English Literature

Arts & Letters-Literature. Special Topics courses include ad-hoc courses on various selected topics that are not part of the regular curriculum, however they may still fulfill certain curricular requirements. Special topics courses are offered at the discretion of each department and will be published as part of the semester course schedule - view available sections for more information. Questions about special topics classes can be directed to the instructor or department chair.

Arts & Letters-Literature. This course will introduce students to the basic reading and analytical skills needed to understand and appreciate literature. Students will become familiar with reading different literary genres (prose, poetry, and drama) and learn to use basic terms and techniques of literary analysis. They will develop multiple interpretations and responses to literary texts and support their interpretation and responses with textual evidence, both in discussions and writing. Also, they will discover how texts communicate cultural values and ideas through a variety of approaches to the reading and appreciation of literature. Offerings each semester range from an overview of literature through conventional genres to exploration of a limited historical period or topic in literature.

Cultural Diversity, Arts & Letters-Literature. This course will introduce students to the basic reading and analytical skills needed to understand and appreciate literature. Students will become familiar with reading different literary genres (prose, poetry, and drama) and learn to use basic terms and techniques of literary analysis. They will develop multiple interpretations and responses to literary texts and support their interpretation and responses with textual evidence, both in discussions and writing. Also, they will discover how texts communicate cultural values and ideas through a variety of approaches to the reading and appreciation of literature. Offerings each semester range from an overview of literature through conventional genres to exploration of a limited historical period or topic in literature.

Intermediate Writing. Arts & Letters-Literature. This course will introduce students to the basic reading and analytical skills needed to understand and appreciate literature. Students will become familiar with reading different literary genres (prose, poetry, and drama) and learn to use basic terms and techniques of literary analysis. They will develop multiple interpretations and responses to literary texts and support their interpretation and responses with textual evidence, both in discussions and writing. Also, they will discover how texts communicate cultural values and ideas through a variety of approaches to the reading and appreciation of literature. Offerings each semester range from an overview of literature through conventional genres to exploration of a limited historical period or topic in literature.

Arts & Letters-Literature. This course will introduce students to the basic reading and analytical skills needed to understand and appreciate literature. Students will become familiar with reading different literary genres (prose, poetry, and drama) and learn to use basic terms and techniques of literary analysis. They will develop multiple interpretations and responses to literary texts and support their interpretation and responses with textual evidence, both in discussions and writing. Also, they will discover how texts communicate cultural values and ideas through a variety of approaches to the reading and appreciation of literature. Offerings each semester range from an overview of literature through conventional genres to exploration of a limited historical period or topic in literature.

Arts & Letters-Literature. Special Topics courses include ad-hoc courses on various selected topics that are not part of the regular curriculum, however they may still fulfill certain curricular requirements. Special topics courses are offered at the discretion of each department and will be published as part of the semester course schedule - view available sections for more information. Questions about special topics classes can be directed to the instructor or department chair.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of literature written in Britain during the Old English period (8th century to 1066) and Middle English period (1066 to 1485), key periods in the formation of English language and culture. Principal genres include epic and lyric poetry, romance, tale, and drama. Representative works include the epic Beowulf, the mystery and morality plays, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Margery Kempe's autobiography, and Arthurian romances.

Arts & Letters-Literature. This course introduces students to a range of voices and narratives about and by marginalized communities in North American and global contexts through a study of contemporary (20th and 21st century) revisions of classic literary and cultural texts in western and non-western contexts. Examples of texts include the Brother Grimms' fairy tales and Angela Carter's short story, "The Bloody Chamber" as well as Jane Campion's film, The Piano; Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys' rewrite, Wide Sargasso Sea; One Thousand and One Nights and selected poems from Mohja Kahf's Emails from Scheherazad.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of literature written in Britain during the 16th and 17th centuries, which accompanied the spread of human-ism, an emergent nationalism, and the civil strife of the latter period. Principle genres include drama and poetry. Representative authors include Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Amelia Lanier, the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets, Lady Mary Wroth, and John Milton.

Cultural Diversity, Arts & Letters-Literature. Critical and comparative study of selected representative literary works from African, Arabic, Latin American, and Oriental literature.

