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ENGL 100. Composition.
For students who need to improve their writing. Emphasis on writing skills, with some analysis of modern nonfiction writing. 01. MWF 810-900 Passino, S.
This writing class is a practice in sustained, creative, and open-ended inquiry. This course requires a daily commitment to the processes of writing and revising. We will work together on ideas for essays, with attention to lucid, compelling, and honest prose. The core of our work together is built around modeling and practicing generous scholarly thinking. Fieldwork is required.
02. MWF 1210-100 Rejack, B.
Writing in the Digital Age
In this class we will study the fundamentals of composition by investigating the practical, stylistic, philosophical, and ethical implications for the future of writing in the digital realm. Our job is to think critically about how new forms of transmission (email, blogs, social networking sites, etc.) alter and reshape how we write. As we all work on developing our own voices as writers, we’ll simultaneously think about how to shape these voices to the proper media. Our practical discussions of the nuts and bolts of writing will intersect with more abstract concerns, as we consider questions of philosophy and ethics. To whom does one address a blog, for example? What is the nature of authorship in the digital space? And what sort of ethical responsibility do we have as writers in cyberspace? Assignments will include several formal essays, shorter response papers, and regular posts to the class wiki site.
03. MWF 210-300 Chuang, A.
This course will focus on developing critical thinking skills and writing.
We will be reading a variety of nonfiction texts that will challenge you to think reflectively about your own writing style. Through texts that take us to places as far away as Paris and India and essays that address contemporary debates about global issues, healthcare, and media, we will learn how to develop original, engaging arguments and find evidence to prove those points. In this class, we will approach writing as a process that involves brainstorming, drafting, peer reviewing, and revising. By the end of the course, I hope that you will be able to look more critically at texts you read across subjects at Vanderbilt, self-edit more effectively, learn research skills, and develop a sophisticated vocabulary for persuasive writing and speaking.
Readings include: essays by Adam Gopnick, Anna Quindlen, Anthony Bourdain, and Salman Rushdie. You will be required participate daily in class discussions and write 4 formal papers and several reading responses. The course will culminate in a final project in which you will research and write about a film of your choice in relation to a contemporary issue.
04. TR 810-925 Choi, Y.
ENGL 102W. Literature and Analytical Thinking Close reading and writing in a variety of genres drawn from several periods. Productive dialogue, persuasive argument, and effective prose style.
01.MWF 810-900
02. MWF 810-900 Wanninger, J.
Adaptation and Inheritance: Deconstructing the Cultural Imaginary.
The literary landscape is filled with texts that are re-workings of older stories; this class will examine a number of them in order to think about the politics and poetics of literary adaptation. Why do we return to the same stories? What work to we imagine adaptation to be doing? How do the creative and strategic re-imaginings we look at reflect or inform cultural ideologies? Texts will (probably) include Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and the film Adaptation.
03. MWF 910-1000
04. MWF 910-1000 Johnson, A.
05. MWF 910-1000 Duques, M.
A Fine Romance?
This course is designed to help you develop strong college-level writing skills and to teach you how to think analytically about literature from a range of different periods and genres--poetry, drama, and fiction. The guiding theme for our discussions will be reflections on the nature of romance. What is the relationship between romantic sentiment and an author’s representation of the natural world?
What can the mixture of passion and reason that accompanies attractions, and is often defined in relation to friendship, tell us about existing gender roles? Is this mixture presented as a model for good citizenship or is it presented as that which threatens the body politic? How do we discern the differences between that which is didactic and that which is sensational, satirical, and experimental in these romance-preoccupied works?
06. MWF 1010-1100 Hovanec, C.
This course is an introduction to writing about literature. It will cover several genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, and film, with special attention to analyzing the particularities of each genre. By the end of the course, students will have produced essays demonstrating their skills in close reading, comparison/contrast, and argumentation; they will also revise each of their essays. These essays will deal with formal and stylistic aspects of the texts under discussion, as well as with their social, political, and/or cultural implications.
The organizing theme of the class is “The Country and the City,” and the works under study deal with one or both of these two settings. Some general questions to be explored in this course include: What values do particular texts inscribe on the country and the city? How do these values change throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as industrialization, urbanization, war, and globalization change the landscape? What roles do travel, tourism, and immigration (both internal and external) play in the way different texts conceive of these spaces?
