ENGL 204-02. Intermediate Fiction Workshop
Lopez, L.
W 1:10-4:00
Limited enrollment. Students will be screened during the first week of class on the basis of writing samples. Registered students must contact the instructor before the first day of class.
This course focuses on analyzing and refining techniques of fiction writing as related to the short story. Fiction writing is a craft, as well as a process and a product. The workshop 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, and tone. To better apprehend and thus build such techniques and others, students will write two original short stories, complete writing exercises, and examine 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 from peers.
206-01. Intermediate Poetry Workshop
Jarman, M.
M 2:10-5:00
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.
Description forthcoming.
ENGL 208A-01. Representative British Writers
Lamb, J.
MW 12:10-1:25
Description forthcoming.
ENGL 211-01. Representative American Writers
Kreyling, M.
MWF 12:10-1:00
As I write this brief description of the course (April 2006) immigration reform is on the American mind. Who’s American and who’s not? Are some people more American than others? What ceremonies (legal, political, social, literary) confer belonging-ness upon Americans? The literary record from the outset is full of examples of these processes. Some work out; some don’t. We’ll begin with the overview (using an anthology), starting with explorers and colonists and the native people who resisted them or tried to accommodate them. We’ll stick with the anthology through the late 19th century, then shift to a couple of novels designed around the theme of who’s in/who’s not: Helen Hunt Jackson’s romance of old California, Ramona, and William Dean Howells’ novel A Hazard of New Fortunes about, in part, immigrant New York City.
ENGL 220-01. Chaucer
Plummer, J.
MWF 11:10-12:00
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 231-01. Nineteenth Century English Novel
Halperin, J.
MW 11:10-12:25
Authors will be chosen from among the following: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, W.M. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Joseph Conrad. The course will emphasize nineteenth-century British backgrounds and history, and biographical matters relating to the authors we study; NO THEORY. There will probably be two short (6-8 pages) papers and either a mid-term or a take-home final. Discussion rather than lecture format.
ENGL 233-01. The Modern British Novel
Wollaeger, M.
TR 9:35-10:50
A survey of major British fiction over the first half (and perhaps beyond) of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the emergence of modernism and its ultimate rejection (it was exported to the U.S.). Authors will include Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and others I have not settled on yet. Depending on the size of the class, the format will mix mini-lectures (on contextual materials and relevant theory), discussions, and group work. Two essays, regular online posts, readings quizzes, and a final.
ENGL 235-01. