"English" is a little word for lots of things. Is it literature you want today, or creative writing? film? theater? journalism? debate? Maximum English introduces you to all these areas and to our unique resources for studying and enjoying them—the full range of "English" here at UR. So you'll learn the fundamentals of reading and viewing from the department's own creative writers, its literary and film critics and historians, and its theater directors. You'll enlarge the experience of reading literature and criticism by listening to writers read their own original work and then discussing it with them. You'll experience plays not only as written scripts but as living theatrical events by attending performances and talking to actors, directors, and designers about what they do to bring a play to the stage. You'll encounter works in different media, from the live human voice to printed books, from the stage to film and electronic hypermedia. Maximum English will launch you into real English—the new expanded version. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature; Novels; Plays, Playwrights, and Theater; Poems, Poetry, and Poetics.

This course in the classical and scriptural backgrounds to modern English and American literature demonstrates how great books such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus' Oresteia , Sophocles' two Oedipus plays, Euripides' Trojan Women and The Bacchae, Plato's Symposium and other dialogues, Aristotle's Poetics , Virgil's Aeneid, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and Dante's Inferno define the core of Western Civilization. All of the works we read will be familiar, whether you have read them before or not. That is, they and we are part of the same tradition. They have been rewritten again and again by every generation of writers since classical times. Applicable English Cluster: Medieval Studies.

This course immerses students in the most challenging, influential, and engaging texts from the earlier periods of English literature, from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries. Our aim will be to enjoy and understand these texts in themselves, while also examining their relation to each other and to their larger historical contexts. Although the texts vary from epic to lyric to drama to satire to novel, we will find ourselves returning to a set of recurring questions, such as how to define the literary, how texts make meaning, and how the reader can best render such meanings into interpretation. While keeping these larger themes in mind, we will nonetheless begin our questioning each week by focusing on the specific wording, structure, texture, and tone of each text, considering such authors as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Milton, Behn, and Pope.

This course provides a basic introduction to some of the major works and themes in American literature, focusing primarily on the development of the novel and short story, with limited attention to poetry and drama. We will begin in the nineteenth century and work our way through such contemporary writers as Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner. Our focus will be on the creation of a national identity and how issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect in the formation of an American literary tradition. Students will trace a number of important themes such as the relationship between politics and art, the impact of slavery and the Civil War, immigration, the American dream, and the development of a national mythology and ideology. In our study of various movements in the American literary tradition, we will also pay close attention to the intellectual debates concerning audience, language, and the purpose of art that have shaped key texts and historical time periods.

This course provides a broad overview and introduction to media. We will cover histories of different types of media (internet, radio, audio recordings, television, cable, film, journalism, magazines, advertising, public relations, etc.) as well as various theories and approaches to studying media. No prior knowledge is necessary, but a real interest and willingness to explore a variety of media will come in handy. Occasional outside screenings will be required (but if you cannot attend the scheduled screenings, you may watch the films on your own time through the Multimedia Center reserves). Students will be evaluated based on assigned writing, classroom discussion leading, participation, short quizzes, midterm exam, and final exam.

Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture.

This class will be structured as a writing workshop, with students sharing their own fiction and participating in critiques. We will read and discuss stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by influential writers, including Poe, Melville, Chekhov, Flaubert, Dinesen, Faulkner, Baldwin, Angela Carter, and Welty. Students will have the chance to experiment with different styles and structures as they learn about literary invention. We'll consider techniques for shaping fictional characters and the related issue of point of view, the possibilities of narrative design, the role of setting and description, and the process of revision. Permission of instructor required. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing; Novels.

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, preferably 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 Theatre Program at 275-4959 for details. Applicable English Clusters: Creative Writing; Plays, Playwrights, and Theater; Theater Production and Performance.

