Fall Course Descriptions

FALL 2023 UPPER-LEVEL LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION COURSES

ENG 210 | Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing | Dr. Luke Redington

This course provides theoretical and practical approaches to technical communication. As an introductory course, it welcomes interested students from all disciplines. Its first major unit, “What Is Technical Writing?” gives students the opportunity to identify and describe the powerful role technical communication is currently playing in their own lives. In the second unit, “Technical Writing and the Law,” students will use primary documents from an actual court case to navigate a realistic workplace scenario. The third unit, “Technical Writing and the Cutting Edge of Science,” gives students experience in the key skill of making technical concepts understandable to public audiences. This course fulfills a Writing and Rhetoric requirement and is a required course for the professional writing concentration.

ENG 315 | Creative Writing: Playwriting | Prof. Mark Stevick

College students are primed to write plays, and they write terrific ones. This course gives you, O student, a chance to do just that. Over the term, your guest playwrights will instruct you on the playwriting essentials: Sophocles on backstory; Shakespeare on point of attack; Caryl Churchill on dialogue; Craig Lucas on the plot; Lynn Nottage on the unspoken word; Suzan Lori Parks on adaptation; Tony Kushner on spectacle; David Ives on brevity, soul, and wit; Melina Lopez on writing from life; Lin-Manuel on writing from history; All The Greats on conflict; and Arthur Miller on titles that give away a play's ending. After daily workouts on these concepts, your buff pen will compose a ten-minute play; and after that, you'll move on to developing characters, motivations, obstacles, and dialogue for a shapely one-act play. Your scripts will be read aloud in class--possibly in public--by colleagues who'll bring more complexity and humor to your lines than you knew was there. Finally, locally-famous playwrights will drop in to discuss your work; and you'll have a chance to usher at a Boston theatre and then to see the show for free. You're welcome to this writing regiment, regardless of your experience level with theatre. This course fulfills a Writing and Rhetoric requirement and counts towards the creative writing concentration.

ENG 334 | British Romantic Period | Dr. Chad Stutz

The Romantic Period in Britain lasted from the late eighteenth century through the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Despite its comparative brevity, however, the Romantic Period was one of the most fertile and controversial eras in British intellectual and literary history. It is no exaggeration to say that Romantic writers such as Jane Austen, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and others revolutionized the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and religious landscapes of the early nineteenth century. Many of the ways we understand concepts such as beauty, childhood, creativity, the human mind, imagination, the individual, nature, and originality owe a profound debt to this consequential movement. This course will explore in detail the major figures and themes of British Romanticism. In addition, we will attempt to situate Romanticism within the broader context of British literary and intellectual history by examining both its relationship to the Enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century and its continuing legacy to the present day. This course fulfills the British Literature after 1800 requirement.

ENG 347 | African American Literature | Dr. Andrea Frankwitz

This course will survey the wide range of artistic talents of African American writers over the past few centuries and set these works in their historical, cultural, and spiritual contexts. We will begin with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and then move to Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and then on to some influential essays by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Sampling from the Harlem Renaissance, we will read novels by James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, along with the poetry of the era. Taking our examination of racial heritage and individual Black identity and culture further into the twentieth century, we will read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's Beloved and then finish up the semester with poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Natasha Trethewey. This course fulfills either the American Literature after 1800 requirement or the Representational Ethics requirement.

ENG 380 | Tutoring: One to One | Dr. Luke Redington

ENG 380 combines theory and practice to train excellent writing center tutors. As an introductory course, it assumes no prior knowledge of writing center theory or practice; rather, it provides rigorous engagement with the history, practices, and major ideas that have shaped writing centers around the world and here on campus. Upon completion of ENG 380, students are eligible to apply to be peer tutors in the Tupper Writing Center at Gordon College or to apply for positions at Gordon’s Career Connection Institute. This course fulfills a Writing and Rhetoric requirement and counts towards the professional writing concentration. 

ENG 491 | Senior Seminar: The Short Story Cycle | Dr. Andrea Frankwitz

This course will examine the fascinating genre of the short story cycle, a tradition that begins in 1820 with Washington Irving's The Sketchbook. More than simply a collection of tales, the cycle is a novel-length grouping of interrelated stories that are linked by character, theme, and/or setting. Variously known by the names of "composite novel," "short story sequence," "serial story," and "short story cycle," this genre came of age in the first half of the twentieth century. We'll examine this "integrated" variant of the short story genre and how it works, consulting relevant theory and criticism and reading a range of examples of the cycle, such as Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway's In Our Time, Updike's Too Far to Go, Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, and Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies. This course fulfills the Senior Capstone requirement.

