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Fall 2013 Upper-Level English CoursesNotice: English 271 (British Literature II), English 281 (American Literature II), and English 282 (American Ethnic Literature) are now taught in rotations, two semesters on, one semester off.
If you have any questions, please contact Sarah Baar (baar@hope.edu).
Course DescriptionsENGL 155.01A: Intro Creative Writing: Poems Poetry as an art: that’s what this class is all about. How do you work with words as if they were clay, paint, musical instruments? Come explore what it means to be a poet by making poems yourself. We’ll scribble, sculpt, build, and talk about the process for seven and a half creative weeks—though you just may get hooked and never stop. ENGL 155.01B: Intro Creative Writing: Poems Poetry as an art: that’s what this class is all about. How do you work with words as if they were clay, paint, musical instruments? Come explore what it means to be a poet by making poems yourself. We’ll scribble, sculpt, build, and talk about the process for seven and a half creative weeks—though you just may get hooked and never stop. ENGL 213.01: Expository Writing II In this workshop-oriented course, students will make their own choices of both topics and expository genres. In the process, everyone will focus on clarity and style to suit chosen audiences and purposes. Revising with feedback will then lead to a semester’s end portfolio. Full semester. ENGL 213.02: Expository Writing II In this workshop-oriented course, students will make their own choices of both topics and expository genres. In the process, everyone will focus on clarity and style to suit chosen audiences and purposes. Revising with feedback will then lead to a semester’s end portfolio. Full semester. ENGL 214.01A: Workplace Writing The focus of every writing workshop is, of course, to help students become more effective writers. In this course, students will particularly be working to become better professional writers. The class focuses on skills suited to workplace writing by learning appropriate genres and formatting. In some ways, this course focuses on rhetoric--both oral and written--because rhetoric is the foundation of strong communication skills. The course is taught as a participation-heavy, collaborative workshop. Students will work with each other in groups daily, and they will work collaboratively on certain projects. Multimodal and technology-related projects will also be incorporated into various areas of the course. ENGL 214.01B: Workplace Writing The focus of every writing workshop is, of course, to help students become more effective writers. In this course, students will particularly be working to become better professional writers. The class focuses on skills suited to workplace writing by learning appropriate genres and formatting. In some ways, this course focuses on rhetoric--both oral and written--because rhetoric is the foundation of strong communication skills. The course is taught as a participation-heavy, collaborative workshop. Students will work with each other in groups daily, and they will work collaboratively on certain projects. Multimodal and technology-related projects will also be incorporated into various areas of the course. ENGL 231.01: Literature Western World I Aesop's fables and Homer's tales of war and adventure start us on an oddysey of ancient literature. Ancient Roman and medieval Italian epics send us on a spiritual journey that also embraces excerpts from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and the Islamic Koran. Chaucer takes us on a pilgrimage with the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, and Cervantes inaugurates a quest with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Sappho, Lady Murasaki, Marie de France, and Sor Juana de la Cruz go places where few females dare to tread. Michelangelo and Shakespeare lead us through the Renaissance and Reformation and prepare us for the modern world. As you study these authors and works, you will read and take tests and write journals and short papers (or a longer research project) about the masterpieces of Western literature in a global context. ENGL 233.01: Ancient Global Literature Ancient Global Literatures is a four credit course that fulfills the Cultural Heritage 1, Global Learning 1 and Cultural Diversity requirements of the General Education program. It presents a dialogic perspective of the Ancient literatures in the Western and non-Western traditions within a fresh and diverse range of selections. It seeks to examine the world’s great literature by exploring the epic in its historical, philosophical, social as well as the literary and cultural links between past and present, East and West. The course is therefore conceived as cross-over between the Western and non-Western traditions of literature in their historical, cultural and philosophical contexts. It is a multi-genre course and would draw from selections including epic and lyric poetry, drama, and prose narrative, and focus on the oral narratives of Ancient Africa, India, China and the Middle East. ENGL 248.01: Intro to Literary Studies This course is an introduction to the literary forms of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction, considering elements they have in common and elements unique to each. It will examine how genres differ, but also how they intersect and overlap and influence each other. It aims to teach how to read literature with sensitivity, understanding, and appreciation, and how to approach that reading from a variety of theoretical perspectives. It is not a course in writing stories or poems or drama--for that, see English 254 or 255 or 258. It is a foundational course, intended