Reporting and Writing the News introduces the student to journalistic writing and reporting. Through a variety of classroom exercises and through out-of-class reporting, students learn to prepare accurate and balanced news stories. Assignments progress from single-source interviewing to news profiles, speech-and-meeting coverage and feature stories. Additional experience is gained through rewriting assignments, as directed by editing comment. Attention is also paid to First Amendment issues such as libel, as well as to the challenges and opportunities presented by new media. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

Reporting and Writing the News introduces the student to journalistic writing and reporting. Through a variety of classroom exercises and through out-of-class reporting, students learn to prepare accurate and balanced news stories. Assignments progress from single-source interviewing to news profiles, speech-and-meeting coverage and feature stories. Additional experience is gained through rewriting assignments, as directed by editing comment. Attention is also paid to First Amendment issues such as libel, as well as to the challenges and opportunities presented by new media. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

Basic public speaking is the focus of this course. Emphasis is placed on researching speeches, using appropriate language and delivery, and listening critically to oral 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, and problem-solving address. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication. The course utilitizes 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.

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.

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.

An introductory/intermediate course on the materials, techniques, and equipment involved in sound and lighting as used in theatrical applications. Focuses on the principles and practices of implementation and design. Safety practices will be taught. Course will include lecture, one-on-one tutorials, and hands-on practical laboratory work in association with a production of the International Theatre Program.

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.

Students must register for the lab when registering for the course, Acting Techniques.

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 learning how to embody these characters fully in voice and physicality.

This is an introductory course focusing on directing for the theater. The class will guide students through the directing process: from textual interpretation and production conceptualization, through staging and visualization, to working with actors. Please note: students taking Directing are also required to register for Directing Lab.

Students taking Directing are also required to register for Directing Lab.

What is it about Beowulf that lends itself to so much retelling? Why is it so hard to receive it? What has the curriculum done wrong in presenting it? Why must everyone give Beowulf a sex life? Why did Woody Allen hate it? How did Seamus Heaney transform it? How does it lurk on the edges of popular culture, but can't seem to make it in the ranks of high literature without toil, and groan, and much apology? And, what is the nature of translation—not just of words, but a whole ethos? This multimedia class will examine older and newer translations of Beowulf, read Scandinavian literature relevant to Beowulf (Hrolfskraki Saga etc.), look at comic books based on Beowulf, watch the three major movies made about Beowulf in the past ten years, listen to Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf, and read articles about translation theory. Minimal instruction in Old English vocabulary and the problems of translating some of the harder passages in Beowulf . Just look at what Wright does to Hrothgar and Beowulf's farewell scene, rescuing it from all suggestions of impropriety.

This course focuses on drama written by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Classes center around careful study of individual plays. We consider, among other topics, the playwrights' emphases on their characters' psychological interiority, their staging of death, their use of props, their fascination with sensational and often violent events, their interest in memory, and their insistent references to contemporary performance practices (including the Renaissance tradition of boy actors playing women's roles). We also become familiar with descriptions of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theatrical spaces—their geographical location and physical properties, the composition of their audiences, the training and performance practices of their actors, and the aesthetic, economic and political contexts of their productions. And we sort through the plays' depiction of the proper relations between ruler and subject, husband and wife, parents and children, and European and non-European characters. Readings include plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Kyd, Marlowe, Middleton, Shakespeare, and Webster. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Applicable English Cluster: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater.

This course will study the full range of Shakespeare's plays, including his comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. We will pay attention to both dramatic language and historical context in order to read and analyze the plays with as much comprehension and pleasure as possible. Course requirements: attendance, two five-page papers, and a midterm and non-cumulative final of identifications.

This course will study the lyrics of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Traherne, and Marvell, the seventeenth-century authors of so-called "metaphysical poetry." "In perusing the works of this race of authors," Samuel Johnson wrote, "the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined." We will exercise our minds in this class both by retrieving the historical material out of which these poets fashioned their ideas and by examining the formal strategies with which they enacted their ideas in their poems. I expect the majority of our class time will be spent on close reading. Course requirements: attendance and three five-page essays.