How do intermediate spaces, e.g. small towns or suburbs, challenge the binary opposition of country and city?
07. MWF 1010-1100 Pexa, C.
What are monsters and what makes them horrible and, often, also lovable? How do our diverse imaginings of monsters—whether ogres, misanthropes, serial killers, atom bombs, totalitarian governments, automatons, children, mothers, mothers-in-law, fathers, or otherwise—embody and attempt to exorcise social anxieties? How do monsters attempt to define what is outside or other against a coherent sense of what is inside? In the encounter with difference, who are the abjected, the monstrous, and what are the terms by which they are described, captured, and known? In this course you will explore these questions by reading across a variety of genres, developing your analytical and writing skills by doing both close readings of texts as well as three argumentative papers of increasing length and complexity.
08. MWF 1010-1100
09. MWF 1110-1200 Alijewicz, M.
Vengeance, Narrative, and Identity
This class will require each student to think and write critically about written texts in the genres of poetry, prose, drama, and film. The primary goal of this class is to improve each student’s writing. But in order to write effectively, interpretive abilities must be developed.
Although in this class we will be focusing on literature and film, the techniques we will cover include analysis, argument, and eventually research, which have wide applicability in most professions and fields of study. Revision, generating ideas, peer-review, and self-criticism will give you the tools and practice to learn how to improve your own writing after you have finished this course.
10. MWF 1110-1200
11. TR 810-925 Barnett, E.
Memory and Forgetting. This semester we’ll look at novels (including Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Sebald’s The Emigrants), short stories (including Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”), poems (including works by Shakespeare, Keats, Bishop, Stevens, Komunyakaa, and Kelly), and films (including Vertigo and Sans Soleil) that address memory directly, a preoccupation that often leads to, or accompanies, stylistic innovation. We’ll also explore memory, and the forgetting that defines it, in small writing assignments; we’ll even (for extra credit) memorize a few poems and passages.
Homes and Homelands: The Irishman in and out of Empire
This class will look at representations of the Irish within the larger context of the British imperial enterprise. Of particular interest will be texts in which we find the Irish themselves serving as agents of empire, however ambivalently or unwillingly. What contradictions did British imperialism pose to its Irish benefactors, and how did they perceive themselves within its structures? How did colonized peoples and political dissidents react to the Irish? Possible authors include Olive Schreiner, W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Aidin Higgins, John Banville, Thomas Connolly, and Arthur Griffith.
13. TR 935-1050 Baca, B.
14. TR 935-1050 Covington, E.
Why do we remember and why do we forget? In this course, we will investigate the ways that memory has been discussed, represented, imitated, and modeled in literature. We will explore literary considerations of memory in prose, poetry and film, focusing particularly on the ways that scientific research on the topic of memory are depicted in literature.
15. TR 935-1050 Minarich, M.
16. TR 1100-1215 Bellonby, D.
17. TR 1100-1215 Freeman, H.
18. TR 1100-1215 Ross, D.
This course requires each student to think and write critically about both written texts, and the interaction between literature and culture.
Thematically, this class will think about the difference between the concepts of insider and outsider. The texts we will read will prompt us to consider: What does it mean to be either inside or outside? How do groups of outsiders differ from the lone outsider? Is the line between being an insider or outsider permeable? We will also consider broader questions such as: How does literature reveal something about the time in which it was written? How does it reveal things about us today? To succeed in this class, you will need to challenge your preconceived notions of what art and literature are, as well as think openly about what ideology is and how it functions. We will concentrate heavily on close-reading literature, as well as improving your ability to write and think analytically.
ENGL 104W-01. Prose Fiction: Forms and Techniques
Close study of short stories and novels and written explication of these forms.
1. MWF 1210-100
2. MWF 110-200
3. MWF 110-200
4. MWF 210-300
5. MWF 1210-100
FYS 115F. Freshman Seminar
22. MWF 910-1000 Hearn, A.
More than Mr. Darcy: The Life and Works of Jane Austen
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman of good feeling must be in love with Mr. Darcy. Like all such truths in Austen’s fiction, however, this one could stand some finessing—there’s more to Jane Austen than Mr. Darcy. (There’s also more to Mr. Darcy than Mr. Darcy.) Jane Austen the woman and Jane Austen the novelist offer students an excellent personal and academic model: so much of her fiction, indeed the course of her own life, turns on the acquisition of self-knowledge, sound judgment, and independent thought—qualities essential to living a good life as well as writing a good essay.
Although the study of Jane Austen and her fiction could happily engage a lifetime, we will make a good start by reading four of the six main novels, dipping into the novelist’s entertaining letters, and exploring the world of the woman and her work: What’s the big deal about Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s country estate? Why do the amateur theatricals at Mansfield Park cause such chaos? Who’s the real villain in Emma Woodhouse’s story? What’s so scandalous about Marianne Dashwood’s letters to Willoughby? Who was Jane Austen’s lost love, why did she recant on her promise to marry a friend, and what explains the “lost years” of silence in her writing? And why, why, why does she still mean so much to us now?
We will therefore work our way through four of Austen’s novels (Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility), studying them as both literary texts and examples of successful composition, as well as gaining an understanding of their historical, cultural, and biographical contexts. We will write three formal academic essays, the final assignment having a research component. Students will be encouraged to read a biography of Jane Austen alongside the required reading of the four novels (suggested titles will be provided).
One final note: one need not love Austen’s work or even know it to enroll in and enjoy this course. Also, one need not be a girl.
23 . TR 810-925 Epstein, J.
Riots, Scandals and Panics in 20th Century Literature and the Arts
This course will examine literary and artistic scandals, riots, and panics from the first half of the twentieth century: stage plays, films, musical works, and radio dramas responsible for some kind of cultural freak-out. Works such as J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and Stravinsky's pagan ballet The Rite of Spring premiered to riots in the stands; Orson Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds had audiences wondering if they were being invaded by Martians. In this seminar we will study these texts as artworks on their own terms, and as participants in a cultural and historical conversation. What made this period of history a hotbed for artistic scandal? What purposes were served by inducing these scandals? Why did these artworks cause such shock—controversial politics? moral impropriety? aesthetic impudence? Even though we may think of theater spectators as quiet, well-behaved creatures, how did these works startle their audiences out of complacency? Other works to be studied include Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. In independent research projects, students will investigate their own scandal-inducing texts, from or beyond the first half of the century. As we grapple with these various texts and questions, we will also spend considerable time discussing strategies for successful academic writing and argumentation.
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication. 01. MWF 810-900 Rejack, B.
This introduction to the art of reading poetry will start from the simple notion that in order to fully understand poetry, one needs to understand form. By "form" I mean both stylistic techniques (like everyone's favorite, personification) and formal patterns (like everyone's favorite, the sonnet). We will begin by learning to read poetry through close attention to workings of poetic devices. As we develop the necessary concepts and vocabulary for analyzing poetry, we will also look at the long history of forms. With the sonnet, for example, we will trace its history from its introduction to English during the early Modern period, all the way to contemporary variations on the form. This approach to poetry combines critical textual analysis with an awareness of form's meaning as a cultural, historical object.
02. TR 110-225 Teukolsky, R.
This course will serve to introduce the basic forms of poetry, as well as some of the histories and criticisms of the genre. We will begin by asking, “What is a poem?” The first part of the course will familiarize students with different poetic forms, such as sonnet, ode, ballad, elegy, and blank verse. Students will gain a critical vocabulary for the study of poetry, including terms such as meter, rhyme, diction, symbol, and metaphor. We will practice the art of close reading, learning to analyze subtle distinctions in the poet’s choice of words. The second part of the course will examine poetry in its historical and cultural contexts. Clusters might focus on: Victorian women’s poetry; the British poets of World War I; Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance; and poetry in translation. This course is writing intensive. Class time will be spent on learning the mechanics of writing, at the levels of word, sentence, paragraph, and essay. Requirements will likely include a short close reading, drafts and revisions of two major essays, and active class participation.
