Johnston Visiting Professor:
Adjunct Faculty:
The courses in English provide opportunity for the extensive and intensive study of literature for its aesthetic interest and value and for its historical and general cultural significance.
The English major: A minimum of 36 credits selected to include the following:
No more than 12 credits earned in off-campus programs, transfer credits, credits from courses offered by other Whitman departments, or cross-listed courses may be used to satisfy major requirements. Courses used to satisfy requirements in other majors or minors cannot also be used to satisfy requirements in the English major or minor.
Courses taken P-D-F may not be used to satisfy course and credit requirements for the major.
The English department strongly recommends at least two years of a foreign language, especially for students planning to attend graduate school.
The English minor: A minimum of 20 credits selected so as to include the following:
Courses taken P-D-F may not be used to satisfy course and credit requirements for the minor.
Distribution: Courses in English (except 150, 250, 251, 310, 320, 321, 322, and 389 which apply to fine arts) apply to the humanities distribution area and alternative voices as indicated.
110 Language and Writing
4, 4 Fall: Hashimoto, McGovern, Terry
Spring: Terry, Staff
A course designed to examine the nature and function of language and rhetoric and to provide extensive writing experience for students. This course does not apply toward English major requirements or major grade average. Open only to first-year students.
150 Introductory Creative Writing
4, 4 Elliott, Roberts
The writing of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Experience not necessary, but students should expect to complete weekly exercises, share work aloud, and write responses for peers. In addition, extensive reading and analysis of pieces by established writers in a variety of literary forms.
177 Introduction to Poetry
x, 4 Roberts
The forms, strategies, voices, and visions of British and American poetry from the Middle Ages to the present day.
178 Introduction to Fiction
4, 4 Fall: Leise; Spring: Leise, McGovern
The principal aims and techniques of fiction through the study of traditional and experimental novels, short stories, and novellas. Work by such authors as Dickens, the Brontës, Conrad, Chekhov, Faulkner, Hemingway, Kafka, Crane, Malamud, Bellow, Gallagher, Paley, and Barth may be included.
179 Introduction to Drama
4; not offered 2009-10
The study of the forms and techniques of drama; the study of plays as literary texts and as scripts for production, including plays from antiquity to the present.
181, 182 Introduction to Literature and the Humanities
4
The study of selected works in major forms of thought and expression in literature and the humanities. Subjects for the sections change from semester to semester and year by year depending on the particular interests of the instructors. The current offerings follow.
181A: Introduction to Native American Literature: Storytelling as Survivance and Escape
4, x McGovern
This course explores how Native storytellers express their struggle not only to survive, but to thrive — what Vizenor calls “survivance.” The course will begin with trickster stories and creation myths from the Cherokee, Sioux, and Salish cultures; then we will discuss how Native authors revise ancient mythologies and invent stories for future generations. While Native authors and characters tell stories to escape from a history of injustice, storytelling also creates a sense of continuity between the past and the present. Authors include Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), Bell (Cherokee), Johnson (Mohawk), Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee), Mourning Dove (Okanogan/Colville), Silko (Laguna), and Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Dakota). Readings include Living Stories of the Cherokee (ed. Duncan) and essays by King (Cherokee) and Sarris (Miwok-Pomo). We will view Eyre’s film Smoke Signals. Distribution area: humanities or alternative voices.
182A: Introduction to Native American Literature: or, How to Read the Great American Indian Novel
x, 4 McGovern
In his poem “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,” Sherman Alexie uses ironic humor to describe the elements of a stereotypical American Indian novel — but the genre is not so easy to define. From Pulitzer Prize winner House Made of Dawn to acclaimed works such as Ceremony and Tracks, these novels form a canon of Native literature — while American Book Award winners Reservation Blues and Shell Shaker extend the definition of great indigenous writing. We will discover that the great American Indian novel remains a work in progress. Authors include Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), Howe (Choctaw), McNickle (Métis Cree/Salish), Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee), Mourning Dove (Okanogan/Colville), and Silko (Laguna). We will view Alexie’s film The Business of Fancydancing. Distribution area: humanities or alternative voices.
182B: The Witches of Salem: Contexts, Reactions, and Representations
x, 4 Leise
The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692 occupy a singular place in the history of colonial New England. This course will examine the legacy of an event whose proximate causes may have been unique to its time, but which has become a parable of distrust repeated time and again in U.S. history. We will examine the religious and scientific beliefs of the Puritan colonies of New England, including accounts of witchcraft that may have fed the paranoia of Salem Village. We will then look to the trial transcripts themselves, as well as recent historical research. Finally, we will consider literary representations of the Salem Trials, including those of Whittier, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Arthur Miller, Maryse Condé, Nicole Cooley, and Kathleen Kent.
