Spring 2012 200-level English Courses:
ENGL 200.01 Intermediate Nonfiction Writing
Solomon, S.
Other People’s Lives: Memoir, Profile and Biography
Because enrollment to this course is by instructor approval based on a submission, all students will initially be placed on the waitlist. After joining the waitlist, all students should wait for a welcome email from the instructor regarding the submission requirement. As soon as the instructor selects the class members, that select group of students will be enrolled in the course and all others will be dropped from the waitlist.
Students in this course will read selected portraits of other people—portraits drawn from memory and personal experience and from documents, both historical and contemporary—and then they will try to write their own portraits. This is a nonfiction workshop, so the emphasis will be on writing vividly and offering feedback to classmates about writing. The class will read excerpts of biographies (mostly about writers and other artists); long and short profiles, the latter in the form of obituaries (in Britain are often wonderfully evocative sketches of the man or woman who has died); and memoirs that focus on another person. We will look at how these descriptions can make individuals come alive on the page—at the details of character and action that give the reader a sense of other people’s lives, their idiosyncrasies, their virtues and limitations, and tell memorably what people do and how they do it.
ENGL 200.02 Intermediate Nonfiction Writing
Guralnick, Peter
Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission.
This is a workshop on Creative Nonfiction, which revolves around the writing of the participants, with additional readings in work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Jack Kerouac, Wil Haygood, Rosanne Cash, and Alice Munro. It will focus on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception, with special emphasis on the profile -- in other words, how to make a real-life story come alive in the same way that fictional narrative can. This is a workshop in which we are all interdependent on each other's efforts.
Three major pieces of 2500-3000 words will be assigned. Every student in the course will critique each of the other students' papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. Class participation is the second most important element of the class (after the writing itself), so attendance is of the highest importance. Most of all, the workshop is a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing (irrespective of the level of achievement) should make it engaging -- and fun -- for all. The only prerequisite is a commitment to effort and honest self-expression.
Enrollment in ENGL 200, Intermediate Nonfiction Writing, is by consent of the instructor, Peter Guralnick. In order to determine eligibility for the class, please write a brief non-fiction (true-life) sketch (250-350 words) having to do with a specific personal fear, your own or someone else's. It can be in narrative form or written as a first-person account, but it should be vivid, true, and make both the fear and the person "come alive." Also, please include your major and any writing courses or experience you have had -- as well as anything else that you think might be pertinent. Please email your writing sample and brief background information to Professor Guralnick at peter.guralnick@vanderbilt.edu
ENGL 201. Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Guralnick, Peter
Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same proviso. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
This is a workshop on Creative Nonfiction, which revolves around the writing of the participants, with additional readings in work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Jack Kerouac, Wil Haygood, Rosanne Cash, and Alice Munro. It will focus on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception, with special emphasis on the profile -- in other words, how to make a real-life story come alive in the same way that fictional narrative can. This is a workshop in which we are all interdependent on each other's efforts.
Three major pieces of 2500-3000 words will be required, along with the possibility of some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the other students' papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. Class participation is the second most important element of the class (after the writing itself), so attendance is of the highest importance. Most of all, the workshop is a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing (irrespective of the level of achievement) should make it engaging -- and fun -- for all. The only prerequisite is a commitment to effort and honest self-expression.
ENGL 204. Intermediate Fiction Workshop
Lopez, Lorraine
Please note: This course has limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should request the course and contact the instructor about submitting an application form and a writing sample to address an assigned prompt.
This creative writing workshop focuses on developing and refining techniques of fiction writing as related to the short story. Fiction writing is a craft, as well as a discipline and a process. This course is designed to help students hone skills, such as, but not limited to developing effective characterization, using perspective judiciously and consistently, proportioning summary (exposition) appropriately to scene, developing imagery that resonates metaphorically, as well as selecting and applying significant detail to enhance scene, characterization, tone, etc. To better apprehend and build such techniques and others, students will write two original short stories, complete writing exercises, attend and respond to literary events, and analyze published short stories to discuss structural and stylistic components that contribute to these stories’ overall success, in addition to reading text on craft on a weekly basis and critiquing work produced by peers.
