Canisius College

ENG 151 Narratives of Service: Reflecting on Immersion Experiences
1 credit
Faculty: Dr. Rita Capezzi
Pre-requisite: completion of any international service experience prior to the start of the spring term
Many times when students return from international service immersion trips, they feel the desire to create written narratives documenting both what was rewarding and what was troubling about their experiences. The purpose of this course is to encourage and enable the reflection that can lead to accounts capturing the significance of international service for the individual involved, as well as for sharing with others. Through group discussion of our experiences, as well as relevant readings selected by the group, we help each other to put our experiences into words that can serve as personal statements, narratives for friends and family, or promotional materials for future trips or fundraising activities.

This course has been offered in Spring 2010 and 2011, following Dr. Capezzi’s service immersion trips to India. In both cases, students and faculty have prepared presentations for Ignatian Scholarship Day. Likely this course will follow a similar pattern.

Students and faculty will meet together once every two weeks at a mutually agreed upon time to discuss readings and preparation for writing service narratives.

ENG 205:  Varieties of the Essay
Dr. Thomas Reber
English major 200-level course, Writing Minor
Fulfills Core advanced writing Intensive attribute: non-majors are welcome.
This course will focus on the production of various kinds of essays by the students.  Readings will include models of essays focusing on personal issues, cultural issues, political issues, nature and the environment, and perhaps travel and food.  Much attention will be given to the writing style of both the model essays and the essays produced by the members of the class, but many other aspects of writing will be explored, including the situation and audience of the respective essays, as well as different methods of organizing texts.

Students will produce 4-5 polished essays, at least half of which will be written in stages, with a draft turned in for critiquing by the students and/or the instructor before the final version is produced.  In addition, homework assignments will probably include brief critical pieces (400-500 words or so) analyzing some of the model essays.  There will also be a final exam that will consist mostly or entirely of an essay or essays.

English 221: Hallowed Houses
Dr. Jennifer Desiderio
English Major 200-level course
Fulfills Core advanced writing intensive attribute
Fulfills Core diversity attribute
This class will focus on close reading and writing skills and will prepare students for the demands of 300-level course work. We will look at houses and domestic spaces and ask how their representations correspond with the historical moment. For instance, we will read Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893), a novel on the tenement houses in New York City. We will ask why Crane writes on such a topic and how he represents the immigrant dwellers who were often considered subhuman at the end of the nineteenth century.  Thus, our course will be interested in pursuing the connections between literature and history. Our class will center on Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and his ideas on the American home and its relation to nature and identity.  We will compare and contrast Thoreau’s idealism to a variety of American texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine urban and suburban dwellings, haunted houses, and the middle-class desire to own a house in texts by authors such as John Updike, Lorraine Hansberry, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. We will end the course by reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, a reflection on the contemporary immigrant’s relationship between homes in India and America.

ENG 222: Vampires in Literature and Culture
Dr. Rachel Greenberg
English major 200-level course
Fulfills Core advanced writing intensive attribute
Women’s Studies Course
This course will examine the image of the vampire in English and American literature over a broad historical period.  We will focus particularly on the vampire’s literary roots and traditions, as well as on the various cultural meanings we tend to associate with vampires and which continue to evolve.  Indeed, the vampire has proven to be an especially adaptable and therefore persistent figure in literature, television, and film, and thus, a reliable gauge of a range of cultural anxieties, ranging from deviant sexualities to xenophobia to HIV/AIDS, to name just a few. In reading the vampire through a range of cultural metaphors, the course will provide a partial history of the vampire in literature, while also considering the place of vampires in literature and culture today.

ENG 224: The Journey in Literature
Dr. Jean Gregorek
English major 200-level course
Fulfills Core advanced writing intensive attribute.  Fulfills Core global diversity attribute.
Traveller’s tales are as old as antiquity, and stories recounting epic adventures and magical journeys have long been staples of world literature.  Reading first-hand accounts of other peoples and places has long been a major vehicle for learning about the world, and certainly also a way in which we come to ponder our own values, customs, and ways of life.  This course will examine some important narratives of travel written in English.  We will study a number of traditions and tropes within travel writing, explore different relationships between travel writers and their subject matter, and take up questions of who gets to travel, for what purposes, and the material conditions of their journeys.  The study of travel writing overlaps with many related genres, and we will be considering examples of adventure tales, accounts of ‘slumming,’ hobo travels, immigrant narratives, women travellers, experimental novels, and road movies, as well as contemporary postcolonial critiques of travel writing.  Some authors we may be likely to read include Ernest Shackleton, Roger Cherry-Apsley, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, George Orwell, Jonathan Raban, Jon Kracauer, Bruce Chatwin, Amitav Ghosh, and W.G. Sebald.