03. MWF 1110-1200
04. MWF 1210-100 Staff
05. MWF 1210-100 Staff
06. MWF 210-300 Staff
07. MWF 310-400 Staff
08. MWF 310-400 Rejack, B.
This introduction to the art of reading poetry will start from the simple notion that in order to fully understand poetry, one needs to understand form. By "form" I mean both stylistic techniques (like everyone's favorite, personification) and formal patterns (like everyone's favorite, the sonnet). We will begin by learning to read poetry through close attention to workings of poetic devices. As we develop the necessary concepts and vocabulary for analyzing poetry, we will also look at the long history of forms. With the sonnet, for example, we will trace its history from its introduction to English during the early Modern period, all the way to contemporary variations on the form. This approach to poetry combines critical textual analysis with an awareness of form's meaning as a cultural, historical object.
09. MWF 410-500 Staff
10. TR 935-1050 Bachmann, B.
The aim of this course is to cultivate critical reading and writing skills for analyzing poetry. Through close readings, discussions and writing assignments, you will build a vocabulary for thinking about poetry and acquire tools for interpreting and appreciating poems. By learning to read and write about poetry, we will develop our own responses to the questions, ‘what is poetry’ and ‘why poetry matters.’ In addition to completing reading responses and three major papers, we will attend literary readings (two or three) sponsored by the Department of English during the semester.
11. TR 935-1050
12. TR 1100-1215 Levy, E.
The aim of this class is to give you a sense both of the variety of English and American poetry and of its unity, as poets take up and transform traditional forms, themes and attitudes across time. The class falls into three parts:
Form. First, we will focus on such basic poetic conventions as rhyme, meter, and metaphor, together with one of the most durable verse forms in English, the sonnet.
Between “you” & “I”. Next, we will focus on poetry as communication between an “I”—who both is and is not the poet him or herself—and a “you” who is at once intimate and public, with a special emphasis on the Romantic ode.
History. Or rather, histories: the history of poetry, and history in poetry, two themes which, as we will see in the final weeks of class, are often intertwined in poets’ minds.
13. TR 110-225 Hilles, R.
14. MWF 1110-1200 Staff
ENGL 117W. Introduction to Literary Criticism
01. MWF 210-300 Staff
02. MWF 310-400 Staff
03. TR 110-225 Garcia, H.
How are words stitched together so as to create “literature?” By what means does a poem, novel, play, or film continue to live in the past, present, and future? And what are the tools through which readers are to dissect these monstrous creations? This writing-intensive course will look for answers to these questions by investigating one aptly chosen specimen of a living textual corpse—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). We will read and re-read this twentieth-century cult classic from a wide variety of critical approaches to literature, i.e. the theoretical frameworks by which we bestow value and meaning onto literary texts. The goal of this experiment is to develop your ability to ready closely and intensively, think critically, and write and revise extensively. We will observe how interpretations of Shelley’s novel shift according to different schools of criticism (i.e. formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial theory, etc.), while adopting an inter-textual approach that considers the influential works of William Godwin (her father), Percy Shelley (her husband), and Edmund Burke (romantic theorist) as well as film adaptations of the mythic figure of “Frankenstein” (the monster and/or the scientist). By the end of the semester, you will have produced a well-researched, well-theorized paper on this novel and mastered the critical reading skills that will be of value to you long after this course has ended.
04. TR 400-515 Staff
ENGL 118W. Literary and Cultural Analysis
Analysis of a range of texts in social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Interdisciplinary study of cultural forms as diverse as poetry, advertisement and film. Newly added section - section number TBA MW 11:10-12:25 Nelson, D. Masculinity in U.S. Literature and Culture
MW 1110-12:25 Nelson, D.
Why is manliness such an obsession in the early United States? Why do white men like to play Indian? Why do they like to play Elvis? Is masculinity a performance, like drag? What about those six-packs?! This class will study constructions of American manhood from the early nation to our own day, considering a range of texts: plays, literature, advertisements, televisions shows, movies and presidential bodies. This course will give you an introduction to masculinity theory and history. We’ll be studying how manhood changes over time, raced constructions of manhood, the hetero/homo complex, manliness and militarism, male friendship, and presidential manhood. You’ll be bringing your own examples and writing your final paper on a text/subject of your own choosing.
