English (ENG)

This course will prepare students for the UB Curriculum's Communication Literacy sequence by introducing them to the basic conventions of academic writing. Assignments will offer practice in the analysis and development of essays, effective use of grammar, and revision. Each student will compose twenty pages of graded and revised writing.

An introduction to research, writing, and rhetorical practices employed in academic and professional contexts. The course examines the operation of genres, the audiences they address, and the purposes they serve. The course focuses on the analysis and development of student writing and rhetorical practice. Assignments include research essays, digital compositions, and oral presentations. This course is a controlled enrollment (impacted) course. Students who have previously attempted the course and received a grade other than W may repeat the course in the summer or winter; or only in the fall or spring semester with a petition to the College of Arts and Sciences Deans' Office.

This course provides an introduction to the study of literature and culture through close readings of texts (in English) that many readers have found valuable for inspiration or guidance in their own lives. It will consider works in relation to the social, cultural, political, and artistic movements from which they evolved, and what each work meant to its first readers and, in more searching detail, what it can mean to us now, in terms of our own values and understanding. We may also consider questions of what makes a work of literature ¿great.¿ Is greatness a relative concept? Who gets to choose what great means? What is the impact of literary greatness on the cultural history of a society?

The rapid development of digital media technologies has presented new challenges and opportunities for the pursuit of eudaimonia, or happiness, a foundational concern of Western philosophy and one enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. This course investigates the classical traditions of happiness and current challenges with living well in our heavily mediated, digital culture. In particular, the course considers the role that design plays in how we experience technologies and then expands that lens to examine how these technologies will affect the future of work. Students will encounter and discuss these issues, conducting experiments that encourage them to rethink how they interact with digital media and considering how design practices from product design to the organization of online communities and the development of individual habits might help them to "live well".This course is the same as CL 125 and DMS 125, and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

The goal of this course will be to understand the relationship of literature and technology over time. We will study some of the most important novels, short stories, critical essays, and films from the last two hundred years in order to ask how literary writing defines technology and mediates its impact upon society. With an an emphasis on science fiction, this course will teach you to think like a literary scholar, and to employ the discipline's core research methods, including formal and rhetorical analysis.

This course introduces students to journalism. Using Buffalo as a backdrop for finding news and topics for feature stories, 193 stresses practice in the basic techniques of journalism, including finding and producing a print and broadcast news story on deadline, thinking in relation to the screen, and packaging stories for the web and broadcast media. This course will teach you to think, act and write like a journalist. The course is a gateway into the Journalism Certificate program and will provide an introduction to the basic principles of research, reporting and writing for print, broadcast and the web. We will cover essential reporting tools (researching, interviewing, observing) and learn to write hard news stories, short features, blogs, TV broadcasts and reported opinion pieces. This course is the same as DMS 193 and course repeat rules will apply.

The one credit UB Seminar is focused on a big idea or challenging issue to engage students with questions of significance in a field of study and, ultimately, to connect their studies with issues of consequence in the wider world. Essential to the UB Curriculum, the Seminar helps transition to UB through an early connection to UB faculty and the undergraduate experience at a comprehensive, research university. This course is equivalent to any 198 offered in any subject. This course is a controlled enrollment (impacted) course. Students who have previously attempted the course and received a grade of F or R may not be able to repeat the course during the fall or spring semester.

The three credit UB Seminar is focused on a big idea or challenging issue to engage students with questions of significance in a field of study and, ultimately, to connect their studies with issues of consequence in the wider world. Essential to the UB Curriculum, the Seminar helps students with common learning outcomes focused on fundamental expectations for critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and oral communication, and learning at a university, all within topic focused subject matter. The Seminars provide students with an early connection to UB faculty and the undergraduate experience at a comprehensive, research university. This course is equivalent to any 199 offered in any subject. This course is a controlled enrollment (impacted) course. Students who have previously attempted the course and received a grade of F or R may not be able to repeat the course during the fall or spring semester.

This course focuses on contemporary and historical issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class and religious sectarianism in American life. It approaches the intersections among these categories and how they have evolved in relation to one another in complex and dynamic ways. Readings may include historical and/sociological materials as well as literary ones, and may view pluralism through one or more special lenses, such as education, immigration, or class conflict.

This course teaches the top ten books recommended by UB faculty for all undergraduates to read. As such, it serves as an introduction to the study of literature.

Selected key texts of world literature in English or in translation. This course introduces students to narratives of romance that span Asia's wide variety of religious, literary, theatrical, and cinematic traditions. Rather than defining romance by what it contains, we will instead consider what romance as a genre does. Through this approach, it becomes possible to examine why certain narratives were compelling enough to be transmitted across and preserved within a diverse range of cultures and historical periods. Texts include English translations of Sanskrit drama, Persian and Hindi Sufi mystical works, early Japanese and Chinese novels, recent Bollywood cinema, Korean television melodramas, and the worldwide Harlequin Romance phenomenon. For example: Prof. J. Holstun, Non- North American Fiction Well read a diverse group of novels and novellas from South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, including And the Rain My Drink, Han Suyins historical novel about the Malay Insurgency against British rule, and its defeat; The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assiss modernist autobiography of a dead man; and Hadji Murat, Lev Tolstoys short novel about a Muslim Chechen warlord.

This course will introduce students to narratives of romance that span Asia's wide variety of religious, literary, theatrical, and cinematic traditions. Rather than defining romance by what it contains, we will instead consider what romance as a genre does. Through this approach, it becomes possible to examine why certain narratives were compelling enough to be transmitted across and preserved within a diverse range of cultures and historical periods. Texts include English translations of Sanskrit drama, a Hindi Sufi mystical work, an early Japanese novel, recent Bollywood cinema, Korean television melodramas, and the worldwide Harlequin Romance phenomenon. There are no prerequisites for this class. We will be covering a wide range of materials, and it is essential that students complete assigned readings before class and actively participate in class discussions. All are welcome in this class, regardless of age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, ethnicity, or religion. I ask that you keep an open mind towards the course materials and be tolerant and respectful of the opinions expressed by your fellow classmates. This course is the same as AS 221 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

This course introduces students to literary texts from a variety of medieval European traditions and genres. Readings will span the period from the early Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, including texts from French, German, Italian, Greek, Yiddish, and the ever present Latin [all in translation], illustrating the broad scope of genres of the time, including love poetry, epic, letters, dramas, theology, biography, and romantic-erotic fables. Among the functions of the course will be to redirect critical attention away from the [almost exclusively male] canon of medieval texts and toward texts written by women, so that some insight may be gained into problems of literary reception and production on the part of women, of the role of women in literate society, and their informing activities in religious movements, and to gain some perspective on the history of women's literature in Europe as it is relevant to contemporary issues in gender studies.

This course surveys British and Irish literature from its Old English beginnings to the late 1700s. Concentrating on major works of poetry, drama, and fiction from the Medieval, Early Modern, and Eighteenth-Century eras, students will learn to situate literary writings within their relevant socio-cultural contexts. Readings may include works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Behn, and Swift. Course lecture and discussion will address issues of ethnic identity, gender conventions, social and economic crises, political subversion, sexuality and knowledge, and the poetics of power.

This course surveys British and Irish literature from the early 1800s to the present, including the Romantic Period, the Victorian Era, and the rise of Modernism. Students will focus on major works of poetry by authors like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Moore, and important novels by Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Woolf. Lectures and discussion will concentrate on how these writings respond to seminal events in their time ranging from the Industrial Revolution to the Reform Bills to the first World War.

This course covers US literature from colonial contact to the Civil War. Students will investigate how poems, novels, and plays describe the new world, assess the truth-value of literature, and evaluate the opportunities and perils of American democracy. By the end of the semester, students will understand the major literary, political, and cultural debates that preoccupied the American literary tradition from the 17th to the mid-19th century, and how literature influenced these debates. Authors may include Franklin (inventor of the "autobiography"), Cooper (inventor of the Western), Poe (inventor of the mystery story), Stowe (author of perhaps the most influential political novel every written), Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville.

This course surveys US literature from Reconstruction to the present. Students will learn how literary writing enables us to thrive and survive in the world by exploring novels and short stories by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, among others. Lecture and discussion will teach students how to read literature and life in detail and in context. This interpretive work will reveal how literature responds to pivotal events in American social history and contributes to artistic movements such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism.

Introduces students to the short story and the novella. Readings include a large number of authors from a wide variety of countries writing about an extraordinary array of different subjects from the dramatic to the mundane. Attention is given to the formal characteristics of short fiction, such as character development, plotting, and point of view, as well as to what these stories have to tell us about the cultures that produce them. Students will practice techniques of close reading, formal and cultural analysis.

This course introduces students to the forms, language, and history of poetry, and to methods of poetic interpretation. It aims to help students improve their language awareness, their ability to read poems with recognition, understanding, and appreciation, their awareness of the historical, social, cultural, and political contexts in which poems are written. By reading a wide range of verse written between the 1600s and the present, students will explore poetry's four defined historic functions (to imitate, to teach, to express, to invent), its different partitions (genres), and how and why it differs from prose.

This course introduces students to the history of the novel in Britain and America, from the form's origins in the 1700s through the present. By reading signature fictions by authors ranging from Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen to Henry James and Gary Shteyngart, students will explore how the novel first emerged and has reinvented itself ever since.

