This course will teach students to engage with writing and theater making in some selected forms. It will train them to become creative practitioners, who are skilled in the art of imaginative expression. The course will further help students understand how literature and performance works.
Course Catalogue
Course Code: ENG 4316
Course Name:
Creative Writing: Dialogue and Scriptwriting
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
Course Code: ENG 4317
Course Name:
Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This workshop-based course is designed for students interested in advancing their skills in writing creative nonfiction. It will involve many of the literary techniques used in fiction, such as, narrative structure, point of view, imagery, use of dialogues, etc. Emphasis is on exploring different approaches to the genre and on drafting, revising, and editing original work of nonfiction.
Course Code: ENG 4318
Course Name:
Film Adaptations
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course focuses on theories of film adaptations and critically examines the relationship between writing and cinema. The students will engage in questions of fidelity, visual representation and cultural dynamics that are active in film adaptations of literary genres such as the novel, short story, nonfiction essay, and poem.
Course Code: ENG 4319
Course Name:
Digital Storytelling
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course will explore digital storytelling through the art of animation, mobile filmmaking, and other formats. Storyboards, character development, and editing to produce a finished project will also be covered in this course.
Course Code: ENG 4420
Course Name:
Translation Project
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
The translation project will deal with both theoretical and practical aspects of translation while students learn about the varieties of translation, the role of the translator, and the nature and the quality of translation, they will also do a translation work - either that of a novel or a play or a collection of poems - and learn how to interpret a translation in terms of quality, aims, failings, meaning, etc.
Course Code: ENG 501
Course Name:
Research and Study Methods
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course provides an introduction to research methodology in English Studies with an aim to familiarize students with basic concepts of research. It also acts as a preparatory course for students undertaking research for their Final Project (dissertation). The course examines current research paradigms, principles of research design, commonly used research methods for small-scale studies, processes involved in the analysis of data with a possible theoretical framework and modes of presenting research findings. The aim is to ensure that students have the training to conduct research academically (and professionally). The course is designed to help them develop specific skills (grant writing for example, or advanced library research), or guide them through useful practices (such as proposal writing for higher studies and conference paper plan).
Course Code: ENG 502
Course Name:
Advanced Literary Theory
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
This course aims to provide an updated and in-depth understanding of some of the major theoretical schools in modern literary theory and ideas that shaped the twentieth century intellectual landscape. The course traces major developments within the history of literary criticism from formalism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, post-colonialism to post-structuralism. Starting with a general understanding of what reading a literary text with a theoretical lens entails, it proceeds to engage with particular issues such as authorship, subjectivity, class, ideology, gender, race, and sexuality using the theoretical texts. During this course students will learn to apply the ideas encapsulated in each major theory to read and critique selected literary texts.
Course Code: ENG 503
Course Name:
The Cultural Construction of Shakespeare
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
The aim of the course is to understand how Shakespeare constructs culture, and cultures construct Shakespeare. The bard has already become a part of cultural language everywhere; he is seen to be not only modern but also postmodern and truly multicultural. This course will thus begin by understanding the broad concept of cultural construction as an act of meaning creation arising out of the ideological, political and social dynamics of different cultures. Students will be encouraged to explore Shakespeare’s cross cultural encounters and his appreciation of diversity, plurality and marginality in redefining race, ethnicity, gender, place and text – in other words, ‘constructing’ cultures. The students will then focus on how Shakespeare himself has been the subject of cultural construction across time, space and languages through translation, adaptation, theatrical and filmic reproduction, pop music, advertisement, cartoons, comic books and other forms of appropriation/assimilation.
Course Code: ENG 504
Course Name:
Literature and Media
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
The course explores the relationship between literature, contemporary media, and culture. Since both literature and media involve production, dissemination, consumption and post-processing of discourse and operate through politico-cultural networks, a combined (and comparative) reading of literature and media will develop a better understanding of the ways meanings are produced, transmitted, and transformed through different cultural and social contexts and values. The course intends [i] to expose students to the theories and creative know-hows pertaining to media with a focus on journalism, film and new media, [ii] to mobilize students to optimize their English language skills and creative thinking to produce media materials, and [iii] to mobilize students to explore and analyze the ways in which media connect us with the world and influence our world view and society.
Course Code: ENG 505
Course Name:
Approaches to Cultural Theory
Credit Hours:
3.00
Detailed Syllabus:
The course is concerned with interdisciplinary approaches to the study and critique of culture and society. It provides students with an introduction to theoretical concepts and approaches to the many dimensions of culture. Theoretical approaches that have shaped critical and scholarly discourses of cultural are studied, drawing on disciplines of social sciences and the humanities. Engaging the most ground-breaking and prominent theorists of the present—as diverse as Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Nancy, Žižek and recent Feminist, and Digital theorists—the course explores approaches to a range of issues and problems concerning power, economics, media, art, visual culture, identity and discourse in contemporary, and historical contexts.