1. MWF 1010-1100 Chapman, R.
This course explores how texts register the cultural values, concerns, anxieties, and desire of the historical moments in which they are produced. Organizing our exploration, we will examine the cultural phenomenon of filmed Shakespeare. From the 1899 filming of King John to present-day Shakespeare spin-offs such as A Midsummer Night’s Rave and Hamlet 2, Shakespearean characters and plots have offered film and culture a means of critical exploration. It will offer us the same. Texts examined will most likely include: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, and the cinematic adaptations they produce, such as Shakespeare in Love, Scotland, PA, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, and other film adaptations by Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh.
2. MWF 810-900 Staff
3. MWF 1010-1100 Staff
4. MWF 1110-1200 Spires
Richard Wright: Texts and Contexts.
This course uses Richard Wright’s life and work as a guide for discussing literary technique, genre, media technologies, and forms of cultural criticism. We pay particular attention to the ways that these considerations inform Wright’s (and our) reading of power (raced, classed, gendered, etc.) in the U.S. and the world. Beginning with “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and Uncle Tom’s Children we discuss the role of the artist in society, Wright’s use of a Marxist analysis, and his theories about the uses folk culture. By mid-semester, we will have encountered multiple forms (prose fiction and nonfiction, poetry, film, and photography) and genres, leading to a larger conversation about the role of formal and generic conventions in shaping meaning through literary concepts such as signifyin(g), intertextuality, naturalism, and realism in Native Son. We will conclude the semester with The Outsider and a discussion of existentialism and nihilism.
5. MWF 1210-100 Chapman, R.
This course explores how texts register the cultural values, concerns, anxieties, and desire of the historical moments in which they are produced. Organizing our exploration, we will examine the cultural phenomenon of filmed Shakespeare. From the 1899 filming of King John to present-day Shakespeare spin-offs such as A Midsummer Night’s Rave and Hamlet 2, Shakespearean characters and plots have offered film and culture a means of critical exploration. It will offer us the same. Texts examined will most likely include: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, and the cinematic adaptations they produce, such as Shakespeare in Love, Scotland, PA, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, and other film adaptations by Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh.
6. MWF 1210-100 Staff
7. MW 235-350 Enterline
Shakespeare and the Culture Industry
This course moves between a number of Shakespeare’s plays and modern film adaptations of them. We ask questions about gender, class, sexuality, and power in light of literary and cinematic technique. Beginning with consideration of the issues most important to Shakespeare and early modern England, we then examine the kinds of cultural investments that emerge when his plays are translated into films for modern audiences. While investigating the concerns about representation, sexuality, gender, and power both modern and early modern societies share, we also will ask what kind of cultural capital “Shakespeare” and “Elizabethan England” have for contemporary culture. Authors and films include: Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh (Much Ado About Nothing), Trevor Nunn (Twelfth Night), Shekar Kapur, (Elizabeth), Kenneth Branagh, (Much Ado About Nothing), Grigori Kozinstev, (Hamlet), Peter Lake, (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), John Madden, (Shakespeare in Love), Oliver Parker, (Othello) Julie Taymor (Titus), Orson Welles, (Othello), Franco Zeffirelli, (Hamlet and Taming of the Shrew).
8. MWF 210-300 Staff
9. MWF 410-500
10. MWF 410-500
11. MWF 410-500
12. MW 235-350 Kasibhatla, J.
Topic: Contemporary British Literature.
What does it mean to be a post-imperial nation? In this course, we will study how contemporary British literature struggles both with Britain’s past as an empire and its present status as a secondary power in the shadow of the United States. We will explore how British literature has represented the crises that emerged in key moments of political and cultural change including: the rise of Thatcher, the demise of the welfare state, conflicts over immigration policy and ideas of multiculturalism.
Students who take this course will read representative texts of British literature from 1950 to the present, with specific attention to narrative techniques and representations of class, religion and racial identity.