This survey covers major moments in the evolution of science fiction by exploring works by Arthur Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, and Jules Verne, and movies such as *2001: A Space Odyssey* and *Blade Runner*. Lecture and discussion will ask students to think about how and why do we draw the line between insider and outsider, friend and enemy, human and monster. Formally, students will consider what rhetorical conventions and plot elements characterize the science fiction genre.

This course introduces students to the study of the motion picture, from its invention in the late 19th century to the present, with a focus on the development of the language of cinema over the course of the 20th century. Lecture and discussion will reveal how each film genre bears its own history of aesthetic, technological, and social innovation. By watching, discussing, and writing about the works of some of the world's greatest filmmakers, including Ford, Hitchcock, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Welles, we will improve our critical viewing skills and learn to think like filmmakers as we engage this quintessentially 20th-century art form.

The major fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and the film versions based on those narratives will be read/viewed and the major themes and cultural issues found will be analyzed: language and myth, the relationship of good and evil, heroism, environmentalism, totalitarianism, agrarianism, and issues of gender.

For decades, mystery novels have been dismissed as "potboilers," not worthy of serious critical attention. Whatever one may think of the literary merits of mysteries, there is no denying the fact that they have proved to be a remarkably resilient and diverse form of popular fiction. This course surveys a selection of both the most important examples of mystery writing and recent attempts to update the genre. Our focus will be on the narrative techniques used by these writers to create character, structure plot, and maintain suspense. We can tell a lot about a society from the way it discusses crime and punishment. Therefore, we will also study how novels and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Harris and others provide miniature social histories of the periods in which they were written. For example: Prof. D. Schmid, Mystery Novel as Cultural Artifact For decades, mystery novels have been dismissed as "potboilers," not worthy of serious critical attention. Whatever one may think of the literary merits of mysteries, there is no denying the fact that they have proved to be a remarkably resilient and diverse form of popular fiction. This course will survey a selection of both the most important examples of mystery writing and recent attempts to "update" the genre. Our focus will be on the narrative techniques used by these writers to create character, structure plot, and maintain suspense. We can tell a lot about a society from the way it discusses crime and punishment. Therefore, we will also study how these novels and short stories provide miniature social histories of the periods in which they were written.

This course surveys environmentalist writings, from 19th-century touchstone works like Thoreau's *Walden* through contemporary essays, articles, fiction, and poetry. Students will investigate how evolving conceptions of the environment have shaped the formal properties and thematic concerns of literary writing, and then place this writing in the context of debates surrounding climate change, natural disasters, endangered/invasive species, genetic science, and wilderness preservation.

This course surveys popular young adult literature, both contemporary (e.g. *The Hunger Games*, *Thirteen Reasons Why*) and historical (*Oliver Twist*, *Alice in Wonderland*). Students will learn how to analyze and write about the relationship between literary texts and the cultural problems they represent, and specifically, how YA fiction raises questions of gender definition, sexuality, race and ethnicity, body image, shaming practices, generational conflicts, and social pressure.

This course introduces students to twentieth-century Irish literature. Beginning with the Literary Revival, we will track how changes in Irish society were both complicated and simplified by literary figures. As a unified and unitary sense of the Irish people was argued about and, at times, fought over in the political sphere, how did writers add their voices to these debates? How did they respond to the challenges posed by women's suffrage and feminism; the dwindling and impoverished population of Irish speakers on the island; differentiating the Irish from their British neighbors; migrations to urban centers in a predominantly agricultural and rural society; high rates of emigration; an island partitioned into a twenty-six county south and a six-county north; and the bitter legacy of Ireland's struggles for self-determination? We will examine the public transmission of information, whether as representations of rumor, gossip, or chatter; the production of literary texts as politically-motivated and even propagandistic statements meant to spur debate and change public opinion; and the reception of such works in troubled and frequently violent contexts.

This course introduces students to major literary texts in Asian American literature, including works by Bulosan, Okada, Hong Kingston, Nguyn, and Hamid. Beginning with an examination of how the term ¿Asian American¿ was coined in the 1960s, we will survey literary texts that portray Asian identities and experiences in the United States in the twentieth century. The primary goal of the course is to understand how American writers gave expression to the predicaments and psychology of Asian American lives.

This course surveys African American Literature by exploring the diversity of literary production that falls under the category of black. Students will investigate how major works of prose and poetry by Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison address questions of immigration, sexuality, gender, and slavery. Readings may also include critical analyses of popular culture such as hip-hop, music videos, and blogs. This course is the same as AAS 271.

A survey of Latinx literature from the Mexican American War of 1848 and the Spanish American War of 1898 to the present. Students will study literary works of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and memoirs in relation to their historical, linguistic, political, regional, gendered, and cultural contexts. Texts will be selected from a diverse group of authors, literary movements, and media forms. Topics and themes may include the literary performance of identity and culture, immigration, struggle and protest, and artistic activism.

This course surveys literature written by women, with a focus on the historical and cultural contexts of women's lives. Readings of canonical and non-canonical works will address themes including body image, women's work and constructions of domesticity, reproduction and motherhood, women's culture, and issues of agency and voice. We will engage in debates about the literary canon, language ownership, the usefulness of gender as basis for a literary genre and community, and the function of writing as part of a global exchange.

What stories can law tell? How does story-making shape our legal system? This course explores how legal and literary writing use language and narrative to address fundamental problems of justice, equity, and fairness. We will consider these questions by evaluating representations of law in various genres, including lyrical poetry, Sophoclean drama, fiction by Melville, Kafka, and Morrison, and films like *Twelve Angry Men* and *A Civil Action.* Alongside these works of literature, we will also read statutes, constitutional provisions, and landmark judicial opinions to ask how rhetoric and storytelling shape the making and interpretation of law.

The content of this course is variable and therefore it is repeatable for credit. The University Grade Repeat Policy does not apply. For example: Prof. D. Schmid, Intro Pop Culture Despite the fact that popular culture plays a large part in the vast majority of ordinary lives, its serious study is still a relatively recent phenomenon in the academy, which has tended to dismiss pop culture as nothing more than mindless, frivolous, even pernicious entertainment. This class will explore why pop culture matters by introducing students to the basic theories and approaches to the scholarly study of popular culture, concentrating in particular on how pop culture helps to create and reflect the zeitgeist of the periods in which it emerges and evolves. We will accomplish these goals by focusing on the theme of violence in American popular culture. From the Puritan period to the present day, Americans have always documented their intense interest in violence through popular culture and we will investigate the history of and reasons for this interest by studying examples taken from a wide variety of genres and subjects. Along the way, we will discuss the distinction between folk, mass, and popular culture; changing definitions of criminality and deviance; manifest destiny; urbanization; the influence of evolving media technologies, and the rise of a celebrity culture organized around criminals, with a primary emphasis on how popular culture gives us insights into the societies of which it is an integral part. This class will be taught in a large lecture format, with small seminar groups each Friday to discuss particular texts. For example: J. Bodway, The Gothic From the success of survival horror video games (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.), to the continued popularity of horror films (Halloween, Saw, etc.), it is not a stretch to say that horror is a business, and its business is good. As a business, horror is an emotion that is manufactured by the images that we see and by the stories that we read. However, these images and stories have a history, and this course will examine how this history has come to shape our understanding. Our investigation will begin with a study of the gothic novel as it emerges at the end of the eighteenth century, then move into the many gothic themes of British and American Romanticism. Gothic literature often blurs the distinction between the physical and the psychological. In addition to our readings, we will examine paintings by such artists as Henry Fuseli, Francisco de Goya, and Gustave Dore. We will end the semester with a screening of Stanley Kubrick's rendition of The Shining; a tour de force of gothic cinema.

This course is an introductory-level survey of Shakespeare's earlier works--that is, a selection of those plays and poems written before 1600: sonnets, comedies, and histories. It will introduce students to literary studies in general and prepare them to take advanced 300- and 400-level courses in Shakespeare and other early literature.

This course surveys Shakespeare's later works. It concentrates on plays and poems written after 1599-1600, with a special focus on tragedy (*Othello*, *King Lear*, and *Macbeth*) and romance (*The Winter's Tale*, *The Tempest*, and *Pericles*). ENG 289 offers an excellent introduction to literary studies in general, and advanced 300- and 400-level courses in Shakespeare and other early literature.

This course will introduce students to the vast field of literary representations of war from the Bible and Homer to the literature of 9/11. As old and as varied as the history of literature itself, the literature of war crosses time periods, national traditions, and genres. Moreover, the theme of war gives us a way to study the relationship between literature and philosophy, literature and other arts (such as painting, photography, cinema, and music), and literature and technology. However, the definition of 'war' has changed dramatically over time and continues to change. Accordingly, this course will approach the study of literature and war by examining these changes, seeing how shifts in the structure of war can alter our experience of time and space, self and other, friend and enemy, nation and people, public and private, love and death, and war and peace, just to name a few. Finally, we will consider how literary representations of war might themselves constitute an attempt to find alternatives to war.

