ENGL - English (ENGL)

A developmental writing and reading course designed to increase competence in writing essays and reading comprehension.

A 3-credit workshop linked with specified sections of ENGL 1201 required for students whose placement examinations indicate the need for additional reading and writing instruction in a focused, intensive environment.

A 3-credit workshop linked with specified sections of ENGL 1201 required for second language students who need additional reading and writing instruction in a focused, intensive environment.

Structured exercises in writing and revising short essays based on themes suggested by representative readings. Prerequisite: satisfactory score on required placement test or ENGL 0100 or 0150 as appropriate.

Introduction to literature through representative readings in the three major genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. Training in methods of library research and the mechanics of citation, quotation, and paraphrase in the writing of longer research papers.

Catholicism is a religion of The Word, and the literary arts have played a natural role in the expression and exploration of the Catholic Faith. The course examines representative works and authors ranging from the early centuries and Dante to contemporary Catholic authors and explores how their writings, poetry and novels have deepened Catholicism's understanding, articulation, beauty and contemplation.

A course in the history and theory of writing center pedagogy and the practice of writing center tutoring for undergraduate Seton Hall University Writing Center tutors, usually in conjunction with (but sometimes in advance of) their appointment.

Literature of the Western tradition from Homer to the Renaissance.

Literature of the Western tradition from the 17th century to the present.

Readings of American authors from the colonial period to the Civil War.

Readings of American authors from the Civil War to the present.

Readings in British Literature from Beowulf to the 18th century.

Readings in British Literature from the Romantics through the 20th century.

Study of research techniques, history of the discipline, and introduction to major critical theories. Practice in applying critical discourse to literary texts. Required for all English majors in the sophomore year or as soon as they declare the major.

This course introduces students to the fundamental generic conventions of the British and American traditions by analyzing their most resonant Classical and Eurasian influences and interlocutors. In doing so, the course also introduces the categories of formal textual analysis and interpretation—diction, syntax, trope, theme, genre, narrative, and meter. Students will read diverse, historically significant texts (all in English translation) including epic, drama (tragedy, comedy, realism), mythology, romance, fiction (romantic, realist, modernist), prose (autobiography, essay, manifesto, critique), and an array of lyric modes. While we will strive to engage these texts in all the complexity of their contexts and content, our focus will be on the particular formal conventions that these texts established, transformed, or otherwise modeled for Anglo-American writers.

The Bucket List. Ever thought “I should read that?” This is the course in which you do. The class will consist of lectures and a weekly discussion. 3CR

Readings in 16th century poetry and prose. Emphasis on Sir Thomas More, Sidney and Spenser.

Readings in literature of the natural world by authors such as Thoreau, Mary Austin, Annie Dillard, John McPhee and Barry Lopez, as well as representative selections of ecocriticism.

This course will be an introduction to fiction writing. The course will cover the rudiments of fiction writing: plot, character, style, point of view, and description. Students will be introduced to the workshop method.

The course will cover the basics of poetry writing, including metaphor and metonymy, meter and received forms, and the dynamic relationship between the poetic line and the sentence. It will also introduce students to the workshop method of critique.

Introduction to writing in several literary genres, including short story fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Not a prerequisite for ENGL 2512 or 2513.

Practical exercises in the techniques of composing short stories. Peer reviews and criticism.

Practical exercises in the techniques of composing poetry. Peer reviews and criticism.

Reading and writing of analytical essays in a broad range of disciplines (literature, business, science, etc.) Peer review and criticism. (Note: Only one section of Writing Workshop is required for the writing minor.)

Exercises and readings in expository prose, culminating in essays that further develop the skills required in effective writing of creative nonfiction. Peer review and criticism. (Note: Only one section of Writing Workshop is required for the writing minor.)

Communication for the business world, such as letters, resumes, memos, electronic communication, short and long reports.