210 Expository Writing
4, 4 Hashimoto, Scribner
A writing course for students who have mastered the skills and insights basic to competent writing but wish to develop their skills in expository prose and increase their awareness of the possibilities of language. Prerequisite: sophomore or above. First-year students by consent.
250 Intermediate Creative Writing-Fiction
4, x Elliott
An intermediate workshop in fiction writing offering students the opportunity to expand their knowledge of fundamental techniques and important works in the genre. Students will write original short stories and experiment with strategies and structures through exercises meant to increase their awareness of, and proficiency in, the elements of fiction. Extensive analysis of peer work and important established models in the genre. Weekly assignments in reading and writing to develop critical and creative faculties. Final portfolio of creative and critical work. Prerequisite: English 150 or 220 or consent of instructor.
251 Intermediate Creative Writing-Poetry
4, x Roberts
An intermediate workshop in poetry writing, intended to expand knowledge of fundamental techniques, and to familiarize students with many important writers in the genre. Students will have the opportunity to write and revise poems based on prompts as well as on their own. There will be weekly reading and journal exercises, and extensive analysis of peer work and established models to develop critical and creative faculties. Final portfolio of creative and critical work. Prerequisite: English 150 or 220 or consent of instructor.
290 Approaches to the Study of Literature
4, 4 Fall: Davidson, Leise
Spring: Alker, DiPasquale
A course in practical criticism designed to introduce students to some of the possible approaches that can be used in literary analysis. This course is required for those graduating in English. Not open to first-semester first-year students.
310 Advanced Composition
x, 4 Hashimoto
An advanced expository writing course for students serious about developing an effective, personal style and the insights necessary to analyze and evaluate it. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
320 Advanced Creative Writing–Fiction
x, 4 Elliott
An intensive advanced workshop in fiction. Students will continue to develop their proficiency in fiction writing by reading deeply and analyzing established models, completing exercises, producing drafts of original stories and revisions, participating in discussions of peer work, and giving presentations based on close readings. Final portfolio of creative and critical work which may include some consideration of where the student’s work fits into a fiction-writing tradition. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor and English 250 or equivalent.
321 Advanced Creative Writing-Poetry
x, 4 Roberts
An intensive advanced workshop in poetry. Students will have the opportunity to develop proficiency in poetry writing by completing exercises, producing drafts and revisions of poems for peer discussions, reading deeply and analyzing established models, and actively participating in rigorous and constructively critical discussions. Weekly poem assignments, as well as reading and journal exercises. Final portfolio of creative and critical work. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor and English 251 or equivalent.
322 Advanced Creative Writing-Nonfiction
4; not offered 2009-10
An intensive advanced workshop in “the fourth genre,” creative nonfiction. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with form, to address a range of subjects in weekly creative nonfiction pieces, and to read deeply and analyze established models as well as peer work to develop important critical faculties. Students will be expected to participate actively in rigorous, constructively critical discussions. Weekly exercises, as well as reading and journal assignments. Final portfolio of creative and critical work. Prerequisite: consent of instructor and English 250, 251, or equivalent.
336-341 Studies in British Literature
4
Courses designed to introduce students to the literature and culture of England in each of six literary periods: the Middle Ages (English 336), the Renaissance (English 337), the Restoration and 18th Century (English 338), the Romantic Period (English 339), the Victorian Period (English 340) and 1900-Present (English 341). The specific focus of each course will vary from year to year. Topics in a particular literary period may be taken a total of two times, but only one may count toward the fulfillment of the period course requirement. A second topic taken in a particular literary period may count toward the elective requirement.
336A ST: Medieval Literature: Death and Desire in Epic and Romance
4, x Davidson
Centuries before Romeo and Juliet, the Middle Ages developed the literary genre of passionate, sexual love and noble death known as romance. This literary genre was reintroduced to England after the Norman invasion, but Anglo-Saxon culture had already developed its own literature of glorious death — epic. This course will trace the parallel developments of Anglo-Saxon epic and British romance, and their conflicting and hybrid creation of narrative.
337A ST: Studies in Renaissance Literature: Love, Sex, and Power in Tudor England
x, 4 DiPasquale
Henry VIII’s England was shaped in no small part by the sometimes sordid story of the king’s amours. The England of his daughter Elizabeth tied its identity as a sovereign island realm to the inviolate virginity of a queen forever wooed and never possessed. Not surprisingly, love, desire, gender roles, and the power-dynamics of sexual relationships were major themes in Tudor literature and helped to define some of its most important genres: Petrarchan sonnet, Ovidian elegy, erotic epyllion, romantic comedy, domestic tragedy, and romance epic. We will read poems, plays, and prose by such writers as Henry VIII, Wyatt, Elizabeth I, Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Heywood.
