Information found in this online edition of the 2008-09 catalog is unofficial and for informational purposes only. By authority of the dean of the College, some factual corrections to the printed version may appear here. The official document of record is the printed edition of the 2008-09 Catalog. For more information, please contact the Office of the Registrar.
English
Chair: Rishona Zimring
The Department of English acquaints students with a wide range of English and American literature from a variety of perspectives. The department teaches students to read literary texts and to write effectively and persuasively about literature and its relation to human experience. English courses also share the goal of helping students read, think, speak, and write critically.
The department has a strong commitment to the teaching of writing in its literature courses. In addition, courses in creative writing provide an opportunity for majors interested in writing poetry and fiction to develop their skills to an advanced level. Some of the creative writing courses also satisfy Lewis & Clark's creative arts requirement.
The Major Program
Students are encouraged to declare the major in the sophomore year. The department requires that students interested in an English major take the twosemester sequence Major Periods and Issues (English 205, 206) in the sophomore year, if possible, and no later than the junior year. During this course and in close consultation with an advisor, the students should chart a program of courses that will satisfy major requirements.
During their senior year, usually in the fall semester, majors take the senior seminar. Though seminars vary in focus and content, each addresses its subject in the context of current critical discourse and requires students to write a long research-based paper. Each seminar gives students the experience of engaging in advanced research, developing independent critical perspectives, and sharing ideas with a small number of students in a seminar setting.
Within the major itself, students may shape their program in a number of ways. A concentration in writing and literature incorporates both creative writing courses and literature courses appropriate to a particular student's interest. A concentration in British and American literature combines courses calculated to strengthen the student's understanding of literary history and the major writers in British and American literature. These concentrations indicate two of the emphases possible within the English curriculum, though they are not intended as binding tracks. On the contrary, students are urged to work out a major concentration that best suits their individual interests.
Major Requirements
A minimum of 40 semester credits (10 courses), including the following:
- English 205 and 206.
- At least four courses at the 300 level or higher, including two courses in British literature before 1800 (310, 311, 313, 330, and 331 or 332) and one course in American literature (320, 321, 322, 323, 324, and 326). Major figures (333) and special topics (398) courses may be applied to either requirement when the subject matter is appropriate. Either 331 or 332 may be taken to fulfill half of the two-course, pre–1800 requirement, but students cannot fulfill the entire requirement by taking both courses.
- English 450, to be taken in the senior year.
- Three elective courses from any English department offering (excluding 244, 444 and 299, 499).
Minor Requirements
A minimum of 24 semester credits (six courses), including the following:
- English 205 or 206.
- One 300-level course in English or American literature.
- Four elective courses at the 200 level or higher, including creative writing courses.
Honors
The senior seminar enables students to synthesize a particular program of study, complete a significant piece of original work, and be recognized for this accomplishment. Honors will be awarded by the department to seniors who have a 3.500 or above GPA in the major and who do outstanding work in their senior seminar. Honors students make oral presentations of their senior seminar papers to the department.
Resources For Nonmajors
All of the department's course offerings are open to nonmajors except the senior seminar. Preference is given to majors and minors for enrollment in the Major Periods and Issues sequence (English 205, 206).
Faculty
Lyell Asher, associate professor. Renaissance English literature, Shakespeare.
John F. Callahan, Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities. Post–Civil War and 20th-century American literature, African American literature.
Rachel Cole, assistant professor. 19th-century American literature.
Kurt Fosso, associate professor. British romantic literature, critical theory.
Karen Gross, assistant professor. Medieval literature.
Susan Kirschner, senior lecturer. Prose writing.
Will Pritchard, assistant professor. Restoration and 18th-century literature and culture.
Mary Szybist, assistant professor. Modern poetry, poetry writing.
Pauls Toutonghi, assistant professor. Fiction, expository writing, creative writing.
Rishona Zimring, associate professor. Modern British literature, postcolonial literature.
Visiting Faculty
Jerry Harp, visiting assistant professor of humanities. Renaissance, 17th-century, poetry.
Andrea Hibbard, adjunct professor of humanities. Victorian literature and culture, law and literature, women's studies.
ENG 100 Topics In Literature
Staff
Content: Emphasis on a particular theme or subgenre in literature to be chosen by the professor. Recent topics have included Heroines in British Fiction, Literature and the Environment, Love and the Novel, History of the Lyric Poem, and Literature of Immigration.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits. May be taken twice for credit with change of topic.