This course is designed to address the needs of students beginning to write or already writing within their major and to help them become more sophisticated readers and writers in their discipline. In addition, it will help them be more adept in any new situation that involves writing. Students will develop their own theory of writing, including the concepts of purpose, audience, context, genre, rhetorical situation, and discourse community, among others. Students will begin to understand the role of writing in a larger academic and professional discourse community as they explore how practitioners in their field use a variety of genres.

For description, see Africana Studies course descriptions.

Independent studies for English majors require the permission of the professor who specialization is in the area of the student's interest.

Independent studies for English majors require the permission of the professor who specialization is in the area of the student's interest.

Independent studies for English majors require the permission of the professor who specialization is in the area of the student's interest.

Contributions of women writers to Western literature from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, such as Marie de France, Christine de Pisan, Queen Elizabeth I, Susanna Rowson, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen, and including an examination of relevant works in cultural history.

This course explores textual representations and conceptualizations of ‘woman’ from the early 19th century to the present, primarily but not exclusively in the Western tradition. Students will examine how ideas of ‘woman’ are influenced by factors such as race, class, religion, and colonization.

A study of texts written for both teenage and general audiences that focuses on the theme of coming-of-age. The class will begin with an historical look at adolescence in novels such as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, moving on to more contemporary works by writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and Louis Sachar, to consider how adolescence has changed and developed over time.

Children’s Literature explores a variety of children’s books, looking at them as works of literature but also in connection with how they might be taught in a class for children or introduced individually to a child. Film, art, music, and discussion will all be part of this class, which will center on the texts.

This course allows students to expand their ideas of “American” literature beyond the U.S. borders to include the most influential Latin American writers, from the 19th to the 20th centuries: starting with the Cuban José Martí in the late 19th century to the rich mid- to late 20th century, with the so-called “boom” period, including Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Isabel Allende, and others. These writers will be considered alongside American writers who either influenced or were influenced by them: Whitman, Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and others.

This course introduces the popular genres of the Middle Ages, including the epic, romance, spiritual autobiography, hagiography, travelogue, and fabliau. Works and authors may include Augustine¿s Confessions, the Lais of Marie de France, Dante, Chaucer, and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Introduction to the major poetry and prose of the Romantic period, ca. 1798-1832. Students will read works of poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and of prose writers such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sir Walter Scott, and Charlotte Smith, presented against the background of the cultural and historical revolutions that took place in France and America.

Major poets of the period: Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arnold. Novelists such as the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Selections from prose writers such as Carlyle, Mill, Arnold and Pater.

This course introduces the aesthetic innovations of high modernism in the context of World War I, including works by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

This course will consider apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. Texts will consider modern society as a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare, disaster narratives, and speculative science fiction. The course will consider the ways writers have used this basic narrative to explore a wide range of concerns – from feminism and political oppression, to solidarity and the possibility of a just society, to the fusing of popular culture and kitsch into a literary. Alongside novels we will look at short stories, films, and literary theory.

A close study of one of English Literature¿s most fascinating authors, this course will examine the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer's minor poems, focusing on many issues close to Chaucer's heart, including love, gender, war, religion, talking animals, classical literature, alchemy, and birds.

A selection of Shakespeare¿s works against the backdrop of the Tudor and Jacobean worlds, up to our most recent perspectives. After beginning with his early poetry and sonnets, students will study the plays in depth, including histories such as Richard III and Henry IV; comedies such as Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, or Much Ado about Nothing; and tragedies such as Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear.

A study of Yeats¿ use of Gaelic and other mythologies in his poetry and drama to create an Irish art that would culturally politicize his country. Includes plays by J.M. Synge, tales by Lady Gregory, and consideration of the influence of Maud Gonne, Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and others. (Formerly ENGL 2314)

This course explores representations of the body in early American literature, including the place of the body in a variety of religious traditions. More than just its physical form, the body can be read sexually, scientifically/medically, religiously/spiritually, economically, legally, aesthetically, culturally, politically, and philosophically. Readings will begin with explorer and Native American oral narratives, will include texts from a variety of New World settlements, and will go through the literature of the early Republic.