as preparation for all higher-numbered literature courses in the English department. But it also is of value in itself and is recommended for students looking for an elective dealing with literature broadly. Four credit hours. ENGL 248.02: Intro to Literary Studies This course is an introduction to the literary forms of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction, considering elements they have in common and elements unique to each. It will examine how genres differ, but also how they intersect and overlap and influence each other. It aims to teach how to read literature with sensitivity, understanding, and appreciation, and how to approach that reading from a variety of theoretical perspectives. It is not a course in writing stories or poems or drama--for that, see English 254 or 255 or 258. It is a foundational course, intended as preparation for all higher-numbered literature courses in the English department. But it also is of value in itself and is recommended for students looking for an elective dealing with literature broadly. Four credit hours. ENGL 248.03: Intro to Literary Studies This course is an introduction to the literary forms of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction, considering elements they have in common and elements unique to each. It will examine how genres differ, but also how they intersect and overlap and influence each other. It aims to teach how to read literature with sensitivity, understanding, and appreciation, and how to approach that reading from a variety of theoretical perspectives. It is not a course in writing stories or poems or drama--for that, see English 254 or 255 or 258. It is a foundational course, intended as preparation for all higher-numbered literature courses in the English department. But it also is of value in itself and is recommended for students looking for an elective dealing with literature broadly. Four credit hours. ENGL 254.01: Creative Writing: Fiction Writing fiction! Learn more about what it takes to write great stories and practice everything you’ve learned. Join this class for a lively and safe space to experiment and learn about your creativity and improve your story-telling skills. Class will include drafting many short fictional “shapes,” learning about skills and techniques to make your writing snap and sing, reading and analyzing good stories, workshopping your stuff with your classmates, and revision, revision, revision! You will write at least 200 pages of fiction! In addition, other requirements include attendance, participation, and reflecting on at least one Visiting Writers Series event. Active, curious, supportive, humorous, surprising and creative class participation is a must! 4 credit hours ENGL 255.01: Creative Writing: Poems Poetry is play. Poetry is an answer to an unasked question. Poetry is
a pretty big house, with lots of different rooms, in which “Risk” is
always played. That's why poetry permits with language what no other
mode of expression allows. We will attempt to write in many different styles, allowing a huge amount of experimentation based on the style presented. We will discuss the poems we write as a group, and express our respect for the individual poem and poet by questioning it deeply. We will work collaboratively as a whole class and in small groups. We will use our ingenuity to apply our knowledge gained outside the class to the benefit of the class as a whole. We will write until our hands cramp-up, and call our writing poetry. ENGL 258.01: Creative Writing: Nonfiction Course Description Coming Soon ENGL 259.01: Creative Writing: Satire Modestly, I propose that this unsavory course, blandly entitled "Creative Writing: Satire," be eliminated from the smorgasbord of English Department offerings. An abundance of satire already sours our sweet existences. Why should students be fed a diet of hard-boiled lampoons and mushy travesties from the mixing-bowl minds of impossibility thinkers? Furthermore, why should students be encouraged to vomit forth mealy-mouthed parodies or concoct original recipes of tasteless satire in this best of all possible worlds? Idiots will argue that writing satire is a delectable experience. They will point to the exquisite feast prepared by such gourmet satirists as the fabled Aesop, the titillating Aristophanes, the arty Buchwald, and the motherly Bombeck. They will urge Hope students to spice and sauce college life with delicious dishes of nouveau satire. How unappetizing! I think the average Hopeite will suffer mental indigestion from taste-testing political, social, religious, and academic poison from the pens of her or his cohorts in this course. This Monday/Wednesday Afternoon Live class is not the proper fare to be served at an already perfect liberal arts college in the Christian tradition. I have nothing to gain by discouraging your abstinence, except for a peaceful existence minus rough drafts of artistic, literary, musical, and gender satire. Four credit hours. Format: a pinch of lecture; a dash of discussion; an ounce of performance; a pound of workshop commentary on each other's caricatures, cartoons, curses, parodies, political diatribes, and modest proposals, etc. Reading: one or two books and many tidbits from satiric masters to serve as models for writing. Writing: several cups of original satiric writing in a variety of forms chosen by each budding Swift; you'll prepare many experimental pieces, but you'll be able to choose which ones you want to bake to perfection for grading. ENGL 270.01: British Literature I Brit Lit I surveys literature written in England until the late eighteenth century. Its purpose is to give students a general knowledge and understanding of the great writers and