120 Engl 4550. American Literature: Contemporary (3) This course focuses on American literature from the 1950s to the present within the context of the dramatic political and cultural changes that have shaped contemporary American culture, such as the Cold War, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, feminism and multiculturalism. Like its modernist predecessor, it ranges across genres and media to survey various emergent traditions and tendencies in contemporary and postmodern US letters. Representative writers of this period include: Arthur Miller, Flannery O'Connor, Elizabeth Bishop, Tillie Lerner Olsen, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, Amiri Baraka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rita Dove, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow. Engl 4610. British Literature: Medieval (3) This historical survey runs from the eighth century to the end of the fifteenth century - roughly from the reign of Alfred the Great to Henry VII. Some of the more recognizable works include Beowulf, The Wanderer, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, early histories of King Arthur, Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, Julian of Norwich's Showings, Everyman, and Gawain and the Green Knight. Works written in Anglo-Saxon English and northern medieval dialects will be read in modern translations. Engl 4620. British Literature: Renaissance (3) This historical survey runs from just before the middle of the sixteenth century to just after the middle of the seventeenth - roughly from the reign of Henry VIII, through the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, to the restoration of Charles II. Some of the more recognizable figures of this study are Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Anne Askew, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, and Robert Herrick. (Note: this survey does not typically try to do justice to its largest figure, Shakespeare - for whom the department has established English 4730: Shakespeare's Tragedies, Comedies & Histories). Engl 4630. British Literature: Neoclassical and Romantic (3) This historical survey links two periods: the first has frequently been referred to as the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century and includes such figures as Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Mary Montagu, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. The second period covers the relatively short but intense age of English Romanticism - popular because of such writers as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas De Quincey, and John Keats. Engl 4640. British Literature: Victorian (3) This historical survey follows the long span of Queen Victoria's life: from about 1837 when she came to the throne to 1901 when her funeral widely symbolized the passing of the age. Not merely a placid time of Victorian propriety, this era was marked by such philosophical upheavals as that which followed Darwin's Origin of Species. Some of the notable writers are Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, and Thomas Carlyle. This era is marked by the Industrial Revolution, Utilitarianism (Mill, the rise of science and evolution theory (Darwin), socialism (Marx and Engels); Psychology (Freud), resurgence of art (the Pre- Raphaelites), and imperialism (Kipling). Notable writers include: Carlyle, Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, Wilde, Dickens, the Brontes, Eliot, and Hardy. Engl 4650. British Literature: Modern (3) This historical survey focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, a time of great social change for Great Britain and Ireland that led to a rich outpouring of traditional and experimental writing. A variety of writers will be studied in this course in connection with such key developments as the critique of Empire (Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster); the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Renaissance (Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats); World War I (Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain); High Modernism (T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield); divergent poetic world-views (W.H Auden, Dylan Thomas); and World War II, the collapse of Empire, and dystopian visions (Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell). Engl 4660. British Literature: Contemporary (3) This historical survey examines British and Anglo-Irish literature since 1950 as Britain metamorphoses from world power to an integral member of the European Community. The course asks what it means to be a "British" writer in the second half of a century increasingly multicultural in outlook. Possible focuses include postwar disillusion (William Golding); Absurdism and Postmodernism (Samuel Beckett, TomStoppard); neo-Romanticism (Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Nuala Ni Dhomnhaill); experimentalism and magic realism (Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter); innovative historical fiction (John Fowles, A.S. Byatt); and legacies of Empire in a postcolonial world (Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anita Desai). Engl 4710. Eminent Authors (3) This course will feature a single author or several authors as designated by the class schedule of a given semester. May be taken more than once with a different selection. Engl 4720. Chaucer (3) A study of Chaucer's best loved works, using mainly close reading to investigate selections from The Canterbury Tales and minor poems. The works will be considered in the context of theories of the Middle Ages and on the nature of love, of God, of persons, and of the universe. Engl 4730. Shakespeare's Tragedies, Comedies & Histories (3) To give students an understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's breadth and "infinite variety," this course will emphasize representative plays from each of the three types: tragedies, comedies, and histories. This course is of particular importance to English majors and minors, especially those who plan to teach in secondary education or attend graduate school in English. Engl 4740. Milton: Major Prose and Poetry (3) A comprehensive survey of the major prose and poetic works of John Milton, culminating in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Engl 4750. Classical Literature (3) A survey of 3,000 years of intellectual and cultural advancement paralleled with the ascent of civilization from Crete to the Roman empire. The course explores the significance of myths in the process of literary development. Engl 4830. Directed Readings (1-3) Engl 4890. Cooperative Work Experience (1-6) A continuation of English Department 2890 Cooperative Work Experience. Open to all students. Weber State University 2003-2004 CATALOG