ENGL 205.01. Advanced Fiction Workshop
Earley, Tony
Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
ENG 205.02 Advanced Fiction Workshop
Reisman, Nancy
Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
ENGL 207. Advanced Poetry Workshop
Hilles, Rick
Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
ENGL 208A. Representative British Writers, beginnings to 1660
Pangilinan, Cristina
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a diverse company that includes a Knight, a Plowman, a Miller, and some nuns and priests happen to meet at a pub outside of London. Together, they travel to Canterbury to visit a great saint’s shrine, trading tales of joy and solace along the way. The leader of the company turns to a strange, small man and asks “What man artow?” or, more rudely, “what kind of person are you?” The strange, small man of baffling profession, quality, and status is actually Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet himself, and the worst tale-teller of the company. Even when joking, Chaucer has always provoked his readers to ask the question that we will ask throughout this class—what is a poet? In this class, we will also ask, what is an English poet? What kind of men (and some very few women) are they? What do poets do? What is their place in social, intellectual, and even commercial life? What do they hope to accomplish by writing lies about Green Knights, exiled magicians, and murdered virgins? In this class, we will begin with Caedmon, an illiterate cowherd who happens to compose the first English song, and end with John Milton, a poet so ambitious that he claims to justify the ways of God to man. Between Caedmon and Milton, we will learn about Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine di Pisan, William Shakespeare, and many persons we now remember only as Anonymous. Together, we will become familiar with medieval and early modern methods of reading, translating, and composing. We will remind ourselves of some familiar genres—tragedy, sonnet, epic—and learn some new ones—dream vision, romance, masque. No prior knowledge of early English literature is required: we will read and learn together. You will be asked to talk, to write, and to write often.
ENGL 208B. Representative British Writers, 1660-present
Gottfried, Roy
No writer writes in a vacuum. Moved not only by the surrounding events of the time and place, a writer is changed as well by previous authors and works. This course will examine the major periods of English literature from the Restoration to the Modern era in their cultural features and will study the major poets in engagement with their literary predecessors. The course provides an exposure to the famous works of the English tradition for the general student and provides a broad background for those students considering more specialized advanced studies.
ENGL 210. Shakespeare – Representative Selections
Strain, Virginia
satisfies pre-1800 literature major and minor requirement
This course refines students’ close reading and critical thinking skills through an intense engagement with the range of Shakespeare’s drama—his comedies, histories, tragedies, and later “romances.” In the works selected, the pursuit of erotic desire and political ambition predominate—at times simultaneously, in a single lyric phrase or dramatic exchange. We will examine Shakespeare’s language use and dramaturgy in the context of the early modern commercial theater (its material conditions and literary trends) and the poetic and rhetorical traditions disseminated through Elizabethan grammar schools (as a schoolboy, Shakespeare would have read Ciceronian rhetoric and Ovidian poetry). We will also consider Shakespeare’s status as an icon of English-speaking culture and as the poster-boy for the arts. To what extent does Shakespeare’s reputation rest on his texts and on posthumous performance, critical, pedagogical, and political traditions? While we will begin the course by focusing on the historical circumstances surrounding the composition of Shakespeare’s plays, we will end with a creative assignment that asks students to investigate the value of his works for present culture. Combining the texts of Shakespeare and the techniques of “guerilla” artists, students will explore the relationship between their reading life and contemporary life in a project that adapts, repurposes, or defamiliarizes their environment. Weekly assignments and group discussions will require students to stay on top of the reading, while the final assignment that concludes the course will require students to engage in intellectual risk-taking outside the classroom.
ENGL 211. Representative American Writers
Dicker, Rory
This course seeks to provide an overview of written expression in America from the era of exploration and colonization until the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with religious, utilitarian, and overtly propagandistic texts, we will explore how a coherent notion of “America” arose—if indeed it did. We will discuss both how regional, sexual, and racial identities figure into the works we’ll be studying and how differences among these identities contributed to the creation of an American literature. As we read literature written in the nineteenth century, we will consider how it engages with questions about slavery and abolition, the Civil War, industrialization, regional difference, and America’s status as an emerging cultural voice.
English 221. Medieval Literature
Plummer, J.
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
This course introduces the student to the chief literary forms and cultural issues of the late 13th through the 15th centuries in England. We learn Middle English while reading chronicles, saints= lives, drama, romance, lyrics, and allegory, exploring the alterity and modernity of medieval culture, what we have in common with the period and how we differ from it. No previous experience with medieval studies is required or expected. Graded work includes a midterm and final exam, and a paper of 8-10 pages.
ENGL 237W-01. Modern World Literature
Fesmire, J.
This is a great books class which covers the Early Modern Period through the present. We will read Marlowe, Pope, Moliere, Byron, Pushkin, Flaubert, Woolf, Conrad, Achebe, Bulgakov, Hosseini, and Stoppard. You will write three formal essays, one of which will be substantially revised. You will also write a number of short response papers. And you will participate enthusiastically in class discussion.
ENGL 237W-02. Modern World Literature
Schachter, A.
This is a great books course that will focus on romance and desire in prose fiction from the early modern period to the present. We will read works by Diderot, Flaubert, Willa Cather, Marguerite Duras, Vu Trong Phung, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Sholem Aleichem, and Mario Bellantin.
ENGL 243. Literature, Science and Technology
Clayton, Jay
Genetics in Literature and Film
The revolution in contemporary genetics has generated enormous media attention on topics such as Dolly the cloned sheep; newly discovered genes for breast-cancer, homosexuality, and long life; ecological and religious protests against gene tampering; controversies about evolution; insurance problems arising from genetic screening; the patenting of genes; DNA forensic evidence in criminal cases and paternity suits; the prospect of cloning a wooly mammoth; and eco-terrorism over genetically modified food. In this course we explore novels, films, and popular cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with these intriguing issues. These texts will come from a number of different genres, including postmodern novels, science fiction movies and novels, advertising, and critical essays on contemporary science, evolution, and medicine. No expertise in genetics, biology, or evolutionary theory is required. Students will be introduced to the basic concepts of genetics and evolution through science writing by people such as Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, and James Watson, and, as well as in accessible works by some of the pioneers of the new genetics. Novels will include Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Zadi Smith's White Teeth, and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.
ENGL 250. English Renaissance: Drama
Schwarz, Kathryn
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
In this course, we will read a number of plays written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While Shakespeare is the dramatist whose works are most familiar to us from this period, he wrote in a time when drama was emerging as a popular English form, and his plays are part of a larger context in which that form was introduced, challenged, defined and revised. We will consider those patterns of development as they are reflected in such genres as revenge tragedy, city comedy, domestic tragedy, and plays based on current events, taking up the issues—political stability or chaos, status in the social community, perceptions of gender and sexuality, the justification of violence—with which they are most closely concerned. Authors may include Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Cary, Middleton, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, and Ford. Requirements: participation, presentation, paper related to presentation, and final paper.
ENGL 254B. The Romantic Period
Porter, Dahlia
Romanticism and the Past
The Romantic period (1780-1832) witnessed a blossoming of historical consciousness, a newly awakened sense of the importance of the past to both the immediate present and the hoped-for future. From William Wordsworth's probing into his past selves to Walter Scott's gothic mansion filled with ancient relics, "looking back" was a quintessential Romantic activity. In its many forms- historical novels, lyric meditations on childhood, essays devoted to selective remembering and forgetting, poems celebrating classical antiquity, and chivalric romances infused with irony and nostalgia-an engagement with the past saturated the period's literature. This survey of Romantic period literature will take up canonical and lesser-known works to map the effect of thinking historically on literary writing. Through verse and prose by Godwin, Blake, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, John Keats, and Jane Austen, we will explore how literary authors used and abused the "facts" of history, how they envisioned and created personal, national, and global pasts, and where their ideas of history, memory, and individuality converge.
ENGL 256. Modern British and American Poetry
Jarman, Mark
This course will consider those Modern poets who left the strongest imprint on the poetry of their own time and subsequently: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. In the first half of the 20th century, each of these poets created a unique style which embodied his or her personal vision of the poet and the Modern world. Class will consist of an ongoing discussion of their poems and, where relevant, their prose. Two papers and a final.
ENGL 260. 19th Century American Women Writers
Spillers, Hortense
English 260 is devoted to a study of American women writers of the nineteenth century. This course will examine some of the poetic and fictional achievement of this writing community, starting with the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and working its way through the literary witness of Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as some of the writers whose works appear in the The Nineteenth Century Schomburg Collection of Black Women Writers, i.e., Frances Watkins Harper, etc.
ENGL 263. African American Literature
Spillers, Hortense
satisfies ethnic/non-western major and minor requirement
This course is designed to provide an introduction to the study of the literature produced by African-American writers in the social, historical, and political context of the United States. Because we begin our study of black writers with some of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, writing in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the course opens, properly speaking, in the period of colonialist agitation near the end of British rule and a short time before the penning of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the new nation. Even though Wheatley is one of the earliest writers of this survey, we are faced with the likelihood of prototypical literary and expressive forms that go largely unrecorded, but leave their trace in sermons, prayers, and the language of music, especially spirituals and work songs. However, this course is devoted to an examination of writing and its creative product across the genres of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and social critique.
ENGL 271. Caribbean Literature
Nwankwo, Ifeoma
Life, Literature and Music in the Caribbean Diaspora
satisfies ethnic/non-western major and minor requirement
This course brings together texts produced out of Caribbean descended communities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Central America. Our objective is to gain an understanding of the ways in which Caribbean Diasporan writers balance their connections to the Caribbean and to their nation of residence. The writers we engage have roots in a variety of Caribbean sites including Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, Barbados, and Puerto Rico. We will read how these writers represent Caribbean Diasporan people’s creation of identities out of multiple migrations and dislocations. These communities are "multiply diasporan"-- the product of the initial diasporas from Africa and Europe to the Caribbean and the diaspora from the Caribbean to North America and the U.K. The resulting identities are therefore a mixture of multiple cultures and affinities. We will explore questions such as: How is home defined? As a place in the Caribbean? As the nation of residence? As an imagined site between the two? Is that site created through memories? Through language? Through return visits? We will also consider what differences their nation of residence makes in their definitions of home and community and what powers or forces at home, in the Caribbean, or abroad, affect this self-definition. These writers (and their characters) are not only Caribbean descended but also U.S. American, Canadian, British, and Central American, so their identities are at least partially determined by the racial and ethnic infrastructures of the societies in which they live. A person considered "black" in the United States, for example, may not have identified himself as such at home. The class, then, is as much an exploration of Black U.S.ness, Canadianness, Britishness, and Central Americanness as it is of migratory Caribbeanness.
The reading list includes short stories, novels, poetry, and autobiography. Short films, literary critical and/or theoretical readings in each unit will introduce you to the key terms, concepts, issues, and methods that will help you to interpret these Caribbean Diaspora literary texts and experiences.
ENGL 272. Movements in Literature
Schachter, Allison
Picture it: Photography, Literature and Memory
What drives us to take photographs so regularly that even our cell phones double as cameras? Why do we incessantly take images of the mundane events in our lives? In this course we’ll think about the relationship between photography, narrative, and personal memory. We’ll read twentieth century authors who incorporate photographs into their literary works, including Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, and the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. We’ll ask when and why photographs become compelling literary devices? What are the boundaries between visual art and literature? What are the connections between photography and memory? We will not only theorize the relationship between photography and memory but we will also explore that relationship through our own photography. Professor Vesna Pavlović from the Department of Art will be visiting the course to introduce students to the basics of photographic composition. We will discuss our photographs, their social context, and their relationship to personal narratives. A final project will incorporate a photographic and narrative essay.
ENGL 273. Problems in Literature
Plummer, John
Star-Crossed Lovers
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
"Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth."
-- A Midsummer Night's Dream
As Lysander in Shakespeare's play claims, literature is filled with unhappy, unlucky, tragic loves. This course will examine some of the most famous of these, and enquire into the varieties of "crossings," or impediments to true love as well as exploring reasons for the popularity of the motif. Some of the literary texts included are these: Tristan and Isolde; selections from Malory's Morte Darthur, especially "The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenevere" and "The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon"; Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Midsummer Night's Dream; versions of the story of Orpheus and Euridice including Ovid's (Metamorphoses), Boethius' (Consolation of Philosophy), the Middle English Sir Orfeo, Cocteau's Orphée [play and film], and the Brazilian film Black Orpheus; Versions of the story of Abelard and Eloise, including Pope's Eloïsa to Abelard; Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses 4).