works of early England (Beowulf and other Old English texts), medieval England (Chaucer, Langland, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Renaissance England (Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare), writers of the early seventeenth century (Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert) and the later seventeenth century (Marvell, Milton, Bunyan, Dryden), and writers of eighteenth century England (Swift, Pope, Johnson, and Austen). These are the “classic” works and writers that established the tradition on which later writers built, works and writers that all students of English literature should be familiar with. Four credit hours. ENGL 271.01: British Literature II Enter the world of ancient mariners, Grecian urns, opium-eaters, Frankenstein, light brigades, blessed damozels, goblin markets, garden parties, waste lands, jazz, endgames, dumb waiters, dolls museums, the prophet's hair. This scintillating survey course will introduce you to the major movements and writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth during the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern Eras (roughly 1773-2013 or about 240 years). The literary canon (dead but vital white male poets, such as Blake, Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, and Auden) will be augmented by wondrous women warriors (Austen, Shelley, Woolf, Mansfield, and Lessing), Irish giants (Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney), and fresh Commonwealth voices (Rhys, Achebe, Walcott, Munro, and Rushdie). Approximately equal time will be devoted to poetry, fiction, and drama. Forging links between geographical centers, genders, genres, races, and critical approaches will be among the impossible dreams of the teacher. Three tests or innovative test alternatives will measure your mastery of material. Three papers or nonpapers (musical, artistic, sculptural, choreographic, cinematic options) or a longer research project will engage your scholarly and creative impulses. Journal entries will keep you on your toes. You will move from "The Songs of Innocence" to the "The Moment before the Gun Went Off." Four credit hours. ENGL 279.01: Writing for Teachers This workshop course will help its members become better writing teachers by first becoming better writers. You will become more energetic, attuned, and agile writers in multiple genres. You’ll have chances to play with fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and even plays, scripts and the graphic “novel” form! As we become more experienced with the techniques needed to write the kinds of works readers love to read, we’ll also explore how you, future teachers, will teach writing to your future students. Together we will form a community founded on respect for each person as a writer, dedicated to helping each and every person in class become a better writer and teacher of writing. This is a blended learning course. Feel free to contact me before registration if you have questions. Four credit hours. ENGL 280.01: American Literature I This course surveys American literature from its beginnings to the Civil War era, an opportunity to search and understand our fascinating past through the writers, genres, and movements of America’s abundant literary tradition. We’ll begin with the first English-speaking settlers and the Native peoples already here; we’ll confront the crucible of expansion, slavery, and division; and we’ll conclude with the conflagration of the Civil War and exploration of the American West. We’ll be asking: what is distinctly American about the literature we’re reading; how were writers – Rowlandson, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville, Douglass, Stowe – shaped by historical circumstance, gender, race, and class; and how does literature help create and influence our culture now. Our time in class will be a mix of lecture and discussion, with a lean towards discussion. There will be two reading exams, several short papers, class presentations, and a substantial final research project. It’ll be an adventure – come join us! ENGL 282.01: American Ethnic Literature Heart Body Soul ENGL 354.01: Intermed Creative Wrtg: Fiction, Short Story This workshop-based course will help you discover the power of your creative spirit turned loose to play with the techniques and forms of well-constructed short stories. Our texts will be contemporary short stories, technique explanations, and our own writing. Together we'll study how stories are put together. It'll be sort of like playing with Legos: we'll look at stories others have built and study that construction. Next we'll "build" our own. Then we'll take them apart again and see what else we can build using the same pieces! And then we'll bring in new pieces and see what else can happen! We will form a community, founded on respect for each person as a writer, dedicated to helping each and every person in class become a better writer. We will write stories that create experiences that move readers. You’ll read, draft, re-vision and coach others in this course. Though the load is medium, the work—if you’re passionate about it—will be hard. And wonderful. And I hope you will be passionate about it! Four credit hours. ENGL 355.01: Intermed Creative Wrtg: Poems This course is for those who feel some familiarity with poetry, but want to deepen their knowledge of the practices and techniques poets know and use. Prerequisite: any 200 level writing class or permission of instructor.? This workshop/seminar course will concern poems whose strategies include specific technique and form. All poets play with form (I'm not talking just sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas though they