Course Descriptions

English

ENG100E Speech

Learn to use the power of speech effectively, and overcome the fear of public speaking. This is a course in the fundamentals of public speaking. Emphasis is on content, form, and delivery of the most common types of short speeches such as introducing a speaker, presenting information, persuading an audience, demonstrating a technique or process, and impromptu speaking. Self-evaluation, oral and written comments, videotapes, and conferences are included.

ENG112E Professional and Academic Writing

This course provides practice in writing to inform and persuade, and prepares students for successful writing for college and career. Emphasis is on audience, organization, summary, analysis, use of sources, documentation, revision, and mechanics. Several types of essays and a research paper are required. Prerequisite: ENG130E recommended.

ENG113E Learning Skills Seminar

A great way to start, or re-start, your college career. This entry-level course is designed for students who are new to college or who have been away from academia for a considerable length of time. It introduces students to the learning skills necessary for success in their college careers: writing, reading, studying, speaking, thinking, and researching. While students are sharpening these learning skills, they are simultaneously developing confidence in their ability to communicate effectively.

ENG130E English Composition

Take your writing to the next level with this basic writing course emphasizing planning, composing, and revising. Specifically, the course deals with strategies for generating ideas, recognizing audience, clarifying purpose, focusing on a perspective, and choosing effective arrangements of ideas. Techniques of revision, which are central to the course, focus on appropriateness of language and effectiveness of development, as well as on editing.

ENG140E Introduction to Literature

Explore some of the best fiction, drama, and poetry ever written in the English language, and meet a cast of characters along the way. This course includes short stories, plays, poetry, and a short novel. Class discussion and writing assignments make use of such critical concepts as point of view, imagery, and tone. Prerequisite: ENG130E recommended

ENG204E Effective Business Writing

Learn to get your point across and achieve your goals in business. Simple and direct writing works best, and this course improves skills and provides strategies to write better emails, memos, letters, reports, and resumes.

ENG 209E Creative Writing

In this course, students study the techniques used by published poets and fiction writers and learn to employ some of these techniques by writing original poetry and fiction. We also learn the critical language for discussing these genres in a more precise and meaningful way, and have ample opportunity to develop our understanding of the formal characteristics of poems and stories by both published and student writers.

ENG219E Mass Communication in the 21st Century

An overview of the field of mass communications, this is an issue-based course exploring such topics as the influence of television upon culture; media ethics; money and the media; rhetorical analysis of persuasive messages in advertising; public relations and politics; media and minorities; issues in radio, in the music industry, and in publishing; and mass media in the 21st century.

ENG 221E Survey of British Literature I

This course will provide a survey of English literature to the 18th century, concentrating on a selected number of core texts.  There will be special emphasis on literary trends in the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English periods, the Renaissance, the Seventeenth Century, and the Enlightenment.

ENG233E Modern Short Story

A study of the major short story writers including Poe, Fitzgerald, O'Connor, Hurston, Oates, and Graphic Narratives.

ENG263E Children’s Literature

Beginning with the Tales of Mother Goose, the fairy and the folk tale, this course focuses on the history and the tradition of children’s literature, including works such as Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and Charlotte’s Web. Multicultural works that include Asian, Hispanic, and African-American poetry, drama, historical fiction and stories are discussed.

ENG 309E Writing Workshop: Creative Nonfiction

Learn to tell a better story! In this course students read and write essays in various forms of creative nonfiction: the personal essay, nature writing, travel writing, and literary journalism. The course will focus especially on the personal essay, in which writers draw upon and narrate elements of their history or experience to address broader social, political, or philosophical themes.

ENG381E American Novel to Film:
Insane, or Just Plain Evil?  Five Works of North America Fiction, and the Films That Followed

This course will consider the questions of insanity and, in most cases, evil in five North American works of fiction: The novels Moby-Dick, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and No Country For Old Men, plus the ghost-story novella The Turn of the Screw and the Alzhiemer’s short story “The Bear Came Over The Mountain.” Each week we will cover a work of fiction, then view the film that resulted; in addition to the previously mentioned themes, we will explore literary categories and techniques, plus film techniques and adaptation theory.

ENG387E African-American Literature

From rap to hauntings, African-American literature is a dynamic part of our culture. Many of us, however, have limited appreciation of these texts because we are ignorant of their cultural contexts. Beginning with a video on Black English—which shows the aesthetic integrity of this dialect— students explore both the folk and literary traditions as reflectors /creators of African American experience. Work songs, blues, and jazz, as well as classic AA texts form the perspective through which we study novels by Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison.  

ENG396E American Cinema from the 60s

A study of some of the classics of American film from the 1960s and beyond, a time of extraordinary excitement and creativity, when the old studio system was breaking up and a new generation of American filmmakers -- Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Nichols and a host of others -- began to develop new language to reflect the changing social and emotional realities of American life. Films may include The Graduate, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Jaws and others. In addition to discussing the thematic implications of the work, students learn the basic components and terminology of film.