In addition to the films mentioned above we will view Casablanca.
ENGL 274.01. Major Figures - HONORS
Dayan, Colin
Melville and the Other America
An introduction to readings of Herman Melville within often ignored contexts: Calvinist predetermination, empirical philosophy, the common law, natural histories of slavery, and Caribbean fictions. The course will attempt to make sense of the relation between legal practice and spiritual belief in the Americas, as well as studying the process by which words such as "race," "blood," "sacrifice," or "redemption" are specified and by which their precise meaning over time is determined. Finally, in accounting for Melville's reinvention of the genre called "gothic," we will examine a gothic tradition that has little to do with the supernatural, or with the supernatural as we normally understand it. Requirements: one formal class presentation, weekly one-page response papers, shared on OAK, and a final 12-page paper.
ENGL 274.02. Major Figures - HONORS
Garcia, Humberto
William Blake and Enlightenment Medias
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
William Blake (1757-1827) has been variously described as a visionary, mystic, rebel, iconoclast, and even, as the famous nineteenth-century literary critic Leigh Hunt did, “an unfortunate lunatic.” This poet-artist is so interesting for the way he combines ideas and media in startling and challenging ways; and yet, his eccentric views on religion and politics are not as unique as they may initially appear. This honors seminar serves two purposes: to study Blake’s poetry and prose as he produced it, complete with illustrations (including those found in the website The Blake Archive), and to historicize Blake’s work and life. We will examine his turbulent era, between 1789 and 1830, a period that witnessed the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, radical reform movements, the expansion of Britain’s overseas empire, and the rise of prophets and mystics as “insane” as Blake himself. Extended discussions about his printmaking process, the juxtaposition of image and word, and his mythical philosophies of art and life are intended to raise larger questions about the complex intersections of literature, media, and politics—then and now.
As an advanced course centered on a major research project, you are expected to wildly participate, think, research, and write. Requirements: you will write a 5-6 page term paper, which will be revised and expanded into a 15 page research paper based on my feedback and library research. In addition, students will lead group presentations and post weekly blogs on our course website. Attendance and participation are not just mandatory but essential to your success.
ENGL 274.03. Major Figures
Kreyling, Michael
Bell, Vereen
William Faulkner
ENGL 274.04. Major Figures
Porter, Dahlia
Jane Austen and her contemporaries
Jane Austen (1775-1817) is widely recognized as a literary innovator, an author who remade the novel into a finely tuned genre of psychological realism. She is celebrated for her deftly-drawn characters, witty dialogue, engaging heroines, and scenes of English country life—not for the political and social reform agendas embraced by many Jacobin novelists of her generation. In this course, we’ll read Austen’s novels against and through popular works by her contemporaries Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Bage, and William Godwin. With each pairing, we’ll consider how Austen adopts and deploys existing genres and modes; how she handles pressing social concerns from slavery to social inequality; and how her novels fit within the larger literary landscape of her day. To better gage Austen’s reputation in her own time and her continued appeal in our own, we’ll complement the novels with contemporary periodical reviews, excerpts from correspondence, and film adaptations. Requirements include two short papers, weekly blog posts, a final research project, and regular class participation.