count, too). Today's poets work the razor's edge of form and technique: they look to the forms and techniques of the past and use them for a poet's purpose: to create art that speaks in today's vernacular. You'll get prompts and guidance along the way, and you'll see poetry as a living art in which a poet both resettles known territory and blazes new paths across unknown land. ?In English 355 you'll practice poetic techniques and forms while you develop a more profound self-awareness of your innate language habits. You'll write a two-dozen wonderful new poems, and make of them a chapbook while both new and experienced poets provide feedback on your work. You'll learn new strategies for getting more out of reading poetry (top among them: READ LOTS OF POETRY!), you'll meet fascinating poets who love what they do, and you'll explore poetry from around the world. ENGL 360.01: Modern English Grammar If you’ve ever hesitated between who and whom, this course is what you need to increase your poise as a speaker and writer. And if you have selected a career path whose success even partially depends on your oral and written presentation, then you will find this class valuable. Modern English Grammar, a four-unit, full-semester course, introduces you to the building blocks of speech and grammar. Its goal is to make you confident about your writing, and to give you a background that will permanently change the way you write. Beginning with the eight parts of speech, the course builds a cumulative knowledge through exercises, small group praxis, and games. Because the class assumes that some students will eventually be teaching grammar themselves, the learning environment is an active one, designed to model creative learning strategies that are easily adaptable for future teachers. By course’s end you will be able to detect even the subtlest usage errors. ENGL 373.01: Shakespeare's Plays The textbook for this course organizes Shakespeare's plays into four kinds, or "genres": comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. The first "complete works" edition (the so-called First Folio, published in 1623) uses a similar organizing strategy, but it omits "romance" and often puts plays in very different categories from those a modern editor would select for them. Who is right, in a case like this, and why? How much did Shakespeare himself think in terms of genre, as he wrote his plays? Does genre have a fixed identity, or is it a cultural construct? This course will approach Shakespeare's plays by raising questions about the identity of dramatic form, trying to understand, as best we can, how the plays came to have the shape they do. An important question is whether film constitutes a new genre. Is Branagh's Hamlet a different kind of work from a stage production of the play? To help answer this question, the course will strongly emphasize filmed versions of the plays, using the extensive DVD and videotape collection in the VanWylen Library. Four credit hours. ENGL 373.02: Lit for Children & Adolescents This course will focus on reading many works of Adolescent and Children's Literature, with 60% of the readings being Cross Cultural Readings. Reading and analyzing what we have read will be for the purpose of writing a literary theory of your own at the end of the semester, so that you can on your own discern poor, good, and excellent literature and have solid reasons for your decisions. Your final exam for the course will be your completed literary theory. The course will be mainly discussion of the works we are reading and deciding the quality of each of our readings as the semester progresses. It will be a fun course, for the books chosen to be read are all award-winning books. This course is designed to stimulate your imaginations, help your critical thinking skills, rekindle a love of reading for pleasure in your lives, and prepare you to discern quality literature and movies on your own. ENGL 373.03: J.R.R. Tolkien and Medieval Literature Most Tolkien fans know that he was a great scholar of medieval literature. Many of the kernels that inspired his novels can be found in medieval works that he studied. Conversely, what he did with this inspiration can be a guide for modern audiences into the foreign territory of old books and poems. In addition, the variety of ways in which he responded to the works he loved—scholarly articles, poems imitating old forms, sequels, translations, reconstructions of fragmentary works, and, of course, his own fantasy novels—can be models for our own responses. This course will play back and forth across the fuzzy line between interpretive scholarship and creative writing. We will read medieval works, both well-known and lesser known, that Tolkien studied, loved, and in some cases translated. We will also read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as well as some of Tolkien’s lesser known works. And then there are all of the responses to Tolkien’s works, including the Peter Jackson films, which we will make some time to discuss too. There will be opportunities for students to explore Tolkien’s posthumous publications, medieval literature in other languages that Tolkien knew (such as Old Norse and Welsh), how all these works respond to the Bible, and other topics of individual interest. The course will be conducted as a discussion-based seminar. Students will write a portfolio of pieces that will include critical writing as well as other interpretive and creative genres. ENGL 375.01: Irish Literature This course serves as a brief introduction to Irish literature from Jonathan Swift to Seamus Heaney, and to the political contexts that informed literary movements in Ireland from the early eighteenth century to the present. It’s