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EnglishEN105H:
Writing Seminar II: The Reader Within This course looks historically at one complex and provocative question: What does it mean to be a reader? More specifically, how does reading-or the inability to read-form a part of one's identity? What books specifically have influenced the reader within each of us? As we explore these ideas, we will look back at the nineteenth century, a time when many feared the consequences of women pursuing higher education. We will explore, as well, the consequences of literacy and illiteracy today. Readings will include autobiographical writings of Malcolm X and Helen Keller and Bernhard Schlink's challenging novel - The Reader - (1995). We will examine paintings and illustrations featuring the figure of the reader. Students will also have an opportunity to examine their own identities as reader. This Honors section of EN105 is designed to help students to hone their visual and verbal analytic skills, develop thoughtful arguments, and cultivate a sophisticated writing style. EN105H:
Writing Seminar II: American Dreams America is a country long mythified as a place where dreams come true, a land that boasts a signature fantasy called the American Dream. What, however, are the dreams of twenty-first-century America? What do these fantasies reveal about our values, and what role do these dreams play in the construction of our personal and collective identities? To investigate these questions, we will explore the places of the American dream-world where our fantasies are scripted and squandered, fought for and fulfilled. These places can be as diverse as cinema, malls, “McMansions,” and the web. Topics up for discussion include nostalgia in the Natural History Museum, cool fashion at Rem Koolhaas’s Prada Store in Soho, and convenience and speed in a “fast-food nation.”
This course examines the rich tradition of the Gothic in modern America, ranging from the paintings of Grant Wood to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to the fiction of Don DeLillo. How does one define and understand the Gothic? If the standard Gothic plot fixates on the secret behind the haunted house’s locked door, we will attempt to shed light on the hidden cultural preoccupations and anxieties that lurk there. Is modern America haunted? And by what? By whom? Why?
This course focuses on a single but provocative question: What does it mean to be an American in the 1990s? We will begin with a novel from the 1980s that proved prophetic of our current cultural predicament, Don DeLillo's White Noise. This work forces us to investigate the presence and influence of technology in our lives. Introducing us to the cultural condition commonly called postmodernism, this novel will also launch the three main sections of the course, called "American Gothic," "Sense of an American Ending," and "Surviving in America." Whether it be the phenomena of Gothicism, millennialism, or survivalism, we will devote our time in this course to myths, symbols, and narratives of finality in American contemporary culture. EN 105H focuses on argumentation. The class will investigate how to use sources--how to analyze them, how to incorporate them, how to marshal them as substantiation, and how to challenge or question them.
Students in this course concentrate on improving their writing skills in general and on their ability to develop and support a thesis in particular. They study a rhetoric (Sheridan Baker's The Practical Stylist), do writing exercises, and analyze regularly the worth of each other's essays, the content of which derives largely from fiction by Henry James (Daisy Miller); Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle); Milan Kundera ("The Hitchhiking Game"); and John Barth (The End of the Road). Supplementing conceptions of selfhood explored in LSI, a thematic and increasingly challenging progression informs the sequential arrangement of readings.
What is an ideal society? This section of EN105H will focus on several
important utopian visions, including Thomas More's Utopia, Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward, and some contemporary imaginings.
