English

This course is designed to improve critical thinking skills in English that will further enhance problem solving and overall communication ability. It covers argument structures, analysis, definitions and fallacies and provides application of these components in oral forms of debate and negotiation along with writing.

This course provides an overview of working in the United Kingdom and of the current economic situation in the country. It further discusses how the economic situation affects the workplace, how students can integrate into British working life, and how they can make the most of their internship placements. Topics include current political and economic climate, national legal framework, structure and workflow, integration of immigrants into the workforce, discrimination in the workplace, and comparison between U.K. and U.S. work experiences.

This course provides a study of the principal aspects of language acquisition, particularly as it relates to the case of second languages, examining the main theories of language acquisition while focusing particularly on English as a first and second language. Topics covered include: input, interaction, and output-- language as a generator of second languages; acquisition in natural and formal contexts; the language learner-- individual variables and the age factor; acquisition and communication strategies-- pragmatics and interaction in English as a second language; research methodology in second language acquisition.

Has contemporary culture taken a funny turn? This course offers you the chance to find out. Students look at the recent proliferation of comic novels and short stories, as well as stand-up comedy, sitcoms, and film, in order to ask questions such as: why is this funny? how is this funny? should we be laughing at this? and what does this type of comedy say about the contemporary moment? You will also study the theory and philosophy of comedy, using this to inform our understanding of what comedy and laughter do, culturally, psychologically, ethically, and politically.

This course examines decadence as a textual, historical, sexual and cultural formation across a range of literary texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Students are introduced to European and British varieties of literary decadence and aestheticism; art for art's sake theories of aesthetic production; relations between lifestyle, aestheticism and commodity culture; and emergent discourses of degeneration and sexology. The course asks students to consider how decadent aestheticism was shaped by regulatory categories of taste and vulgarity, and by cultural practices of tastemaking, lifestyling and the aestheticisation of sexuality. Students also consider the relationship between sexual dissidence and social and cultural distinction as produced in the representative examples of decadent literature studied.

This course examines modern and contemporary US wring in a variety of genres, interrogating the changing ideas of national literature and exploring the emergence of a variety of voices laying claim to being American. Texts are drawn from the main genres of prose fiction and nonfiction, drama, and poetry. The course starting with the Harlem Renaissance is both a historical marker and a cultural statement, taking Langston Hughes’s  ‘I, too, sing America’ as one of its core themes.

This course examines the literature of wisdom, both ancient and modern, and looks at how reading literature can deepen, enrich, and improve one's life in modern society.