ENGL-204-01 - Intermediate Fiction Workshop
N. Reisman
T - 3:10-6:00 p.m.
Limited enrollment. Students will be screened during first week of class on the basis of writing samples. Registered students should contact the appropriate instructor before the first day of class.
ENGL-204-02 - Intermediate Fiction Workshop
N. Reisman
R - 3:10-6:00 p.m.
Limited enrollment. Students will be screened during first week of class on the basis of writing samples. Registered students should contact the appropriate instructor before the first day of class.
ENGL-206-01 - Intermediate Poetry Workshop
M. Jarman
M - 2:10-5:00 p.m.
This class is a workshop in which we study the craft of poetry writing.
As such, this semester we will concentrate on traditional elements of
poetry--meter, rhyme, and form. In other words, this will be a class in
verse as much as poetry. Each week, using our texts, we will discuss an
aspect of what is called prosody: metrical feet, rhyme schemes,
stanzas, and forms like the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina.
You will discover there is a wide latitude within the limitations of
form, which is not surprising considering that most poetry in English
is formal verse rather than free verse, the latter being a relatively
young and largely American innovation. But we will talk about free
verse, too, and if you are oppressed by the mere notion of writing in
rhyme and meter, you will have the opportunity to write one poem
without such restraints. Admission is by consent of instructor. Please
submit three samples of your work, i.e. three poems, once you register
for the class.
ENGL-208A-01 - Representative British Writers
R. Moore
MWF - 10:10-11:00 a.m.
In this course we will examine six major texts to help us understand
the nature of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the
Restoration. These works include: Beowulf, selections from Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella, a Shakespeare play, and John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress. We will pay particular attention to the cultural,
philosophical and religious contexts of these works as well as the way
that the works talk to and engage with each other. Two papers, a few
tests, and a final exam.
ENGL-208A-01 - Representative British Writers
R. Moore
MWF - 11:10-12:00 p.m.
In this course we will examine six major texts to help us understand
the nature of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the
Restoration. These works include: Beowulf, selections from Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella, a Shakespeare play, and John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress. We will pay particular attention to the cultural,
philosophical and religious contexts of these works as well as the way
that the works talk to and engage with each other. Two papers, a few
tests, and a final exam.
ENGL-210-01 - Shakespeare Representative Selections
D. Kezar
MWF - 10:10-11:00 a.m.
ENGL-220-01 - Chaucer
J. Plummer
MWF - 11:10-12:00 p.m.
We will read a selection of the Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and
Criseyde, contextualizing them against the backdrop of both learned and
popular literary, artistic, and religious practices of the late middle
ages. Instruction will include some background lectures, class
discussion, student presentations, library work, and the use of on-line
Internet resources. Graded work will include a few quizzes, class
participation, a class presentation, two exams, and a paper.
ENGL-232A-01 - Twentieth-Century American Novel
M. Kreyling
MWF - 2:10-3:00 p.m.
This course covers roughly the first half of the century, and
understands the novel not as a free-standing aesthetic form but as
embedded in an ongoing American cultural life. Novels considered
classics of the form for aesthetic reasons are surely part of that
life. We’ll do three: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s
Sanctuary, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls-- “great” almost to
the point of kitsch or self-parody. And there are “trashy” popular
novels no one will admit to reading (we always wait for the movie):
Metalious’s Peyton Place. A novel that defines a peculiarly urban,
American genre, style, and sensibility: Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon
(2005 is the 75th anniversary of its publication). Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God, a breakthrough novel for African American women
writers and readers when it was “rediscovered” in the 1970s: Oprah
Winfrey produced a film version in 2005, starring Halle Berry. And a
novel (or collection of short stories?) that defines the break from
late Victorian realism and taste to the modernist temper of the early
decades of the century: Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Lecture, discussion
strongly encouraged. Expect a midterm and a final exam to confirm your
retention of factual information, and monthly (Aug/Sept, Oct, Nov)
writing assignments totaling at least 15 pages by the end of the
semester.
ENGL-233-01 - The Modern British Novel
J. Halperin
TR - 1:10-2:25 p.m.
Counts as department Honors Seminar. A 3.0 cumulative GPA is required.
You don’t need to be in the English honors program but you do have
to have a GPA of 3.0 or better to register for this course, which will
be limited to a seminar size of 15.
The reading list is not yet set , but the authors we read will
include Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence,
Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Kingsley Amis.
Each student will be asked to write a brief research report and one
critical essay of about 15 pages. There will be a take-home final
examination. Discussion rather than lecture format. There will be some
emphasis on the historical backgrounds surrounding the literature we
read.