ENGL 274.05. Major Figures - HONORS
Enterline, Lynn
Andrew Marvell: Echo, Chameleon, Amphibian
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Described as “subtle,” “elusive,” “mysterious,” and “weirdly detached” lyric poet, Andrew Marvell also had a remarkably engaged political career in which he was known as a “public brawler and controversialist.” As a recent critic remarked, “the mysteriousness of Marvell’s character resides at last in the very independence and privacy for which Marvell so publicly fought.” We will not aim to solve the mystery, but rather to explore it. We will examine Marvell’s career – as teacher and politician – alongside his poetic works, many of which have long been regarded as some of the most haunting and beautiful poems in the English language. In order to help Honors students prepare for writing a senior thesis, the course aims to develop skills in three areas of literary and cultural research and interpretation, reading articles and essays that raise questions of literary, historical, and/or theoretical import. Whether opting for radical withdrawal from the world (“Two paradises ‘twere in one, / To live in Paradise alone), depicting himself a libertine (“now, like am’rous birds of prey”), or inventing pitch-perfect imitations of the voices of others (“A Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn”), Marvell veers from confession to impersonation over a remarkable series of lyrics in which received categories of gender come undone, and pleasure and pain become impossible to disentangle. Reading Marvell in light of the classical poetry he most often invokes (chiefly, Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and comparing his forms of invention with that of his friend and contemporary, John Milton, the seminar will explore a number of theoretical and historical concerns: renaissance and modern theories of language and emotion; lyric poetry and representations of gender and sexuality; education, authority, and resistance; masculinity and cultural capital; the relationship between visual and verbal representation; the movement from classical rhetorical practice to aesthetics.
ENGL 275. Latino-American Literature
Lopez, Lorraine
satisfies ethnic/non-western major and minor requirement
Latino literature is American literature produced by writers inculcated with the U.S. experience, self-identifying as Latinos, and writing in English. This course will examine this enduring and dynamic literature that crosses and re-crosses borders resulting from geographic, linguistic, class, race, and gender difference. To this end, we will read, discuss, present, and write on prose and poetry by authors of Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent writing in the United States. The course, which meets the Ethnic Non-Western requirement for the Major, is designed to accommodate a range of voices in an historical progression to fill in this vital but often overlooked component of our national discourse. The literary models under investigation will be placed within a cultural and historical context in order to provide a sense of the continuities of American literature within the diversity.
ENGL 280-01. Workshop in English & History.
Teukolsky, Rachel
Epstein, Jim
Victorian England
This course will examine the major themes that defined Victorian Britain through its art, literature, culture, and politics. We will explore the rise of the modern city, the expansion of the British empire, the political history of liberalism, the shifting role of the class system, the “separate spheres” of men and women, controversies surrounding sexuality, and the decadent movement at the end of the century. We will conclude by examining the contemporary fascination with all things Victorian, as exemplified by the modern obsession with Sherlock Holmes or the retro designs of steampunk. The course will combine lecture presentations with extensive class discussion. Our readings will concentrate on primary sources from the period, including fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism. Throughout the semester, we will pursue an interdisciplinary dialogue about the relationship between history, literature, and cultural production during the Victorian era.
ENGL 282. The Bible in Literature
Gottfried, Roy
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
An examination of ways in which the Bible and biblical imagery have functioned in literature and fine arts, in both "high culture" and popular culture, from Old English poems to modern poetry, drama, fiction, cartoons, and political rhetoric. Readings include influential biblical texts and a broad selection of literary texts drawn from all genres and periods of English literature.
ENGL 287. Investigative Topics in America
Little, Amanda
America at a Turning Point: Telling Stories of Environmental Crisis and Innovative Breakthrough
Class meeting dates are: January 11, January 18, February 1, February 15, February 22, February 29, March 14, March 28, April 11; film screening/guest speaker on April 18.
Taught by award-winning environmental journalist who has written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Outside Magazine, and authored Power Trip: The Story of America’s Love Affair With Energy, this course focuses on one of the most important global challenges of our time. Climate change presents both a crisis and an opportunity: As warming temperatures pose ecological threats, innovators are responding with a historic burst of new discoveries in renewable energy, electric cars, smart homes, and other pivotal technologies. This course will explore what’s going wrong, what’s going right, and the thrill and challenge of documenting historic change. Readings will include selections from essential environmental writings of the last half-century; seminal present-day texts by Thomas Friedman, Bill McKibben, Amory Lovins, and Elizabeth Kolbert; up-to-the-minute opinion writing and investigative journalism from publications ranging from HuffingtonPost.com to The Wall Street Journal.
The professor has traveled from deep-sea oil rigs into the guts of the electricity grid, from Kansas cornfields into the catacombs of the Pentagon, to investigate America’s changing energy landscape. Students will attempt their own high-adventure investigative journalism in this course—exploring stories locally and statewide that document the effects of climate change and the emerging green economy. We will discuss your pieces in class and the instructor will critique your writing in private conferences.