338A ST: Restoration and Eighteenth- Century British Literature: British Drama
x, 4 Alker
The theatre was at the center of public taste in 18th-century London, but it could also be dangerously subversive. This course will examine 18th-century drama as it reflects, and responds to, its contentious historical context. We will explore such topics as the drama’s response to the English Revolution, the sharp edginess of social comedy, the use of political drama to critique governmental authority, the surprising adaptations of Shakespearean drama, and the emergence of an English operatic form. Writers may include Behn, Congreve, Dryden, Cavendish, Addison, Gay, Lillo, Goldsmith, Home, and Sheridan.
339A ST: Romantic Literature: Romantic Poetry
x, 4 Alker
This class will explore the reconstruction of poetic genres by the major Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron) in response to literary, cultural, and political revolutions. After analyzing the way their poetry and poetic theories interact with and resist the works of their literary predecessors, we will contrast their work with the poetry of contemporaries. This may include emerging working-class poetry; regional poetry; the work of women writers; abolitionist poetry; and antiquarian and gothic poetry.
341A ST: British Literature, 1900–the Present: Modernist Deviance and its Legacies
4, x Majumdar
As modernism offers several shocks to aesthetic conventions, it also revises moral orthodoxy. We will consider literary revisions of different kinds of propriety, while studying various factors that provoked the condemnation of modernist texts as dangerous or ethically “deviant.” Further, the class will trace the legacies of modernist deviance in contemporary art. Writers may include Joyce, Loy, T. S. Eliot, Woolf, Hamilton, Carter, McEwan, Duffy, and Nichols. We will also study films by Gilliam and Frears, as well as excerpts from British popular music.
347 American Literature to 1865
4, x N. Knight
A study of major authors in the American literary tradition from the Colonial period to the Civil War, with emphasis on the writers of the American Renaissance. Topics may include the development of a sense of “American” literature, the growing emphasis on the individual, the importance of nature, the individual’s relation to society, ideas of freedom versus slavery, and changing notions of rights. Authors covered may include John Winthrop, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.
348 American Literature, 1865 to 1914
4, x N. Knight
A study of major authors in the American literary tradition from the Civil War to World War I. Topics may include the reaction to “romanticism”; the development of “realism” and “naturalism”; the problem of using such labels; concerns about the effect of social change on the individual; and the emergence of diverse regional, racial, ethnic, and gendered voices. Authors covered may include Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, Zitkala Ša, Sui Sin Far, Abraham Cahan, E. A. Robinson, and Robert Frost.
349 American Literature, 1914 to the Present
x, 4 Leise
A study of the major authors in the American literary tradition from World War I to the present. Topics may include modernism; postmodernism; the role of the writer in a changing society; tensions of race, class, and gender; and versions of community in contemporary American culture. Authors may include T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, Thomas Pynchon, and other contemporary writers.
350 Chaucer
x, 4 Davidson
Reading, discussion, and lectures on The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and some of the minor poems. They will be read in the original Middle English. Offered in alternate years.
351, 352 Shakespeare
4, 4 DiPasquale
Fall semester: A study of the major plays written before about 1601. Plays to be read and discussed will include The Comedy of Errors; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Richard II; Henry IV, 1 and 2; The Merchant of Venice; Julius Caesar; Much Ado About Nothing; and Twelfth Night. Spring semester: A study of the sonnets and the major plays written after about 1601. Plays to be read and discussed will include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
357 Milton
4; not offered 2009-10
A study of the major poetry and selected prose of John Milton. Paradise Lost will receive primary emphasis. Offered in alternate years.
367-369 Special Authors
4
An intensive study of one significant author such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Ben Jonson, Henry James, Emily Dickinson.
371 Dramatic Literature: Medieval through
Eighteenth Century
4, x N. Simon
A course in the history and development of Western drama from the Middle Ages through the 18th century. Dramatists to be studied may include the Wakefield Master, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Lope de Vega, Molière, Racine, Congreve, Beaumarchais, and Sheridan. May be elected as World Literature 371 or Theatre 371. Offered in alternate years.
372 Literature of the Modern Theatre
x, 4 N. Simon
A study of the directions modern drama has taken from the 19th century to the present. Dramatists to be studied may include Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, O’Neill, Brecht, and Pinter. May be elected as World Literature 372 or Theatre 372. Offered in alternate years.