A close study of selected works by American Romantic writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Douglass, Whitman and Dickinson.

A close study of American fiction and poetry from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including James, Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, Crane and H.D.

This course will explore representations of and responses to illness from the perspective of those suffering from it (the patients), those helping the sufferers (doctors, nurses, spouses, siblings, children, parents, and so on), and those living in a society ravaged by epidemic, such as the Black Death. We will read literature from three traditions--the western secular literary tradition, the Catholic tradition, and the Jewish tradition¿to deepen our understanding of what illness does to individuals and their society, and to strengthen our resources as future patients, caregivers (personal or professional), and individuals for dealing with the spiritual as well as practical crisis that illness generates. Crosslisted with CORE 3370 Engaging the World

This course will focus on the use of fantasy as a literary genre and the presence of religious, and most especially Christian, ideas in the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their predecessors.

Victorian writers characterized their era as, among other things, an age of faith and doubt, and their writings—essays, autobiographies, hymns, novels, poems, sermons, non-fiction prose—consistently vacillate between or concurrently exhibit what they called “the critical spirit” and “the will to believe.” This course addresses the fundamental importance of the dialectic of faith and doubt, as well as Anglican theological debate, the Bible, and the Catholic intellectual tradition to nineteenth-century Britain.

Through texts by and about English Catholic women composed between 1660 and 1800, students in this course will learn about the challenges and opportunities facing these women and the ways – textual and practical – in which they faced them. Students will explore how text, whether private or public, provided 17th and 18th century English Catholic women with a means for negotiating the opportunities and limitations they faced as women, as Catholics, and as Catholic women.

An exploration of Russian literature from the late 19th century to the present, including works of narrative fiction, poetry, and drama.

A survey of the literature written by Latina/Latino authors in the United States. Reading materials, class discussions, exams, and term papers will be in English, but Spanish majors and minors, and native Spanish speakers will be encouraged to write in Spanish, and read Spanish translations when available.

Tracing contemporary fiction from the precursors of postmodernism, Kafka and Borges, through mid-20th century and 21st century writers such as Milan Kundera, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Ian McEwan.

This course addresses the creation and definition of the novel by reading early 18th century attempts such as Daniel Defoe¿s Robinson Crusoe and Eliza Haywood¿s Fantomina, through its establishment as a genre at the beginning of the 19th century. Other authors may include Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen.

This course continues the development of the novel as a genre by reading selected novels by Victorians, such as Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, and proceeds with representative fin de siècle novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy.

A survey of the development of drama in Great Britain from the Middle Ages to Romanticism. Genres include mystery plays, Elizabethan plays other than Shakespeare, Jacobean revenge tragedy, Restoration comedy, and closet drama, with later film adaptations. Authors may include the Wakefield Master, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Aphra Behn, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Byron.

Nineteenth and 20th-century novels that explore a variety of social issues endemic to the American way of life.

An analytic approach to the works of early 20th-century poets such as Williams, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Moore, Stevens and others.

Readings in literature of the natural world by authors such as Thoreau, Mary Austin, Annie Dillard, John McPhee and Barry Lopez, as well as representative selections of ecocriticism.

A survey of the forms and motives of satire from its origins in ancient Greek satyr plays to contemporary television and film comedies. Context, audience, race, and gender will be examined in the satires of Aristophanes, Horace, Voltaire, Ionesco, Pope, Swift, Mel Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, Muriel Spark, Jon Stewart, and Kathy Griffin, among others.

Women writers of the immigrant experience in North America, such as Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Bharati Mukherjee, plus postcolonial women writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Buchi Emecheta, and Arundhati Roy. Issues of gender, ethnicity, identity, and motherhood will be explored within the framework of female narrative strategies.

Practical techniques in the production of creative nonfiction: personal essay, memoir, travel narrative, review and cultural critique. Peer review and criticism.