Our course will investigate intersections between literature and the environment. As nature is a grand concept with deep historical roots and wide geographical spread, our course will focus on writings drawn from a range of temporal, geographical, and cultural perspectives. The course will feature discussion and lecture on ecocriticism, which refers to a range of critical approaches to interrelating literary phenomena and environmental contexts. Students will cultivate critical skills both by looking closely at individual works, and by comparing such works with other literary approaches to nature.

Introduces students to the varieties of literary and cultural criticism and the techniques and strategies required to research and write effective critical essays. The course covers key theoretical concepts and approaches to the analysis of literature (New Critical, poststructuralist, historicist, reader-response, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, eco-critical, queer, race theory, etc.) and how these may be brought to bear on selected works of literature. Attention is also give to paper development, manuscript form, research methods, creative use of biographical and socio-cultural material, and prose revision.

This course introduces students to the language, literature, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. Old English often has a bad reputation, as if the course itself were as dark and ghoulish as the monsters that Beowulf had to fight. Old English does require some work, though it can also be quite a bit of fun, because there is a great deal of interesting material in Old English that you won't find anywhere else and that has nothing to do with sword and ogres and dragons (though there is some of that). By consciously recognizing what you already know about English, Old English can open up a new culture. In this course we will spend some time on a guided review of what you already know about English so you can apply that to thousand-year old texts. Then we'll be ready for reading Old English texts: about daily life, magic, religious practices, gender roles, burial customs, tenth-century ladies fashions, shipwrecks, and so on.

This course surveys the works by Chaucer, including *The Canterbury Tales*, the dream visions, and *Troilus and Criseyde*. Students will learn how Geoffrey Chaucer became the "Father of English poetry," and how his work has profoundly influenced both the literary canon and the very language itself. Besides reading Chaucer's poetry in the original Middle English, we will also familiarize ourselves with late-medieval culture by exploring related primary and secondary texts.

This course investigates the social and cultural function of epic and the hero in medieval Europe. Course material may vary semester to semester, but may include such topics as the Jewish Epic. In the late Middle Ages the literary genre of epic suddenly appeared in Jewish culture for the first time in its history, and it appeared in Yiddish, not Hebrew: both short heroic lays and lengthy epics, both secular tales adapted from Christian sources and religious tales derived from Jewish traditions of Bible and midrash. There are epicized versions of humorous tales of Abrahams youth, pious meditations on core narratives of the Jewish faith (the Binding of Isaac), swashbuckling Jewish adventure heroes, King David as a quasi-medieval night, and a tale of international intellectual intrigue with a high priest, a pope, a Jewish king, a pious scholar, and a beautiful maiden.

This course studies the medieval literary origins of modern conceptions of romantic love. Over the course of the last two-and-a-half millennia there have developed multiple traditions of romantic love in Western Asia and Europe. This course will investigate those traditions by means of a survey of both theoretical writings concerning love and literary works that themselves represent romantic love.

This course covers British drama from roughly 1450 to 1660, from late-medieval mystery and morality plays to the establishment of a professional theatre under Elizabeth I and its development through the Jacobean and Caroline periods.

This course concentrates on Shakespeare's early plays, particularly his histories and comedies. Readings may include Romeo and Juliet (1594-5), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594-6), Richard II (1595), 1 Henry IV (1597), Henry V (1598-99), and Twelfth Night (1599-1600). Lectures and class discussion will address Shakespeare's language, dramatic technique, and formal innovations, as well as the issues his drama raises, from the divine origins of kingship to the reproductive consent of women.

This course concentrates on Shakespeare's late plays, especially his tragedies and romances. Readings may include Julius Caesar (1599), Hamlet (1600-1), Measure for Measure (1604-5), Othello (1604-5), Macbeth (1605-6), and King Lear (1605-6). Lectures and class discussions will address Shakespeare's treatment of problems including the limits of political authority, sexual jealousy, insatiable ambition, and madness.

This course will study John Milton, devoted student of power relations, a poet whose imaginative audacity and intellectual power have inspired three centuries of poets and other readers with wonder and chagrin. Milton is the premier poet of excess, a too-muchness that works, paradoxically, to convert plenitude into poverty and to subvert the possibility of measurement and comparison that reason requires. This subversion, the confusion between too much and too little--will be our theme as it was Milton's. We shall read his major poetry and a little of his prose: *Paradise Lost*, *Paradise Regained*, *Areopagitica*, as well as such slighter works as *Comus* and "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity."

This course focuses on important works of British drama performed between 1660 and 1914. 317a covers 1660 to 1800, and may include plays by Behn, Congreve, Wycherley, among others. 317b covers romantic drama between 1770 and 1830, featuring works by Baillie, Inchbald, Shelley, and Byron. 317c surveys nineteenth-century drama from 1800 to 1914, including plays by Wilde, Pinero, Shaw, and Ibsen. Readings and discussion will emphasize formal analysis of playtexts and engagement with modern performance theory.

This course shows how the English novel came to exist. By reading a broad range of fictions, histories, and poetry, students will see how different genres contributed to the rise of the novel, and how the novel became an enduringly-popular mode of story-telling from the 1700s to the present day.

The content of this course is variable as specified in particular course sections and therefore it is repeatable for credit. The University Grade Repeat Policy does not apply. Poetry and prose in Britain from 1688 to the age of the French Revolution. A: Poetry, Focuses on poetry from 1700 to the 1790s; authors include Pope, Swift, Wordsworth. B: Early Gothic, Focuses on the first examples of the gothic genre in poetry, novels and prose; authors may include Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley. C: Enlightenment Cultures, Consideration of the diverse cultures of the eighteenth century and the formation of the idea of culture in the period. For example 319A: Prof. D. Alff, 18th Century British Poetry What was a poem in eighteenth-century Britain? What did it do or try to do? These are the guiding questions behind this courses survey of English verse written between 1660 and 1800. We will study poems both as self-conscious aesthetic objects possessing certain rhetorical and metrical properties, and as vehicles for public expression. Class discussion and writing assignments will stress the techniques of formal analysis, close reading skills that students can use to make sense of poetic texts from any period. Keeping in mind the mutually-generative relationship between text and cultural context, we will ask why poets adapted certain poetic forms to articulate positions on contemporary issues. How does Alexander Pope's use of heroic couplets contribute to his vanquishment of literary opponents in The Dunciad? Why does James Grainger draw upon the Virgilian tradition of georgic poetry to salute commercial productivity in the Caribbean? For example 319C: Prof. R. Mack, Culture in 18th Century Britain What is culture and what does it means to study it? We'll answer this question first by turning to the 18th century in Britain and France when the concept of culture (if not the term itself) came into being. We'll look at the ways in which writers began to study the customs and habits of other societies and of their own societies. Our texts for doing so will be diverse. We'll examine closely literature, travel writing, history, and philosophy. In doing so we'll be especially concerned with the difficulties that arose when writers attempted to understand cultural differences and with the ways in which they called on different kind of writing to represent those differences. How do you distinguish between actions informed by religious belief and actions informed by habit? To what extent can you believe what you see is not clouded by your own beliefs and opinion? What are the criteria for comparing one culture to another? Writers in the eighteenth century asked these questions and it will be central to our project in the course to compare their earlier answers with later answers in anthropology and literature.

This course studies British poetry and prose written mainly between 1780 and 1832 by such writers as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Wollstonecraft. One recent seminar concentrated on Romantic poets, whose anxieties about the possibility of representation (also about the allied possibilities of likeness, of difference, of repetition, of sympathy, of redemption, and of freedom) produced some of our most provocative critical mythologies, inexplicit allegories of reading and identity.

This course investigates British literature and culture between 1832 and 1901 (The Victorian Era) by concentrating on the works of Carlyle, Ruskin, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Barrett Browning, Browning, Rossetti, Tennyson, and others. Lecture and discussion may consider, among questions, how Victorian literature shapes modern film and televisual culture and how Victorian writing contributed to the formulation of the modern self.

This survey examines the central role played by gender and sexuality in the history, culture, and literature of the nineteenth century within various locations, including potentially Britain, America, or Asia. Students will discover the cultural underpinnings of historical and contemporary conceptions of gender, sexuality, and love. Inasmuch as we play out our gender roles our social life, this course will also serve to introduce students to the ways in which performance is imbedded in the public culture.

When most of us think about novels, the nineteenth century British novel is what comes to mind. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy: these are just a few of these authors that made the nineteenth century literature the golden age of the British novel, in general, and of British realism, in particular. This course will explore novelistic fiction of the 1800s to ask what exactly makes realism realistic. We will thus ask what about these texts encourages us to imagine we're reading about real people with thoughts, feelings, and histories much like our own. We will also examine what makes them unrealistic though more in the sense of what violates the illusion of realism. What, in other words, makes us aware of the fact that we're not actually observing real people acting autonomously in the world but characters in a text?

This course investigates novels written in the British Isles before 1945, with focus on the interrelation between literary technique and the social realities inhabited by British writers over the first half of the twentieth century. While there will be no single, unifying thread connecting every work we read during the semester, we will examine a variety of prose fiction works (novels and short stories), as well as occasionally glance sideways at other non-prose fiction forms (poems, essays, literary and radio recordings), in order to follow the stylistic negotiations and mutations undergone in the literary field during these years. By keeping track of changes to both the form and content of literary works, we will necessarily attend to the social, political, and technological transformations that mark the period and that, indeed, provide the lineaments for how we continue to think about being modern. Specific authors may include Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Samuel Beckett.

