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Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through close attention to poetry and prose.

Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) majors and minors only.
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: General Literature and Language

Section 001 and 002:

This course teaches how to analyze poetry and prose. It assumes some experience with literary analysis but not advanced knowledge. It is divided about equally between poetry and prose. The poetry half explores, among other things, the relation between poetry and music, including rap and popular song. The prose half includes both fiction and nonfiction. Both halves include exercises in creative writing. The goal is to acquire both analytical skill and new ways of understanding creativity, including your own.

Texts:  A custom-designed course pack costing about $15.00 in the UMC plus various no-cost texts online. 

Requirements (subject to change):  Two short tests, a mid-term, some short papers and exercises, and a final paper. For further information contact the instructor: ed.rivers@colorado.edu.

Reading List: Authors studied include Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, E. E. cummings, Louise Erdrich, Nancy Mairs, Diane Oliver, Mary Oliver, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemmingway.

Taught by Dr. Ed Rivers.

Section 003:

Develops the skills of seeing, hearing, noticing, and describing that are the foundation of literary study. We all have feelings about what we like and don’t like, but can you articulate precisely what it is about that book, that song, that film, that makes it amazing and sets it apart from everything else? Doing so imparts the ability to understand and evaluate complexity in a broad range of fields, making the study of English excellent preparation for any further study and any future life. The course also provides introductory knowledge of the grammar and history of English, the mechanics of academic writing, the scansion of poetic meter, and the traditional periods and genres of literature in English.

Reading List: Arrival (film), short stories by George Saunders, Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie, Zadie Smith.

Taught by Dr. Tiffany Beechy.