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1701 North State Street Jackson, MS 39210-0001 (800)352-1050 (601)974-1000
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ENGL 1000: Introduction to Interpretation
MWF 10 - 10:50 a.m.
Instructor: G. Miller
A prerequisite to most courses in the English department, this course focuses on developing engaged critical understandings of literary texts. We'll work to write clearly about a variety of literary texts (lyric poems, plays, stories, a novel, and a film), with increased mindfulness of our critical assumptions and strategies. We'll develop a working critical vocabulary, both stylistic and theoretic. And we'll cultivate the surprises and pleasures of reading.
ENGL 2010: British & American Literary History I
Section 1: MWF 10 - 10:50 a.m.; Section 2: MWF 11 - 11:50 a.m.
Instructor: E. Griffin
A history of British and American literature from the beginnings to 1800, with an emphasis on the meaning and development of literary history.
ENGL 3400: Writing and Reading Fiction
W 6:30 - 9 p.m.
Instructor: S. Kistulentz
This course is a fiction workshop which pairs the careful analysis and discussion of student works-in-progress with intensive readings in contemporary short fiction. We'll read extensively in the hopes of expanding our basic understandings of point of view, narrative voice, dramatic movement, structure, rhythm, and imagery, as well as discuss issues of craft that arise from student manuscripts. Said another way, we'll examine the intimate connection between learning to read as a writer and finding our own unique voice; further, we will work to develop our vocabulary as both consumers and critics of contemporary fiction. Students will write and workshop two short stories during the course of the semester. PREREQUISITES: Introduction to Creative Writing or permission of the instructor.
ENGL 3180: Contemporary American Poetry
TTh 10 - 11:15 a.m., W 12 - 12:50 p.m.
Instructor: S. Kistulentz
This course will involve significant readings in 20th Century American poetry with a specific emphasis on understanding today's evolving trends. We'll read with an idea of discussing how today's poets are in dialogue with their literary precursors, and we'll investigate such post-World War II movements as the confessional school, the beats, the New York School, the Black Arts Movement, and Language poetry. We'll begin with a brief look at arguably the two most influential American poets, Whitman and Dickinson, and analyze the pervasive way in which these two voices are heard, mirrored, and echoed in today's much more diverse world of poetry. Students who are creative writing minors will have the option of undertaking a creative project in lieu of a term paper.
ENGL 3350: Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: "When Our Separate Journeys Converge"
MWF 11 - 11:50 a.m.; Th 9 - 9:50 a.m.
Instructor: S. Marrs
Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of the twentieth-century's most distinguished fiction writers, were also good friends. Though Welty's roots were in Mississippi and Maxwell's in Illinois, the two met in New York City's publishing circles and sensed that they were kindred spirits. They soon recognized that their backgrounds were not so different as they might have thought and that their careers were taking rather similar paths. We'll explore similarities in their lives and works, we look at the letters they exchanged, and we'll talk with other writers who knew them both. Texts: Eudora Welty, Stories, Essays, Memoir; Welty, The Optimist's Daughter; William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories; William Maxwell, Later Novels and Stories; Maxwell, Ancestors. Grades will be based on a mid-term examination, reading quizzes, a term paper, and a final examination.
ENGL 3320: Milton
MWF 9 - 9:50 a.m.
Instructor: G. Miller
We'll explore together the political and literary career of the greatest epic poet in the English language, reading not only Paradise Lost, but also revolutionary prose treatises such as Aeropagitica and sections of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the early Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, the play Samson Agonistes, and a representative sampling of the great lyrics.
ENGL 3500/THEA 3000: History and Literature of the Theatre I
TTh 1 - 2:40 p.m.
Instructor: A. MacMaster
This course will examine dramatic theory, literature, criticism, and theatrical practices from the origins through the Renaissance and includes a study of Classical Japanese theatre. Plays to be discussed and analyzed will probably include Euripides' Medea and/or Bacchae; Aristophanes' Birds and/or Wasps; either Plautus's Menachmi Twins or Terence's Braggart Warrior; either Seneca's Medea or Phaedra; The Second Shepherd's Play; Everyman; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth and The Tempest. Film adaptations of some plays will be analyzed as interpretations.
ENGL 4900: Senior Seminar in English
MW 1 - 2:15 p.m.
Instructor: L. Franey
This class will focus on narrative practice and theory, especially in relation to prose fiction and prose nonfiction in the English-language literary tradition. Storytelling will be our central focus, meaning that we will ask questions about how and why humans tell stories, how and why they shape those stories in the ways that they do, and about the purposes to which stories are put in various contexts. We will read selections from classic theoretical and critical texts such as Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination, and Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey. Primary texts will include short stories from a wide variety of British, American, and world Anglophone writers, at least one novel (probably either a 19th-century realist novel or a 20th-century postmodernist novel), and at least one autobiography or memoir (most likely a slave narrative or immigrant life story).