13. TR 810-925 Jellerson, D.
This course will serve as an introduction to Gender Studies. We will explore foundational concepts for gender studies, such as 1) the difference between sex and gender, 2) the ways in which both sex and gender are constructed rather than innate or natural, and 3) the ways in which gender is performed into existence rather than a category of being that is then authentically embodied. We will also explore some ties between our object of study and the disciplines of psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, and sociology. As we think through these relations and concerns, we will keep an eye on various ways of understanding ideology, which one important theorist calls “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” After an introduction to key concepts, we will undertake a study of a formative text for both psychoanalysis and gender studies, Sigmund Freud’s Dora. The ways in which gender theorists both deploy and critique psychoanalysis strongly influences how we talk about gender today. Our study of Freud’s text will help us think more deeply about issues such as “hysteria,” discursive mastery, and the workings of fantasy in gendered relations. From Dora, we will turn to a selection of twentieth-century poems. The poetry will help us practice close reading and interpretation through psychoanalytic and gender theory lenses. Then we will turn to representations of gender in post-war cinema. In the 1940s and 50s, studios produced what they thought of as “women’s film.” We will examine this trend in its cultural context, the famously “repressive” 1950s. Finally, we will look at a recent graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, who has been writing the “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic for over twenty years. Bechdel’s comic autobiography will provide something of a model for us as we launch our own reflections on how we have constructed (and continue to construct) our gendered identities. Several short papers and one longer, final paper are required.
14. TR 1100-1215 Nwankwo, I.
New Perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance
What is “real” Black culture? Is it the culture of the everyday people or that of the “talented tenth?” Should only “positive” representations of Black culture and life be publicly aired? Who has the right to decide that and to define a “positive” image? What did Harlem Renaissance era writers, musicians, and intellectuals have to say about these issues? How were their views similar to or different from those of the average African American or even from each other? Are their views still valid today? Do and did Black writers and thinkers from other countries share those perceptions?
In this course, we will gain new perspectives on this distinctive era often thought to be one of the most pivotal in the American cultural history. During this period, young Black writers, musicians, workers, and soldiers from New York as well as from the U.S. South and the Caribbean, many calling themselves “New Negroes,” birthed exciting innovations in literature, popular music, film, dance, business, and politics. They showed and showed off what they viewed as the inherent richness and modernity of their cultures. As they did so, they asked key questions about how Black culture should be understood and should be presented in the public sphere.
By closely examining key literary texts, songs, films, newspapers, and other direct-from-the-source materials from this era, we will explore these questions and gain insight into these new ideas about Black culture and identity as well as into their impact on and relevance for today’s debates about cultural authenticity, about popular culture and whether it advances or hinders political progress, and about the relationship between African American culture, in particular, and American culture, more broadly.
The course is structured both to guide you through the development of your own intellectual/research agenda in this area, and to provide you with opportunities to try out and showcase the results of your efforts. Reading/Listening/Viewing List includes: Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Caribbean Calypso music by Atilla the Hun and Roaring Lion, Paul Robeson in Emperor Jones; Assignments to include: Periodic close readings and research reviews; Presentation/Discussion Leading; Final Research Project/Paper
15. TR 110-225 Tichi, C.
The course concerns narratives of social concern, i.e., of the issues pressing upon us in these early years of the twenty-first century (food- and water-related, for instance). How do nonfiction writers tell stories about topics affecting all of us, no matter what our income and class status? The questions we ask concern the power of narrative (i.e., of stories) and the topics we must engage in the challenging years ahead. Writers include Eric Schlosser, Joseph Hallinan, Tracy Kidder, James Augustus Speth, and others.
16. TR 235-350 Childress, S.
Film as a Subversive Art: The Critical Lens of Avant-garde Cinema.
In French, avant-garde literally means "advance guard," a military term used for troops leading an attack across a battlefield. In film and art in general, the term is used to describe a work that breaks new ground in order to express a different way of seeing the world and of living in it. This cinema challenges us to examine how films make meaning and how they challenge our understanding of the world. In this course, we will study avant-garde cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s, with an emphasis on the work of U.S. and Latin American filmmakers. This class will introduce you to the world of avant-garde cinema so you can see how these films use their formal techniques to create and comment upon significant social and aesthetic experiences. The specific objective for this course is to help you further hone your critical thinking and written argumentation skills by developing critiques that examine and/or question the challenges presented by the avant-garde filmmakers we study.
17. TR 400-515 Nesler, M.
“Unhappy in Their Own Way”: Family Dysfunction in Literature
This course will consider a selection of literary works that deals specifically with issues of family function and dysfunction—texts in which authors or characters deal with or argue about familial relations and resulting identity formations and fractures. Students will be asked to consider how family traditions and expectations place individuals within a narrative; students will also consider to what degree textual creation and performance aid individuals in escaping or perpetuating these narratives.