This course will examine the different ways in which gender is constructed through Asian literature, theatre, and film. It is intended to introduce students to the literature of Asia, foregrounding the ways in which gender shapes different types, or genres, of text, and how different genres of text in turn shape notions of gender. Our task in this course will be to discover the cultural underpinnings of historical and contemporary conceptions of gender, sexuality, and love. Inasmuch as we play out our gender roles our social life, this course will also serve to introduce students to the ways in which performance is embedded in the public culture of Asia. Throughout the semester, students will be required to apply the skills we acquire in our readings on theory to a broad set of materials, including authors from across the length and breadth of Asia. There are no prerequisites for this class and all readings are in English. This course is the same as AS 323 and GGS 327 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

This seminar studies literature of post-World War II Britain, beginning with the immigration of significant numbers of West Indian immigrants to England in 1948, an event triggering a process of still unfinished transformation in British identity. Materials may include novels, poetry, music, film, and art. The content of this course will vary from semester to semester.

This course explores innovations in fictional forms by examining the strategies and techniques writers deploy to undermine conventions in the novel and short story. Experimentation in fiction is an ongoing generative force accompanying the historic development of the novel, from eighteenth-century writers such as Lawrence Sterne and Daniel Defoe to the postmodern techniques that arise in fiction by authors such as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Kathy Acker. The seminar will consider a broad spectrum of twentieth and twenty-first century works that challenge literary conventions through experimentation with voice, language, the myriad tropes and formulae for literary expression, and archetypal patterns of narrative, the elements of which can be combined and synthesized into new substances: new genres, new prose forms, new syntax, new strategies for reading and making meaning.

The content of this course is variable. Selected topics in the literature of Britain such as pre-Raphaelitism and decadence, the Oxford movement, English travelers and explorers, the criminal in British literature. For example: Prof. R. Ablow, Historical Trauma and the Gothic From the half-ruined castles, convents, and graveyards of the 18th century through to the maze-like cities and claustrophobic suburbs of the 20th and 21st centuries, this course examines a wide range of Gothic landscapes and the perverse, fractured, and terrified subject who inhabit them. We will think about the different forms of historical trauma that have been worked out through the Gothic from the bloody massacres of the French Revolution through to the horrors of American slavery. We will consider how issues of gender and sexuality play out in a genre that so consistently disturbs the boundary between public and private, male and female, one generation and the next. And we will think about the challenges it poses to the way we ordinarily think about subjectivity with its confusions of inside and outside, subject and object, self and other.

This course studies Irish writing and culture, including the Irish revival, Irish modernism, and writing of the Irish diaspora. It will concentrate specifically on Irish writing and culture produced between 1922 and 1972, the fifty years roughly between the end of one period of intense violence and the beginning of another. In the aftermath of the tremendous outpouring of literary energy that accompanied the political struggles for Irish self-determination and independence in the first decades of the twentieth century, Irish writing has been conventionally held to have diverged along two separate paths: one that continues with experimentally modernist and progressively internationalist forms; and another that turns its back on modernism and instead reverts to a stagnant, insular naturalism. Through our reading for this course, we will question this characterization of Irish writing after 1922, with special attention to the kinds of social critique that are enabled and forestalled by each of these broad modes of writing. The readings for this course include prose fiction (novels and short stories), poetry, drama, autobiography, and non-literary forms.

This course explores American literature from first encounters and early colonies to the Civil War. Readings may include sermons, poems, diaries, travel writing, captivity narratives, and literature of the European/Indigenous encounter; slave narratives; political tracts and documents of the revolutionary and Federalist periods; novels of seduction, Gothicism, domesticity and frontier adventure; and the various writings of transcendentalists, romancers, woman-rights and anti-slavery activists.

A study of significant works of American poetry, drama, and prose from the early nineteenth century to the eve of WWI. May include the investigation of a specific theme¿the US Civil War¿or a particular genre, such as travel writing. Students may study various topics including nature and the environment, science and religion, slavery and abolition, gender and relationships, protest and reform, Reconstruction; may draw upon letters, diaries, travel writing, personal narratives, and political essays by such writers are Irving, Wheatley, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Twain, Poe, Wilson, Truth, Stanton, Douglass, Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton.

This seminar concentrates on twentieth-century literature, examining eras, movements, and literary experiments. Readings and discussion will focus on various community, ethnic, and gendered forms of consciousness as they surface in representative works by Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. Students will ask how these writings address problems such as the mental and corporeal impact of the city on its inhabitants, the effect of industrialization on workers, the traumas of mechanized warfare on soldiers, contemporary efforts to come to terms with modern technology, as well as the problem of addiction in the era of Prohibition.

The course explores the American novel from the 1800s through the present, including touchstone works of long fiction by Twain, Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov, Bellow, Morrison, Tan, Pynchon, and Mailer. By considering novels as both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their times) and hermeneutic (affording practice and skills in the arts of interpretation), students will consider what made the American novel uniquely American.

This course studies selected American poets, emphasizing cultural contexts, national identity, use of vernacular language, and formal innovations. It may include authors from South America and throughout North America as well as in the U.S. One recent seminar focused on the engagement of twenty-first century North American poetries with ecopoetics, mass culture, and monetization. Another explored specific movements in modernist poetry, including Imagism, the Objectivist Movement, The Fugitive Movement, the Confessional School, the New York School, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Movement, the Deep Image School, the Black Mountain School, the Language Poetry Movement, the New Formalism.

This course explores life writing, the practice of textually representing a life, whether through biography, testimony, memoir, letters, diaries, personal essays, or many more forms. Lecture and discussion will address a selection of life-writing narratives to engage some of the more prominent issues of autobiographical projects, including the formation of the biographical subject, the status of memory, temporal frameworks, representations of historical events, political imperatives, and the role of deceit. This course is the same as GGS 352, and course repeat rules will apply.

This course examines writings by African American authors organized either by topic (e.g., slavery) or time period (e.g., Reconstruction or Harlem Renaissance). This course will sample the rich tradition of black writing in the U.S. to consider issues such as genre, audience, authority, and the contemporary legacies of slavery as well as themes such as witness, violence, resistance, sexuality, gender, power, and family.

This course studies the cultural production of Latinos in the U.S., potentially including exploration of performance art, graphic novels and film. Themes of focus may include historical perspectives from the Mexican American War (1848) to the present day; immigration, the border and the criminalization of Latinos; hemispheric approaches to the Americas. All readings are in the English language.

This course explores the genre of travel writing, which encompasses works ranging from memoirs and guide books to modernist novels and lyric poetry.

This seminar explores various cultural, racial, and literary traditions through comparison of two or more ethnic literatures, including writings by African American, Asian American, Latino America, and indigenous authors. Students will think through the theoretical problems of comparison, which insist on maintaining historical specificity while developing nuanced formulations of hybridity and cross-cultural dialogue. Readings and discussion will situate racial formation within historical contexts marked by the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and national and transnational affiliation.

Close study of texts in which American writers attempt to create, define, or revise our sense of a national culture, considered within their larger cultural contexts.

This course covers special topics related to the literature and culture of the United States, and in different semesters may focus on different periods and texts. Examples of past topics include war in U.S. Literature, American reform writings, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Mountain School, literature and film of the Depression era, black humor, and visuality in American literature and culture.

This course studies literatures from various diasporas that highlight the effects of straddling different cultural worlds.

This introductory course will help beginning writers take their first steps towards exploring the craft of poetry and fiction. Students will be introduced to the fundamental vocabulary and techniques of each genre. Throughout the semester, the class will also be presented with diverse readings to study and emulate in order to kindle their own imaginative strategies. We will study differing modes of narration, character development, narrative voice, and minimal and maximal plot developments. In poetry, we will consider the differences between closed and open forms, the use of sound and rhythm, and uses of figurative language and imagery. We will also study prosody and the practice of the line. Assigned exercises will give you the space to experiment with unfamiliar forms. Students are also invited to meet visiting poets and fiction writers at Poetics Plus and Exhibit X readings on campus and in downtown Buffalo.

This course will explore kinds of writing related to environmentalist expression and action, both activist and professional. Students will develop a rhetorical understanding of what makes various forms of communication effective, to be able to produce their own environmentalist communication and respond to that of others. We will consider film representations of responses to climate change, and analyze visual culture's capacity to induce social change. Finally, students will produce a paper in a genre and on a topic of their own choosing, and write a reflective essay about what they hope to accomplish with their paper, who it is for, how it is related to their professional or activist plans, and how it addresses concerns raised throughout the semester related to writing about the environment. Engaging, informative and relevant writing is possible for anyone willing and able to devote work and attention to it; it is collaborative; and it is the result of multiple drafts. Good writing about the environment is the result of curiosity, research, passion, and logical, critical thinking based on trustworthy evidence and expertise. These are the principles on which the class is based.

This course introduces students to the written genres and rhetorical practices utilized by change agents and advocates who champion social causes. Change writing can take a wide variety of forms, such as letters, essays, poster art, blog posts, proposals, and speeches, to name just a few. In the process of composing in different genres to address timely local issues, students study the psychology of change, research local communities, and meet with the stakeholders they hope to learn from and influence. Major assignments include letters, reports, grant proposals, and speeches.