a class about patriot poets, provisional armies, Protestants and priests, potatoes and pubs. We will read across multiple genres, including political satire, fiction, poetry, and drama. We will listen to as much music as I can squeeze in. We will watch several films (Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, Bloody Sunday) and look at some contemporary Irish painting and photography. Who knows—before the semester is over, some of you may be inspired to stomp dance while holding your arms oddly still at your sides. This course isn’t just an offering of “the best Irish poems, plays, and novels,” in other words. I want to make it as much of a cultural immersion experience as possible (without getting myself fired). But that doesn’t mean you’ll be dressing up like leprechauns and singing Oh Danny Boy. Instead, you’ll learn more of the “real” story: about the United Irishmen and the Great Rebellion of 1798; about the Great Famine of 1845-49; the Cultural Revival; the Easter Rising in 1916; the Civil War and resulting Partition; the hunger-strikers and the IRA; the “Troubles” and the Good Friday peace negotiations. We’re going to read a lot (let me underscore that I mean a lot) of amazing literature, and we’ll think about how the texts we are encountering have been produced in specific historic contexts, how authors responded to political pressures, and how their works helped to shape cultural values that still have resonance in the present. We’ll foreground issues of gender, race and ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, because Irish writers were constantly negotiating questions of identity as they sought to make sense of their own violent, seemingly inescapable past. These works speak to us today, even those written almost three centuries ago. Some are hilarious. Others are wrought through with the tragic history of Ireland itself. Many are just so, so beautiful. I love Ireland and one of the main reasons for this is because Ireland is a country full of people who worship language (and those who use it well). In this class we’ll celebrate that awesome impulse by filling our mouths and minds with the words of great authors, writing poems and formal essays and satires in imitation of them, and practicing pontificating, philosophizing, and storytelling upon occasion ourselves. Reading list: Jonathan Swift, “The Story of an Injured Lady,” Gullivers Travels; Maria Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro,” Castle Rackrent; Thomas Moore, “Intolerance” and selections from Irish Melodies; William Carleton, “The Black Prophet”; Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla”; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; William Butler Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan and selected poems; Augusta, Lady Gregory, selection from Cuchulain of Muirthemne; John Synge, Riders to the Sea; Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars and "Juno and the Paycock"; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head; Mary Lavin, “A Cup of Tea”; Eavan Boland, Outside History; Seamus Heaney, North ENGL 375.02: American Environmental Literature
Like Koyaanisqatsi, a mesmerizing film we’ll watch at our first meeting, this seminar will attempt to alter our spatial and temporal modes of perception through defamiliarization. The “natural” will become fantastic, and the mundane immanent with hidden meaning. What if changes in the built environment—the ones we’ve barely noticed—tell us more about the trajectory of our civilization than market-tested political disinformation? What if trees sprouted feathers instead of leaves? What if the ground grew hands instead of grass? What if meditation changed our sense of time, and we could see trees and vines strangling each other for light and water while mountains melt away like heated butter? As John Stilgoe says in our first reading: Outside Lies Magic. But that magic has a dark side, and the outside world can be terrifying as well as sublime: urban disintegration, global warming, nuclear apocalypse, secret toxic events, the destruction of the landscapes that make us who we are, and, with that destruction, the insidious contamination of our bodies from fetal malformation to premature death by cancer. What’s in that water you are drinking? As nature goes, so goes the human body. And the future looks grim just as the past (the pastoral?) seems increasingly ideal, and, by the end of the course, we’ll know more about what it means to be thinkers, writers, adventurers, survivors, teachers, and eco-warriors in a time of radical, perhaps terminal, environmental disruption.
“American Literature and the Environment” will provide you with an introduction to the main currents of American eco-criticism, and it will give you motivation, models, support, and feedback for creating a substantial work of environmental writing, largely of your own devising. The course usually appeals to students of literature, creative writing, and the sciences, as well as to social activists and outdoor adventurers—we get an unusual mix, so you don’t need to worry if your route to the class seems indirect or circuitous. Weirdness—up to a point—is an advantage. The course will not assume any previous knowledge of eco-criticism or environmentalism, but, assuming your commitment to the work, it will pave the way for a deeper understanding of both. And, quite honestly, I hope it will change your life. ENGL 375.03: Literature Crossing Borders "
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting
and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new
element, an “alien” element. There is an exhilaration in
being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being “worked” on.
