Languages & Literatures Courses Spotlight
The department offers a vast array of exceptional courses, which can make it difficult to choose! Here you can find unique courses that have been recommended by faculty for their interesting qualities and fun atmosphere.
Spotlight On...
English 305 - The Literature of Disability
NEW COURSE! ENGLISH 305 Fall 2013
Professor Levy-Navarro
From Tiny Tim to Flannery O'Connor and Beyond!
This course considers representations of disability that continue to impact us today. Is the disabled person the saintly Tiny Tim of A Christmas Carol fame or the denomic Richard III? A super-athlete, like Trischa Zorn, most medaled paralympian, or a great thinker like James Merrick, the "Elephant Man"? Of course, the answer to these questions is all of these things - or none of them - as we choose, yet an understanding of our history helps us better understand - and shape - our present and future. Readings include historical texts as well as present day memoirs from the disabled.
- GH Disgnation
- Part of new Disability Studies Certificate
- Contact: levye@uww.edu
From Tiny Tim to author Flannery O'Connor and beyond!
Consider the past, present, and future of representations of the disabled.
Become part of a new chapter of UWW with the launchnig of the Disability Studies Certificate!
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English 463 - 19th Century Women Writers
This course explores the bildungsroman -the coming-of-age story- from the woman's perspective: What was it like growing up as a girl and young woman in the nineteenth-century United States, Great Britain, and Australia? Read novels, poetry, and short stories that feature working-class girls like Capitola Le Noir in Southworth's The Hidden Hand, orphans like the central character in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and upper-class girls like Fanny Price in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Contrast their lives with the rough experience of Frado, an indentured servant in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig.
This course can be used to satisfy requirements for any of the English major fields of study and is cross-listed with Women's Studies.
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English 345 - African American Literature
This course offers undergraduate and graduate students a unique opportunity to study the historical experience of black Americans through the literature of a number of important writers, ranging from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, nineteenth-century slaves, to W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, modern and postmodern authors. Across a variety of genres such as the slave narrative, Harlem Renaissance poetry, and novels, students will develop a rich understanding of the noble legacy of black resistance to all forms of oppression. Moreover, the course uses media productions to provide students with a visual representation of the historical black experience. The course instructor is Dr. Geneva Cobb Moore, a former Fulbright Scholar.
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English 342 - American Realism and Naturalism
Realism was, and remains to this day, shocking. Realist authors wrote about political corruption, death, sex, racism, immigration, the concentration of wealth and power, ecological beauty and catastrophe, the possibility of a world without God, and the silliness of middle class life. Moreover, they wrote about this material "truthfully," in plain, descriptive English without hiding behind either romantic fancy or modernist obscurity. Watch a woman go crazy after her physician (and husband) locks her in an attic. See what happens when a bored 18-year-old Wisconsin farm girl moves to Chicago and tries to sleep her way to the top. Dare to consider what does or does not separate us from our pets. Peer into factory life before OSHA and walk the back alleys of New York City before electric streetlights. Watch a boy rise from rags to riches. If these stories intrigue you, then this might be for you.