ENG 2004:   Exploring Fantasy Worlds: Escape or Encounter?  Fantasy fiction offers not only the pleasure of escape but also the challenge of recognizing how we could and would act in situations threatening our world, our values, and our lives.  Through exploring fantasy worlds created by Tolkien, Rowling, LeGuin, and others, we will examine the power of word magic to bring to life imaginary worlds that expand our thought, vision, and understanding of what heroism is.  Syllabus

                                 

Eng 2011: English I  English I studies a selection of masterpieces from the Dark and Middle Ages: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Morte d’Arthur, Piers Plowman, The Canterbury Tales, and early English drama.  Through these works we observe how individuals learn to live with God, their neighbors, and themselves as well as how women and the lower classes gain new importance.  Though many works will be read in translation, during the course the student will learn to read Middle English.  Syllabus

ENG 2020: English II  In an age of discovery, Renaissance writers explored the rewards and dangers of reaching into new areas of experience, of questioning the accepted social and moral order, of concentrating on their desires instead of God’s.  A selection of masterpieces by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Milton, and others reveals the possibilities and problems considered by sixteenth and seventeenth century writers.   Syllabus

ENG 2021: Shakespeare I   More advanced than Introduction to Shakespeare, this course will explore seven plays about lovers and rebels, young and old.  We will watch young men and women find their identities or forge new ones while they struggle to balance obligations to family, society, and self, and we will see older men and women struggle with the results of choices they have made.  We will explore Shakespeare’s dramatic art as well as his deep understanding of our humanity.  Students will write several short papers and watch many scenes on film.  Syllabus

ENG 2022: Shakespeare's Outsiders  Though interacting with others, in many of Shakespeare’s plays at least one important character remains an outsider, set apart by color, creed, social status, deformity, or age.  While society rejects him, the playwright does not.  Instead, Shakespeare gives him a context and a voice to explain his feelings and actions.  Sometimes he seems to us almost alien and monstrous, sometimes all too human, for Shakespeare asks us through looking at this outcast to recognize the outcast in ourselves.  Syllabus

ENG 2068:   Why Do We Read Literature, and How?  In this course we will explore how to analyze short stories, poems, and plays by looking at techniques for handling character, narrative point of view, plot, dramatic structure, imagery, symbolism, and theme.  Students will write several short papers.

ENG 3026: Shakespeare on Film  Through films or videotapes of Shakespeare’s plays, we will explore how productions illuminate, enhance, or distort the script and how the change of medium makes different effects possible or even necessary.  This course will examine interpretations of the text as well as foster awareness of dramatic and film technique.  Previous study of Shakespeare is very helpful.  This course counts as a major author course and may be used as an elective for the Film Concentration.  (Alternates every other year with ENG 2021: Shakespeare I)  Syllabus

ENW 3062: Advanced Writing and Research  This course treats writing a humanities research paper as an art as well as a science.  After refining basic techniques of organizing and integrating sources, we will study how style can make an argument seem more convincing, how structure affects response, how varying pace can make difficult material easier to grasp, how using good research well convinces the reader that the writer is an Authority.  Designed  for those with a solid grasp of the basics of writing with research, this course will focus on how to present both the writer's own ideas and borrowed material persuasively, using the tools of logic, psychology, and imagination. This course is offered in alternate years. Syllabus