I have the sense that certain “faculties”—not just
in me but every border resident, colored or non-colored—and dormant
areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened." Literature Crossing Borders And you'll be positively the most fearsome pirates in the Spanish Main. (Elizabeth, Damsel) Not just the Spanish Main, luv. The entire ocean. The entire wo'ld. Wherever we want to go, we'll go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs but what a ship is... what the Black Pearl really is... is freedom. (Captain Jack Sparrow, Philosopher) Hemispheric Reading List
To begin with these marks on the page, the movement of calligraphy:
for to write is, of course, to travel. It is to enter a space, a zone,
a territory, sometimes sign-posted by generic indicators (travel writing,
autobiography, anthropology, history...), but everywhere characterized
by movement: the passage of words, the caravan of thought, the flux of
the imaginary. Writing I cannot tell you what we are going to do. Every class is different and every student has a choice in her/his education. The only promise I can make is that we will do what you find valuable, for your inner being, for your discipline, or what you would want to become. I tell you this and I hope you believe it. I believe in writing that is honest and creative, as you will find in the piece below. I also believe that a photograph is worth a thousand words and that paintings change the world and that dance touches my soul and that telling the story for those who cannot is the bravest thing in the world. This isn't a tale of derring-do, nor is it merely some kind of “cynical
account;” it isn't meant to be, at least. It's a chunk of two lives
running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams.
In nine months a man can think a lot of thoughts, from the height of
philosophical conjecture to the most abject longing for a bowl of soup—in
perfect harmony with the state of his stomach. And if, at the same time,
he's a bit of an adventurer, he could have experiences which might interest
other people and his random account would read something like this diary. Your Professor
I keep telling myself that I am part of a bigger cause. I am the same as so many lives who like leaves caught in the winds of the late light of the year or as black birds suddenly noticing the lateness of the day and thus hurtling themselves into that last light so do we scatter on the rustling grounds of this brave new world. There has been both joy and sorrow in our lives as the last of the provinces of Los Estados are slowly occupied. And yet. Who would have divined in those early times that from Califas to the isla of Nuevo York and from the redwood forests to the Golfo this land would be transformed because of that one early Charon who ferried that first wetback across that stream? I keep telling myself that all would come true if for a singular slice of time I could be Langston Hughes. I would travel down rivers and streams to meet my father. Maybe it is because thoughts turn to streams and Mexico and streams of thought of Mexico that magic occurs. Langston Hughes wrote of streams as he made his way to Mexico, of streams of his now and of the migrations of his now and of course of his then and of the forced migrations of his then. Because I too search for my then, I set forth on my journey that involves streams and Mexico and streams of thought of Mexico. But I do not believe that streams mean me well because I do not believe they are metaphors of our lives, linear journeys from the plains to the ocean. I have to believe that streams are for crossing. Streams are easy to cross; it is those streams of thought that cause first rivulets and then rivers to run down your face eroding and eroding the land beneath them, and then one day you see someone you have not seen in a long time and they tell you how old you look and you respond that it has nothing to do with time but those streams of thought. In 2003 as our country was busily spreading freedom to the rest of the world, I was interrogated because I was taking photographs of the Pigeon Creek power plant. Someone had reported a suspicious looking person making obviously terrorist plans. Who could fathom that I was merely drawn to light, a modern-day believer in Prometheus? I pleaded guilty to creating art. In 2007 as our country still was busily spreading freedom to the rest of the world, I was stopped in Oklahoma for “Driving While Mexican.” The patrolman saw a suspicious looking person doing something obviously illegal. Who could fathom that I was merely drawn to stories of western Kansas, a modern-day believer in Caedmon? I pleaded guilty to writing long, long sentences without use of punctuation. In 1976 I was eight years old and because I had pleaded guilty in 2003 and 2007 I was deported to Mexico. I came back a few weeks later, now I wonder if they had it right all along. ENGL 380.01 Teaching Secondary School Engl Are you an English major who wants to be an English teacher in a secondary school? Are you an English minor who may end up teaching some English as part of your future career choice? If either of these situations fits you, this class is designed to help. We'll learn concrete, practical methods for choosing and teaching literature, for teaching and evaluating the process of writing, and for presenting the study of grammar and usage. Topics of interest related to the profession of classroom teaching as a whole will also be shared. Class sessions will include informal lectures, student projects and presentations, and discussions. Reading will be from texts to be named later, and a mountain of handouts. Three credits total—two for the class, one for a field experience TBA. ENGL 381.01: Tchg Sec Sch Engl Field Plcmnt See info for English 380.01. ENGL 480.01: Intro to Literary Theory Literary theory has passed from being trendy to being simply part of what those pursuing literary studies are assumed to know. This makes it a good time