18. TR 400-515 Childress, S.
Film as a Subversive Art: The Critical Lens of Avant-garde Cinema.
In French, avant-garde literally means "advance guard," a military term used for troops leading an attack across a battlefield. In film and art in general, the term is used to describe a work that breaks new ground in order to express a different way of seeing the world and of living in it. This cinema challenges us to examine how films make meaning and how they challenge our understanding of the world. In this course, we will study avant-garde cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s, with an emphasis on the work of U.S. and Latin American filmmakers. This class will introduce you to the world of avant-garde cinema so you can see how these films use their formal techniques to create and comment upon significant social and aesthetic experiences. The specific objective for this course is to help you further hone your critical thinking and written argumentation skills by developing critiques that examine and/or question the challenges presented by the avant-garde filmmakers we study.
19. TR 935-1050. Nesler, M.
“Unhappy in Their Own Way”: Family Dysfunction in Literature
This course will consider a selection of literary works that deals specifically with issues of family function and dysfunction—texts in which authors or characters deal with or argue about familial relations and resulting identity formations and fractures. Students will be asked to consider how family traditions and expectations place individuals within a narrative; students will also consider to what degree textual creation and performance aid individuals in escaping or perpetuating these narratives.
20. TR 935-1050. Fusco, K.
Revising American Modernism
In this class we will look at questions of art, culture, canonization and national identity through the lens of American modernism. We will be considering modernism in multiple media forms and cultural contexts, and because this is a “W” class, we will be thinking about revision as it applies to both our reading and our writing.
A writing course including the analysis of essays from a variety of disciplines.
1. MWF 310-400 Staff
2. TR 810-925 Staff
ENGL 122. Beginning Fiction Workshop
Introduction to the art of writing prose fiction.
1. TR 400-515 Earley
2. W 910-1200 Randall, A.
Students write six short stories two of which are revisions. We read Cheever and Welty and other masters of the craft as well as Wallace Stegner's On Teaching and Writing Fiction. The Art of The Short Story edited by Gioia is our primary text. Stories are read aloud and critiqued by the group as well as by the workshop leader. The goal of the course is to find your subject, your voice, and to be introduced to the craft of fiction writing. Alice Randall has published three novels, The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, and Rebel Yell.
ENGL 123. Beginning Poetry Workshop
Introduction to the art of writing poetry.
1. MWF 910-1000. Holland, E.
This workshop is an introductory course, designed to explore the craft of writing poetry as well as the joy of reading poetry. Your original poems will be the main focus of the class, but we will also be reading sections of “A Poet's Companion” by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, as well as a few additional poems from contemporary poets, which will be handed out in class. Final assessments will be based on class participation (attendance, discussion, commentary on workshopped poems, in-class writing exercises), preparing poems for workshop and completing written assignments on schedule, and compiling a final portfolio which will contain original and revised forms of your poems.
2. TR 235-350. Bachmann, B.
In this introductory poetry writing workshop, you will both write and read poetry. While the primary texts will be poems written by members of the workshop, you will also be introduced to the work of contemporary poets as well as to criticism on various elements of the craft of poetry, including line, sound, rhythm, perspective, metaphor, imitation and revision. In addition to submitting original poetry to the workshop and critiquing other participants’ work, you will be expected to complete creative assignments and keep a writer’s notebook. Assessment will be based on participation, completion of the assignments and notebook, and submission of a final portfolio.
3. MWF 1010-1100. Lesousky, B.
My great hope for this course is that you will grow to love poetry. But come what may, I will ask only that your feelings be arrived at on your own terms, or within your own systems, as they evolve over the course of the semester via personal inquiry and group discussion. Our focus in the beginning will be somewhat traditional. We will create a working definition of the ‘Poem’, its personalities, its devices. Starting in the third century with the Desert Fathers, we will look at poetry written in exile; poetry written during wartime, in cities under siege; and poetry borne out of traumatic experience. Classical, but contemporary poems as well. And—yes!—we will make our own poems, seven altogether by semester’s end, and gradually these poems will become our core focus. I invite you to join us, so that we might create such a space, daily, for contemplation and reverie.
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