English Association meeting
The English Association (a student group for all English majors and minors) will be meeting soon to plan for spring events. Look for an email about the meeting from Lauren Lacey.
new full-time professor
The English Department welcomes our newest full-time professor:
Ashley Byock, Ph.D.
She lists her interests and areas of study/teaching as 19th Century American Literature; cultures and literatures of death and mourning; first person writing and the American Civil War; African American cultural history; and gender and writing.
All of Dr. Byock's spring courses will use art, science, journalism, and other materials to provide rich cultural contexts for literary texts.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming events nclude the Edgewood College Writing Contest, the publication of Edgewood Review, the Spring English Department Scholarship Forum, and an English Department Dinner. Check back soon for details.
new publications
Adam Fell’s first full-length poetry collection, I AM NOT A PIONEER, is now available from H_NGM_N Books.
"Adam Fell is a break-the-mold original, poet of the strip mall and the lakeshore, bard of Pabst and gas stations and gutted cigarette machines. His brave and quirky poems hum and crackle off the page."
—Erika Meitner
Adam's chapbook Ten Keys to Being a Champion On and Off the Field (H_NGM_N 2010) is available as a free download.
Promotions
The following faculty have been approved by the Board of Trustees for achieving important milestones in their careers:
Tenure: Rachel Poulsen
Associate Professor: Lauren Lacey
Professor Emeritus: Charlotte Meyer
Writing Group
A new writing group has been formed at Edgewood. We are the "Wingra Writers," and our focus is on academic writing about literature and popular culture. There are faculty, students, and alumni in the group, and we will meet at Edgewood on Tuesday evenings to discuss our work.
If you are interested in participating, please contact Lauren Lacey.
consider an
English major
Do you love to read novels and poetry, but think you ought to do something more practical in college? Do you find satisfaction in creative writing, but know that you don't want to be a "starving artist"? You can still major or minor in English.
Those who have majored or minored in humanities studies such as English are increasingly valued in a wide variety of careers. The professional and business worlds have found that humanities majors are often better at solving problems and adapting to new directions than are their more narrowly educated, technically trained co-workers.
The writing and communication skills that are developed and enhanced by an English major or minor are valuable assets. Today, professionals in all fields need to know how to think critically and to speak and write clearly and effectively.
Spring 2012
Featured Courses
200-level courses upper-level courses
200-level courses
ENG 277 J
Language, Society, & the Individual
MW|2:00-3:50 p.m.|Susan Rustick
ENG 260 A CDX
Topics in Ethnic Literatures: American Slave Narratives
TR|12:00-1:50 p.m.|Ashley Byock
Ever since a ship carrying twenty Africans docked and sold its human cargo to European colonists in Virginia in 1619, the successes and failures of slavery have been integral to the American culture. This course will examine a number of slave narratives, reading a few more closely, alongside scholarly commentaries from the nineteenth century to today. We will contextualize these voices in literary, historical, anthropological, and political terms.
ENG 259 CX
Literature of the Quest
TR|2:00-3:50 p.m.|James Hunter
ENG 250G CX HNR
The American Renaissance
TR|2:00-3:50 p.m.|Ashley Byock
The middle of the American C19 saw an explosion of writings pursuing radically new ideas and literary forms, from Emerson's transcendentalism to Whitman's freeform poetic. Was this the birth of a uniquely American tradition, an "American Renaissance" of some kind? Or is that very idea exclusive of the voices of women and African-Americans that have generally been left out of the literary canon? Our readings will range from canonical writers (like Melville and Hawthorne) to non-canonical writers (slave narratives, feminist writers) to critics (from C19 to C21).
ENG 250 CX
Noir in Film and Fiction
TR|12:00-1:50 p.m.|Jack Vitek
ENG 250 CGX
Criminal Utopias:
Science Fiction & Crime Literature with a Focus on Scandinavia
MW|2:00-3:50 p.m.|Agnete Schmidt
Science fiction and Crime Literature are genres that hold up dual mirrors for their readers and facilitate discussions of the changing nature of society, and the nature of good and evil, through popular culture. Over the past decades, Scandinavian crime fiction has seen an explosion in both production and popularity. Scandinavian crime authors have attracted large international audiences and are widely translated with names such as Mankell, Holt, and Stieg Larsson leading the ranks.
ENG 242 CDX
Literature of American Minorities
MW|12:00-1:50 p.m.|Binbin Fu
This course provides an introduction to literatures of ethnic minorities in the U.S., including Native American, African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American literatures. We will read a number of significant 20th century texts which have shaped ethnic minority literary traditions and have become part and parcel of American literature. We will explore such major issues as identity, culture, history, race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will examine how these texts present specific ethnic experiences via diverse literary means and innovations and by doing so contribute to American literature and culture.
