Previous Semester Courses

Course Listing Fall 2023

ENGL 10000-01           Exploring the Major   HU LA 3A h                             

4 Credits           

ICC ATTRIBUTE:      N/A 

INSTRUCTOR:           Derek Adams, Muller 304 

ENROLLMENT:                    25 students per section 

PREREQUISITES:                 None 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:        This course intends to assist scholars interested and/or majoring in Literatures in English (primarily those in their first or second year) with understanding and exploring opportunities available to them during their time at Ithaca College and after graduation. As part of this, you will learn about the mission of a liberal arts education and contemplate the purpose of college. You will also work to define your own purpose in coming to Ithaca College and choosing your major. Though the course is primarily discussion-based, current faculty members and students in the major will deliver guest presentations to introduce you to important information and connect you to useful resources. You will actively pursue knowledge of yourself, your educational options, extra-curricular and professional interests, and you will learn research, writing and decision-making strategies that will benefit you while in college and beyond. We will also dedicate time in class for your own questions to be discussed. 

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion with the occasional context-setting lecture 

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: One 500-word personal reflection, and active participation in class discussions. 

ENGL 11200-01, 02 INTRODUCTION TO SHORT STORY: THIS AMERICAN LIFE (LA)

4 CREDITS

ICC DESIGNATION: Perspectives: HU/CA; Themes: Identities/Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation

INSTRUCTOR: Hugh Egan, 306 Muller, ext. 4-3563

ENROLLMENT: 20 students per section

PREREQUISITE: None

COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this course we will read a wide range of American short fiction, gathered loosely around the themes of childhood, adolescence, adult relationships, aging and death. In the course of our reading and discussion, we will traverse issues related to American identity, especially as they are inflected by race, ethnicity, and gender. We will also become familiar with formal elements of the short story, including point of view, plot, tone, and dialogue. Over the course of the term, we will read a combination of classic and contemporary American stories. We will end the term by reading Alexander Weinstein’s collection, Children of the New World.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Largely discussion.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: Two short essays (2 pages), two longer essays (5-6 pages), a mid-term, a final exam, and class participation. Grading will be A-F. Because of the discussion-oriented format, class participation will be an important part of students’ final grades.

ENGL 11300, Introduction to Poetry

4 Credits

ICC THEMES: Identities; Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation ICC PERSPECTIVES: Humanities and Creative Arts

INSTRUCTOR: Alexis Becker ENROLLMENT: 20 students per section PREREQUISITES: None

COURSE DESCRIPTION: How does a poem produce meaning? What does poetry do with language? This course is an introduction to a) the constituent elements of poems and the vocabulary with which we can analyze them and b) the extraordinary variety and capaciousness of texts we call “poems.” The aim of this course is to arrive at a sense, both ample and precise, of what a poem is, what it does, how it does what it does, and, perhaps, why we should care.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion (online, mostly synchronous)

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Short writing assignments, recitations, poetic compositions, annotated poetry anthology, lively participation.

ENGL 18200-01, 02   The Power of Injustice & the Injustice of Power                                         HU LA 3A h 

TOPIC:                         Life at the Margins in American Literature 

4 Credits           

ICC ATTRIBUTE:        Diversity, Humanities Perspective, Power & Justice and Identities Themes 

INSTRUCTOR:             Derek Adams, Muller 304 

ENROLLMENT:           20 per section 

PREREQUISITES:        None 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:        Many individuals continue to feel as though they live at the margins of society, despite the “melting pot” rhetoric of inclusivity and acceptance that dominates narratives of American identity. While we commonly consider purposeful exclusion an act of injustice on the part of the powerful, we are often unaware of the way that subtle, hidden forms of power render particular groups and individuals powerless. American literature is one of the most widely utilized platforms for articulating the specific issues that arise in response to these forms of power. This course will use an array of American literary texts to explore the complexities of the life experiences of those who are forced by the powerful to live at the margins. We will read the work of Rebecca Harding Davis, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Junot Diaz, Adam Mansbach, ZZ Packer, and Tommy Orange.   

