: A Price Above Rubies (1998), A Thousand Acres (1994), All My Sons (1948), American Beauty (1999), American History X (1999), Bastard out of Carolina (1996), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Dolores Claiborne (1995), Falling Down (1993), Fargo (1996), Fried Green Tomatoes (1992), Heavenly Creatures (1994), In the Bedroom (2001), Ju Dou (1991), Mildred Pierce (1945), Monster (2002), Monster's Ball (2001), Ordinary People (1980), Piano Teacher (2003), Mother and Child (2009), I Am Love (2010).

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.

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 Cluster: Creative Writing.

What makes David Sedaris funny? How about the likes of Tina Fey, Mark Twain, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Swift, Erma Bombeck, Lord Byron, Dave Chappelle, Dave Barry, and The Onion? In this course we’ll seek inspiration from some of the funniest people alive (and dead) while writing our own humor pieces. Students will have a chance to explore a variety of genres, from essays to memoirs to song parodies—and to share work by their own favorite humorists with the class.

Media ABC is an introduction to the very idea of medium and media—as in "the medium of print." The goal is to come to a basic understanding of that concept. The perspective of the course is historical and critical. The key assumption is that media—the human voice, film, electronic files—shape their "content" —words, pictures, sounds—and their authors and their audiences. There have always been media because life cannot be lived without them.

This year's topic is print—the dominant medium of communication for five centuries, its power and influence only now waning as we experience a digital revolution. This remarkable media shift puts us among the first explorers to arrive on the scene of epoch-making changes. We should take advantage of our own unique intellectual opportunity to look back on the history of print from the powerful new perspective of digital media.

Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

This course considers the issues raised in Walter Ong's 1982 study, "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word." His account related the growth of writing and print to the development of science and modern rational thought, exploring possible changes in collective consciousness as a result of the shift of media emphasis. We will examine some classical sources, including Plato's suspicion of the power of oral poetry, and consider the levels of literacy achieved in ancient society; we will also look at European medieval traditions. Central to these discussions will be the roles language and literature played in the lives of non-literate people as contrasted with literate. Study of the modern and contemporary periods focuses on such practices as conversation, becoming literate, collection of oral accounts and their uses, the uses of ethnographic writing, and the different approaches to speech, writing, and language in African American and white communities. A key aim of the course is to show the politics, mutual dependency, and reciprocity of oral and literate uses of language in literary and nonliterary contexts.

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 these 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: Media, Culture, and Communication.

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 Theatre. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater; Theater Production and Performance.

Day & Time: Evening and Weekend Rehearsals
Location: Todd Theatre
First Rehearsal: Tuesday, January 18
Last Performance: Saturday, April 30

For information on auditions and auditioning visit the auditions page of the Web site: http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/theatre/auditions.php.

Day & Time: Evening and Weekend Rehearsals
Location: Todd Theatre
First Rehearsal: Tuesday, January 18
Last Performance: Saturday, April 30

For information on auditions and auditioning visit the auditions page of the Web site: http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/theatre/auditions.php.

Students in Stage Management 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 Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater; Theater Production and Performance.

Day & Time: Evening and Weekend Rehearsals
Location: Todd Theatre
Entrance Prerequisites: by audition only

For information on auditions and auditioning visit the auditions page of the Web site: http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/theatre/auditions.php.

Please visit: http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/theatre/classes.php.

An advanced creative writing workshop in poetry. Students' poems will be discussed weekly. Creative writing assignments will be combined with brief essay responses to a selection of contemporary poetry books. A special emphasis on translation will also be included. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing.

Prerequisites: ENG 122 or equivalent work.
Permission of instructor required by submission of 3-5 poems.

The seminar will focus on Edmund Spenser's narrative poem The Faerie Queene, one of the most extravagantly imagined works of the English Renaissance. It is a work shaped around fables of questing knights and unfolding in a landscape that responds to the logic of dream—marked by encounters with enchanters and demons, monsters and seducers, places of magical refuge and secret danger. This playful and demanding work also probes the uses of imagination, the force of poetry, the nature of faith and reason, the authority of law, the truth of history, and the wildest shapes of human desire. Its poetic language offers stark lessons in the arts of interpretation, in seeing what is hidden and what is plain. The poem combines idealism about human virtue with the clear-eyed realism of Machiavelli's The Prince or Cervantes's Don Quixote, even Shakespeare. And there is in it an awareness of the mind's powers of constructing the world, of the arts of possibility, that is entirely its own.

In this seminar, we’ll do two things at once: read the works associated with the nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” and also read the great books of twentieth-century criticism that produce and defend this tradition. We alternate weeks between works of literature and criticism, in order to establish an interesting reciprocal dialogue between the two kinds of writing. Of criticism, we’ll ask: Which authors or works did critics value or devalue in order to make a “tradition”? What happens when we focus on the “literary” elements of critical prose? Of the literature: What features of form or content made certain works the harbingers of a cultural “rebirth”? Is there any sense in which these literary works do something like “criticism”—e.g., in thinking about their own value as fulfilling the call for a national aesthetic? Readings include literary works by Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and critical works by D.H. Lawrence, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, and Richard Poirier.

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 Theatre 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 professsionals 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.