ENG 294 A+B: Introduction to Creative Writing
Janet McNally
English major Writing course
Creative Writing major requirement
Creative Writing minor requirement
Fulfills Core advanced writing intensive attribute
This course will allow students to explore the fundamental skills of fiction and poetry writing, and is designed around the belief that one must read widely and closely in order to write well. This is an intensive writing course, meant for students who are dedicated readers and serious about the process of writing. We will examine the works of both established and emerging writers in hopes of discerning and emulating the qualities of good poetry and fiction. Frequent writing exercises will provide the opportunity to practice, to imitate, and to experiment. Class members will work together to create a welcoming and productive workshop, including extensive in-class discussion of both published writers and student work.

English 299 A: Introduction to English Studies
Dr. Rita Capezzi
Required of all English Majors.  Prerequisite: one 200-level English course.
ENG 299 is a gateway to 300-level courses and required of all English majors. This course introduces students to the essentials of literary analysis and interpretation. Focusing on the rigorous close reading of poetry, prose narrative and drama chosen from different historical periods, the course will stress writing with critical awareness about literature. Throughout the course as well, I will use framing pieces of critical theory to define specific strategies of close reading. Expect to participate actively in class discussion and to write four analytical essays, six to eight homework assignments, and a major revision for the final exam.

In this section of ENG 299, I have organized the course into four units. Three of the units address literary texts that have had a major impact on the history of literature, along with some critical texts that illuminate the meaning and significance of the literature. I arranged these units by the genres poetry, drama, and fiction. The texts this semester are William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, and William Shakespeare’s Othello.

The fourth unit considers contemporary writing by Aryn Kyle, one of the authors visiting through the Contemporary Writer’s Series. In connection with this text, we will address the kinds of secondary materials at our disposal and which can be best brought to bear on defining the meaning and significance of this work.

ENG 299 B: Introduction to English Studies
Dr. Amy Wolf
Required of all English Majors.  Prerequisite: one 200-level course or permission of instructor.
This course will balance close reading with more theoretical analysis and concentrate on three genres—drama, poetry, and prose narrative.  Texts will include critical editions of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a volume of contemporary poetry, and several works of literary criticism for each text.  We will develop a critical vocabulary and consider different ways to read and write about literature, and whether or not that vocabulary and those ways of reading change according to historical time and place, genre, and background.  How do we bring who we are to our reading of literary texts?  What does it mean to read “like an English major”?  How do we balance the qualities in a text—language, imagery, and symbols for example—to qualities outside a text—biography, history, culture, for example?  We will aim for depth over breadth, concentrating on just a few works but reading or re-reading them from different angles and from different critical perspectives.  Four essays, six to eight homework papers, and class discussion required.

ENG 306: Eighteenth-Century Literature
Dr. Amy Wolf
Pre-1800 British Literature or English major Elective.
Women Studies course
The eighteenth century in Britain has been called the Enlightenment, the Neoclassical Era, and the Age of Reason, but none of these labels completely captures the diversity of writing of the “long” eighteenth century, the period roughly from 1660 to 1800.  This period marked the emergence of the literary marketplace and women as professional writers.  It wasn’t unusual for a literary figure to write satire, newspaper articles, travel narratives, poetry, drama, and fiction.  More than anything else, this period is marked by dialogue, writers talking to each other and to the public through literature.  For this reason, the course will not be organized strictly chronologically, but rather in large thematic categories within which some of these conversations occurred.  We will look at poetry, prose, drama, and novels about the battle of the sexes, masquerade and transgression, race and colonialism, and the values associated with the city vs. the country, among other themes.  We will try to immerse ourselves in some of the battles—of wit, of literary prowess, of sexual politics, of satire and slander—with which the writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century were engaged.  Class attendance and participation are required, as are five homeworks, two essays, and a final examination. 

English 309: Modern British Literature
Dr. Jane Fisher
English major elective course.
Women’s Studies course
Our special focus this semester will be representations of the city in twentieth-century British literature.  The twentieth-century was the first time that the majority of British people lived in cities, and twentieth-century British writers struggled to find new symbols and literary forms to accurately reflect urban life.  We will focus on the special advantages for enrichment, community and engagement that urban life offered but also its vulnerabilities and disadvantages.  Course assignments include a number of portfolio essays, one oral research report, and a take home final exam.  Readings will be drawn from the list below.