Writing styles for reporting scientific or technical information in formats such as abstracts, reports, manuals, grant proposals, and collaborative writing projects. Cross-listed with the graduate course in Scientific and Technical Writing, ENGL 6414.

Strategies of teaching writing as a developmental process. Cross-listed with the graduate course in Composition Theory and Practice, ENGL 6415.

Trends in poetry from mid-century to the present, including confessional poetry, the Beat Generation, the New York School, poetics of identity, the Black Mountain poets and others.

Representative works of American novelists prior to 1915, such as Melville, Twain, Cooper, Irving, Stowe and Chopin.

Representative works of American novelists since 1915, such as Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, O'Connor, Ellison, Updike and Morrison.

Advanced communication for the business world, such as letters, resumes, memos, electronic communication, short and long reports.

This course will focus on a particular issue of fictional craft, from point of view, to plot, to character development through readings of classic and contemporary work, writing exercises, and workshop.

Appreciation of Asian literature. Readings and analysis. Part I: traditional literature (5th century B.C. to 18th century A.D.). Part II: modern literature (19th and 20th centuries).

Appreciation of Asian literature. Readings and analysis. Part I: traditional literature (5th century B.C. to 18th century A.D.). Part II: modern literature (19th and 20th centuries).

For description, see Department of Classical Studies course descriptions. (Formerly ENGL 2611)

For description, see the Department of Classical Studies course descriptions. (Formerly ENGL 2612)

Survey of the major developments in Black literature since the 19th century. Literature in view of social, political and cultural movements of African-Americans. Comparisons with some works of Africans throughout the diaspora.

Black writings involved with social protest and as an outgrowth of social change. The Black writer as an outgrowth of social change, and as a 'mover,' directing himself to his own community. Richard Wright to Imamu Baraka and contemporary neo-African and pan-African writers.

In-depth study of major African-American literary figures, their lives and major works.

For description, see Africana Studies course descriptions. (Formerly ENGL 2616)

Harlem Renaissance (1920-40): the emergence of the "New Negro" and the impact of this concept on Black literature, art and music. Literary movements shaped by Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer compared to American writers of the "lost generation." Special emphasis on new themes and forms developed by the Harlem Renaissance writers.

The linguistic development of English from its first appearance on the island of Britain to its present function as a world language.

An advanced workshop in writing short stories and longer forms of fiction within the context of important trends and concerns in contemporary fiction.

An advanced workshop in the writing of poetry within the context of important trends and concerns in contemporary poetry.

Spiritual Writing is a reading and writing-intensive course in the genres that make up spiritual non-fiction: spiritual autobiography, spiritual memoir, spiritual/travel narrative, the nature essay, and others. Students will study and engage in dialogue with some of the great historical and contemporary spiritual writers of the world, such as St. Augustine, Thomas Merton, Viktor Frankl, Mother Teresa, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Joseph Campbell, Martin Luther King Jr., Carlos Castaneda, Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Black Elk, and others. Students engage in figurative and literal dialogue not only with Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general but with other spiritual faith traditions, including Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Native American spirituality, and others.

The genre of spiritual writing, broadly defined, is not just abour religious beliefs or doctrine but about experience that is transformative and has the capcity to transport us to another dimension. This course will focus on classic and contemporary readings that demonstrate how writers from a variety of traditions, both western and non-western, have used writing to explore, understand, and represent their spiritual experiences. Writing assignments invite students to analyze issues related to spirituality and the rhetoric of spiritual writing.

Independent studies for English majors require the permission of the professor who specialization is in the area of the student's interest.

Varying topics in the study of selected authors, genres, or periods of American literature. Topics will be posted prior to registration.

Varying topics in the thematic or comparative study of selected authors, genres, or periods of world literature in translation. Topic will be posted prior to registration.

Capstone course required for all English majors in their senior year, culminating in oral presentations and a significant research paper.

Capstone course required for all creative writing majors in their senior year, culminating in oral presentations and a significant creative writing project.