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion with the occasional lecture 

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Students will closely examine course materials, actively engage in class discussions, write short textual analysis essays and a

ENGL 18300-01, -02 ENGENDERING MODERNITY:  TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS
4 Credits
ICC THEME:  Identities
ICC ATTRIBUTE:  Diversity
INSTRUCTOR: Jennifer Spitzer, 305 Muller
PREREQUISITES: None
ENROLLMENT: 20 Students per section

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will focus on a representative body of twentieth-and twenty-first century Anglophone women writers, writers who adapted earlier literary forms, and in some cases produced major stylistic innovations. We will examine how these authors negotiated a predominantly male literary tradition and marketplace, and how they drew upon and constructed their own literary communities, audiences, and ancestries. We will read works that self-consciously reflect on issues of identity, gender, sexuality, feminism, and authorship, as well as works that explore the complex intersections of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexuality. We will also consider the relationship between gender and genre by reading a wide range of literary forms, from novels, short stories, and poetry, to memoirs, essays, and political manifestos. Authors include Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

COURSE FORMAT: Discussion, with brief lectures.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: One 4-5 page essay, one 5-7 page final paper, midterm exam, and short informal writing.  Because of the discussion-oriented format, class participation and attendance will be an essential part of students’ final grades. 

ENGL 19417-01,02: Earth Works: Literature, Nature, and the Environment. LA 3a HU
4 credits
INSTRUCTOR: Paul Hansom, Muller 321
ENROLLMENT: 20 per section
PREREQUISITES: None
STUDENTS: Open to all students.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: What is the nature of nature? This class offers an exciting literary, cultural, and historical exploration into the idea of “nature” and the “natural.” While it may seem self-evident to us that nature is all of that stuff “out there” – trees, rocks, oceans, animals, you know what I mean – this class will explore how natural environments in literature are not simple, common-sense places, but are in fact dynamic cultural constructions that change over time. What do we actually mean by nature? How do we understand it as a place, as an object, or as a literary form? Might nature be nothing more than a unique human experience? As you can see, this class will raise many intriguing questions, and by examining the “eco-literature” embodied in novels, stories, poems, biographies, and non-fictions, our sense of the natural will be challenged, and hopefully, expanded. We will be helped on our journey by Thoreau, Wordsworth, Cather, Wolfe, Krakauer, Snyder – among many others.  

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion/ limited lecture. The class is designed around focused discussions of primary works.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: Active class participation, response papers, analytical essays, presentations, final exam.

ENGL19600 Introduction to Graphic Novels

4 CREDITS

ICC DESIGNATION: Perspectives: HU/CA; Themes: Identities/Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation

INSTRUCTOR: Kasia Bartoszynska, Muller 327

ENROLLMENT: 20 students per section

PREREQUISITE: None

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course does not provide a historical survey of graphic novels and comics, but rather, offers an overview to thinking about the graphic novel as a genre, and examining the kinds of stories it can tell. We will read a diverse range of texts, from tales of superheroes to accounts of war, and stories of doomed love, or bad weather, and consider how each book’s unique approach to combining words and images calls for different kinds of interpretive strategies.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Largely discussion.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: Regular short writing assignments, final exam, and class participation. Because of the discussion-oriented format, class participation will be an important part of students’ final grades.

ENGL 20100-01 APPROACHES TO LITERARY STUDY

4 CREDITS

ICC DESIGNATION: Writing Intensive

INSTRUCTOR: Hugh Egan, 306 Muller

ENROLLMENT: 15 students per section

PREREQUISITES: One course in English.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course is designed to encourage English majors early in their careers to become more reflective, self-conscious readers, writers, and thinkers, and thus better prepared for the upper-level English curriculum. Students will grapple with the issues and concerns that occupy literary critics when they think about literature, including the biases and assumptions that guide them. Focusing on a handful of well-known texts spanning a variety of literary genres—including Joyce’s “The Dead,” Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Morrison’s Sula—we will practice the skills of close reading and critical application. That is, we will attempt, first, to inhabit these works as worlds unto themselves, and second, to place them in appropriate critical conversations and align them with relevant critical schools of thought. The course will thus involve both formal analysis and scholarly commentary.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Largely discussion.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS & GRADING: Three 5 page essays, an in-class presentation, and a longer final research project.

