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New and Noteworthy Courses for Spring Quarter
More hands-on and analytical skills are available in English 269 (Digital Media Composing), taught by Professor Les Tannenbaum, which is a laboratory-based introduction to the theory and practice of creating digital media. In this course, you will learn to improve your photographic skills, design web pages, and produce audio-visual stories, using such programs as Audacity, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and iMovie. No prior technological experience is required (Call # 08812-9 ). This course satisfies GEC the requirement for Arts and Humanities, Analysis of Texts and Works of Art, Visual/Performing Arts.
Seen Natalie Portman in The Other Boleyn Girl, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII in The Tudors, or Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I? Want to learn more about the court, culture, and literature of this fascinating period? Then sign up for Professor Chis Highley's English 521 course, Sixteenth-Century English Literature. In this strongly interdisciplinary course, you will explore the literature and culture of one of the most extraordinary centuries in English history (Call # 08882-6).
Learn how poetic themes and styles change over time, as we move from the Renaissance to the present day, in Professor Jeredith Merrin's English 560 class (Special Topics in Poetry). The course will culminate in an examination of an example of a contemporary work, Time and Materials, by the former Poet Laureate and recent Pulitzer-Prize winner, Robert Hass (Call # 08889-4).
What happens when we talk face to face? How and why do conversations begin and end? What's the function "you know" and "like" when we talk to each other? How do we use language to get what we want from other people? Find out the answers to these and other questions regarding everyday speech in English 571 (Studies in the English Language), taught by Professor Galey Modan (Call # 08896-6).
Why or how can President Obama call himself a "mutt" or hybrid? In what sense(s) are we really a nation of "mutts"? What is hybridity, and how does it show up as an important aspect of American identity in autobiography, the most popular form of self-representation in literature? In this course, English 575, taught by Professor Ashley Byock, you will read or view the works of such people as Frederick Douglass, P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Spike Lee, and Eli Wiesel, to see how hybrid cultural contexts, autobiography, and American identity intersect (Call # 08898-7).
If you think you know what literacy is, think again. Our concepts of literacy have really been changing over time, and the factors that have influenced that change are the subject of Professor Harvey Graff's History of Literacy course (English 585.02 - Call # 08905-4).
Guilty pleasures or boring moralism? What is the relation of aesthetic pleasure to moral judgment in the appreciation of a work of art or literature? Can there be works of art that are aesthetically valuable while being morally questionable? Can a work be morally "correct" and yet lacking in aesthetic value? In Professor Jon Erickson's English 576.03 course (Aesthetics and Ethics), you will read theoretical texts dealing with this problem by Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wilde, and Nietzsche, followed by readings of contemporary philosophers on the aesthetic/ethical tension. You will also read from some possible "test cases" such as Nabokov's Lolita, Euripides Medea, Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, Martin Macdonagh's The Pillowman, Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things or Sarah Kane's Blasted (Call # 08900-7).
For further information, please check the course descriptions in the English Department web site.