The course covers the period roughly between World War I and World War II, dealing with the rich creativity we associate with Modernism. We will read and discuss such writers as Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, etc., studying not only the works but some of the major trends in art, culture, and knowledge that make the modern period so important and exciting. The method will be a combination of close reading, lecture, and discussion with (probably) one short paper and one longish paper. Not open to freshmen. Applicable English Clusters: American and African American Studies; Modern and Contemporary Literature.

As both literary and visual art, plays often provide the most potent themes and content in all of the arts. This course explores the history of playwriting and dramatic performance as creative outlets for artists of African descent. The course surveys the tradition of black theater, paying particular attention to the formal aspects of drama and covering a range of historical and thematic contexts, including slavery, social protest, interracial relations, intra-racial differences (including class, gender, and sexuality), and the attitudes of today's African Americans toward black history. Special attention will be paid to ritual as a thematic and structural principle in this tradition. Featured playwrights include James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Charles Fuller, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, and more. Students will be evaluated on class participation, weekly reading responses, and two formal papers.

This course introduces students to the many different schools of literary analysis developed in the twentieth century: from New Criticism to Formalism to Structuralism to Deconstruction to New Historicism to feminist and postcolonial theory, various movements have sought to address how meaning is made in a text, what kinds of meaning, how to find those meanings, and what to do with them. Beneath each movement lies a different approach to fundamental questions about the nature of reality and representation, signification and interpretation. Earlier theories of literature will also be covered, from the ancient Greeks through Renaissance "Defences of Poetry" through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of criticism and aesthetics.

More broadly, a study of the gray zone between short story and novel, containing many ambiguous labels (long short story, novella, short novel). The course will interrogate various boundaries—When does a short story become a novella? When does a novella become a novel?—and locate answers not merely in word count, but in reader experience and expectation. Because of the (relative) brevity of these in-between texts, the course will cover much stylistic and geographic ground. Author list may include: Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Carson McCullers, Nathanael West, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Henry James, George Saunders, Ethan Canin, Aleksandar Hemon, William Gass, Flannery O'Connor, Cynthia Ozick, Peter Taylor, and Jane Smiley.

As contemporary readers continue to search for new and exciting types of writing, and as "cyberculture" becomes increasingly mainstream, science fiction becomes increasingly important to scholars of American literature and culture. This course covers a range of science fiction texts and issues, including the genre's European literary antecedents, its "roots" in American periodical fiction, the emergence of the science fiction novel, the genre's treatment of issues of difference, cyberpunk, and beyond. Featured writers include Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, William Gibson, and more.

We focus on cinematic texts—short, documentary, and feature—and literary genres of Asian Pacific Islander American (APA) works from the twentieth and twenty-first century—drama, fiction, poetry, and memoir. Our APA literature includes works by Chinese American, Filipina American, Indian American, Korean American, Japanese American, and Vietnamese American authors, among others. We will analyze APA theories too, interrogating the construction of "America," myths, and "foundational fictions." Students will lead discussion, write essays, and write short response papers.

This course provides a basic introduction to some of the major works and themes in American literature, focusing primarily on the development of the novel and short story, with limited attention to poetry and drama. We will begin in the nineteenth century and work our way through such contemporary writers as Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner. Our focus will be on the creation of a national identity and how issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect in the formation of an American literary tradition. Students will trace a number of important themes such as the relationship between politics and art, the impact of slavery and the Civil War, immigration, the American dream, and the development of a national mythology and ideology. In our study of various movements in the American literary tradition, we will also pay close attention to the intellectual debates concerning audience, language, and the purpose of art that have shaped key texts and historical time periods. Lectures will provide social and cultural background to the literary works discussed in class.

Theater in England will be conducted in London from Wednesday, December 29, 2010, through Saturday, January 8, 2011. Students should arrive in London no later than the evening of Tuesday, December 28. They may return on Sunday, January 9.