to think about what theory contributes to the discipline and how it connects literary studies to other disciplines like philosophy, history, theology, and psychology. Deep consideration of the different schools of thought that have shaped literary studies will help you see the principles behind each and their possibilities and limitations. It will inform and enrich your judgment about what kind of reading is important and why. I hope it will help you not only understand literary texts better, but enjoy them more. And since literary theory approaches everything as a text, it will help you learn to read—and enjoy—everything as literature (or at least try it out). We will begin by considering basic questions and points of view about literature as articulated by classic thinkers from Aristotle to Eliot. Most of the course will be a tour of the major schools of thought from the past century, such as formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, reader-response theory, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, postcolonial criticism, ecocriticism, and cognitive literary theory. As we move through these schools, we'll consider the writings of major theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricouer, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Stephen Greenblatt, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Anzaldúa. We will give particular attention to René Girard’s mimetic theory of culture as both a literary theory and a theory of theory. The course will be conducted as a discussion-based seminar. Requirements will include several short papers and a long final paper that apply theoretical approaches to the texts of your choice. One side benefit of the course is getting to write critically about whatever texts (stories, poems, plays, films, games, etc.) you are interested in. ENGL 495.01: Adv. Creative Writing: Multi-Genre Poets and playwrights and novelists and memoirists and comic writers all together. Oh my! You’re an advanced creative writer, with many classes and pages under your belt. Now is a time to focus less on the how-tos of genre and more on the what-ifs of many forms. What other ways of reading and writing and seeing will help you reach that true, true place in yourself and share it with readers? We’ll focus on the elements essential to good writing and creating authentic meaning in any genre. Together we’ll build skills in the genres we most love by experimenting with writing we’ve never tried before, or thought we’d left behind long ago. Know you’re a novelist? Let the depths of haiku take you by surprise. Lyric poetry your favorite playground? Discover the new images that drawing a comic version of your poem can bring. Always wanted to invent a genre (I’ve toyed with the idea of a Tremblarian sonnet form myself.)? Well, why not take the risk? Each week we will read and write new work, explore new genres. I’ll bring some (memoir, haiku, comics, villanelles, the 10-minute play) and you can bring others. Self-assigned daily writing is assumed. Participation in weekly course work (reading, writing, discussion and workshop) and attendance at all VWS readings and/or Q and A sessions is required. Active participation in a small writing group outside of class is also required. Often students find long-lasting writing partnerships in these groups. You should be willing to enjoy (really enjoy) very close attention and thoughtful response to your work and be willing to help colleagues with their work both immediately and in written reflections composed outside of class. Each student will create a final professional chapbook of appropriate length (between 20 and 40 pages) including multiple genres. At the end of the course, the chapbooks will be self-published and distributed to all workshop members. Maybe even beyond? Workload: even, intense, inventive, fun. Prerequisite: any 300 level creative writing course
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American Environmental Literature is a seminar that considers the ways
writers and artists have imagined the North American environment: the
country and the city, the natural and the constructed, the inhabited
and the abandoned. We’ll discuss representations of trees, forests,
deserts, mountains, cities, cemeteries, houses, shopping malls, highways,
subways, derelict buildings, and the secret places known only to children
and the homeless. We’ll think about the way places change through
the seasons and over geologic spans of time. And we’ll consider
the inhabitants of different kinds of places: from “charismatic
megafauna” in panoramic landscapes to the baroque colonies of microbes
that inhabit our bodies.
To that end, we’ll read about one book each week. Some of those
books will be deep and complex, some of them brisk and adventuresome.
Some will be self-consciously literary; others will emphasize the relation
between texts and images and texts and the physical world. Of course,
we’ll read some of the most famous and influential works of American
environmental writing: Thoreau’s Walden, Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, and Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of
Great American Cities. We’ll reconsider Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as an
ecological text, and we’ll read more recent contributions to the
tradition of environmental writing such as Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. We’ll consider the
strange textuality of trees with Audubon Field Guides in hand, as well
as the astonishing work of Thomas Pakenham. We’ll explore the photographs
and writings of the urban adventurer Camilo Jose Vergara as he explores
American Ruins, and, following his lead we’ll learn about the new
urban exploration movement (bring rope and flashlights). I’ll also
introduce you to my own work on nineteenth-century memorial landscapes
(i.e., old, ruinous cemeteries). And, of course, you will do some environmental
exploration and meditation of your own. 