ENGL-243-01 - Literature, Science, and Technology
J. Clayton
-
On the cover of the October, 1999 National Geographic a piglet with
human DNA introduces an issue dedicated to asking: "Are we ready for
the gene age?" This cover story is only one of a multitude of articles
in the media on genetics, covering 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.
Literature and film have not been far behind in responding to
breaking developments in genetics. In this course we will explore
cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with--or exploit--the
revolution in contemporary genetics. 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.
The novels and films will be grouped into five broad categories, each exploring a major issue arising from genetics in society:
* Evolution
* The discovery of DNA
* Cloning
* Genetic engineering
* Genetic testing and forensics
No expertise in genetics, biology, evolutionary theory, or other
forms of science is required. Students will be introduced to the basic
concepts of genetics and evolution in small doses of engaging science
writing by people such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Matt
Ridley, as well as in accessible works by some of the pioneers of the
new genetics. (Advanced biology students will be encouraged to
substitute more challenging readings in genetics on a case by case
basis.) Novels will include Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, Jeffrey
Eugenides' Middlesex, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Philip Kerr's A
Philosophical Investigation, Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf, and Zadi
Smith's White Teeth.
ENGL-250-01 - English Renaissance: The DramaK. Schwarz MWF - 1:10-2:00 p.m. Counts as department Honors Seminar. A 3.0 cumulative GPA is required.
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, 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, Ford. Requirements: participation, presentation, paper related to presentation, and final paper.
ENGL-263-01 - African American Literature
S. Salvant
TR - 2:35-3:50 p.m.
Topic: Counts toward Ethnic/Non-Western requirement for English majors.
ENGL-263G-01 - African American Literature
S. Salvant
TR - 2:35-3:50 p.m.
A survey of selected literary texts (slave narratives, novels, poetry,
essays) written by African Americans in the nineteenth century. While
charting formal and thematic continuities, we will also discuss the
diverse strategies of representing the African American experience
during this period. Major topics of discussion will include literacy,
rhetorical strategies of moral suasion and political argument,
representations of "race mixture," dynamics of genre and gender,
spirituality, and the development of literary tradition.
ENGL-268A-01 - America on Film: Art and Ideology
S. Girgus
MWF - 2:10-3:00 p.m.
The course concerns the study of American culture and character as
presented in film. It will consider film as a modern art form, a system
of cultural production, and an expression of the diversity of the
American experience. Beginning with a detailed discussion of the
elements of the structure and composition of film as an art form, the
course will analyze film according to models that originated in
literary criticism such as genre, authorship and directorship,
narrative, ideology. It will consider how contemporary film theory has
developed such critical concepts to explain and analyze the unique
world of cinematic visual and literary signs. Thus, it will relate
visual images and literary text to cultural context. In our discussions
of this relationship between literature and film, we will consider how
films and narrative treat basic American themes such as the individual
and community, frontier and urban violence, ethnicity and minorities,
the representation and role of women, visual desire and sexual
exploitation, and the family. We will study these themes in the work of
mainstream and maverick directors such as Frank Capra, John Ford,
Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Elaine May and in major
genres such as the cowboy and western, the gangster movie, screwball
comedy, the love story, the family scene.
ENGL-271-01 - Caribbean Literature
S. Goudie
MWF - 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Counts toward Ethnic/Non-Western requirements for English majors.
The achievement of writers and artists from formerly colonized areas in
the world represents arguably the most significant facet of literary
production during the last half of the twentieth century. The selection
of St. Lucian poet, playwright and essayist Derek Walcott as the
recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 aptly emblematizes
the importance of that achievement. In this course, we will consider
literature produced by the formerly colonized—artists and works now
frequently termed “postcolonial”—from one of these areas: the
Caribbean. We shall focus especially on the Caribbean novel in its
Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic manifestations but we may also
treat poems, plays, songs, paintings, and other forms of literary and
cultural production. As we proceed, we will concern ourselves with the
formal virtuosity and thematic nuances that characterize richly diverse
Caribbean postcolonial literary traditions. A central preoccupation of
the course will be to identify the ways in which colonial and
postcolonial realities shape the contours and central issues of
Caribbean writing, issues such as cultural and linguistic syncretism,
gender and ethnic relations, and race and resistance.
ENGL-272E-01 - Movements in Literature
S. Goudie
MWF - 12:10-1:00 p.m.
Topic: Contact Zones in Colonial American Literature and Culture
Counts toward the Pre-1800 Literature requirement for English majors.
