MH with a concentration in English

Teaching College English (ENG515) - This course will investigate both theoretical and practical issues related to teaching First-Year composition. Topics will include developing effective syllabi, identifying and articulating learning objectives, designing effective writing assignments, assessing college writing, understanding and creating rubrics, and developing an effective critique process. Students will develop a portfolio that includes a teaching philosophy, syllabi, and sample lesson plans. The final assignment will be the development of a syllabus with a paper explaining the rationale for that syllabus in terms of pedagogical goals for the course and best teaching practices.

The Culture and Literature of Modernity (ENG530) - Readings in cultural and literary identity: 1880-1920. Coming after Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, the style and traditions of literature, music, dance, and art took on a new reality that shattered old artistic conventions. The course will examine the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the music of Igor Stravinsky and American jazz artists, the art of the cubists, the dance forms of Isadora Duncan and the evolution of modernism.

Creative Writing Workshop: Short Story (ENG541) - The Creative Writing Workshops are writing courses in the tradition of the classic writer’s workshop with the advantage of being online. Students will write and criticize their own and each other’s material in light of critical study of the writing of short fiction.

Creative Writing: Performance Writing (ENG545) - This course develops skills in the art and craft of telling stories through performance media such as films and plays. Through writing scenes, scripts for short films, and tightly focused writing exercises, students will learn correct screenplay format, develop a “feel” for screenwriting style, enhance their powers of description, their skills in writing dialogue and action, and in constructing scenes and plot. The overarching emphasis is on learning how to translate mental moving images (the film or play that the writer sees in his or her head and all it encompasses or evokes), to words on the page in a way that those words create approximately the same moving images in the reader’s mind.

Poetics of Western Drama (ENG583) - Readings from ancient dramatic works including those of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes. Exploration of the unique nature and continuing significance of Greek tragedy and Greek theater in the drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. All discussion will stem from Aristotle’s Poetics as the basis for western dramatic traditions and conventions. Topics of study from the texts will include such issues as the tragic voice, the role of women, the nature of heroism, human beings’ relationship to the divine, and the role of the fate in human affairs.