Welcome to English 105, Spring Style

Hello all! My name is Melvin Pena. Such as I am, I am to be your professor for English 105: Cosmopolitanism and Composition. Feel free to peep around the weblog entries from last quarter to get a kind of idea for the kind of thing we'll be looking for. Starting with Friday's class, you'll be required to post a question to incite and inspire discussion and conversation.

I encourage you to look at my CTECs from the Winter Quarter. I want to make super clear, as I believe I did in the email I sent to all of you a couple of weeks ago, that if you are looking for a blowoff class, or one that conforms to your ideas of an expository writing class - you are looking under the wrong stone here.

This class is not just writing, but intensive reading, thinking, and discussing of literature from the 18th and 19th centuries. We'll be reading a number of different styles of writing - essays, novels, satires, philosophical tales, personal musings, an early gothic novel, and some later really messed up gothic stories, to name a few.

We'll be starting the quarter with three classes on Joseph William's "Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace." We will be meeting this week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday - our classroom is Parkes Hall 222. Tuesday we will be introducing ourselves, and Wednesday we'll begin our discussion of "Style." Just to give you the heads up, please read Chapters 1-3 for Wednesday's meeting. Come to class ready to ask questions and to discuss, with each other, and with me.

Texts (in the order we'll be reading them):

Joseph Williams, "Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace"
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Reveries of the Solitary Walker"
Lucy Moore, ed., "Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld"
Henry Mackenzie, "The Man of Feeling"
Clara Reeve, "The Old English Baron"
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, "In a Glass Darkly"
Samuel Johnson, "Rasselas"
Voltaire, "Candide"

There will also be hand-outs which I will photocopy when the time comes.
A fuller syllabus to follow.