Registration begins tomorrow, kiddies! Set your alarms for 6:55 a.m. and be logged in to UIS to start adding those numbers at 7:00 a.m. on the dot. Don’t forget to email, call, or stop into the Department Office to ask Lana or Gina for your priority registration numbers today.
Check out Part One of selected course descriptions for a detailed look into the classes being offered this fall. Of course you can view the full list of descriptions, including registration numbers, here.
Dr. Carmen Kynard is offering a brand new course this fall on African American Literacies and Education in the 20th and 21st Centuries. The course number is ENG 185, and the registration number is 76097. This class assumes a basic knowledge of some education history, especially Brown v. Board of Education, as well as Plessy v. Ferguson. We will be thinking about literacies as a subfield in Comp/Rhet. This class aims for the students to acquire both a breadth and depth into literature, research, and criticism. We will be working with critical socio-linguistics, that is with student works, college student texts, and pop culture texts. The expectation is that you will be joining the research community, so the class will be culminating in a research project.
Introduction to the Profession will be taught this fall by Dr. Granville Ganter. The course number is ENG 110, and the registration number is 76108. This class is a requirement for all D.A. students. Dr. Ganter’s focus in this course will be the history of English programs, specifically the 19th and 20th Century development of the English Department. This class will expose you to a variety of angles to this profession and will also include research methods. We will be compiling the research interests of the students in the class, learning how to use databases, and how to propose a course of study without yet having read most of the books on it. This is the kind of work you will be doing when writing a proposal for a book publisher or a grant. The aim of this course is practicality and will be split about 50-50 between methodology and historical sense.
Dr. Robert Forman will be teaching Allegory and Epic, which will focus on the four primary epics of antiquity: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Apollonius of Rodes’s Argonautica. Criticism of the past fifty years will also be read parallel to the primary texts. One view of the course in particular is the singularity of these verses. Is Vergil independent in this tradition, or did everything come from Homer? Can the epic be written after Homer? One text in particular that Dr. Forman recommended during his talk was The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry.
Finally, last but certainly not least, in the introduction to our fall courses is Dr. Robert Fanuzzi’s class on Narratives of American History: “America” as a Trans-Atlantic Construct. The course number is 635, and the registration number is 76096. What is America? America is a land composed of different language groups and literary traditions. Have we decided what “American Literature” is? This course looks at the struggle to define American Literature and how to prevent the definition from becoming fixed. The emergence of a national literature occurs from the creation of British American through the 1850’s, but this class looks at how it is shaped through residues of literary history going back to Columbus and the transatlantic network. What colonial residues are there? There are certainly aspects of Cultural Studies as well as Performance Studies in this class — how what people say to define themselves bespeaks a narrative identity.
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