ENG 105 The Art Of The Novel
Asher, Pritchard
Content: A study of major works in English, American, and European fiction, from the 17th century to the present. Goals include increasing awareness of the particular kinds of knowledge and perception that the novel makes available; considering the variety of ways in which novels braid moral and aesthetic concerns; understanding how novels respond both to everyday human experience and to previous literary history; and heightening appreciation for the range of pleasures that the novel can afford. Writers may include Cervantes, Sterne, Austen, Flaubert, Kafka, Woolf, Nabokov, Kundera, Pynchon.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 200 Introduction To The Short Story
Toutonghi
Content: Elements of fiction such as plot, character development, descriptive language, and voice. Emphasis on craft-based exercise. Extensive reading of short stories, culminating in the writing and revision of a final story.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 201 Introduction To Poetry And Poetry Writing
Szybist
Content: Elements of poetry such as imagery, rhythm, tone. Practice in the craft. Frequent references to earlier poets.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 205, 206 Major Periods And Issues In English Literature
Asher, Cole, Fosso, Gross, Pritchard, Zimring
Content: Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of English literature. Fall: Middle Ages to end of 17th century. Spring: Romantic period to middle of 20th century.
Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. For English 206, completion of English 205 or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits each. Enrollment preference given to English majors and minors.
ENG 208 Prose Writing: Creative Nonfiction
Kirschner
Content: Writing in the genre known variously as the personal essay or narrative, memoir, autobiography, to introduce students to traditional and contemporary voices in this genre. Daily writing and weekly reading of exemplars such as Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, Hazlitt, Woolf, Soyinka, Baldwin, Walker, Hampl, Dillard, Selzer, Lopez.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 209 Introduction To American Literature
Callahan, Cole
Content: Survey of major periods and issues in American literature, from the Puritan theocracy and early Republican period through American Romanticism and Modernism. Authors may include Edwards, Franklin, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Cather, Williams, Faulkner, Wright, Ellison.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 234 Strange Bedfellows In Poetry: From Donne To Jorie Graham
Szybist
Content: How poets of different eras have worked with similar themes, techniques, traditions. Possible groupings include Poetics of Prophecy (William Blake, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg); Poetry of Meditation (George Herbert, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham); Textual Indeterminacy (Christopher Smart, Emily Dickinson, John Ashbery); Vicissitudes of Aristocracy (Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord George Byron, Robert Lowell); Representations of Race (Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove); Shifting Personae (William Butler Yeats, John Berryman); Plays of Wit (John Donne, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin).
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 243 Women Writers
Staff
Content: Varies according to instructor. May focus on the common themes and patterns of influence in British, American, or international literature by women, or on close scrutiny of two or more authors. May focus in some years exclusively on fiction and prose writers, in other years on women poets.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: At least every other year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 244 Practicum
Zimring
Literary Review
Content: Production of a first-rate literary review. In weekly workshops, students gain some familiarity with all the processes involved (editorial, layout, printing, business, distribution) and intimate experience with at least one.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Each semester, 1 semester credit. May be taken four times for credit.
Peer Tutoring in Writing
Content: Designed for any student interested in learning theories and methods for teaching writing one-on-one; required of students interested in becoming tutors in the Writing Center. Social dimensions of a tutorial, including a Writing Center user's perceptions of good writing and the writing process, his or her perception of the role of the tutor, how all of these elements affect a writing conference. Rhetorical dimensions of writing, including strategies and techniques to help student writers solve their own problems.
Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 2 semester credits.
ENG 250 Introduction To Shakespeare
Staff
Content: Plays representing the several types Shakespeare wrote--histories, comedies, tragedies, romances. Usually covers eight plays and selected sonnets and poems. May include class performance sessions, discussion of video and film. Summer course includes trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: Every third year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 279 Classical Backgrounds
Asher, Fosso, Gross
Content: A study of epic, drama, and poetry from the Greek and Latin classics. Writers may include Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Ovid.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: At least every other year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 280 The Medieval World
Gross
Content: An introduction to the world of the Middle Ages in Europe and in England. Exploration of the richness of the medieval experience through manuscripts, visual arts, music, architecture. May focus on a particular theme set by the instructor, including the cult of the saints; interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims; medieval cities; travel and pilgrimage; court culture; rural life; chivalry and romance; university culture and medieval education; popular devotional practices. Possible authors may include Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Julian of Norwich, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Ibn Battuta.
Prerequisite: None.
Taught: At least every other year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 299 Independent Study
Staff
Content: Opportunities for well-prepared students to design and pursue a substantive course of independent learning. Details determined by the student and the supervising instructor.
Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 1-4 semester credits.
ENG 300 Fiction Writing
Toutonghi
Content: Discussion and small-group workshop. Required reading aloud from an anthology, with student-led discussion of authors' texts. Daily exercises in various elements of short fiction, graduating to full-length stories; emphasis on revision. All students write evaluations of peers' work and participate in oral critique.