ENGL 21900, SHAKESPEARE

4 CREDITS

ICC DESIGNATION: Identities; Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation

INSTRUCTOR: Christopher Matusiak, Muller 326

ENROLLMENT: 20 per section

PREREQUISITES: One course in the humanities or social sciences, or sophomore standing.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Why study Shakespeare now? The question has never been more pressing for those who would situate the playwright and his works at the heart of English studies and other Humanities disciplines. Shakespeare was an immensely talented poet, but he died over 400 years ago. Of what use can he be in grappling with the problems currently confronting us?—rising tides of political authoritarianism and war; economic inequality, systemic racism, xenophobia, misogynistic violence; and, critically, ideological polarization that prevents us from arriving at a consensus on ‘reality’ itself? If Shakespeare is to be viewed as relevant in 2023, his work arguably must help bring the challenges we now face into better focus and inspire us to respond in meaningful ways. Whether indeed they have this capacity will be the question that guides us throughout the semester. No prior knowledge of Shakespeare is necessary to succeed in this course—only enthusiasm, curiosity, and a readiness to study three rich texts—The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale—both in the contexts of Shakespeare’s time and our own.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion/lecture.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: active participation; close-reading exercises; a reader-response journal; a take-home final exam.

ENGL 23200 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

4 CREDITS

ICC DESIGNATION:  Writing Intensive

INSTRUCTOR:  Alexis Kellner Becker

ENROLLMENT: 20 students

PREREQUISITES:   One course in the humanities or social sciences, or sophomore standing; WRTG10600 or equivalent.

OBJECTIVES: This course provides a partial introduction to the huge range of literature written between c. 800 and c. 1500 CE, primarily in the British Isles. Who produced medieval literature? Who read it or listened to it? How did medieval writers wrestle with the social, economic, political, economic, and ecological problems of their time? How did they think about history? How did they tackle the question of what it means to be a person, a citizen, and/or a fictional character? This course will explore how imaginative literature in the Middle Ages created different kinds of human, nonhuman, and superhuman subjects, real and imaginary. How, we will ask, can this literature help us think through our own ideas about how to read and how to live?  Readings may include Old English elegies and riddles, Icelandic saga, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Mabinogion, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Middle English lyric.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE:  Discussion, with some context-setting lectures.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS & GRADING:  Three 4-5-page essays, one short response paper, a term paper, and class participation.  Grading will be A-F based on the above requirements.  Because of the discussion-oriented format, class participation will be an essential part of students’ final grades.

ENGL 24300 Television and the Global Novel

4 CREDITS

INSTRUCTOR:  Chris Holmes

ENROLLMENT: 20 students

PREREQUISITES:   One course in the humanities or social sciences, or sophomore standing

OBJECTIVES: This course will examine ways in which prestige television has drawn from the form and content of the contemporary global novel. We will watch examples of tv series which adapt novels, steal from novel ideas and forms, and compete with novels for our attention, and as examples of cultural capital. We will also be reading novels that have been adapted to television, as well as novels that borrow from the cinematic forms and spectacles of 21st century television. Series and novels will likely include: SeveranceGiri and HajiThe WireNormal People, and Station Eleven.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE:  Discussion, with some context-setting lectures.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS & GRADING:  Two 4-5-page essays, a final paper, and class participation.  Grading will be A-F based on the above requirements.  Because of the discussion-oriented format, class participation will be an essential part of students’ final grades.

ENGL 27100-01 RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
4 CREDITS
ICC DESIGNATION:  Writing Intensive (pending)
INSTRUCTOR: Christopher Matusiak, Muller 326
ENROLLMENT: 20 per section
PREREQUISITES: One course in the humanities or social sciences, or sophomore standing.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:  This course explores the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a period known as the English Renaissance.  We will read major works of poetry, prose, and drama by writers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, Lady Mary Wroth, John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton, with attention to their social, religious, and political contexts.  How did the ground-breaking developments of Humanism, the Reformation, and the English Civil Wars impact the imagination of these writers? Why did Renaissance adopt and redefine genres such as the erotic lyric, tragedy, pastoral, and epic?  How did their writing circulate materially in print and manuscript? In formulating answers to these questions, students will come to understand the radical nature of England’s transformation into an early modern state in the context of a wider European Renaissance inspired by continental authors such as Petrarch, Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Montaigne.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion/lecture.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS & GRADING: active class participation, one informal commonplace book, one formal essay.