This course examines specialized forms of technical writing such as manuals, instruction sets, and resource guides. Students practice creating documents and multimedia objects that are understandable to many different types of readers and accommodate different audiences.

This course teaches modes of literary interpretation and strategies for researching and writing compelling and persuasive interpretive essays. Students will learn how to craft essays on poetry, fiction and non-fiction as well as how to locate historical and critical sources, create annotated bibliographies, enter into critical and theoretical conversations in their own essays, and present research orally and visually. Emphasis on argumentative structure, use of textual and extra-textual evidence, and literary critical concepts, terminology and style.

This course explores modes of scientific discourse that engage with general audiences. Students practice communicating scientific concepts to audiences with various scientific literacies in essays, articles, videos, and audio.

This course investigates genres of professional and workplace communication, including memos, progress reports, proposals, and job application documents. Assignments and class instruction parallel the writing demands of professional workplaces, incorporating collaborative writing practices as well as technology and visual rhetoric.

Students learn to research, report and write like a professional journalist. Students will produce up to four pieces of original journalism during this class and will learn about current trends in media and media production. They will learn interviewing and note-taking skills and critique current works of mainstream journalism. The class will hone students' skills as writers and readers and teach them to write a long-form piece of journalism.

This course introduces students to the rhetorical practices of technical and professional communication in the health sciences, including technical reporting, communicating with the public, and visual and oral presentations.

Writing is a technological practice, and emerging digital media technologies have significantly altered the scope of writing practices from the integration of text with other media forms to the ubiquitous role social media, mobile technologies, and data analysis now play in both personal and professional communication. This course examines the theory and practice of writing in these spaces through a study of rhetorical and social challenges and practice writing in emerging digital genres.

What Is Modernism? Who gets to define it? Why did so many artists, musicians, architects, and writers become fascinated with the new in ways that rejected primary aesthetic structures of the past at the beginning of the twentieth century? This course introduces some of the key works published during the first few decades of the twentieth century in relation to such questions. We will read this literature in the context of what modernists themselves claimed they were doing, or wanted to do. After briefly looking at innovations in the visual arts and music during this period as points of comparison, we will read literary manifestos espousing the ideals or programs of Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism, and feminism, and we will read poets and fiction writers who take up, reject, or revise these programs in their own writing. Students will read and analyze artist statements, some of the great literature of the period, and some of the more ephemeral work published side by side with that of the great writers in little magazines.

This course studies writers and the literary field in the United Kingdom during the modernist period, devoting specific attention to topics like the rise of mass politics and mass culture, imperialism and colonial administration, and particularly British responses to transnational literary formations. Recent seminars have focused on topics such as the rise of mass culture between 1925 and 1950, and the culture and reception of the Bloomsbury Group.

This course studies poetry movements, sometimes focusing on a single movement and sometimes on comparative study of two or more. Movements may include Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, Modernism, the Beats, the Black Arts movement, and LANGUAGE Poetry. Lecture and class discussion will examine the multiple stances and corresponding propositions taken up by innovative American poetry and poetics. How does poetry respond to its cultural moment? How has poetry changed in response to emerging technologies and forces of globalization? The abiding objective of this course is to further your practice of attentive reading, to open up the range of your critical discourse in relation to poetry, and to invite you to produce criticism attuned to the historical and material conditions under which poetry arrives.

The content of this course is variable. Study of poetry written from the end of the nineteenth century up to the present day, potentially including poetry in translation from several cultures and places. A. Modern and Contemporary British Poetry Study of twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and poetry movements in the British Isles. B. Modern and Contemporary North American Poetry Study of twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and poetry movements of North America. For example: Prof. S. McCaffery, 20th Century Avant-Garde Poetry This course explores the emergence and transformation of primarily twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone poetics in North America as well as the twentieth-century emergence of the Avant-Garde. Authors and topics covered include Imagism, Vorticism, Feminist Poetics and Poetry, Italian and Russian Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Objectivism, the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude, Projective Verse, the New American Poetry of the 1960s, the New York School and Language Poetry. Alongside texts to be studied, analyzed and compared are relevant theoretical texts largely by poets themselves. For example: Prof. Ming Qian Ma, Poetry and Poetics This course will introduce students to modern and contemporary poetry in the 20th century, with an emphasis on the American poetry. Following a chronological approach, the class will cover the period from the so-called High Modernism to the present, studying the major poetic movements such as Imagism, the Objectivists, the Fugitives, the Confessional School, the New York School, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Movement, the Deep Image School, the Language poetry, and others. The overarching topic of our critical inquiry is the poetry-poetics relationship, as it is perceived and practiced by diverse poets in their corresponding socio-political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. The class will focus on close reading of selected poets representing each poetic movement in conjunction with selected criticisms by these poets.

This course familiarizes students with theories that attempt to account for the specificity of the literary object. Discussion will focus on questions of reading and interpretation, linguistics and poetics, narrative, rhetoric, genre, literature and the arts, or politics and education. We will survey the major schools of modern and postmodern literary criticism and theory, including formalism, psychoanalysis, gender and race theory, genre theory, new historicism and cultural studies, post-colonial criticism, deconstruction, among others.

This course studies the writings of a scholarly and politically committed movement created mainly by progressive intellectuals of color, focusing on the law's centrality in constructing and maintaining social domination and subordination.

This course offers an interdisciplinary study of how human sexuality can be conceived outside the terms of fixed identity, and how certain ideas about sexuality and sexual politics have come, over the past few decades, to be know as queer theory. Does queer attempt to bridge Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender identities or does it aspire to go beyond identity categories? What kind of politics is possible after identity politics? We will consider a wide range of ways of thinking about gender and sexuality in our attempt to assess the pros and cons of different descriptions of sex. Readings may include work by theorists and authors such as Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, Delany, Winterson, and Halberstam. This course is the same as GGS 369.

This course surveys several feminist frameworks for thinking about gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, and oppression, including a consideration of the ways in which gender has left its mark on literary history and culture. Readings may include poetry, short fiction, speeches, and critical essays in American feminist theory. We will start with key figures in the nineteenth century and work our way through the twentieth century. This seminar will give students speculative instruments to help to see more in a reading, event or pattern than they would see without the lens of feminist theory.

This course examines issues relating to the study of popular culture through consideration of a wide range of media, including music, television, film, fiction, and the internet. One recent seminar focused on celebrity culture, and the role fame plays in American culture, by providing a history of the concept, clarifying the terminological complexities that surround fame, and examining the ways in which popular culture has propagated, reflected, and offered insight into our obsession with fame. Another course focused on popular genre fiction, including Westerns, Crime films, Horror, Sci-fi and Adventure Romance.

This course offers extensive reading in the Bible, one of the most influential and perennially-popular books in the world, and a fundamental pillar in the construction of Western civilization. Part history, part literature, part philosophy, part law-book, it raises still relevant questions concerning ethics, community, knowledge, the place of man in the world, and the very idea of a responsible self. We will read selections from the Bible including Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Samuel, several of the prophets, Job, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, some Psalms, and the Gospels of Matthew and John. Students will also consider modern biblical scholarship and explore the more important uses of religious and biblical ideas in various periods of English and American literature. This course is the same as JDS 374 and RSP 339 and course repeat rules will apply.

Examination of the iconography and literature of the sacred tradition in art. For example: Prof. D. Christian, Heaven, Hell & Judgement The course will consider ideas and images of eternal reward and punishment & stories and pictures of heaven, hell, and judgment from ancient Sumner to modern film. We will begin with the oldest known story of the underworld, five-thousand year-old Sumerian goddess Inannas descent From the Great Above to the Great Below. We'll look at the Egyptian weighing of the soul at death against the feather of Maat or justice, at Odysseus and Aeneas explorations of the worlds of the dead, at Plato's and popular ideas of what's next. We'll also consider Biblical apocalypses, Sheol, Hades and heaven, medieval journeys to heaven and hell, Dante's Inferno and Paradiso, and Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. We'll look at paintings, mosaics, and sculptures of Judgment, heaven and hell, including especially some Byzantine art, Romanesque churches, Giotto, Signorelli, Michaelangelo, and Bosch. We'll close with the 1946 classic film, A Matter of Life or Death, released in America as Stairway to Heaven. Through these verbal and visual imaginations we'll explore ethical and religious ideas of the judgment of good and evil, punishment and reward. This course is the same as AHI 318, RSP 375, and CL 375 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

This course explores mythology both as a kind of knowing and as sacred stories in religion, literature, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and science. Students will discuss and write about the myths, tales, and legends told by a variety of authors, from indigenous North American storytellers, orators, singers, and dramatists to medieval Germanic poets to British novelists. Class discussion and lecture will raise, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how mythology attempts to explain where and how the world and we came to be. This course is the same as APY 379, and course repeat rules will apply.

This course focuses on literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its aesthetic and ideological antecedents. Recent seminars have focused on the novel of globalization, and the new social realist novel through comparative analysis of Jonathan Franzen, *Freedom* (2010), which depicts a middle- American dysfunctional family, and Zadie Smith's *White Teeth* (2000), which stirs together a postmodern fabulist style with a multinational and multiethnic cast of characters in London.