The class meets once per week in the evenings for lecture, film screenings,
group discussion, adventures, and writing exercises. Those exercises
may include learning how to describe things like tarantulas, peacock
feathers, and mastodon bones with technical accuracy and style; searching
the Hope campus for unnoticed and mysterious places; and learning how
to hear and smell and feel. As Wavy Gravy, the sixties guru, said, the
real trick is to “Be Here Now.” In addition to reading, the
course requirements include attendance of all classes, weekly brief writing
exercises and peer reviews, three substantial contributions to the online
discussion forums, and a 15-page paper (or the negotiable, hybridized
equivalent in images, video, audio, and/or Website development) assembled
from your semester-long environmental explorations (e.g., “Subterranean
Hope College,” “From Winter to Spring on the Lake Michigan
Beach,” “The Passage of Time in Pilgrim Home Cemetery,” and “A
Hundred Years in Prospect Park”).
The title for this course easily could be Literature without Borders.
This class also could be about how real people move in real trains
or real cars across real landscapes with real border patrols guarding
imaginary lines in the sand. However, this is the weird part: those
guarding the imaginary lines are not so much interested in detaining
real people or in real trains as much as they truly are passionate
about containing all those potentials of the human imagination, like
ideas or beliefs or values or visions of reality that are different
if not in opposition to those found within those (again) imaginary
lines. It is one of the ironies of this migrant earth that ideas, beliefs,
values, or visions of reality, whether within or without those imaginary
lines, are created and dissolved in the (again) imagination. And what
is literature if not an agent in the construction and destruction of
the (once again) imagination and all that entails. Literature Crossing
Borders, or Literature without Borders, is a class with a simple plan:
the exploration of literature with the idea that while real people
moving in real trains and real cars crossing real landscapes can be
stopped by real border patrols, the imagination and all that it entails
is borderless, moving as easy through lines as the human heart moves
across epidermis to meet its kindred heart. 
This is an American literature course that examines literary works ranging
from novels to short stories to poems to theatrical pieces to diary
accounts to newspaper articles. In a course that seeks to span the
hemisphere, I suppose that spanning the vast world of literature is
apropos. The course is divided into two sections, Places Created and
Places Found. Places Created is a figural description of this Brave
New World; for this class it also serves as the conceptual starting
point to begin discussion on what exactly this Brave New World is.
The proposed reading list is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred
Years of Solitude and Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in
Cuban, rounded
out by short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo,
and Alejo Carpentier. We also will scale the heights of Machu Picchu
and walk down the street of Harlem with Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes,
respectively, making a map of how those travels in Places Created lead
to unexpected springs such as Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca. 
Places Found pays homage to the Open Road, an idea that if we follow
the teachings of Captain Jack Sparrow is more about finding the idea
of freedom and of challenging the boundaries of our own humanity as well
as those imposed by borders and fences. This section will include words
such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s
Motorcycle Diaries, and Maria Amparo Escandon’s Gonzales
and Daughter Trucking Co., rounded out by short stories and newspaper articles by
those who span the hemisphere looking for adventure and for themselves.
The is the truest of all American endeavors, because the only way we
can find out who we are and what we believe in is to take to the open
road in some machine that signifies the wealth of our technology and
the ways that technology synchronizes with our dreams. Then it is off
to meet the world, and it is different and that makes it powerfully attractive.
But sometimes it is not so different than we supposed, only that it is
in much need of repair or better yet someone has to yell from the top
of the mountain that strange things are happening and that they need
to be addressed. So we come back with a journal full of notes and we
scream that injustices are worse when they involve ignorance or apathy.
The Open Road. We take it because freedom must be proved and justice
must be proved and the only way we know who we are is to prove it. 
I should ask you to write term papers, grueling with five sources and
twelve pages in length. Correct citation, formal writing, the whole
kitchen sink in one caboodle. Last time I taught this course, though,
we wound up causing havoc at Hope, creative, safe havoc. And. We burned
some books. It really was not our fault. We were reading Pablo Neruda’s
Spain in the Heart about the Spanish Civil War. He was telling us how
soldiers used scraps of papers and rags to print the book. And how
they carried the book with them, even as hell was raining on them from
above, in a scene best captured by Picasso’s Guernica. And they
carried the books with them into the front lines and into battle. And
they carried the books with them even when they should have taken food
or clothing. And that was too much for us. So if you love books and
their symbolic meaning, the way they feed our soul: sometimes destruction
is an important as creation. 
I wonder if it turned out okay in the end, if the right bifurcations
happened along the way and I should really be here. I keeping telling
myself that all happens as it should happen.