FALL 2023 CORE LITERATURE COURSES

ENG 140A | Nobel Literature | Dr. Andrea Frankwitz (4 credits)

First awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature represents the acme of literary artistry, and, in the words of Alfred Nobel, is given to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”  Considering not a particular text but a writer’s oeuvre (a writer’s work regarded collectively), the awarding committee, the Swedish Academy, bestows this honor for the tremendous contributions which the writer has made to the world of literature and which also have “conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.”  In this course, we will study texts by authors from several different countries and continents, with the aim of developing both an appreciation for their respective texts and represented cultures and also an understanding of how literature can enable us to transcend our own borders.  Course texts will include the genres of poetry, drama, short fiction, and novel. 

ENG 140B | Shapeshifters | Prof. Mark Stevick (Quad 1, 2 credits)

Alter egos, secret identities, double agents: literature is sprinkled with characters who are known for the way they alter their appearance. Those changes always tie to the stories' plot and power. From Proteus to Percy Jackson, from Joseph/Zaphenath-Paaneah to Joy/Jobu Tapaki, a character's transformation fuels a story's conflicts and forces its climax--and results in a changed world. Authors, too, may need to shapeshift as they seek to write the truth. In this class, we'll begin to investigate shape-shifting in literature, as we'll look to apply what we learn to our own lives and faith.

ENG 140C | Jesters | Prof. Mark Stevick (Quad 2, 2 credits)

"Jester" is an Anglo-Norman word meaning "storyteller." Although the position of the jester is now (mostly) defunct, our modern storytellers continue the tradition of critique-through-ridicule in prose, poetry, scripts, and comics. We know Shakespeare's jesters; we may add to them the witty storytelling of Stella Gibbons and Flannery O'Connor, of Martin McDonagh and Dario Fo. "Jester's privilege" allowed the court jester to lampoon without fear of punishment. Today's satirists and caricaturists may not enjoy such security. This course will investigate jesters and prophets and will consider the concept of the holy fool--the fool for Christ.

ENG 140D | Orphans and Others: A Place in the World | Prof. Lori Ambacher (4 credits)

In this course, we’ll be exploring literature that examines the theme of finding a place in the world. Why is the theme of belonging somewhere, and to someone, so important to humans? We’ll be looking at literature that is familiar to you, along with some that are not, reading novels, stories, poetry, movies and passages of scripture that follow the lives of orphans and others who aren’t always welcomed by society—underdogs, if you will. We’ll also be working to make connections between these literary sources. Short-response writings and class discussions will allow you to consider the works as we read them, while oral presentations will help you to build your knowledge of the authors’ worlds. A longer essay will challenge you to consider two of the authors’ works in greater depth, and a final reflective essay will ask you to make deeper connections between your own life, your faith, and one of the pieces you read over the course of the semester. Research presentations will allow you to explore a real topic related to one of the course’s novels, such as the actual orphan trains. 

ENG 141 | Western Literature | Prof. Alex Miller (4 credits)

This course, subtitled “The Order of Myths,” explores Western Literature from a particular angle: the development, reuse, and reinterpretation of Greek mythology by western and non-western writers over the centuries. Though our readings progress in loosely historical order, this is not a "history of literature" course. Instead, it is organized according to a theme: plagiarism. Beginning with Homer, the development of literature in the West has involved creative retellings of certain myths. Shaped and contorted by the assumptions and contexts of each author and generation, myths are the spine of western literature. They constitute a common narrative currency that unites western literature’s many tribes, languages, and epochs, and even forms a point of entry for non-westerners to begin interacting with western ideas. By studying the appearance and reappearance of these myths over time, you will develop a sense of the images, characters, and themes that have haunted all exchanges in the history of western culture. But, if you are paying attention, you will also notice how individual authors’ personalities have been just as important as the myths themselves: it is not just the tales that matter, but the telling and the teller. Western Literature is the product of a unique mixture of corporate and individual influences, of myths (for which we can never locate an original author) and interpreters (the well-known authors who, again and again, have made those myths memorable and relevant). By paying attention to the way western myths have been ordered and reordered over time, my hope is that you will learn to appreciate the unique collisions of style and substance that characterize the western heritage.

For a complete list of the literature, composition, and creative writing offerings this semester, see the fall course schedule.