We will see approximately 16 plays. We do not yet know what the full schedule of plays will be, but you can be certain that we will see the best of what's available in the world's theater Mecca. Last year we saw, among others, such distinguished productions as Nick Stafford's brilliant production of War Horse, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad, Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, John Guarre's Six Degrees of Separation, Ferdinand Bruckner's Pains of Youth, and Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, which we paired with Hall;s most famous play, Billy Elliot, the Musical; the world premieres of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, Michael Wynne's The Priory, and John Logan's Red; and, at the Globe Theatre, the Footsbarn's hilarious Christmas Cracker with its Lord of Misrule, three-headed Shakespeare, musical acrobats, and charming lady maggot (who was eager to meet us all). The historical spread of the plays was terrific, from the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Twelfth Night (1600) and Thomas Middleton's Yorkshire Tragedy (1605) to Frank McGuinness's London premiere of Greta Garbo Came to Donegal (2009). Only in London is such a range of theater possible.

We stay at the Harlingford Hotel, 61-63 Cartwright Gardens, a couple of blocks from the British Museum and the new British Library. The course is restricted to 23 students and carries four credits. The $2550.00 fee includes tickets to all plays and housing. Students must obtain passports and make their own travel arrangements to and from London. If you wish to see what students have seen on previous years go to the Web site for the course (http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/england/) where you can investigate various aspects of the seminar—syllabuses from 1992 to the present, student journals, information about the Harlingford Hotel, in Bloomsbury, where we always stay, the London theater scene in general. You may obtain the application form from the English Department or Professor Peck. You need permission of the instructor to register. See Professor Russell Peck <russell.peck@rochester.edu>.

Introduction to the history, technology, and cultural significance of motion pictures of the "pre-sound" era, with screenings of 35mm prints accompanied by live music in the Dryden Theatre. Special attention will be paid to the major pioneers, Dickson, Porter, Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, but the course will include a variety of internationally produced films selected from the world-famous archival film collection of the George Eastman House. Discussion sessions will cover the origins and development of the motion picture industry and its leading genres up to the general introduction of movies with pre-recorded music, sound, and dialog, beginning in 1927. Broad issues relating to the transformation of American and world popular entertainment forms and traditions, in relation to the established performing arts of the period, will also be covered. Relevant connections to preserving the world's film heritage will be highlighted, and the film restoration facilities of the Motion Picture Department will be visited in this course. 

This course will attempt to cover the history, literature, and above all, the cinema of vampirism from the silent era through the present day. We will study a number of important examples of the form, read a couple of significant literary works about the vampire, especially Bram Stoker's novel Dracula , and also employ one or two texts that deal with the vampire in cinema. Not open to freshmen. Applicable English Cluster: Modern and Contemporary Literature.

This course will engage Second Life and other Virtual Worlds to examine not just 3D artistic environments, but "machinima," film-clips using "avatars" as actors, with an emphasis on New Media narrative, participatory culture, and potential educational uses. Given our technical equipment, students will participate in making a film and/or art project.

This course investigates technical theater beyond the realms of ENG 170 (Technical Theater). It focuses on work related to the scenic design and technical production of the semester's Theatre 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.

This course is for students who have completed a 100-level creative writing course or have similar experience in the writing of poems. After reading a wide variety of poems in different forms, students will write metered poems, rhymed poems, free-verse poems, and several more elaborately patterned poems (sestinas, villanelles, pantoums). They will also be asked to revise these poems substantially. The goal of the course is simply to become a better writer by recognizing that the beauty and power of all linguistic utterance is driven by its form.

From The New Yorker to the blogosphere, successful feature writers bridge the gap between news and commentary, shedding light on people, places, and perplexing issues. We'll study their methods and put them into practice as we write our own articles, both long and short. Among the feature forms we'll explore: profiles, trend pieces, investigations, science and travel stories, and color pieces. Among our topics: finding and developing ideas; researching; interviewing and quoting effectively and ethically; achieving the right structure and tone; fact checking; revising and pruning; and getting published. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication.