ENGL 28100-01 ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE
4 CREDITS
ICC DESIGNATION: Writing intensive
INSTRUCTOR: Julie Fromer
ENROLLMENT: 20
PREREQUISITE: One course in the humanities or social sciences, or sophomore standing.

OBJECTIVES:  Romanticism in Europe and England; English romantic and Victorian poetry. The movement toward realism, especially in the novel.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Mostly discussion.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: Two critical essays, assorted quizzes and response pieces during the course of the term, and a final examination. Grading is A-F, based on the above as well as on attendance and participation in class discussion. 

ENGL 29700 (02) Professional Development Practicum (Graphic Novels)

INSTRUCTOR: Katharine Kittredge, Muller 317, Ext. 4- 1575

ENROLLMENT: 10

PREREQUISITES: none

OBJECTIVES: The "Graphic Novel Advisory Board" is a group of IC students who get together to review children's and teen's graphic novels. They share their findings with rural librarians and discuss ways for them to enhance their collections of graphic novels. The group puts out a monthly newsletter reviewing a wide range of graphic novels. This 1.5 credit experimental course is a great opportunity for anyone interested in education, promoting reading, or marketing/publishing graphic novels. If the pandemic allows, we also host community events promoting reading and collaborate with ITHACON to provide a whimsical reading room.

FORMAT/STYLE: Small group collaborative activities, regular writing assignments, weekend site visits.

GRADING: Performance of assigned tasks, participation in site visits, regular writing assignments, end-of-semester assessment based on personal goals (may involve event planning, reviewing, editing, or doing website enhancement), reflection on event and personal achievement.

ENGL 33100-01, DRAMATIC LITERATURE I: Early English Comedy and Tragedy

4 CREDITS

ICC DESIGNATION: Writing Intensive

INSTRUCTOR: Christopher Matusiak, Muller 326

ENROLLMENT: 20 per section

PREREQUISITES: Three courses in English, history of the theater, or introduction to the theater.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course traces the evolution of English stage comedy and tragedy from the medieval period to the seventeenth-century. Comedy, with its emphasis on laughter, emotional fulfilment, and social harmony is sometimes viewed as less serious in its aims than its ancient counterpart, tragedy. But rarely in the English tradition are

comic and tragic impulses merely antithetical. English comedy depends upon an awareness of the precariousness of human happiness—life’s ripe potential, at every turn, for disaster and despair—while tragedy, no less conscientiously, weighs the values of joy, order, and rationality against their obliteration to achieve its fullest effects. As dramatic categories, then, comedy and tragedy are mutually constitutive and complementary in the way they artistically organize and evaluate human experience; both at once affirm and subject to painful disintegration our prized ideas about the world and our positions in it. To better grasp the formal, political, and philosophical dimensions of English comedy and tragedy before 1800, this course will first survey some foundational examples of each from ancient Greece and Rome, including Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; Seneca’s Thyestes; and Plautus’s The Haunted House. We will then study a selection of medieval and early modern English plays that adapt or appropriate past works in innovative ways, such as Noah and his Wife (and other civic Biblical pageants); Thomas Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet; Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist; Elizabeth Carey’s The Tragedy of Mariam; John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (a sequel to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew); and Aphra Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion/lecture.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: active participation; close-reading exercises; an essay; a take-home final exam.

ENGL 35300: Race, Gender and Otherness (Girlhoods in Literature) 

4 CREDITS  

INSTRUCTOR: Katharine Kittredge, 317 Muller  

ENROLLMENT: 20 students per section  

PREREQUISITES: sophomore standing or permission of instructor.  

