Course Offerings
Freshman English
Freshman English prepares students to read and write with greater precision. A concentrated study of the parts of speech and the parts of the sentence attempts to consolidate and extend the grammar that students have learned in grade school. Students will also learn about specific words—not just what they mean but how they came to mean what they mean. Expository writing assignments, mostly short, emphasize the relationship between accurate topic sentences and well-chosen supporting details. Other writing assignments require narration and description. The students read and discuss, analytically, short stories, several novels (including Lord of the Flies and Huckleberry Finn) and one Shakespearean play, usually Romeo and Juliet. The course also introduces students to literary uses of mythology.
The English Tutorial
During one activity period each week, students who demonstrate a need for additional support in Freshman English will attend this extra thirty-minute class. The tutorial will be taught by the students’ regular English teachers and will focus on reinforcing the instruction in the class, answering students’ questions, practicing the skills, and discussing the students’ methods of preparing for class, quizzes, and tests.
Sophomore English
With little systematic study of grammar, Sophomore English treats usage problems as they appear in student writing. Teachers devise writing assignments that require students to use strong, active verbs and to vary their sentence patterns. One segment of the course defines and deplores clichés and euphemisms while advocating concrete, specific writing. Early in the year, students learn Frye’s definitions of comedy and irony and use these to interpret the characters and outcomes of short stories and poems. Students talk and write about these short works and, later in the year, about the four or five longer works (an autobiography, Elie Wiesel’s Night, two novels including The Catcher in the Rye, and two plays including Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Students also write a series of narratives, where the emphasis on evocative details and polished syntax persists. The course emphasizes the need to write in stages: brainstorming, organizing, hypothesizing, outlining, drafting, rewriting, editing, and proofreading.
Junior English
The short story, poetry, the novel, and a Shakespearean play (usually Othello or Much Ado about Nothing) receive approximately equal attention. The course requires students to write closely focused, well-organized, longer essays in and out of class. These essays demand a responsive reading of the text, forceful theses, careful presentation of evidence, tight transitions, and an intelligent structure. Students also write and rewrite an autobiographical essay of the sort that many colleges require on applications for admission.
1818 Classes
Through St. Louis University’s 1-8-1-8 Program, students may take Junior Honors English and most of the Senior electives for college credit. Students may earn three hours of credit for each SLUH class that matches St. Louis University course for which the student has not already received credit. Numbers in parentheses indicate which St. Louis University classes the SLUH classes match.
Junior Honors English (En190, En202)
In its structure, this course resembles Junior English; but the writing instruction, presuming mastery of basic skills, challenges students to write with considerable sophistication and insight. Readings are often longer and more challenging: Hamlet rather than Othello, Light in August or Jude the Obscure rather than Our Town, for instance. Students in this course are often ready to perform well on the Advanced Placement test in Literature and Composition at the end of their junior year, or they may elect to take the course for St. Louis University credit.
Senior English Electives
All of the following are one-semester electives. The senior elective offerings change somewhat from year to year. In all of these electives, except Reading and Writing Fiction, students write about the literature they read. Most of the classes require other kinds of writing as well: e.g., personal essays, imitations, and parodies.
All Senior electives except Reading and Writing Fiction and Expository Writing may be taken for college credit through St. Louis University's 1818 Program. Each class a student takes for 1818 credit must match a different SLU class from any he has already taken. He may not earn credit for a 202 course more than once, for instance. The numbers in parentheses next to course names indicate which St. Louis University courses the SLUH elective matches.
African-American Voices (En190, En 202)
This course will attempt to introduce students to some of the prominent voices of this century. Because of the limitations of a one-semester class, we will unfortunately not be able to present a comprehensive coverage of these writers, but will instead pick and choose, hoping to familiarize students with at least a core of important writers or words. Our readings will include poetry, short story, the novel, and drama, perhaps even some music. Possible authors include Ntozake Shange, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Ernest Gaines, and others. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to visit the Black Rep during the semester and do some independent research or reading to broaden their background.