Readings:  Wilde The Importance of  Being Earnest; Conrad, The Secret Agent; Eliot, The Wasteland; Joyce, The Dead”; Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Bowen, short stories; Isherwood, “I am a Camera,” Larkin, selected poems, Stoppard’s Travesties.

ENG 312: American Women Poets: Reading and Writing
Prof. S. Cookson
English major elective course or English major writing course.
Fulfills women writers requirement for English/Education majors,
Fulfills contemporary literature requirement for Creative Writing Majors,
Women’s Studies Course
This course was created as a hybrid critical/creative writing course. Students write both critical essays in response to the published poets the class is reading, and poems of their own in response to the published poets.  In the past I have used an anthology of contemporary American women poets; this time around I will use separate volumes by several twentieth century poets. These will likely include Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and Lucille Clifton. To this mix of American poets I may add an Irish poet, Eavan Boland, for a different perspective on a woman poet’s experience in our times. In addition to poems, readings may include some prose by these poets: for example, Plath’s journals and some essays by Boland. The writing assignments will still be the combination of critical and creative response described above. In addition to regular written and oral responses, students will also give an oral presentation and submit a portfolio of their poems as part of the course grade.

Texts proposed: The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath; The Journals of Sylvia Plath; The Gold Cell (poems), by Sharon Olds; Blessing the Boats (poems), by Lucille Clifton; An Origin like Water (poems), by Eavan Boland; Object Lessons (essays), by Eavan Boland.

ENG 318: Modern American Literature
Dr. Robert Butler
English major Elective
A survey of American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The course will focus on the works of major writers such as Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, E.E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Ralph Ellison, and Anne Tyler. Careful attention will be paid to major literary trends as they were shaped by important historical and cultural forces.

Topics will include the new woman and the new man as modern heroes, WWI and the American literary imagination, the development of the city and the rise of naturalism, the quest for self in post 1945 American drama, and the search for renewed community in contemporary literature.

The course satisfies English major elective credit but is open to students of all majors.

English 319L: The Novel Nation: The Rise of the American Novel, 1787-1900
Dr. Jennifer Desiderio
Pre-1900 American Literature or English major Elective
Fulfills Core diversity attribute
Women Studies course
This course will examine the rise of the American novel.  We will be looking at three historical moments in American literature: the postrevolutionary, antebellum, and postbellum eras. As a result, we will be learning the characteristics and vocabulary surrounding the American novel of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Realism. Because the first American novel appeared in the same year as the nation’s Constitution, we will look closely at the complex and compelling relationship between the novel and the nation.  We will approach the novel as the place where American authors worked out and displayed their hopes and fears for the young republic. We will examine how novels construct a national identity; negotiate questions regarding who should and should not rule; comment on the incorporation or exclusion of the non-English “other”; and create gendered rules for its new citizens. We will begin the class with post-revolutionary writers, like Hannah Webster Foster and Charles Brockden Brown. We will move into Romanticism with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, and Fanny Fern. And, we will conclude the class with Realist writers, such as Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin.

ENG 323: Shakespeare II
Dr. Lindsey Row-Heyveld
Satisfies Shakespeare Requirement
Attending one of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime would have been nothing like the experience we’re used to; there was no sitting on plush chairs in a hushed and darkened theater.  Instead, attending a play would have been much more like attending a football game: crowded and raucous, with all kinds of people and lots to distract you from the main event.  In this class we will be focusing our attention on that main event, reading Shakespeare’s plays closely, emphasizing their structure, language, and genre.  At the same time, we will also study how those plays were produced and published, consumed and circulated in early modern England, giving us a better understanding of how Shakespeare’s works migrated from the rowdy, bustling playhouses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London to the high class, high culture theaters of today.  We will spend most of our time studying the plays carefully and critically, in order to become familiar with reading (and speaking/performing!) Shakespeare’s dynamic language and narratives, but you can also expect to write about those plays regularly, as well as to complete at least one project focused on producing these dramas.

ENG 350:  The Theater Experience
Eileen Dugan
English Major Elective, Theater Minor
This is a course for anyone who has ever watched a play and wondered “how do they do that? And then wondered, “Could I do that???”  The course is designed to give students a “hands-on” look at work of theater professionals.  We’ll look at what each member of the theater team contributes, and how it all comes together in a cohesive performance.

We will attend plays, and meet with professional designers, directors, theater managers, and actors who will share their back stage insights and experiences.  Students will have the opportunity to work on their own projects in costume and sound design, acting, and directing.

