Southern New Hampshire University instructor. Readings, lectures, and films on cultural and historical contexts may supplement the literary material. Prerequisite: ENG 120. LIT 300 Literary Theory (3 credits) This course is an introduction to the major schools of contemporary critical theory, and an examination of principal exponents of these theories. The student will become familiar with the most important features of psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism and feminism and examine the meaning of structuralism and post-structuralism. In addition, the course affords an opportunity to practice applying the theories to specific literary texts. Prerequisite: ENG 120. LIT 305 Popular Fiction (3 credits) This course will analyze today’s popular fiction in America. What makes a book a “best seller”? Writers who strike it rich generally write books that are fast-paced and easy to read, follow a set of conventions that readers recognize, and touch a nerve within their society. This course will introduce students to a variety of literary sub-genres (such as true crime, memoir, road novel, detective fiction, western, and mystery) and to the media culture that hypes and sells these books. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 330 Gender and Text (3 credits) Focusing on literary works about women, women’s roles, as well as masculinity and men’s roles, students will analyze how gender, race, sexuality, class, and other factors influence various writers’ representations of gender roles. The course also examines how definitions of gender roles change over time and across cultures. Students will read selections from feminist theory and gender studies that illuminate pervasive assumptions about women and men, past and present. Prerequisite: ENG 120. LIT 332 The Nature Writers (3 credits) This course introduces students to the prose and poetry of major British and American writers and naturalists since the 18th century who observe nature vividly and write about humanity’s relationship with the natural environment. Students will read authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Leopold, and Abbey. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 316 Modern Drama (3 credits) This course explores modern, 20th and 21st-century plays from American, British, Russian, and world literature. The works taught will vary by instructor, but students may read O’Neill, Williams, Miller, Mamet, Pinter, Ionesco, Synge, Soyinka, and Beckett, among others. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 336 Thoreau and His Contemporaries (3 credits) This course considers the works of Henry David Thoreau as a transcendentalist, essayist, poet, naturalist and teacher. Other members of the Concord School, such as Emerson, the Alcotts, and Fuller, are also discussed. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 319 Shakespeare (3 credits) Students will study selected Shakesperian comedies, tragedies and chronicle plays. The course also provides the students with a general overview of the Elizabethan era and the world in which Shakespeare lived and worked. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 337 Modern Poetry (3 credits) This course immerses students in modernism and postmodernism via British and American poetry. Students will read Frost, Eliot, Pound, Stevens and other major modern and contemporary poets, as well as essays on poetry and artistic ambition in the twentieth century. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 320 Hemingway’s Paris Years (3 credits) Perhaps more than any other twentieth century American writer, Ernest Hemingway continues to be studied and celebrated throughout the world. This course is designed to explore the man behind the myth. Through reading, writing, discussing, and a trip to Paris—the place where it all truly started — students in this course will gain insight into this complex world icon. Update your passport and come discover the larger picture that made a young Ernest Hemingway from Oak Park, Illinois, into a worldly author that all want to claim as their own. Currently offered only at Seacoast Center. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 344 Comedy and Satire (3 credits) This course introduces students to an important type of Western literature that is found in almost every genre, from drama (Aristophanes, Moliere, and Wilde), to poetry (Horace, Pope, and Frost), to stories and novels (Aesop, Chaucer, Voltaire, and Gogol). These authors and many others have developed comedy and satire into effective literary tools for critiquing their society. Each instructor will focus on a major period or target of this literature—for example, the eighteenth-century or contemporary times or the medical, religious, or political profession. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 328 Multi-Ethnic Literature (3 credits) Since the beginnings of American literature, writers have been concerned with defining and creating American identity. After the Civil Rights movement, many writers defined American identity in ethnic and racial terms, arguing for a revised, pluralistic idea of American identity. Students will read fiction, poetry, and essays by twentieth-century American authors who identify with African American, Native American, Asian American, and Chicano heritages. In 148
addition to race and ethnicity, students will discuss how class, native language, religion, gender, sexuality, and history figure into these writers’ images of an American self and community. Prerequisite: ENG 120.
LIT 345 Postcolonial Encounters (3 credits) We will explore an array of regional and national literatures from the “third world,” such as Africa, India, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In addition, we will also address questions of culture and knowledge production in those areas, the dialectic between first and third world, as well as the notions of the modern, civilized metropolitan center and the traditional primitive periphery. We will also take up questions concerning autonomy and authority, power and powerlessness, voice and silence, and the re-presentation of fundamental theoretical concepts like culture, identity, racism, immigration,