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 his 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.

This course will introduce students to the theoretical backgrounds, practical challenges, and creative activity of literary translation. We will survey appropriate theories of language and communication including semiotics, post-structuralism, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. We will consider varied and conflicting descriptions by translators of what it is they believe they are doing and what they hope to accomplish by doing it; and we will study specific translations into English from a variety of sources in order to investigate the strategies and choices translators make and the implication of those choices for our developing sense of what kinds of texts translations actually are. Finally, students will, in consultation with the instructor or with another qualified faculty member, undertake exercises in translation of their own. By the end of this class each student should have a working knowledge of both the critical backgrounds and the artistic potentials of translation.

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. The class comprises a once-weekly lecture and a series of practical labs. This 4.0-credit course meets for the entire semester. Applicable English Cluster: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater.

Plays in Performance is a class made up of actors, assistant directors, and stage managers working on the current production in Todd Theatre. Actors are cast after auditioning at the beginning of each semester. Students wishing to stage manage should approach the director of the production either at the time of auditions or before the beginning of the play's rehearsal process. Although there is no written component for this course (the performance of the play constitutes a final "exam"), a significant time commitment is required of actors and stage managers, both on weekday nights and over weekends. This class meets during the first half of the semester. Permission of instructor required. Applicable English Cluster: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater.

Plays in Performance is a class made up of actors and stage managers working on the current production in Todd Theatre. Actors are cast after auditioning at the beginning of each semester. Students wishing to stage manage should approach the director of the production either at the time of auditions or before the beginning of the play's rehearsal process. Although there is no written component for this course (the performance of the play constitutes a final "exam"), a significant time commitment is required of actors and stage managers, both on weekday nights and over weekends. This class meets during the second half of the semester. Permission of instructor required. Applicable English Cluster: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater.

Students in Stage Management I and/or II (fall/spring) 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) Theatre Program productions in their registered semester.

This class is a lab tutorial for actors cast in productions in Todd Theatre. Working one-on-one with an acting and voice coach, students tackle specific technical challenges raised by their involvement in the specific theatrical work in production.

1.0 credit/Pass-Fail.

This is an independently designed course, focusing on specific theater or theater-related projects, and demanding significant skill application or acquisition, independent and self-motivated research, including advanced written work, if appropriate. Topics may include elements of theater related to production, management, and/or design.

This is a workshop for students who have completed ENG 117 or have some experience writing fiction on their own and are ready to concentrate on more ambitious projects. We'll read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and we'll discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. We'll also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students will be expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction. Permission of instructor required.

As both literary and visual art, plays often provide the most potent themes and content in all of the arts. This course explores the history of playwriting and dramatic performance as creative outlets for artists of African descent. The course surveys the tradition of black theater, paying particular attention to the formal aspects of drama and covering a range of historical and thematic contexts, including slavery, social protest, interracial relations, intra-racial differences (including class, gender, and sexuality), and the attitudes of today's African Americans toward black history. Special attention will be paid to ritual as a thematic and structural principle in this tradition. Featured playwrights include James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Charles Fuller, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, and more.

This class has the same basic course reading as ENG 228, but writing and research assignments in this section are designed to fulfill the advanced seminar requirement for English literature majors. Instructor’s permission required.

This course focuses on drama written by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Classes center around careful study of individual plays. We consider, among other topics, the playwrights' emphases on their characters' psychological interiority, their staging of death, their use of props, their fascination with sensational and often violent events, their interest in memory, and their insistent references to contemporary performance practices (including the Renaissance tradition of boy actors playing women's roles). We also become familiar with descriptions of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theatrical spaces—their geographical location and physical properties, the composition of their audiences, the training and performance practices of their actors, and the aesthetic, economic, and political contexts of their productions. And we sort through the plays' depiction of the proper relations between ruler and subject, husband and wife, parents and children, and European and non-European characters. Readings include plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Kyd, Marlowe, Middleton, Shakespeare, and Webster. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

This class has the same basic course reading as ENG 208, but writing and research assignments in this section are designed to fulfill the advanced seminar requirement for English literature majors. Instructor’s permission required.