Literature written in and about the Americas from 1500-1800 reveals
that “contact zones,” social spaces wherein competing cultures clash
and/or cohere, are central to the formation of American colonial and
postcolonial identities. In this course we will focus on how European
colonialists and those with whom they came into “contact” sought to
represent these spaces. Writings will include texts authored by or
about the following groups: Native Americans and European explorers and
settlers; North American and West Indian planters, and their slaves and
former slaves; New England Puritans and their detractors; British
loyalists and American revolutionaries; and various writers of the
early national period of the United States. Although we will read
primarily literature authored in English, we will also treat writings
in translation produced in the Spanish and French American colonies.
The topics we will discuss may include: European encounters with Native
America; New England Puritan testimonies of religious rebellion from
England and political and religious controversies internal to the early
American colonies; the 18th-century religious revival known as the
“Great Awakening”; the emergence of post-colonial American identities
through the independence movements of the American and Haitian
Revolutions; and the early American novel in its sentimental and gothic
manifestations. Throughout the course we will consider readings in
their political, social and historical contexts, and we will map the
intersections between these contexts and other matters, both thematic
(race, gender, and colonial and national identity) and artistic (voice,
literary form, and structure).
ENGL-272G-01 - Movements in Literature
J. Kasibhatla
TR - 11:00-12:15 p.m.
Topic: Sub-Continental Drift: Literature of the South Asian Diaspora
Postcolonial Literature
ENGL-273E-01 - Problems in Literature
L. Enterline
TR - 2:35-3:50 p.m.
Topic: Shakespearean Sexualities
Counts as department Honors seminar. A 3.0 GPA is required.
ENGL-274-01 - Major Figures in Literature
C. Tichi
TR - 1:10-2:25 p.m.
Topic: Edith Wharton and Willa Center
The dynamism of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries can
be measured by the growth of cities and their new social arrangements,
together with a certain nostalgia for America's receding rural past.
Among numerous novelists chronicling the new era, Edith Wharton and
Willa Cather emerged as major writers, prolific and bold as they showed
U. S. life fraught with personal ambition, amorous and murderous
passion, and class-based rivalries. Their Americas, from the heartland
to the mansion, emerge in fictional geographies whose stylistic
achievement merits close investigation.
ENGL-274E-01 - Major Figures in Literature
J. Halperin
TR - 11:00-12:15 p.m.
Topic: Jane Austen and the Gothic Novel
Counts toward Pre-1800 requirement for English majors
This course will satisfy the “E” requirement for English majors and
is limited to an enrollment of 35. But it is not limited to English
majors.
We will begin with several gothic novels and a novel of
sensibility, all from the second half of the eighteenth century. We
will then read three novels by Jane Austen: probably Northanger Abbey,
Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park. The last part of the course
will focus on where the gothic goes afterwards, especially in such
mainstream writers as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and perhaps others.
There will be several in-class essays plus a take-home final examination. A few lectures, but mostly discussion.
ENGL-280G-01 - Workshop in English and History
V. Bell & R. Messier
TR - 9:35-10:50 a.m.
Counts toward Ethnic/Non-Western requirement for English majors.
This course will consist of extensive readings in literature written by Eastern and Middle-Eastern writers about their encounters with Western culture and by Western writers about their encounters with Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures. Some relevant films (like Lawrence of Arabia) will be viewed and discussed as well. Some selected historical readings will be used to supplement background lectures by Professor Messier when historical contexts need to be filled in. A brief user-friendly history of Islam will also be required. Two papers will be required, spaced to be due at roughly the mid-point and the end of the semester; an in-class midterm and a take-home final will be the basis of the rest of the grade. The class format will be mainly class-discussion.
The course is not constructed to be an historical survey, but it will begin with a brief unit on the original traumatic cultural encounter, the Crusades, and readings from contemporary accounts of that event from both sides of the divide. Following that there will be an even briefer section on the rise of the Ottoman Empire and its relation to the Age of Exploration in the West (which produced Columbus and his vision of the East). Then, for the major portion of the course, we will move into the 19th and 20th and eventually even the 21st centuries, concluding with materials on the Arab-Israeli conflict (both prose analysis and fiction--Phillip Roth's Operation Shylock, for instance)--and possibly the Iraq War.
Throughout the course care will be taken in each unit to provide competing and overlapping perspectives. The advantages of the course lie mainly in the unusual opportunity to perceive the West and its values from the perspective of Eastern and Middle-Eastern writers. The majority of the texts will be novels or selections from novels, each one of which will be contextualized historically by Professor Messier before they are taken up in class. The list of works from which the texts will be selected (eight or nine in all--for class) will include such works as: The Travels of Ibn Batutta (from the fourteenth century); Flaubert's Letters from Egypt; The City of Wrong by M. Kamel Hussein (a Muslim account of Jesus's crucifixion); Crescent: A Novel by Diana Abu-Jaber (about Iraqi immigrants in America); Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (about using western texts in Iran to raise the consciousness of Iranian women); From Beirut to Jerusalem (excerpts) by Thomas Friedman (about the Arab-Israeli conflict); Orientalism and The Question of Palestine (excerpts) by Edward Said; Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (a story of a Sudanese student's experience in the West); The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus (about a clash between an Iranian-American family with a young white American woman over property rights); An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra (a slightly different take on western values from the perspective of modernized Buddhism). Etc.