(If you have taken Intro to Theater, this is a great follow up---and a chance to try your hand at some of the jobs we looked at in that course.  If not, this is a chance to find out what the theater professions entail, and to plunge right into the experience.) 

ENG 365: Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio
Dr. Jack D’Amico
Core Capstone and English major Elective course.
Using selected cantos from Dante’s Divine Comedy, primarily “Inferno,” we will review the four subject areas of the core.  Students will deliver oral reports, submit short summaries of those reports, and write a long reflection on the core curriculum which utilizes secondary sources.  The course will be structured as a seminar.

ENG 371B: Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson
Dr. Jack D’Amico
Pre-1800 British Literature or English major Elective.
The course will be structured around a comparative study of three English Renaissance plays on the related themes of money, greed and power:  Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Jonson’s Volpone; and three plays on magic or necromancy:  Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Jonson’s The Alchemist.  We will consider the various thematic connections between the plays, as well as major differences in genre, dramatic structure, and language.  Students will write on each of the plays and will take a comprehensive final exam.

ENG 381: Post-Colonial Literature
Dr. Jean Gregorek
English major Elective
This course introduces students to literature, film, and theoretical writing from areas of the globe that have recently emerged from European colonization.  Taking most of our examples from Caribbean fiction and Caribbean contributions to postcolonial theory, we will explore a number of important questions, including:  What does it mean to grow up under colonial rule?  What were the various forms of resistance to European colonialism?  What are some of the legacies of colonial rule and neo-colonial control, and how do these continue to shape the present and future of postcolonial societies?  How does the cultural production from these places tend to draw from--but shift the emphasis of--the traditional canon of European and American literature?  How does literature and film from the Caribbean offer new and important perspectives on issues of identity, hybridity, nationalism, race, class, community, feminism, sexuality, politics, justice, resistance to oppression?  Students will be expected to engage with both primary and secondary critical texts as we consider works by such authors as Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Fred D’Aguiar, Andrea Levy, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others.

ENG 382: African-American Literature
Shana Williams
English major Elective course
Fulfills Core diversity attribute
Though this course, as the name suggests, focuses on works of literature written by African-American authors, like any literature course, we will explore the complexities of human experience, behavior, and emotion. Of course, the main difference is that we will attempt to examine how the unique history of blacks in this country has created a social and collective identity that has, in turn, created an equally distinctive experience.  We will look closely at how the institution of slavery and the subsequent disenfranchisement experienced by blacks has shaped the worldview of these authors in very different ways.  While some authors paint a rather optimistic view of black potential and achievement, others offer a rather bleak look at the condition of blacks and the ability of African-Americans to escape such a condition.

Despite the variety of texts we will explore this semester, our ongoing project unifying all the texts will be a semester long “conversation” about the various themes that characterize black life, both in the past and presently.  We will look at sexuality within the black community, both heterosexuality and homosexuality (or more specifically, an attempt to escape heteronormative ideas), ideas of femininity and masculinity; the former will examine ideas of beauty and aesthetics in the black community (i.e. a preference for lighter skin, straight hair, and an overall desire to imitate white features as an admission of black female self-loathing and hatred), while the latter will examine male ideas of hypermasculinty that are arguably a result of the emasculation of slavery.  Additionally, we will examine the struggle for visibility in a white world, concepts of the Old Negro vs. New Negro, and ideas of freedom, confinement, and escape/triumph.

ENG 388: Literary Publishing
Dr. Mick Cochrane
English major Elective.
Creative Writing major course.
The theoretical component of the course will involve a study of the history of the literary magazine from the founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912 to the present time. We’ll attempt to understand both the function of the magazine as a literary force and the interaction of design and text. Readings will be supplemented by guest speakers—professional editors, publishers, designers, writers, and a bookseller—who will add their perspective. The practical component of the course will focus on editing The Quadrangle, the Canisius College literary and visual arts magazine. The work will include soliciting and selecting material, copy-editing and proofreading, design, layout, printing, publicity, and distribution. You do not have to take the course in order to work on the literary magazine, but you do have to work in a significant role on the magazine in order to take the course.

Prerequisite: ENG 294 (or ENG 394) or permission of instructor

ENG 389: Business Communication
Mark Hammer
English major writing course.
Fulfills Core advanced writing intensive attribute
ENG 389 addresses a wide variety of professional writing tasks that vary both in length and complexity.  Students begin by scripting a letter of introduction and resume.  Thereafter, students must complete a wide variety of assignments that range from writing for online consumption, field work interviews and research essays, writing professional business correspondence for a global audience, etc.  Students must also interact with industry professionals, apply for internships and have the opportunity to do community service work, as writing consultants, with various non-profit organizations in and around WNY.  The course is taught as a practical guide to professional communication and writing and is meant for students whose interests lie across the Canisius major curriculum.