Description: This course offers a focused consideration of the role that children’s media has played in fostering systemic racism in our culture, and the hope it offers for dismantling racism and promoting empathy and understanding. The course will begin by looking at images from the late nineteenth century, and then consider progressive texts from the late twentieth century and twenty-first century. The texts include books for young children (5-7 years old), books for middle grade readers, texts for Young Adults, two films and two graphic novels. Throughout the semester we will also be looking at the critical response to children’s literature both in the academic community and in the popular press.   Since all texts have female or non-male identifying protagonists, gender is also a major topic of discussion; this course is part of the Women’s and Gender Studies curriculum.  

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Largely discussion.  

COURSE REQUIREMENTS & GRADING: Daily reading quizzes or weekly blog posts, mid-term paper or exam, an in-class presentation, and a longer final research project. 

ENGL 38200: Modern Literature, Making it New: British and American Modernism

4 Credits

Instructor: Jennifer Spitzer, 305 Muller

Prerequisites: Any three courses in the humanities, and at least one of those in English.

Enrollment: 20 Students per section

If Ezra Pound’s “make it new” is the signature slogan of modernism (that period of cultural production from roughly 1890-1950), what do we make of the fact, brought to light by the scholar Michael North, that the slogan was not itself new but a recycled phrase from Chinese history?  Why was literary modernism so invested in the concept of newness, and what about modernism was new? In this course, we will think about modernism as a “crisis of representation” and a “revolution of the word,” but we will also consider the aspects of literary modernism that were anti-modern and nostalgic.

We will begin the course by surveying some of the earliest statements of literary modernism, Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” and Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life.”  We will go on to consider how various modernisms announced themselves through the manifesto, and we will look at several examples of the genre, including Wyndham Lewis’ Blast and Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto.” For the remainder of the course, we will range across modernist genres—the short story, the free-verse poem, the stream-of-consciousness novel—to assess how and why modernists renovated earlier forms. We will consider the relationship between so called “high-brow” literature and more popular forms, such as jazz. Finally, we will consider the sociological developments that helped pave the way for literary modernism, among them urbanization, immigration, imperialism, the rise of advertising and mass communication, and upheavals in relations of race, class, sexuality and gender. As we think about newness in art, we will consider the proliferation of “new” social types during this era, including the New Negro and the New Woman.

We will read poetry, long and short fiction, and essays by Charles Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Rebecca West, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and Nella Larsen.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion, with some lecture.

Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in class discussion. Students will participate in group presentations, and will hand in a short 5-6 page paper, and a longer 8-10 page final paper.

ENGL 40000-01 CAPSTONE IN ENGLISH

1 CREDIT

ICC DESIGNATION: Capstone course

INSTRUCTOR: Robert Sullivan

ENROLLMENT: 20 students per section

PREREQUISITE: Senior standing in English

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course provides students with an opportunity to reflect on their four years of study as English majors and within the ICC. The goal of the course is to complete all necessary material for the ICC e-portfolio, and for students to consider their own experiences within the context of College academic programming as well as the framework of the liberal arts more generally.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Discussion, with some context-setting lectures.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: One 1000-word reflective essay, one shorter reflective assignment, and class participation. Grading will be P/F.

ENGL 46000-01        Seminar in Contemporary African American Literature HU LA 3A h

TOPIC:                       Toni Morrison through the Decades

4 Credits

INSTRUCTOR:          Derek Adams, Muller 304

ENROLLMENT:        10

PREREQUISITES:     Four English courses; junior standing

COURSE DESCRIPTION:    To be clear, I love Toni Morrison! She is, quite simply, one of the greatest authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although Morrison’s inclusion in the American literary canon now goes unquestioned, rarely is her work examined in a single author course. As a result, much of what we learn about her and her fiction are fragments of a whole. This class will attempt to cultivate a more comprehensive understanding of Morrison and her entire body of work through an examination of her literature spanning five decades. We will focus on one text from each decade – Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), A Mercy (2008), God Help the Child (2015) – devoting three full weeks to each. We will consider how issues of race, gender, sexuality, and social class shape a reader’s understanding of the material and how the material influences our understanding of those same identity categories. Too, we will pay particular attention to motifs such as home/homelessness, memory, family, trauma, violence, love, and history.     

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE:            Seminar

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:           Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions, along with an open mind. Students will complete one midterm essay, one final research essay (based on the midterm), a reading journal, an annotated bibliography, and a group discussion facilitation.