375 Literary Theory
4; not offered 2009-10
This course introduces students to arguments about the shaping, the effects, and the interpretation of literature. Themes for the course will vary, but among the questions we will consistently examine are the following: Through what kinds of assumptions is literature read? How do characters in literary texts themselves read? How do these texts interpret what they represent? We will devote approximately equal time to the study of theoretical texts and to reading literary works through theoretical lenses. Writers may include Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Pater, Foucault, Derrida, Said, and Deleuze. Offered in alternate years.
376 Colonial and Anti-Colonial Literature
4; not offered 2009-10
This course will examine texts from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Australia. We will study how these works negotiate the past and present, and how they explore multiple forms and conditions of colonialism and postcolonialism. Discussions of primary works will be supplemented with readings from theoretical and critical texts. Writers may include Kipling, Tagore, Conrad, Manto, Emecheta, Carey, Gordimer, and Rushdie. Offered in alternate years.
387 Special Studies
4
Studies of English or American literature and language generally not considered in other courses offered by the department. The specific material will vary from semester to semester. The current offerings follow.
387A ST: American Literature after the American Century
4, x Leise
This course will look at American literature after the close of the 20th century, at a time of radical transformation of American life. We are post-Cold War; post-9/11; even post-human. So are we still postmodern? If we’re post-everything, where have we arrived? Short-story and novel writers may include Don DeLillo, Junot Díaz, Percival Everett, William Gibson, Paul LaFarge, Shelley Jackson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Marcus, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders; poets, possibly Elizabeth Alexander, Nathaniel Mackey, Kay Ryan, and Natasha Trethewey.
387B ST: Holding Hands Across the Generations: Kinship in Native American Literature
4, x McGovern
This course focuses on representations of kinship, a web of relations that is essential to Native American cultures. We will explore artistic genres as diverse as the members of a family, including autobiography, drama, ethnography, fiction, photography, and poetry. Native authors depict families that confront crises, but still survive from one generation to the next. Through their depictions of complicated relationships, Native authors create bonds that are stronger than blood which can reach across the generations. Authors include Deloria (Yankton Nakota), Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), Harjo (Muscogee/Cherokee), Highway (Cree), Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee), Silko (Laguna), and Tapahonso (Navajo). Readings include essays by Owens (Cherokee/Choctaw) and Revard (Osage) as well as excerpts from Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 by Child (Red Lake Ojibwe). We will view Redroad’s film The Doe Boy. Distribution area: humanities or alternative voices.
387A ST: Visual Adaptations of Written Texts: Homage, Betrayal, or Something Completely Different
x, 4 Davidson
Visual and written texts engage us on different intellectual and imaginative levels, so that the experience of one is seldom comparable to the experience of the other, even when both profess to portray the same subject-matter. Generic demands merge with the interpretive decisions implicit in every act of translation, and this is highlighted in particular when a text refers to itself as an “adaptation” of an “original.” Indeed, terms like “originality,” “historicity,” and “authenticity” are all called into question by multiple narrative versions. This course will examine a series of related written and visual texts, including fairy tales, myths, short stories, novels, plays, autobiography, and creative non-fiction adapted as film and television. Texts will include versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Grail Narratives, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and others.
387B ST: Captive Indians: Retelling the Indian Captivity Narrative
x, 4 McGovern
This course considers how Native authors reversed Anglo literary conventions of captor and captive to re-imagine narratives of Anglo-Native conflict from indigenous perspectives. By reading literary accounts of historical events such as the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, this course focuses on the “Other” side of American history. Whether they were taken hostage as prisoners of war, carried away to boarding schools, or bound by American laws and treaties, Native peoples spoke out against their captors and continue to raise their voices today. Authors include Black Elk (Oglala Lakota), Black Hawk (Sauk), Eastman (Santee Sioux), Geronimo (Apache), Highway (Cree), Ortiz (Acoma), Tapahonso (Navajo), Yellow Wolf (Nez Perce), and Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Dakota). We will read selections from wiyáxayxt/wiyáakaa’awn/as days go by (ed. Karson) and essays from Boarding School Blues (Trafzer and Keller, eds.). We will view the documentaries Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School and Two Rivers: A Native American Reconciliation. Distribution area: humanities or alternative voices.
389 Special Studies in Craft
4
Studies of literary craft not considered in other courses offered by the department, intended for upper-level creative writing students. Active participation in rigorous discussions and intensive workshops expected. Final portfolios of creative and critical works. Specific material will vary from semester to semester. The distribution area is fine arts. Prerequisites: Consent and 250, 251, or equivalent.