Study of various film genres (melodrama, horror, film noir, comedy, science fiction, westerns) and sub-genres (maternal melodrama, splatter films, police procedurals, cyberpunk) as artistic texts and as Hollywood marketing strategies. For example: Prof. J. Frakes: The Middle Ages on Film When one thinks of medievalist films, Monty Pythons Holy Grail or Heath Ledger in A Knights Tale or Richard Gere in First Knight might come to mind. Interestingly, many if not most serious and important film directors have almost from the beginning of the art form made at least one major medievalist film: Lang, Bergman, Eisenstein, Bresson, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, and of course Terry Gilliam. Spanning the history of film-making, these medievalist films more often than not provide insight into the filmmakers conception of history and of contemporary politics and social issues far more than of a particular attempt to `recreate the Middle Ages on film. A survey of medievalist film-making is a survey of twentieth-century political and social movements and in fact also a survey of the history of film-making. In this course we will conduct a comparative study of a broad range of medieval literature and film representations of the Middle Ages from Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, with a focus on the social function of the texts and films in their contemporary historical contexts. For example: Prof. A. Spiegel, American Genre Films Some of the most durable and popular stories ever told have been presented in a variety of American genre films. This semester the emphasis will be on Fantasy: Horror and Science Fiction, Musicals, Swashbucklers, Martial Arts, and some of the dreamier specimens of Film Noir; works like The Bride of Frankenstein, Blade Runner, Singin in the Rain, The Prisoner of Zenda, Blue Velvet, Enter the Dragon, and more. How much realism can be squirreled into an escapist format? We'll find out. For example: Prof. Joan Copjec: Post-War Image The flight from urban centers, which began after WWII in the U.S., was preceded by a new category of film set exclusively in claustrophobic but eerily empty urban spaces. These films which came to be known as noir or black films coincided not only with the collapse of the urban dream of sociality and technological perfection, but also with the collapse of the institution that manufactured and sold that dream to a delighted public: the Hollywood studio system. In Europe, too but first of all in Italy cinema took an unprecedented turn: toward neo-realism. In the first part of the course we will examine classic examples of film noir genre and neo-realism to see how they joined social problems and urban space to a new conception of the cinematic image. In the second part of the course we will examine the legacy of film noir and neo-realism in more recent films in which social problems are once again conceived as problems of urban coexistence and its failures to provide suitable modes of habitation for a diverse population. We will discuss the exponential rise of slums throughout the world and how IMF has gutted local economies while pretending to help struggling countries get back on their economic feet. The political struggles that have come to divide cities along racial and ethnic lines -- in Paris, Jerusalem, and L.A., particularly -- will be discussed alongside films that depict these divisions. We will attend to appreciation of the cinematic innovations and aesthetic breakthroughs which the films themselves invent in order to put these images on screen. Finally, we will discuss how the institutions of cinema, including international film festivals, play a role in defining these urban locations.

This course studies post-cinematic media and the questions these media raise regarding memory and media storage; the relations of language and literature to technology; documentation and referentiality. Recent topics have included video games and how they have proliferated and mutated into a vast ecology of media, interactivity, and genre. Another recent seminar focused on visual journalism, and how the language of images can create powerful narratives and afford potent modes of storytelling.

This course analyzes feature filmmaking through the study and discussion of classic films by great directors. A regular UB class, the Buffalo Film Seminar welcomes the general public to attend film screenings. The seminar is grounded in two underlying assumptions: The first is that watching a good film on a television set is like reading a good novel in Cliffs Notes or Classic Comics: you may get the contour of the story but not the experience of the work. Movies were meant to be seen big, in the company of other people. The second is that a conversation among people of various ages and experiences about a good movie they've all just seen can be interesting and useful.

This course offers an intermediate-level survey of some major film interpretations of William Shakespeare's most famous and enduringly-interesting plays from the first half of his career (up to c.1600).

Courses in literature primarily from outside the United States and Britain. All texts in English or in English translation. A: Transnational Literature The study of literature from geographically and culturally diverse places that undermines the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures B: Literature in Translation Major texts in English translation, viewed in light of cultural and aesthetic cross-currents. C: Arab Literature Studies in literature by Arab writers in English translation, including focus on topics like Arab women writers, the Arab novel, and Palestinian literature. D: World Jewish Literature Study of Jewish writing, which has been written in all the languages Jews have spoken, including Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, German, Serbian, Hungarian, Polish, Hebrew, French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. All literature taught in English translation. E: African Literature Studies in literature from Africa in English and English translation, including focus on topics like African women writers, the African novel, and African drama. For example: 383 A: Prof. C. Mardorossian, Transplantation, Displacement, and Identity This course focuses on narratives that emerged in response to a condition of exile, migrancy, and rootlessness that they paradoxically embrace and celebrate. The authors we will read emphasize the mixing of races, cultures, and languages across widely separate geographical and historical spaces. Throughout the semester, we will explore the alternative and regenerative forms of identity and self-understanding that are made possible by the experience of transplantation and displacement. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which writers depict their characters relation to their urban, rural, and physical environment. We will try and determine whether there is such a thing as a migrant aesthetics whose parameters we can identify in the fiction we read. We will read novels and short fiction by contemporary diaspora writers from India, Bangladesh, the Caribbean (Antigua, Cuba, Martinique), South Africa, England, and Iran. How do these works help us redefine the relationship between individuals and their environments? How do generational differences affect the literary production of these diaspora communities? What happens to diasporic literature when it is produced by writers who have not experienced their parents history of migration? What is the difference between diasporic, migrant, and exile literature? For example 383B: Prof. W. Hakala, Afghanistan in the Travelers Eye Afghanistan has long attracted the attention of people from afar. From ancient quests for the Water of [Eternal] Life to more recent expeditions seeking to exploit its vast underground mineral deposits, the Afghanistan carried in the travelers imagination often conflicts with the Afghanistan that is actually encountered. This course is intended to serve not just as an introduction to the motivations and experiences of travelers to Afghanistan, but also to the forms of knowledge that are produced in the wake of such travels. For example 383H: H. Young, Contemporary African Literature This class will introduce students to a wide array of contemporary African literature. We will examine the legacy of colonialism and slavery, reading about how Africans have navigated the forces of global capital that still wrack the continent today. Moving away from stereotypes of Africans as primitive, we will examine complex cultural, linguistic and political histories that engender literary portraits of sophisticated peoples dealing with the vicissitudes of daily living. We will read, amongst other things about ghosts, prophets, child soldiers and bees.

English 384: Shakespeare in Film 2 is an intermediate-level survey of some major film interpretations of a number of William Shakespeare's most famous and enduringly-interesting plays from the second half of his career (after 1599- 1600).

This course studies the literary production of peoples of the African diaspora, examining transatlantic perspectives that enable comparison of black writers from places such as the Caribbean, England, and the United States. Moving across genres as varied as science fiction and graphic mystery novels, we will listen carefully to the sonic boom of rage, resistance and despair that echoes back and forth across the Atlantic. Ghosts, the mothers of murderers, and the children of slavery all speak their stories, asking us to walk a little of the way with them towards re-memory and perhaps, redemption.

This course studies the literatures of colonized or previously colonized peoples and their diasporas. This may include fiction and essays from a selection of countries with a history colonialism (India, South Africa, Nigeria, Antigua, Haiti, Martinique, Canada). We will analyze these texts in light of the important debates that have been preoccupying postcolonial studies (the field that studies literature and writings from and about colonized and ex-colonized countries). These debates gravitate around issues of cultural difference, agency and resistance, the politics of home and diaspora, globalization and the environment. Close attention will be paid to the different patterns of othering (human/animal, East/West, self/other, male/female) that these potential postcolonial narratives display, challenge, and sometimes unwittingly reproduce.

This course studies writing by women across a variety of periods and genres, with focus on the historical and cultural context of women's lives. A: "Twentieth-Century Women Writers Study" treats writing of twentieth-century women, attending to its differences from and connections to earlier periods and mainstream traditions. B: "U.S. Women Writers" explores U.S. women's writing as it participates in mainstream literary and rhetorical traditions and creates its own counter-traditions. The course may include women's autobiographies, speeches, essays, letters, captivity and slave narratives, poetry, fiction and drama from a variety of periods. This course is the same as AMS 335 and GGS 335 and course repeat rules will apply.

The idea of India has long attracted the attention of people from afar. Whether in search of gold or enlightenment, the India carried in the traveler's imagination often conflicts with the India that is actually encountered. This course is intended to serve not just as an introduction to the motivations and experiences of travelers to India, but also to the forms of knowledge that are produced in the wake of such travels. We will begin by examining the accounts of early Greek ambassadors and sailors and Chinese pilgrims seeking wealth and knowledge. Both Muslim and Christian adventurers produced travelogues that describe the marvels of India in the medieval period. The Mughal court fascinated Europeans sojourners, while Indian travelers were in turn both delighted and disgusted by what they observed in Europe. Hippies more recently and in their own way reenact quests by colonial British officials for the sublime and picturesque. The diversity of perspectives that these works present challenges readers to consider what it means to be an outsider looking in on a culture, compelling us to consider arguments for and against treating certain geographic and political regions and temporal periods as coherent cultural zones. By reading and discussing a wide range of both primary and secondary source materials, students will develop a broad familiarity with the history, literatures, religions, and geography of South Asia. All of the readings are in English and no background in South Asian languages, history, or literature is expected. This course is the same as AS 383, and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

This course introduces students to texts, concepts, and debates in the tradition of Freudian psychoanalysis. It will emphasize the application of psychoanalysis within non-clinical fields (literature, linguistics, law, history, politics, religion, sociology, anthropology, economics, mathematics). After establishing the basics of psychoanalytic theory and practice, our discussions will revolve primarily around the texts where Freud examines the origins of human society and, further, where he considers the role of literature in society.