Prerequisite: English 200 or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 301 Poetry Writing
Szybist
Content: Discussion of student work with occasional reference to work by earlier poets. Students develop skills as writers and readers of poetry.
Prerequisite: English 201 or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 310 The Middle English Period
Gross
Content: Introduction to the major genres of English literature from the 13th through the 15th centuries. Political, social, historical, and religious contexts that affected the emergence of English as a literary language and that shaped the lyric, drama, narrative poetry, and prose writing of the period. Readings, all in Middle English, include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich's Revelations, The Book of Margery Kemp, Sir Orfeo, St. Erkenwald, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and shorter poems, as well as selected plays, romances, lyrics, sermons, and tracts.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 311 Literature Of The English Renaissance
Asher
Content: Developments in poetry, fiction, and drama during the Elizabethan period and the 17th century. Genres such as the sonnet and sonnet sequences, the pastoral, heroic and Ovidian verse, satire; examples from non-Shakespearean dramatists, comedy, tragedy. May include Browne, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Marlowe, Marvell, Milton, Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Surrey, Wyatt.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 312 The Early English Novel
Pritchard
Content: Traces the process by which, over the course of the 18th century, the novel became Britain's preeminent genre. Topics include the relation of novel to romance, debates over the morality of fiction, claims of novels not to be novels, women as readers and writers, and the period's various subgenres (e.g., epistolary novel, gothic novel, sentimental novel). Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Stern, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, Jane Austen.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 313 Restoration And 18th-Century Literature
Pritchard
Content: An introduction to British literature written between 1660 and 1800 (i.e., between John Milton and Jane Austen). Covers the full range of the period's genres, except for the novel, and includes many of the period's major authors (John Bunyan, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Thomas Gray, Samuel Johnson). Topics include the tension between Puritanism and Libertinism, the relation of 18thcentury authors to their classical forbears, the contrast between country and city, and the growth of England's empire.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 314 The Romantics
Fosso
Content: British writers circa 1785 to 1834, an era of "imagination" and "feeling" as well as of revolution, war, and social change. Authors may include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Hemans.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: At least every other year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 315 The Victorians
Fosso, Gross
Content: Major Victorian writers and their responses to social and economic conditions. May include the Brontës, Eliot, Dickens, Nightingale, Hardy, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill, Arnold, Gaskell, Mayhew, Gissing.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 316 20th-Century British Literature, Early
Zimring
Content: Major British and Irish writers of the first part of this century whose responses to such major events as World War I shape the conventions of 20thcentury British literature, in particular modernism. Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Eliot, Auden, Rhys, Ford, Mansfield.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 317 20th-Century British Literature, Post–World War II
Zimring
Content: Survey of British fiction after the Second World War, covering such topics as fictional form (realism, fantasy, metafiction); class relations; national identity and multiculturalism; narratives of sexual identity; the politics of country/city representations; writers and social responsibility; youth, age, generations; subcultures; postwar British cinema. Authors include Graham Greene, Irish Murdoch, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Every third year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 318 Modern Poetry
Szybist
Content: Significant modern British and American figures and more recent poets. May include Owen, Auden, Kavanagh, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Roethke, Plath, Levertov.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 319 Postcolonial Literature: Anglophone Africa, India, Caribbean
Zimring
Content: Post–World War II literary works and essays exploring the literary and cultural issues raised by the collapse of the colonial world order. Western travel and primitivism; decolonization and national allegories; authenticity and the invention of tradition; immigrant dreams; constructions of race; women and the nation; adolescence and the novel of education. Rhys, Rushdie, Emecheta, Coetzee, Achebe, Ghosh.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 320 Early American Literature
Cole
Content: American literature in English from exploration and colonization through the beginning of the 19th century. Texts include autobiographies, sermons, captivity narratives, essays, poems, and novels. Topics include contemporary literary definitions of America (as land, a set of colonies, a nation, a culture, an ideology); the definition of American literature (What are our criteria of inclusion? How are those criteria conditioned by the structure of academic discourse?); how literature of the period imagines the relationships between European and indigenous populations; how it imagines the relationship of America to Europe; how it reflects variant ideologies (both religious and secular) within the colonies and later the republic; the significance of the tensions between these ideologies for concepts that remain current in American discourse today (the individual, the new world, freedom, agency, the frontier).
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Every third year, 4 semester credits.
ENG 321 Pre–Civil War American Literature
Cole
Content: A study of American literature in the decades preceding the Civil War. Texts include transcendentalist essays (Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau); adventure, romance, and protest novels (Hawthorne, Poe, Sedgwick, Stowe); short stories (Davis, Melville); poems (Dickinson, Whitman); and a slave narrative (Douglass). Topics include literary contributions to contemporary debates over religion, national expansion, national identity, slavery, and the rise of women and labor; the influence on those contributions of Puritanism and other early-American ideologies in combination with British Romanticism and 18th- and 19th-century philosophy; variant literary articulations of concepts that remain current in American discourse today (the individual, freedom, law, the family, opportunity, happiness).