389 ST: Hybrids: Organic Form and Literary Invention
4, x Roberts
One provocative aspect of genre-distinctions is how they might be blurred to create original expressive forms. Through time, writers have cross-pollinated, grafted, and espaliered: lyric with memoir, narrative with traditional meters, graphics with novels, meditations with travelogues, etc. to create a garden of delights: prose poems, pillow books, drabbles, lyric essays, nanofictions, epistles, and even blogs, to name a few. In an era of ever-increasing hybridity, we’ll explore together various published works by authors who’ve employed organic and invented forms to express themselves in striking manners. And we’ll try our hand at writing/inventing some, too. Though we won’t focus on theory, we may consider at times what sorts of situations could compel writers to let ideas bloom in distinctive ways. Authors may include: Seth, Winterson, D’Agata, Purpura, Viramontes, Young, Barry, Kundera, Shonagon, Rilke, and Stein.
401, 402 Independent Study
1-4, 1-4 Staff
Directed reading and the preparation of a critical paper or papers on topics suggested by the student. The project must be approved by the staff of the department. Thus, the student is expected to submit a written proposal to the intended director of the project prior to registration for the study. The number of students accepted for the work will depend on the availability of the staff. Independent Study may not count as one of the electives fulfilling minimum requirements for the major or minor without prior written approval of the English department. Prerequisite: consent of the instructor.
491 Seminars in English and American Literature
4
Seminars require a substantial amount of writing, a major written project of at least 15 pages involving research in secondary sources, and oral presentations. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Open to junior and senior English majors only. Prerequisite: English 290.
491A The Poetics of Place
4, x DiPasquale
What is a place? How do we define the spaces and places in which we live or delineate the boundaries of particular geographical, architectural, and literary spaces? How are human beings defined by the places they inhabit or inscribe? In pursuit of diverse literary responses to these questions, we will read a series of Renaissance country house poems, Kenneth Grahame’s early 20th-century children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, and Derek Walcott’s monumental postcolonial epic Omeros, along with a variety of theoretical texts on space-place theory.
491B American History, American Fiction
4, x N. Knight
Almost every “canonical” American author has written historical fiction. Why is this genre such a draw? What does an interest in historical fiction say about an author’s — and audience’s — relationship to an American past? Historical fiction can be nostalgic, corrective, dystopian, or even incomprehensible, depending on the author. Does fiction destroy history? The struggles between history and fiction, American ideologies and national identities, and past and present will be examined in this course. Authors may include James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Chesnutt, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and E.L. Doctorow.
491C Ulysses, Modernism, and Modernity
4, x Majumdar
This course studies James Joyce’s Ulysses as an important instance of modernity and modernism. Joyce’s extraordinary text provokes a reconsideration of the uniqueness of national literary traditions and national languages, and calls for a combinative, comparatist reading across linguistic, disciplinary, and geographical borders, all at once. We will examine Joyce’s writing as an insistently different form of expression and modernism’s foremost novelistic experiment. The class will require a rigorous reading of Ulysses, carried out against a backdrop of literary, political, historical, and theoretical considerations. Students will acquire a sophisticated entry into Ulysses, while simultaneously becoming acquainted with prominent issues of modernism. Joyce’s text is clearly aware of, and active in, the traditions that modernism transforms. While addressing how this reconstitution takes place, the class will discuss how Joyce addresses modernity itself. Further, it will study the political strategies of the novel for Joyce’s claims as a postcolonial writer.
497 Thesis
4, 4 Staff
Designed to further independent research projects leading to the preparation of an undergraduate thesis. The creative thesis, an option for a student of exceptional ability in creative writing, will be a substantial, accomplished collection of work in a particular genre. Limited to, but not required of, senior English majors. Prerequisite: approval of a proposal submitted to the English department prior to registration by a date designated by the department. For full details, see the English Department Handbook.
498 Honors Thesis
4, 4 Staff
Designed to further independent critical and creative research projects leading to the preparation of an undergraduate thesis. The creative thesis, an option for a student of exceptional ability in creative writing, will be a substantial, accomplished collection of work in a particular genre. Required of and limited to senior honors candidates in English. The candidate will be assigned to an appropriate thesis adviser, depending upon his or her field of interest. Prerequisite: admission to honors candidacy and approval of a proposal submitted to the English department prior to registration by a date designated by the department. For full details, see the English Department Handbook.
© Whitman College | 345 Boyer Ave. Walla Walla, WA 99362 | Contact us