There are numberless options for us as we move into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Those options that are not used for class will be among the options for you to use for paper topics. The above list obviously will be narrowed down by the time the syllabus is constructed.
ENGL-286A-01 - Twentieth-Century American Drama
T. Chen
TR - 2:35-3:50 p.m.
Counts toward Ethnic/Non-Western requirement for English majors.
This course introduces students to twentieth-century American drama by
juxtaposing the theatrical work of canonical American playwrights
(Eugene O'Neill, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller) with
the dramatic texts of contemporary Ethnic American playwrights and
performance artists (Wakako Yamauchi, Lorraine Hansberry, August
Wilson, Maria Irene Fornes, Anna Deavere Smith, Velina Hasu Houston,
Tony Kushner, David Henry Hwang, Diana Son). We will trace how race,
class, gender, and sexuality have been--and continue to
be--theatrically performed by focusing on how the theater operates as
both a space of interpellation and resistance. In the process, we will
learn how to read dramatic literature as well as how to analyze the
basic elements of drama (structure, character, language, scenography).
The course emphasizes the process by which a script becomes a
theatrical production.
ENGL-288G-01 - Special Topics in English and American Literature
D. Nelson
TR - 9:35-10:50 a.m.
Topic: Inindianation: or why white men like to play Indian from the Boston Tea Party to Dances With Wolves
Counts toward Ethnic/Non-Western requirement for English majors.
Why do white men like to play Indian? From rent protests, to the
Boston Tea Party, from volunteer firemen to the Fraternal Order of Red
Men, from Boy Scouts to Dead Heads, from Calvin Coolidge to Kevin
Costner, from lacrosse to football and baseball mascots, white men have
enjoyed playing Indian. Years ago, historian Richard Drinnon argued
that Indians got to play the symbolic devil to New England's repressive
Puritan sexuality. More recently, historian and cultural critic Michael
Paul Rogin has argued that Indians are the symbolic demon of emergent
liberalism. Their arguments don't exhaust the subject and in this
course, we'll begin by studying the odd term that the Fraternal Order
of Red Men uses for their induction: Inindianation. In. Indian. Nation.
This course utilizes an interdisciplinary, American Studies
approach to conduct its work: it is not primarily literary. We'll work
out some common historical background as we investigate early US
literary and cultural enactments of "Inindianation." Beginning in the
early nation, we'll move our analysis through the twentieth-century.
Along the way, we'll consider how Native American thinkers and writers
have responded to such practices.
This course will provide you with an introduction to political
writings and frontier literature in the early nation. It will offer you
an encounter with nation, race and gender theory. It will teach you to
think with critical care about primary texts, critical writings and
films, and about historical and social issues.
Requirements: reading preparation and out-of-class movie
viewing. Group research presentation. Short writing assignments. Final
research essay.
ENGL-290A-01 - Honors Seminar
M. Schoenfield
T - 11:10-2:25 p.m.
A 3.0 cumulative GPA, 3.3 Major GPA, and Approval Required. Final
Enrollment determined by English Department at the end of the course
request period.
This is an intensive seminar for seniors seeking honors in the major
and planning to write an honors thesis in Spring, 2006. Making use of
shared readings including Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock and Art
Spiegelman's Maus, this course is an exploration into critical
theories, methods, and questions which culminates in the designing of
an argument and outline for the thesis. Through class discussion, short
papers, and small-group interactions, students will interrogate
questions of literature and culture, of aesthetics, of poetics and
form, of the interactions between literary and political
representation, of the identity of the "author" and the "reader," of
the tension between realism and reality, of gender, ethnicity, and
other identity formations that influence the activities of literary
production. From this array of investigations, and in conjunction with
the literary background students have already amassed, students will
select individualized projects and help their colleagues to formulate
their projects. Creative Writing majors may design a project in
fiction, poetry, or non-fiction as a thesis, and all students are
encouraged to take an imaginative approach to their projects.
Admission by application only: applications are available in
the department and from the web site. The deadline for applying will be
in early April. This course counts as an elective toward the major, and
is credited and graded independently of the Honors Thesis course (290B)
offered in the Spring.
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