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 322 Post–Civil War American Literature
Callahan, Cole
Content: American literature as it reflects cultural and historical events such as reconstruction, industrialization, Western expansion, the women's rights movement. Aesthetic issues such as the rise of realism and naturalism. Cather, Chesnutt, Chopin, Crane, Douglass, Dreiser, DuBois, James, Jewett, Melville, Norris, Twain, Wharton.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 323 Modern American Literature, 1900 To World War II
Callahan
Content: American literature in the first half of the 20th century as it is shaped by American writers' growing familiarity with European modernism, with the failure of Victorian values exposed by World War I, and with the increasing presence of women and minority writers. Anderson, Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hurston, LeSueur, Stein, Steinbeck, Toomer, West, Wright.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 324 Modern American Literature, Post–World War II
Callahan
Content: American literature in the second half of the 20th century as writers respond to such historical and cultural forces as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the Vietnam War. Aesthetics of postmodernism and the breakdown and mingling of traditional literary genres. Baldwin, Barth, Bellow, Doctorow, Ellison, Erdrich, Lowell, Mailer, Morrison, O'Connor, Olsen, Plath, Salinger, Silko, Walker.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 326 African American Literature
Callahan
Content: The African American literary tradition from the late 19th century to the present. Points of contact with, and departure from, the rest of American literary history with emphasis on the black oral tradition, particularly the pattern of call-and-response as writers adapt it to the literary forms of fiction and poetry from spirituals, work songs, blues, jazz, and storytelling. May include Baldwin, Baraka, Brooks, Brown, Chesnutt, Dove, DuBois, Dunbar, Ellison, Gaines, Harper, Hayden, Hughes, Hurston, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Knight, Morrison, Toomer, Walker, Williams, Wilson, Wright.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Alternate years, 4 semester credits.
ENG 330 Chaucer
Gross
Content: The poetry of Chaucer in its literary, historical, social, and religious contexts. Topics may include the relationship between the sacred and the profane, the representations of men and women in 14th-century English society, the rise of the vernacular in the later Middle Ages, medieval attitudes towards poetry and authorship, the influence of continental European literary forms on English traditions, manuscript culture and ways of reading and writing before the advent of printing, the characteristics of different medieval literary genres, and the critical reception of Chaucer. Readings, predominantly from The Canterbury Tales, are in Middle English.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 331 Shakespeare: Early Works
Asher
Content: Critical reading of plays representative of the development of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies. Usually covers six or seven plays and selected poetry, typically including The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 332 Shakespeare: Later Works
Asher
Content: Critical reading of plays representative of the development of Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, romances. Usually covers six or seven plays and selected poetry from 1604 to 1611, typically including Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 333 Major Figures
Cole, Fosso, Pritchard, Toutonghi, Zimring
Content: Detailed examination of writers introduced in other courses. Figures have included Austen, Blake, the Brontës, Ellison, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: At least every other year, 4 semester credits. May be repeated for credit with change of topic.
ENG 340 Topics In Literary Theory/Criticism
Fosso, Staff
Content: Emphasis on a particular topic in literary theory and criticism, to be chosen by the professor. Topics may include theories of meaning, literature and ethics, feminist literary theory, and theories of value.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: At least every other year, 4 semester credits. May be taken twice for credit with change of topic.
ENG 401 Advanced Poetry Writing
Szybist
Content: An opportunity for experienced student writers to develop their skills as poets and to work on a sustained project. A workshop in which at least half of class time will be spent discussing student writing, with an emphasis on revision. Work will include the examination of literary models.
Prerequisites: English 301. Consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 402 Advanced Fiction Writing
Toutonghi
Content: Students will complete a long project (a collection of short stories, a novella or the beginning of a novel, or some combination thereof). Workshop format plus additional reading as needed.
Prerequisites: English 200 and 300. Consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 444 Practicum
Staff
Content: Experience in editing, writing, and other aspects of publishing. Specifics vary depending on placement with a sponsoring publishing house, journal, or related enterprise.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 1-4 semester credits.
ENG 450 Senior Seminar
Staff
Content: Varies in focus and content. Subjects addressed in the context of current critical discourse. Students write a long research-based paper.
Prerequisites: English 205 and 206.
Taught: Annually, 4 semester credits.
ENG 499 Independent Study
Staff
Content: Same as English 299 but requiring more advanced work.
Prerequisites: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Taught: Annually, 1-4 semester credits.