This poetry writing workshop asks students to submit original writing for peer review, compose weekly critical responses, and read advanced representations of the genre. The goal is to help student poets develop their style, hone their technique, and produce original poetry. Previous workshops have concentrated on specific issues in poetic composition, such as the relationship of poetry to difficulty. All versions of 390 will leverage UB's status as one of the most exciting sites for the study of contemporary American poetry today by providing students with the opportunity to hear and meet the poets and scholars of poetry who visit Buffalo during the semester.

This writing workshop asks students to submit original writing for peer review, submit weekly critical responses, and read advanced representations of the genre. The goal is to help students develop their style, hone their technique, and produce original fiction, and to consider important questions: What is the relationship of truth to fiction? How is reality created on the page? In what ways do fictional phenomena become credible in the stories in which they exist? How is the implausible made possible through fictional language? Under what conditions does a fiction support, resist, or transform the notion of story by which it is often circumscribed? Students will explore the relation of fictional worlds to the words that create them through assigned exercises, workshop submissions, and discussions of selected readings.

This workshop will teach students the practice of writing creative non-fiction, the fastest growing genre in today's literary marketplace. A staple in magazines, newspapers, and the paperback book industry, creative non-fiction takes many forms, including essay, memoir, longform journalism, biography, autobiography, history, and sports writing. Students will learn to sharpen their prose, craft compelling narratives, and enhance the readability of their works through instructor feedback, in-class exercises, and peer critique.

The Spectrum student newspaper - Do you want to learn to report, write and see your work published in a way that will impress employers? Are you interested in learning to shoot photos and video and to use social media effectively and responsibly? The Spectrum is looking for reporters, editors, multimedia and design students who are aggressive, self-motivated, and willing to meet story deadlines on a weekly basis. Students will work on one of The Spectrum's four desks (news, features, art or sports), and will gain an understanding of how UB works and have an opportunity to talk to UB administrators, campus police, athletes, artists and officers. Students will learn teamwork and gain an instant coterie of friends. Students who worked on The Spectrum called it their defining college experience.

The content of this course is variable.

This course prepares students to work in a media market where photos and video almost always accompany reported pieces. The Internet has smashed the barriers between television, radio and print journalism and students in this class will study and discuss these changes and work to produce their own projects. Students will increase their analytical skills and learn to combine original reporting and writing with photos, graphics, text and tweets. This class will help students develop the versatility necessary to succeed in a quickly evolving and growing media market. Students will develop as media producers and consumers and learn to better exercise their civic responsibilities as journalists and as citizens. The class requires a smart phone. The instructor will assist any students who do not have one to get one as needed for the class.

Is it ever OK to break the law to get a story? When is it the right decision to publish a rumor? How do you know whether a picture that likely will offend readers and viewers should be used? This course pushes students to examine how every action a journalist makes in gathering, organizing and presenting the news requires a value judgment. The course covers media credibility, steps in ethical decision-making, handling anonymous and unreliable sources, accuracy, conflict of interest and the difference between reporting and exploiting grief. The course uses the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics as a model and guideline. Students study a range of historical scenarios as well as hypothetical cases. They debate with the instructor and each other. Students read and discuss the decisions and mistakes of past journalists and analyze the dilemmas unfolding in newsrooms today.

The content of this course is variable. For example: J. Conte: Postmodern Culture One of the cultural turns of postmodernism is the intensifying shift from a print to a media graphics dominated culture. The prevalence of visual media has been the site of a debate regarding the relationship of complicity and/or critique of art and architecture in postmodernism. In support of the happy embrace of popular media in art and literature, the landscape designer and writer Charles Jencks, in Critical Modernism: where is post-modernism going? (2007), revises his argument that postmodern art and architecture have led the way since the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis in 1972 in adopting an eclectic style that combines popular and elite forms, mixed media, and cross-cultural references. Fredric Jameson, however, offers a more skeptical and Marxist reading of postmodernism, described as the cultural logic of late capitalism, in which the contemporary arts are seen to have been at least partially compromised by their intimate relations with consumerism and multinational corporatism. Supplementing our reading of these and other cultural critics of postmodernism, we will be examining a variety of works of postmodern art and architecture that have become test cases of what appeals to both populist and museum-going audiences. These works are either playfully ironic appropriations of popular culture; or they are coopted by the commercial and celebrity media they represent; or both. Interleaved with the art and criticism, we will read books that, in the waning days of print literature, make art and popular media the subject of sophisticated literary fictions. For example: Prof. Ming Qian Ma: Modern and Contemporary North American Poetry Designed as a survey class of modern and contemporary poetry in America, English 400 will begin with a brief review of poetry written in the traditions of Realism and Naturalism and then proceed by following a chronological approach that cover the period from the so-called High Modernism to the present, focusing on the major poetic movements such as Imagism, the Objectivist movement, the Fugitive Movement, the Confessional School, the New York School, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Movement, the Deep Image School, the Black Mountain School, the Language Poetry Movement, the New Formalism, and others.

This Honors seminar will concentrate on British literature and culture composed before 1800. Though the specific time period and generic traditions will vary from semester to semester, past seminars have asked how western epic came to embody the most essential values of different cultures, and how seventeenth-century poetry and prose came to grapple with new concepts of agency, emotion, action, and obligation in the years leading up to the English Civil Wars.

Various literary and cultural topics that cross national, linguistic, and cultural borders. For example: Prof. R. Schiff, Ecocriticism and Medieval Literature Western critical engagement with the environment too often privilege modernity, for example seeing the Romantic period as launching an era of Nature. Yet medieval literature is often deeply engaged with environmental issues, meditating on humans immersion in a dynamic material world shared with animal, vegetable, and other entities. Our course will explore the poetics of nature in medieval romance, examining how landscapes and life-forms interact in the pre-modern Western imagination. We will explore the animalized worlds of otherworldly deer, voracious werewolves, and aestheticized birds.

Texts written by women of various nationalities and periods in a variety of genres up to 1800. For example: Prof. R. Mack, 18th Century British Women Writers Do women and men think and feel differently? In this course we will look at the importance of this question for British women writers from the end of the seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth century. We will be concerned in particular with the role of women writers in the emergence of the novel. In the mid-eighteenth century, women began for the first time to publish in significantly large numbers. But these women experienced both the possibilities and limitations of their new positions; they were often told that they could only write texts on certain subjects or novels with certain kinds of characters. In this course, we will concentrate on how these women writers, engaged in charting their new social roles, represent their female characters thoughts and feelings, Specifically, we'll ask how these writers deal with women's usual consignment to the realm of feeling. Can the rational though so important for men's roles in society also give heroines power, or must these fictional women obtain power of other kinds emotional or even economic? Are happy endings possible for intelligent heroines? Is there any alternative to an end in marriage?

Study of the social and cultural function of epic narrative; may include texts and/or film from a single time period or across the centuries. For example: Prof. J. Frakes, Early Medieval European Epic This course will investigate the social and aesthetic functions of epic early medieval European societies by means of historical and literary critical readings, but in particular by reading major portions of the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, in the original language. Appropriate secondary readings will be assigned, such that we can use the epic to come to an understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture and especially twenty-first century literary critical understandings of the epic.

The contents of this course will vary from semester to semester Themes may include: Shakespeare's social context, gay and lesbian studies in Shakespeare, Shakespeare and national politics, Shakespeare and colonialism, Shakespearean adaptations, Shakespeare on film, and many more topics. Readings and seminar discussion will familiarize students with new scholarship in Shakespeare studies. Writing assignments will stress close and careful analysis of the plays.

The content of this course is variable. Selected topics in early modern British literature such as the literature of exploration, science and literature, studies of specific genres or authors, classical antiquity and Humanism, reformation and religious controversy, gay and lesbian studies.

The content of this course is variable. Selected topics in American literature, including attention to critical questions at the forefront of current criticism in American literature and American studies. For example: Prof. J. Conte: Literature of Immigration The path of immigration to the United States extends from the halls of Ellis Island to the globalized migration of the twenty-first century. First generation immigrants are often drawn to these shores by the blight of poverty or religious/political persecution; hope to make for themselves a fabled but often fictitious better life: and are riven between the desire to retain old world customs and the appeal of new world comforts and technological advances. Second-generation immigrants face the duality of a national identity striving to become recognized as real Americans and an ethnic heritage that they wish to honor and sustain but which marks them as always an other. Then there are the natural-born American citizens. The third-generation descendent will have only indirect or acquired familiarity with his or her ethnic heritage: the loss of language and a multi-ethnic identity.

