| source Caltech (X) |
level |
department English (X) |
An introduction to English composition for students whose first language is not English and who need focused instruction before taking a freshman humanities course. This course offers fundamental strategies for composing fluent standard written English and for constructing academic arguments. Students are assigned to En 1 a based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Continuation of En 1 a for students who need additional instruction before taking a freshman humanities course.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
A course in developing forceful academic essays, for students who need more focused attention to writing before entering freshman humanities courses. It emphasizes analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading. The class features small seminar discussions and weekly conferences with the instructor. Students are assigned to En 2 based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
For course description, see Humanities.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
For course description, see Humanities.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
For course description, see Humanities.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
For course description, see Film.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Instruction and practice in writing about science and technology for general audiences. The course considers how to convey complex technical information in clear, engaging prose that nonspecialists can understand and appreciate. Readings in different genres (e.g., magazine and newspaper journalism, reflective essays, case studies, popularizations) raise issues for discussion and serve as models for preliminary writing assignments and for a more substantial final project on a topic of each student’s choice. Includes oral presentation.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Students will develop their poetic craft by creating poems in a variety of forms. The lecturer will provide guidance and direction, supervise class discussions of students’ works, and assign outside reading as needed. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, and 88 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit. Instructor: Hall.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
The class is conducted as a writing workshop in the short-story and personal essay/memoir form. Modern literary stories and essays are discussed, as well as the art and craft of writing well, aspects of “the writing life,” and the nature of the publishing world today. Students are urged to write fiction or nonfiction that reflects on the nature of life. Humor is welcome, although not genre fiction such as formula romance, horror, thrillers, fantasy, or sci-fi. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit. Instructor: Gerber.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Students will develop their talents for writing imaginary short stories other than science fiction. A number of models will be proposed to them for inspiration, e.g., folk tales, tales of the supernatural, fables, stories of “magic realism,” examples of surrealism and the “absurd,” and so on. The lecturer will provide guidance and direction, supervise class discussions of students’ works, and assign outside reading as needed. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit. Instructors: Hall, Magun.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Whereas a diarist writes from an ever-moving present, the art of memoir demands remembering, standing far enough back to shape experience and give it meaning, to discover a “story line” one never suspected existed, to find continuity in seeming randomness. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit. Instructor: Magun.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
This course teaches the basic skills of news gathering and reporting. Students learn how to research stories, conduct interviews, structure news articles, and produce balanced copy. They also work on developing concise and effective prose. In addition to writing several articles, assignments include reading and discussing material from professional newspapers as well as analyzing and editing the writing of peers. The course covers other topics relevant to responsible news writing, such as journalistic ethics, the tradition and responsibilities of free speech, and the social function of the press in a democracy. Affiliation with the
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Elie Wiesel has written: “At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man . . . It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.” This class will explore the reverberation of this premise in the literature that grew out of the holocaust experience, as well as the shifting aesthetics of “holocaust literature” over the last half century. Put simply, can there be “an aesthetics of atrocity”? What are the responsibilities of art and literature to history? Should a perpetrator of genocide ever engage our moral imagination? In an attempt to grapple with these questions, students will read works, both fiction and nonfiction, by a range of authors, including Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Ida Fink, Cynthia Ozick, Tadeusz Borowski, Bernard Schlink, and W. G. Sebold. Not offered 2008–09.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
This class will consider how women’s writing in the 20th century often flouts the conventional portrayal of woman as ministering angel preoccupied with the needs of family without much regard to her own. Writers to be read include Kate Chopin, Colette, Marguerite Duras, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Elfriede Jelinek. Instructor: Magun. Not offered 2008–09.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
An individual program of directed reading in English or American literature, in areas not covered by regular courses. Instructor: Staff.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Students will study research methods and write a research paper. Required of students in the English option. Instructor: Staff.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
A close study of Shakespeare’s plays with an emphasis on his language, dramatic structures, characters, and themes. Each term will concentrate on a detailed consideration of three or four of Shakespeare’s major plays. The first term is not a prerequisite for the second. Instructor: La Belle.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
Epic poetry is a competitive and self-referential genre. Virgil imitates and revises Homer, Dante makes Virgil his guide through hell and most of purgatory before leaving him behind, and Milton transforms the entire epic tradition. Since Milton’s engagement with and criticism of the epic are essential elements of
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
The course will investigate readers who have made adventurous uses of their favorite works of literature, from Greek antiquity through the 20th century. Sometimes those readers count, at least temporarily, as literary critics, as when the philosopher Aristotle made Sophocles’
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
The realistic novel as a surprising, even experimental moment in the history of fiction. How and why did daily life become a legitimate topic for narrative in the 18th century? The realistic turn clearly attracted new classes of readers, but did it also make the novel a better vehicle for commenting on society at large? Why were the formal conventions of realistic writing so tightly circumscribed? Authors may include Cervantes, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole, Boswell, and Austen. Not offered 2008–09.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
A survey of the 19th-century novel from Austen through Conrad, with special emphasis upon the Victorians. Major authors may include Austen, Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Gaskell, Brontë, Collins, Trollope, Stoker, Hardy. Not offered 2008–09.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
A survey of the 20th-century British and Irish novel, from the modernist novel to the postcolonial novel. Major authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Orwell, Amis, Lessing, Rushdie. Not offered 2008–09.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
A selective survey of English writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Major authors may include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Austen. Particular attention will be paid to intellectual and historical contexts and to new understandings of the role of literature in society. Instructor: Staff.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page
The literature of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, from the late 18th century to the present day. Particular attention will be paid to gothic’s shifting cultural imperative, from its origins as a qualified reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, to the contemporary ghost story as an instrument of social and psychological exploration. Issues will include atmosphere and the gothic sense of space; gothic as a popular pathology; and the gendering of gothic narrative. Fiction by Walpole, Shelley, Brontë, Stoker, Poe, Wilde, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison. Film versions of the gothic may be included. Instructor: Staff.
Score: 8.442726 Details | Listing | Web page