The Alienated Hero (En190, En202)
This course will focus on protagonists who do not fit into society, rebels who stand outside or beyond the social norms. Classwork will include quizzes, tests, analytical essays, concluding with an individual project. Possible works include Doestoevsky’s Note from the Underground, Plath’s The Bell Jar, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis," Shakespeare’s Richard III, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Shaffer’s Equus, Suskind's Perfume, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener," Poe’s short stories, and such films as A Man for All Seasons, The Wild Bunch, The Wages of Fear, Awakenings, Rushmore, The Elephant Man, and Amelie.
American Literature (En190, En202)
In this course we will study selected works from major American writers and filmmakers in order to discover what is specifically “American" about these works and to see what this literature tells us about America. We will focus on such well-known nineteenth and twentieth century authors such Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison and Tennessee Williams and also on more recent writers like E.L. Doctorow, Tim O’Brien, and Colson Whitehead, as well as the films such as Citizen Kane, Chinatown, The Godfather, and Six Degrees of Separation.
Introduction to Irish Literature (En190, En202)
Is Ireland doomed to repeat forever the past it knows perhaps too well: invasions, English oppression—real and imagined, fatal hunger strikes, aborted revolutions, bombings and snipers, leaders who sometimes inspire, sometimes self-destruct and never unite the many factions of Ireland for very long? By studying some of the best sagas, poems, plays, stories, and films of the culture, we can dig beneath clichés like shamrocks and leprechauns and blarney to answer questions like this one, improve our understanding of Ireland's compelling history and, most of all, enjoy some of the world's best literature, in other words, get at the good turf. Students should expect to write essays, take tests, and develop an independent project through which they explore their own interests in a way that leads to a demonstration of what they have learned.
Irish Literature II (En190, En202)
This course seeks students who wish to extend their exploration of Irish literature beyond that point where the introductory course can go. For example, the first course uses MacLaverty's interesting but relatively easy novel Cal while the Irish II course takes on an equally interesting but more complex contemporary novel like Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark. Similarly, we will read a post-colonial play such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot to build upon the plays of rebellion that we study in the introductory course. Irish Literature II is offered in the second semester only. Whereas in Irish Literature I we dash, in Irish Literature II we linger.
The Literature of Initiation (En190, En202)
The texts of this course explore events central to the human psyche: first encounters with significant and often traumatic events. Often these events mark the passage from childhood to adulthood. Some societies mark the coming of age with rituals of initiation. More often in modern literature, the initiation is not planned but forced upon the protagonist by hard circumstances. The course will also focus on initiations by which an adult steps into a circle of hidden and often terrifying knowledge. Possible texts include Into the Wild, Death of a Salesman, Testing the Current, Gabriel's Story, About a Boy, Goodbye Columbus, Bad Blood, and Henry IV part One. We will examine individuals who are changed, for better and worse, by radical circumstances and thereby initiated into alternative ways of life and belief. Likely movies include Ulee's Gold, Henry V, and The Graduate.
Literature of Men and Women (En190, En202)
Students in this course read, discuss, and write about poems, stories novels and films by women and men who use literature to explore questions of gender: What definitions of maleness and femaleness have societies created? How does gender, through biology and environment, exert pressures on our senses of ourselves and on others? Possible texts include Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Tennessee Williams'A Streetcar Named Desire, Ibsen's The Doll House, Toni Morrison'sThe Bluest Eye, several short stories and the movie Shakespeare in Love. (This course is offered in the summer, in conjunction with Nerinx Hall.)
Poetry (En190,En202,En220)
This class will operate from the assumption that great poems are not formless expressions of feelings; they make artful use of the physical and intellectual—as well as the emotional—properties of language. We will spend most classes talking about the design, the devices, and the implications of one or two poems we have all prepared to talk about. During the first half of the course, students will write imitations of the poems we have read and discussed. As we learn more about the properties of a good poem, we will have gradually greater independence in shaping the forms and subjects of the poems we write. But throughout the course, we will focus eighty percent of our attention on reading and writing about published poems and twenty percent on writing our own poems. The course will work more or less historically: beginning with older poems and working toward modern poems. We will also survey the various kinds of poems—including short lyrics, long narrative poems (perhaps “The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner") and some dramatic monologues. Eventually, we will focus on two or three poets of the twentieth century—probably Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jason Sommer. Writing assignments will include critical essays about single poems, comparisons between two or more poems, and the students’ own poems.