The content of this course is variable. For example: Prof. J. Holstun: Slave Rebellions Slave narratives usually means the stories of individual slaves or families as they suffer, survive, escape, and make reasoned and impassioned pleas for abolition. But enslaved black people throughout the Western hemisphere, and the white people who owned and feared them, also told themselves another sort of slave narrative stories of armed black people joining together to kill their white owners and liberate themselves. This course is about black revolutionary struggle, white fear, and some moments of solidarity. We will study stories of revolts by slaves in cities, on ships, and on plantations, primarily in the United States, but also in the Caribbean and Latin America. And we'll consider both literary questions (about genre, style, and point of view) and political questions about terrorism, the right to revolt, and the ethics and efficacy of armed resistance.

This course offers concentrated study of James Joyce. Readings and discussion may focus on the composition and reception of a single work, such as Joyce's landmark novel, *Ulysses*. Students will closely read the novel, attending to its formal challenges, the thorniness of its narrative details, and the background and context for its story of a single day in Dublin. Alternatively, the course seminar may cover a range of fictions from Joyce's career, including *Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man* and *Finnegan's Wake* to consider the conditions of aesthetic practice and literary, economic, social, and historical forces that shaped those works. Students will acquire a new vantage point on the problems and issues subtending Joyce's age and works: Irish struggles for political and cultural self-determination; exilic reinvention and cosmopolitan self-fashioning; class disparity and social attitudes; educational opportunity and access; the political and cultural influence of new forms of media; changing conceptions of gender roles and sexual politics; and debates about the place of art in modern society.

The content of this course is variable. Concentrated and detailed study of the works, biography, and milieu of a single author, chosen by the instructor. For example: Prof. N. Schmitz, Ernest Hemingway In addition to Hemingway's great works, this course will engage Hemingway's relation to Gertrude Stein, see what she says about him in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and what he says about her in A Moveable Feast. We might gaze upon some of her sentences written in the teens, note their swing, their simplicity, and see that same thing in early Hemingway. For example: N. Schmitz, Hemingway/Stein/Faulkner Triple trio, a concert of early modern masters of American literature, three writers, three works each. Ernest Hemingway: In Our Time, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms. Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons, Lifting Belly, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner: Go Down, Moses (counts as three). Pam Laws, Floridian soul singer, gives us her angry version of the hymn Go Down, Moses. There is erotic merriment (the best of all joys) in Lifting Belly and the best of all deaths in For Whom the Bell Tolls. From text to text we engage, we relish, three classical styles, each distinctive, each inimitable.

This intensive poetry workshop asks students to submit original work for review and revision, and to offer critical response to their peers. Throughout the semester, we will experiment with new modes of writing poetry and promote a dialogue between acts of creation and acts of critical attention by responding to each other's work and through studying a wide range of poetry and poetics in a transhistorical frame. We will be listening for ways to extend the possibilities of the poem; we will pay close attention to issues of process, craft, and vision. The course is geared to help students produce mature work with an aim toward future publication.

This intensive fiction workshop asks students to submit original work for review and revision, and to offer critical responses to their peers. Students will wrestle with and refine their writing, while developing a better ear for language. If, as Blanchot poses, fiction is impoverished by nature, writers must carefully sediment with words the worlds they create in order to make their narratives seem real to the reader. This course will encourage students to consider the nature of that authenticity: how the writers use of language helps produce, challenge, or resist the representations of the phenomena she creates. All participants will produce two polished fictions by the end of the semester, with an aim of future publication.

The content of this course is variable. Intensive practice in writing; specific approach chosen by instructor. Prerequisite 390, 391, or permission of instructor.

This course examines film theories of realism, formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, cognitive criticism, as well as recent discourses on film phenomenology and ¿cinema of the body.¿ The course addresses classical and contemporary film paradigms through the interaction between Moving Image and Senses, Body and Mind, emphasizing such metaphors of filmic experience as Window and Frame, Door and Screen, Mirror and Face. Assigned readings include selections from the writings of Bazin, Eisenstein, Baudry, Metz, Balasz, Gunning, Arnheim, Mulvey, Bordwell, Deleuze, Marks, and Sobchack, among others.

This course examines new narratives of cinema as it attempts to redefine its status as an art form in the context of digital technologies and emerging media. The topics for discussion include database cinema, multiplex cinema, cinema of attractions and cinema of effects, verticality and multiplicity, new film history and media archaeology, genealogy of 3-D cinema and compositing effects, film installations, fandom, and cinematic remixes. This course considers theoretical writings by Elsaesser, Shaviro, Sobchack, Rodowick, Casetti, as well as media works by Figgis, Greenaway, Herzog, Cuaron, etc. This course is the same as AMS 436 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

This seminar investigates contemporary cinema, potentially including popular film, film from various cultures and sub-cultures, and topics in film theory.

The content of this course is variable. Advanced study of literature written primarily outside the U.S. and British Isles. Literature taught in translation. For example: Prof. W. Hakala: Islam and South Asian Literature The purpose of this course is to expose students to the wide variety of poetic and prose literary forms associated with Islam in South Asia, incorporating examples in English translation from Arabic, Hindi, Pashto, Persian, Tamil, and Urdu originals. Instead of presenting materials chronologically, students will explore literature synchronically through a variety of themes and genres common to the literary tradition of various South Asian languages. As such, the course is organized into five sections: 1) Theoretical foundations; 2) Formal Poetry; 3) Narrative Poetic Forms; 4) Prose; 5)Literary History. Students are expected to demonstrate familiarity with the content of readings and evaluate the efficacy of the various approaches through which literature has been analyzed. All of the texts are in English and no background in South Asian languages or literature is expected.

The content of this course may vary, though the aim is to examine some of the key texts, approaches, and ideas that are used to theorize culture. Students will discuss some familiar lenses for interpreting culture (e.g., Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) as well as the key concepts that are central to cultural analysis (e.g., ideology, history, race, nature, and agency). Students in the class should develop a familiarity with the tools of cultural analysis, and also to use those tools to better understand what is at stake in the production, distribution, and consumption of culture.

Sound structure of English, including the articulation of sounds, phonological patterns and alternations, and dialects. This course is the same as LIN 301 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

Syntax and morphology of English, including lexical and grammatical categories, basic clause structure, and complex sentences. This course is the same as LIN 302 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirements.

The content of this course is variable. For example: Prof. J. Valente: Irish Literature Revival: The Irish Art of Scandal This class focuses on Irish novels from the 1980s to the present day as literary responses, in real time, to the slowly unfolding and deepening child abuse scandal, both disciplinary and sexual, in Ireland. We will look at how these novels represent the war on children conducted in Irelands Catholic orphanages, Magdalen laundries, industrial schools and church sacristies. That is to say, we will interpret the novels as modes of social intervention in a problem involving both violence and secrecy. But we will also seek to determine what is distinctively literary in these interventions, what difference it makes that these are in fact fictional narratives with aspirations to aesthetic value. In a larger sense we will be pondering the social vocation of literary art, the specific means and consequences of literatures reaction to social and moral crises. For example: Rhonda Reid: Tutoring/Teaching Composing/Writing Do you want to teach Tutor in the Writing Center Learn about writing in the professions and the workplace Improve your writing English 470 introduces students to theories of writing and focuses on improving writing through one-on-one conferencing. Students who have completed the course are eligible to apply as peer tutors in the Center for Writing Excellence. The course should: introduce composition theories and learning theories; improve writing abilities through reading, practice, conferences, and reflection; help develop oral communication for effective one-on-one interaction as well as group discussion and presentations; develop tutoring skills and strategies to work with writers from diverse backgrounds, including other disciplines; expand knowledge of ways to use technology to communicate effectively; enhance research strategies and skills; and develop leadership abilities.

For example: R. Reid English 495 introduces students to theories of writing and writing consultancy. The skills developed in this class will help students to leverage writing skills into professional contexts and provide experience with teaching and mentoring in both real and virtual environments.

These three-credit courses allow undergraduates to do sustained work as interns. Students have in the past used this course opportunity to obtain internships at local newspapers such as The Buffalo News, to work at regional and national magazines such as Long Island Pulse and Maxim, to work for literary agents in New York City, and to pursue research programs at institutions such as the Schwan Law Firm and Compeer Greater Buffalo. Students have also used writing internships while working to complete the Journalism Certificate Program. These internships allow students to hone skills in research and writing key to a successful career in journalistic fields.

Honors theses allow students to conduct sustained research in close consultation with a faculty member. The English Department offers an honors program for serious students who enjoy doing intensive work and would like the challenge and excitement of exchanging ideas and research with fellow students and instructors in a seminar setting. The resulting thesis will be an independent scholarly or creative work of 30-35 pages. English majors have written honors theses on such topics as pulp fiction, radical Islamophobia, comic books as literature, and colonialism in Irish literature, and on such key literary figures as Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Milton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Sylvia Plath, and Edith Wharton.

The content of this course is variable. Work with faculty mentor on research or creative project.

English undergraduate students may pursue independent studies with faculty members who agree to work with them on a topic of their choice. Independent Studies range from 1-6 credits, depending upon the nature and scope of the project. These courses give students the chance to pursue individual interests while working one-on-one with scholarly specialists. Past Independent Studies have included research on autobiography as a genre, a study of intersections of queer theory and Shakespeare studies, editorial work with the gender studies journal Speakeasy, and an exploration of African American vernacular in literary works.