Arts & Letters Literature. Cultural Diversity. This course will focus on lived experiences of conflict, trauma, and resistance within colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial spaces-and the role of literary, cinematic, and cultural texts in bearing witness-in different parts of the world. We will examine key conversations and debates on colonization and decolonization; orientalism; globalization and neo-colonialism; race, gender, and class struggles; and generational trauma and memory across a wide variety of literary, visual, and oral genres/media. Selected course texts will include Aimé Cesaire's A Tempest (a postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare's tragicomedy The Tempest); Toufic El Rassi's Arab in America (a comic book about the author's hyphenated identity and growing up experiences in pre- and post-9/11 U.S.); Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night (a memoir that chronicles conflict in Kashmir, one of the most militarized regions in the world); spoken word poems that challenge Orientalist stereotypes about non-Western women as exotic and/or oppressed; and critically acclaimed films, such as Maquilapolis and Trick or Treaty, which document Indigenous communities' experience of and resistance to globalization and settler colonialism. This course will include both analytical and reflective components that will foster critical thinking skills and encourage students to make self-reflexive connections between the multiple "worlds" that are depicted in the course texts and students' own locations and experiences.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of literature written in Britain from the late 17th to the late 18th century, emerging in conjunction with the rise of rationalist philosophy, experimental science, industrialization, and empire. Primary emphasis is on the rise of the British novel and on the emergence of satire as a key literary mode of the period. Other principal genres include drama, poetry, and nonfiction prose. Representative authors include William Congreve, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of literature written in Britain from 1780 to 1830, which both celebrated and challenged the social, political and economic changes that accompanied industrialization and the American and French revolutions. Students read non-fiction prose, poetry and novels by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and John Keats.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of literature written for young adults. Students will read, listen to and evaluate a wide variety of literature published for or enjoyed by young adult readers, including traditional folk tales, myths, and legends; fantasy and realistic fiction; biography and autobiography; and poetry. Students will also study techniques for teaching and using literature in the 5-12 classroom.

Arts & Letters-Literature. The study of literature written in Britain from 1830-1900. The course focuses on representations of individual and national identity emerging amidst sweeping social, political, and economic change. Representative works include novels by the Brontes, Dickens Eliot, Hardy, Wilde; non-fiction prose by Carlyle and Mill;- poetry by Tennyson, the Brownings and the Rosettis.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of major currents of nineteenth-century literature of the United States, from the antebellum period, through the Civil War, to the very beginnings of the twentieth century. The course may explore any of the following literary movements: the Romantic movement, including Transcendentalist writers and philosophers (e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), as well as the writers of the Romance fiction (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville); mid-century domestic fiction (including such writers as Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe); slave narratives (Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglas, among others); and American Realism, including major proponents of realism at the end of the century, such as mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, so-called "local color writers," such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and turn-of-the-century naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of British literature written in the 20th century, shaped by the critical shifts in thought and literary technique associated with modernism and postmodernism. Each movement, developing in the wake of a World War, is characterized by a major break with literary tradition. Principal genres include poetry, drama, novels, short fiction and the essay. Representative authors include William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Iris Murdoch, Tom Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill.

Arts & Letters-Literature. Special Topics courses include ad-hoc courses on various selected topics that are not part of the regular curriculum, however they may still fulfill certain curricular requirements. Special topics courses are offered at the discretion of each department and will be published as part of the semester course schedule - view available sections for more information. Questions about special topics classes can be directed to the instructor or department chair.

Arts & Letters-Literature. Cultural Diversity. A study of early twentieth-century American literature (called "modernism"), from World War I through the 1930s. The course explores the work of white modernist writers (many of whom were part of the expatriate community in Paris during the period) alongside that of the African American writers of the same period who lived in the United States and participated in the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Among the writers studied may be Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, H.D. William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Nella Larson, and W.E.B Du Bois.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of American literature from the beginning of the Second World War (1939) to the present. Particular focus is given to anti-establishment literature protesting the cultural conformity of the 1950s, the counterculture writers of the 1960s and early 70s and the post-modern writers of the 1980s and 90s. Includes representative literary movements such as the Agrarian writers, Beat writers, the confessional poets, the Vietnam writers, and a wide variety of ethnic writers producing literature in traditional and experimental forms. Representative authors include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Eudora Welty, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Lowell, Tennessee Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Arthur Miller, Tim O'Brien, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Edward Albee, David Mamet and Maria Irene Fornes.