Our readings, discussions, and writing will consider questions about
human nature and potential, equality and opportunity, freedom and
social control and, not least, the place in utopias for creative,
and perhaps subversive, citizens. EN105H Oscar Wilde once said that "education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." Is that true? It it is true, or if it holds a measure of truth, then why are we here in college at all? What is the purpose and outcome not just of what we learn but of how we learn? What is the subtext of education in its current form and howmight it be changed? What is the line between education and indoctrination, and how are we to know when we cross it, or if we already have done so? College Upside-down will challenge students with and alternative approach to writing, thinking, and learning. It will force its participants to rethink nature of the educational experience itself. It will question the nature of knowledge and its brother, wisdom, as well as the nature of studentship, empowerment, and collaboration. Readings from Paulo Freire, John Gatto, Noam Chomsky, Howard Gardner, and Neil Postman will facilitate discussion about the nature of education and its connection to reasoning and humanization. takie this course if you've ever sat in a class and wondered why. EN105H We
will use literary and semiotic analysis to write about the ways in
which our knowledge of narrative stories forms the building blocks
for our individual and group identity and for our interpretation of
cultural objects and events. We will define and redefine "story"
as we study its characteristics and applications across communities,
cultures, and media. We will begin by studying story elements (word,
natural narrative, metaphor, symbol, myth, archetype) and story type
(fairy tales, fish stories, and urban legends), and we will analyze
their presence in and influence upon song lyrics, cinema, and television.
In the second half of the course, we will take up transformations
of word and story into object and event. Guided by our two textbooks,
we will examine the ways stories represent and reproduce themselves
in other guises; for example, as objects from the market place (toys,
cars, fashion and personal possessions), as events (school lunch and
rock concerts), and as media forms (cartoons, weather reports, talk
radio, gossip columns)> We will find that story is the ghostly
presence within such seemingly disparate phenomena. Moreover, our
work with story and semiotic analysis will show us that the deceptive
familiarity of the mundane often masks deeper significance than that
which initially meets the eye. But we may also agree that a cigar
is just a cigar--then, again, perhaps not. The class will meet in
the Lanzit Center, a networked electronic classroom, which will allow
us to use bulletin boards and chat room exchanges in our consideration
of expository writing and course theme. The first of a coordinated pair of course offering instruction in key writers, important texts, and the historical sequence of literary movements from classical, continental, British, and American literature. Evolving Canon I extends chronologically through the first half of the seventeenth century. Intended as a foundation for the English major, this course establishes a shared experience of texts and concepts. Required of all majors as reparartion for 300-level courses. Evolving Canon I is a prerequisite for Evolving Canon II. EN211
Fiction The honors component enriches the work of EN 211 by focusing on three authors and allowing students to examine, discuss, and write about thematic and stylistic patterns in these authors' works; to discover how critics generate questions, develop their assertions, and support those assertions with evidence; and to make connections between biographical contexts and creative works. EN211:
Fiction
& HF200 Fiction Workshop
At its best, literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise, but an enriching, natural human response to literary works. The Honors Forum Workshop will allow students to look deeply into additional fiction from three authors studies in the EN211.01 course. The main work of the course will involve "reading in slow motion," rereading each author's work with an eye trained on language, symbolism, recurrent stylistic patterns and themes. Traditional literary scholarship on and non-traditional approaches (both print and web-based) to these works will be springboards for our own interpretations of them. Requirements are two short papers and one class project/report. Students must be enrolled in EN211.003 to take HF200.001.
En 213 is primarily a course in close reading and practical criticism of poetic works. Students electing to enroll in the one credit Workshop will meet for an additional hour in order to discuss some of the “classical” definitions of poetry, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and including some Renaissance theories, passages from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Keats, Arnold, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. An extra paper will be expected for these students.
The study of rhetoric, grammar, composition theory, and
collaborative learning as training to become a
peer tutor of writing. Course
work includes weekly writing assignments from the English 103
curriculum, presentations on grammar and punctuation,
oral reports on scholarly
issues pertaining to composition research and pedagogy, and a
term project related to rhetorical theory, collaborative
learning, or
writing instruction. Each EN 303H student works throughout the
term with two students enrolled in English 103. After successfully
completing EN 303H, students are invited to join the staff of
The Skidmore Writing Center as paid tutors. Students
wishing to enroll
in EN 303H should be strong and confident writers, who are familiar
with rules of grammar and punctuation and have good communications
skills. Prior to enrolling in the course, students need a professor's
recommendation and must submit a writing sample. Open to sophomores,
juniors, and seniors. Instructor's signature required for enrollment.
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