Reading and Writing Fiction (cannot be taken for 1818 credit)
This course, which focuses exclusively on fiction, uses room M204 as its writing clinic. Students will spend about one third of the semester reading short stories and the other two thirds writing them. The stories we read will be those of contemporary authors whose voices, methods, and themes students can absorb and emulate. At first the class will read and discuss analytically one author’s stories, perhaps those of Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff and/or Ethan Canin. Gradually, the reading and class activities will direct their attention less to the reader's experience of the stories and more to the writer's craft, particularly his or her ways of creating scenes and writing dialogue. In their journals, students will respond to specific assignments to mine their own experience for scenes and plots. Students will spend many days writing and many nights rewriting. By the end of the semester, students will be required to turn in at least thirty pages of revised and polished fiction, not including science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. Some days will be set aside for small- and large-group conferences about student work. One week late in the course will be reserved for students to devote themselves to reading independently a collection of stories by a single writer (John Cheever, Bobbie Ann Mason, Randall Kenan, George Saunders, Richard Russo, Flannery O'Connor, or Tim O'Brien).
Satire (En190,En202)
Satire is the art of mocking, pursuing its serious purposes with techniques that make us laugh. The course examines poems, plays, stories, novels, cartoons, songs, and films so students may understand what makes for good satire. During the semester, we will discuss the targets, ideals and techniques of the satirist, the role of humor in satire, and distinguish satire from genres like it. During the course we will discuss satires spanning the time from 411 B.C. to 1994. A.D. Authors will likely include Chaucer, Swift, Voltaire, Flannery O'Connor, Vonnegut, and David Lodge.
Shakespeare (En190,En202,En240)
This study of Shakespeare emphasizes the variety as well as depth of his achievement. The class will read and discuss some of the sonnets and four plays—including perhaps Richard II, Measure for Measure, Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, and King Lear. The approach to the plays will emphasize performance criticism—that is, consideration of how the texts suggest staging, costume, gesture, and intonation.
Short Story Writers (En190,En202,En260)
When a new acquaintance tells you one joke, you may understand the joke, but you hardly know the joker: he or she may only be passing on a story his mechanic recently told him. But when a joker tells you several stories, you can begin to figure her out: you begin to see a pattern in her interests and obsessions. By reading a dozen or so stories by each of the authors (most likely Hawthorne, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver), we see the maker of the stories as well as the stories themselves. And seeing the creator, we then understand better the creation.
The Practice of Expository Writing and Reading (cannot be taken for 1818 credit)
This course seeks to attract Seniors who continue to show, based on their performance during Junior year, an inability to write clear and persuasive essays. Their writing frequently displays disorganization because their purpose statements are unfocused and because they do not sufficiently support their positions with specific and convincing evidence. These writers have difficulty sustaining an argument, resort to bland, abstract, or cliched language. To address these weaknesses, this course will encourage more effective writing through an intense writing process which begins with the discovery of a topic, shaping it into a thoughtful purpose statement, fashioning a working outline, writing a rough draft, revising it, followed by careful editing. Students begin this course by reviewing the principals of paragraph rhetoric by writing paragraphs of description, narration, exposition, and persuasion; subsequently, they will expand the paragraph to the longer, closely focused and logically developed essay. This course requires students in both their longer and shorter assignments to write sharply focused topic and thesis sentences developed and supported with plenty of concrete evidence that advances the thesis or position. The literary content of this course includes a close reading of a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts which will become the basis of in-class and out-of-class essays. Students will from time to time submit their writing for peer evaluation; they will also be asked to orally defend their essays before the class. Three days a week, classes will consist of teacher- or student-directed instruction while the other two days will allow students to work in class on upcoming writing assignments with the teacher available for conferencing and individual instruction in specific student needs. Department approval is necessary for students to enroll in this course.