This course provides a basic introduction to some of the major works and themes in American literature, focusing primarily on the development of the novel and short story, with limited attention to poetry and drama. We will begin in the nineteenth century and work our way through such contemporary writers as Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner. Our focus will be on the creation of a national identity and how issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect in the formation of an American literary tradition. Students will trace a number of important themes such as the relationship between politics and art, the impact of slavery and the Civil War, immigration, the American dream, and the development of a national mythology and ideology. In our study of various movements in the American literary tradition, we will also pay close attention to the intellectual debates concerning audience, language, and the purpose of art that have shaped key texts and historical time periods. Lectures will provide social and cultural background to the literary works discussed in class.

This class has the same basic course reading as ENG 250, but writing and research assignments in this section are designed to fulfill the advanced seminar requirement for English literature majors. Instructor’s permission required.

This course introduces students to the many different schools of literary analysis developed in the twentieth century: from New Criticism to Formalism to Structuralism to Deconstruction to New Historicism to feminist and postcolonial theory, various movements have sought to address how meaning is made in a text, what kinds of meaning, how to find those meanings, and what to do with them. Beneath each movement lies a different approach to fundamental questions about the nature of reality and representation, signification and interpretation. Earlier theories of literature will also be covered, from the ancient Greeks through Renaissance "Defences of Poetry" through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of criticism and aesthetics.

This class has the same basic course reading as 240, but writing and research assignments are designed to fulfill the advanced seminar requirement for English literature majors. Instructor’s permission required.

This course will study the lyrics of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Traherne, and Marvell, the seventeenth-century authors of so-called "metaphysical poetry." "In perusing the works of this race of authors," Samuel Johnson wrote, "the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined." We will exercise our minds in this class both by retrieving the historical material out of which these poets fashioned their ideas and by examining the formal strategies with which they enacted their ideas in their poems. I expect the majority of our class time will be spent on close reading. Course requirements: attendance and three five-page essays.

This class has the same basic course reading as ENG 213, but writing and research assignments are designed to fulfill the advanced seminar requirement for English literature majors. Instructor’s permission required.

In literature, language, fantasy, and thought are a combined gesture. The seminar considers the extent to which the language of literature is assimilated into ordinary usage. Many study literature, remember it, but assimilate its usages sparingly. Students of literature understand that its language is never an inert vehicle for fantasy or thought. The language itself acts, often without the awareness of users and readers, within different audiences in ways that require formal study. The seminar's substance addresses the interests of English majors in all four strands—literature, LMC, creative writing, and theater. With attention to a variety of genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and popular songs, the seminar estimates the speech action of literary language. After study and discussion of the specific works, seminar members are asked to experiment with the language of the works on the reading list by using the language of these works in new contexts and then comparing the new usages with those experienced in reading.

The works on the class list take a variety of liberties with language and present different gestures that we readers figuratively translate as we read, reflect on the work, and then perhaps repeat in new situations. Some of the works on the reading list raise issues of language action. These works apply to all literature to some degree. Seminar members are asked to reach their own judgments about the relation of theoretical statements to the works of literature.

Research projects emerging from this course may include a variety of historical or critical studies of literary language. Students are invited to review works of Erich Auerbach, Shoshana Felman, Richard Ohmann, Gerald Bruns, Russian Formalist critics, New Critics, and others who have presented specific takes on how to approach the study of literary language.

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 Theatre 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 professionals as part of the internship. Interns should have good writing skills and be willing to work creatively. Skills in graphic design are a plus.