ENGL 288.01. Special Topics in English/American Literature
Jarman, Mark
The Devotional Tradition in American Poetry
The devotional tradition in American poetry includes and expands on the devotional tradition of English poetry beginning with John Donne and George Herbert, so that what we might call devotional in American poetry not only includes attitudes toward the sacred within and without the Judeo-Christian tradition, but a strong heterodox tendency to rethink the idea of the sacred itself. The class will consider the examples of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as devotional poets and continue into Modern and Contemporary Poetry with poets as varied as Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot and Denise Levertov, Philip Levine and Jean Valentine. Two papers and the chance to write a devotional poem or series of poems.
Harold Bloom, American Religious Poems
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
Maurice Manning, Bucolics
Chase Twichell, The Snow Watcher
Jean Valentine, Lucy
Charles Wright, Sestets
ENGL 288.02. Special Topics in English/American Literature
Barsky, Robert
Sex and Censorship in the writings of D.H. Lawrence: A Bakhtinian Perspective
This course will discuss the overlapping visions of the mind/body relationship in both Bakhtin and Lawrence by assessing, in Lawrence’s critical writings and his fiction, how the desiring body can be represented in language. Lawrence’s interest in the ‘whole human body’ and his rejection of a purely metaphysical relationship to the world, -- including his sometimes-scandalous efforts to portray the sexual yearnings of the body in all of its cycles of desire and survival, -- are excellent starting points for an exploration of key Bakhtin concepts. Bakhtin’s rejection of formalistic approaches to language, and his emphasis upon dialogic interaction and answerability, help us to understand the central role of the “carnivalesque” in his writings about Fyodor Dostoyevsky and in his long study of Rabelais and the carnival. We will also assess the treatment that Lawrence received in the hands of the Press and the censors, who almost unanimously condemned his overly-graphic descriptions of bodies, culminating with the famous trial against him for his great masterpiece, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
ENGL 288.03. Special Topics in English/American Literature
Kutzinski, Vera
Race, Gender and Science Fiction
satisfies ethnic/non-western major and minor requirement
Marginalized in literary scholarship, science fiction can be characterized as a literary laboratory for examining closely theories of cultural difference. In this laboratory, differences between humans and non-humans often become reflections on differences among humans and the ways in which certain differences—race and sexuality foremost among them—have resulted, and continue to result, in social divisiveness and political strife. To approach issues of difference, science fiction writers create plots and settings to test out what living with “others” respectfully might actually mean. By constructing otherworldly scenarios, these writers take on issues on inequality, oppression, and exploitation that are acquiring new urgency in the twenty-first century. We will explore how science fiction puts reader’s own identities at risk in highly productive ways. Readings include works by Ursula LeGuin, Arthur Clark, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, and theoretical texts about cultural difference. Requirements: weekly 500-word papers; one longer essay.
ENGL 288.04. Special Topics in English/American Literature
Tichi, Cecelia
American Literature of Two Gilded Ages
America’s twenty-first-century Gilded Age has become a recent byword of economists and journalists, though the term is borrowed from Mark Twain and invites focus on the first Gilded Age of the late 1800s, when such writers as Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Henry James and others produced the fiction that chronicled the splendor and squalor of that American era. The fiction and nonfiction of these and other writers will be the class “lens” for exploration and definition of the world(s) of the first Gilded Age. Our attention will then turn to the writers who are mapping our own new, second Gilded Age, including Louise Erdrich, Dave Eggers, Tom Bissell and Marisa Silver. How is the new Gilded Age a “rerun” of history—and how not? We will evaluate points of comparison and of stark difference.
ENGL 289b. Independent Study
Designed primarily for majors. Projects are arranged with individual professors and must be confirmed with the Director of Undergraduate Studies before 10th day of class. *Variable credit (1-3 hrs.)
ENGL 290b. Honors Thesis
Wollaeger, M.
TR 2:35-3:50
Prerequisite: 290a.
ENGL 291. Special Topics in Creative Writing
Daniels, Kate
Whole Walden