ENG 391: Advanced Fiction Writing
Dr. Mick Cochrane
English major Writing course
Creative Writing major course
This is a fiction workshop for serious writers. The course will include close readings of literary texts, lots of writing and revising, peer critiques, and individual conferences. We’ll discuss various elements of the craft of fiction (dialogue, description, character development, plot, point of view) as well as the processes of revision and editing—all with an eye toward helping each student draw on his or her own unique experience, observation, language, and imagination in order to shape compelling fiction.

Prerequisite: ENG 294 (or ENG 394) or permission of instructor

ENG 396Q: English Honors Seminar: Innocents Abroad: Americans in London
Dr. E. Roger Stephenson
English Honors Seminar or English major Elective.
London is still very much THE primary destination for American travelers. We’re comfortable with our common language and what is—in some critical aspects—our common heritage. But we also see London (and Great Britain generally) as a place of history and culture in some ways very much richer, and more intimidating, than our own. From our earliest history, many important American writers have felt the same.  For them, too, England—and especially London and its environs—was a place where the writer and his/her craft were more often welcomed and appreciated than at home. England offered a very robust publishing community as well. For these reasons, many of our most influential writers have spent part of their careers “across the pond.”

This course will follow some of these “Pilgrims Returned” as they repair to England. We’ll examine their responses to the more dense cultural and artistic environment of the Motherland. And we’ll explore how this environment impacted their artistic development in terms of subjects, visions, and modes of expression.

We’ll look at works by Franklin, Irving, J.R. Lowell, Hawthorne, B. Taylor, James, Fredric, Crane, Frost, Eliot, H.D., and Amy Lowell. Our concern will be with fiction and poetry primarily, though we’ll look to journals (“notebooks”) and letters, too.

ENG 401: Texts, Contexts, and Subtexts
Dr. Thomas Reber
English major Writing course
Requiredcourse for the Writing Minor
Fulfills advanced writing intensive attribute
We will study a variety of texts, ranging from poems to advertising to movies to conversation.  As we analyze these texts, we will consider not just how they are put together linguistically but why they come into being and how they are received.  Our work will thus be partly linguistic and partly cultural—we'll view texts both as objects comprised of language and as cultural artifacts with particular meanings for their audience. 

To help us to understand these texts, we will study:
• the metaphors they display,
• the issues of gender and language they raise,
• the power relationships they imply.

Probable Assignments:
• a paper analyzing metaphors
• a transcript and analysis of a real conversation you will have audio-taped
• a small-group presentation on a critical approach to texts
• short papers or journal entries of your comments on the course readings  or discussions
• a final exam (essay)

Probable Texts
Tannen, Deborah.  You Just Don’t Understand:  Women and Men in Conversation.
Brummett, Barry.  Rhetoric  in Popular Culture.

ENG 426: Advanced Playwriting
Kurt Schneiderman
English major Writing course or English major elective
Creative Writing major course
Fulfills Core advanced writing intensive attribute
Enhance the playwright within!  This course builds on the lessons learned in Playwriting 411 and takes students the next step of the way on the journey to developing a full-length original play. Studying classic works such as Strindberg's Miss Julie and Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, to more modern works such as Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross in addition to attending and analyzing local theatrical productions, Advanced Playwriting provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the structure of modern plays and a step-by-step approach to the development of original dramatic works.
 
ENG 490: Creative Writing Senior Capstone
Janet McNally
The goal of this course is to teach students to do all the things that working writers d prepare, submit, and present work consistent with professional standards; understand and articulate how their work fits into larger literary traditions; and show a practical knowledge of the particular professional lives of writers, what they do and how they prepare themselves to do that work. In this course, students will produce a polished, accomplished portfolio of creative work in a genre of their choice; they will research markets for their work and prepare their own professional-quality submissions; and they will also learn to present their work publicly, concentrating on the selection and delivery of their creative work for a live audience, and as part of the course, participate in a formal, public reading. They will, in addition, prepare an artistic statement, reflecting on their influences, aesthetic values, and goals as writers, and, finally, research and explore career options and opportunities.

Prerequisite: Senior Standing, ENG 294 (or ENG 394) or permission of instructor