COMM 1000: Public Speaking
M 6:30 - 9 p.m.
Instructor: A. Box
Students will study principles and strategies for effective oral communication. The course will emphasize principles of rhetoric, while teaching students methods for researching, organizing, and delivering various kinds of speeches. It will also explore ethical, social, and political issues surrounding public address.
COMM 2000: Introduction to Communications
TTh 1 - 2:40 p.m.
Instructor: C. Coats
Students will encounter a range of theories within the communication discipline that analyze interpersonal, intercultural, group, and media communication. The class will attempt to help students connect communication theory to their everyday lives as well as to their future professions. Also, students will learn to critically engage media texts and write rhetorical analyses of media texts.
COMM 3500: Studies in Rhetoric/Environmental Rhetoric
MTWF 9 - 9:50 a.m.
Instructor: R. Boada
This course is intended to help students enhance their awareness, improve advocacy skills, and become better critics of environmental issues. We will explore the rhetorical dynamics of how discourse works to inform, construct, and produce individual and cultural perceptions of "Nature" and "Environment." We will examine how the concepts of "Nature" and "Environment" are presented in various academic and social contexts, such as literary and media genres. Topics include ecocriticism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, globalization, and environmental justice. We will read texts from Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. among others.
COMM 4900: Senior Seminar
MW 1 - 2:40 p.m.
Instructor: C. Coats
This course is designed to help students acquire more advanced skills and develop more advanced critical thinking in the field of communications.
COMM 3750/ENGL 3570 (Cross-listed course): Myth and Symbol
TBA
Instructor: S. Smith
IDST 1000: American Heroes
MWF 11 - 11:50 a.m., Th 9 - 9:50 a.m.
Instructor: C. Coats
Every Hollywood blockbuster has a common thread: the superhero. This character may be masked or unmasked, have super-human strength (Spiderman, Hell Boy) or strength from technological wizardry (Batman, Iron Man). Or the character may just be smarter, faster, or carry a bigger or better gun (Bourne Identity).
This course explores the superhero in American cinema. We will seek to understand the history of this character and the narratives embedded in this character. In this course, we will ask the following questions: What do superheroes tell us about gender, particularly masculinity? What do they tell us about race? What do they tell us about the ideals of "America"? We will address these questions by learning how to closely read media texts and connect those texts to concepts in visual communications, media studies and studies of rhetoric.
IDST 2400: Manifest Destiny
TTh 10 - 11:15 a.m.
Instructor: E. Griffin
This course will consider the importance of American Exceptionalism - better known as "Manifest Destiny" - in our national consciousness. We will begin by exploring the early colonial ventures at Jamestown and Plymouth, pause to consider the roots of the American Revolution, then move westward via the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Mexican-American War and the California Gold Rush. After another pause to think about how the Civil War complicates both this period of unprecedented expansion and our nation's sense of "election," we will continue moving westward as our nation's victory in the Spanish-American War propels the United States to global prominence at the end of the 19th century.
"Manifest Destiny" will satisfy your Core 4 requirement, and while our major interdisciplinary focus will be on the connections between Literature and History, our materials will come from the fields of geography, philosophy, religion and the visual arts as well. In order to bring the issues we raise closer to home by observing how our theme enters the popular mind via the motion picture medium, we will meet several evenings during the course of the semester to view and critique some classic (and not-so-classic) American films. The course also cross-lists in Latin American Studies.
IDST 2400-01: Slavery and the American South
MTWF 9 - 9:50 a.m.
Instructor: S. Marrs
This study of slavery in America will address questions that have long preoccupied students of the South's peculiar institution. What do we know about the people who were enslaved? About the African cultural traditions they brought with them to America and managed to preserve? About the conditions under which these men and women lived and labored? About the methods by which they sought to escape from slavery or to obtain a degree of power within it? What do we know about the individuals who owned slaves, about their family lives, their cultural traditions, their religious beliefs? How did they see themselves? How did they attempt to rationalize their participation in the slave system? In attempting to answer these questions, we shall examine fiction written by black and white, male and female, nineteenth-century Southerners, we shall read excerpts from nineteenth-century diaries and slave narratives, we shall look at twentieth-century novels about slavery, and we shall pay close attention to recent essays by major historians. In addition, we shall listen to music and look at photographs from the nineteenth-century American South. Short quizzes, a term paper, mid-term and final examinations will provide the basis for grading. Texts: Rosengarten, Tombee, Portrait of a Cotton Planter (booklet of excerpts); A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard; Douglass, Narrative of a Life; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Gerster and Cords, Mythology and Southern History, vol. I; Morrison, Beloved; Jones, The Known World.
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