ENG 236 CG
Intro. to Drama:
World Drama in Context
MW|10:00-11:50 a.m.|Rachel Poulsen
This course will survey global drama in translation, beginning with the development of a modern tradition in the seventeenth century and continuing into the present day. The class is designed to help students acquire the tools for understanding, appreciating, and critically analyzing drama as literature, as well as theater as performance. Students will exercise critical thinking skills as they read, analyze, and discuss a variety of plays.
ENG 235 CX
Intro. to Poetry
MW|8:00-9:50 a.m.|Stefan Hagemann
ENG 210 CX
Intro. To Literature
TR|10:00-11:50 p.m. & MW|2:00-3:50 p.m.|David Young
ENG 205 BX
Intro. to Creative Writing
TR|2:00-3:50 p.m.|David Young
MW| 4:00-5:50 p.m.|Adam Fell
Upper-level courses
ENG 302 2X
Professional Communication
TR|12:00-1:50 p.m.|James Hunter
In this COR 2 course, students will design and produce a major project for a community organization; the project will be writing-based, and may include documents in a variety of media. Students will work closely with their community partners, both on the project itself and through at least 20 hours of volunteer work. The course will include document format and design, editing skills, and audience analysis, and will require learning to use basic computer applications, such as Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and MS Expressions Web. Students will also study a series of basic texts on individual ethics and the role of the individual in the community, and will be expected to integrate these readings into formal and informal reflections on their own values, their place in the community, and their role in building a more just and compassionate world.
ENG 476
Advanced Writing Workshop: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
T|5:30-9:00 p.m.|Lauren Lacey
Have you ever wanted to explore writing in non-realistic modes? Are you contemplating the series that will make Harry Potter look unpopular, or planning the next great space opera? Maybe you just want to write about fairies and aliens . . . This advanced writing workshop will focus on techniques relevant to science fiction and fantasy, as well as on writing outside of realism more generally. Students will read short examples of the best of both genres, create and workshop at least one piece of science fiction and one piece of fantasy, and develop strategies and techniques suited to the peculiarities of the genres of science fiction and fantasy.
ENG 327ACQ
Lit. & Gender:
Woman in the 19th Century
W|5:30-9:00 p.m.|Ashley Byock
From the unholy birth of Mary Shelley's monster in Frankenstein (1818) to Kate Chopin's dangerously free heroine in The Awakening (1899), the nineteenth century marked an extraordinary historical passage for British and American women. Women's claims to new kinds of social and literary freedom were themselves monstrous to many who worried that liberated women would undermine social stability. This course will look at how women rewrote their social roles and opened up new ways of imagining interiority in literary form. Readings will include fictions like Jane Eyre, feminist criticism from Mary Wollestonecraft (1792) to today, domestic manuals, and a look at depictions of women in everything from paintings to advertisements.
ENG 331A CX
Shakespeare
MW|12:00-1:50 p.m.|Rachel Poulsen
In this course, we will examine 7-9 plays in depth, from comedy and tragedy to history and romance. Shakespeare's ongoing attention to power relationships, particularly the intersections between public and private power, will be our thematic focus. From wars to weddings, the plays stage the human drama as a series of impassioned power negotiations, and the individual drama as a struggle between duty and desire. Tracing this theme, we will discuss how the plays serve as a commentary on his culture, while still remaining relevant to our own.
ENG 370BCGX
Postcolonial Fiction
MW|10:00-11:50 a.m.|Lauren Lacey
This is a course about contemporary fiction written in English from around the world, as well as the struggle to come to terms with the legacy of colonialism and current neo-colonial conditions. We will read fiction from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. If you're still trying to figure out what "postcolonial" means, fear not because we will sort it out together. Our readings of primary texts will be informed by historical grounding, geographical/political contexts, and cultural and literary theory to do with postcolonial subjectivity.
ENG 314 X
Literary Journalism
MW|2:00-3:50 p.m.|Mary Morgan
This course will introduce student writers to literary journalism. It is a transcendent form of journalism that borrows its techniques and form from the traditional fictional novel. Students will have an opportunity to study, read and discuss a diverse selection of examples in the genre, and they will also write their own literary journalism.
ENG 317 B
Photojournalism
F|10:00 a.m. –12:50 p.m.|Linda Friend
Students will learn to shoot high quality photojournalist images of all types, including news, sports and features, will learn the latest version of Photoshop, and will work with Edgewood's student newspaper's reporters on stories and have their photos published in On The Edge. We also do group shoots for the newspaper's feature stories, and learn the ethics of photojournalism. Guest photojournalist speakers are featured regularly. Students need to have their own cameras or check them out through TAC.
ENG 316 B
Video Production
F|3:00-5:00 p.m.|Linda Friend
Students will have access to and learn to shoot high quality videos of their choice, will learn the ethics of video journalism and how to do great interviews, will learn industry-standard Final Cut Pro editing software,and have a video package by end of semester with their work on a DVD to use as resume material. Students do not need their own video equipment.