Cultural Diversity, Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of the history of African American literature. The course begins with early writings by slaves (these may include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs); moves through the nineteenth century to study the Harlem Renaissance writers of the early twentieth century (including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston); continues into the twentieth century to investigate post-World War II works (by such writers as Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansbury, and Gwendolyn Brooks); and ends with investigating contemporary African American texts (these may include novels by Toni Morrison and movies directed by Spike Lee).

Arts & Letters-Literature. Cultural Diversity. A study of literature written by American Indian authors, beginning with the cultural traditions and influences within oral literature, then moving through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This exploration continues through the works of the twentieth century, surveying poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by authors such as N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Wendy Rose, Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Louis Owens, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, and Montana American Indian authors D?Arcy McNickle and James Welch.

Cultural Diversity, Arts & Letters-Literature. This course offers students an in-depth look at Latinx (latin ex) literary movements within the United States and perspectives of peripheral US Latinx identities in the XX and XXI centuries. The class will discuss Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban cultural movements and social dynamics at length, with some discussion of other Hispanic Diasporas within the US. Students will read short stories, drama, essays and poetry (in English) in their exploration of the US Latinx canon. Music, film, podcasts and interviews will also be incorporated as important structural elements to the course. By the end of this course students should be familiar with US Latinx perspectives of ethnicity, immigration, identity, nationalism, freedom, gender, sexuality and political and social power differentials. Students will also further develop their critical reading and writing skills through assigned work.

Arts & Letters-Literature. A study of the dramatic and poetic art of William Shakespeare. Plays from both the Elizabethan and Jacobean pe-riods will be selected to illustrate the development of the author?s style and theatrical conventions, with representation from the histories, the comedies, the Roman plays, the tragedies, the problem plays, and the late romances. Students will develop their critical faculties by applying a variety of recent approaches to Shakespearean scholarship.

Independent study is open to junior and senior students only. At the time of application, a student must have earned a 3.0 cumulative grade point average. A student may register for no more than three (3) semester hours of independent study in any one term. In all cases, registration for independent study must be approved by the appropriate department chairperson and the Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Arts & Letters-Literature. Special Topics courses include ad-hoc courses on various selected topics that are not part of the regular curriculum, however they may still fulfill certain curricular requirements. Special topics courses are offered at the discretion of each department and will be published as part of the semester course schedule - view available sections for more information. Questions about special topics classes can be directed to the instructor or department chair.

The senior thesis is designed to encourage creative thinking and to stimulate individual research. A student may undertake a thesis in an area in which s/he has the necessary background. Ordinarily a thesis topic is chosen in the student's major or minor. It is also possible to choose an interdisciplinary topic. Interested students should decide upon a thesis topic as early as possible in the junior year so that adequate attention may be given to the project. In order to be eligible to apply to write a thesis, a student must have achieved a cumulative grade point average of at least 3.25 based upon all courses attempted at Carroll College. The thesis committee consists of a director and two readers. The thesis director is a full-time Carroll College faculty member from the student's major discipline or approved by the department chair of the student's major. At least one reader must be from outside the student's major. The thesis director and the appropriate department chair must approve all readers. The thesis committee should assist and mentor the student during the entire project. For any projects involving human participants, each student and his or her director must follow the guidelines published by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Students must submit a copy of their IRB approval letter with their thesis application. As part of the IRB approval process, each student and his or her director must also complete training by the National Cancer Institute Protection of Human Participants. The thesis is typically to be completed for three (3) credits in the discipline that best matches the content of the thesis. Departments with a designated thesis research/writing course may award credits differently with approval of the Curriculum Committee. If the thesis credits exceed the full-time tuition credit limit for students, the charge for additional credits will be waived. Applications and further information are available in the Registrar's Office.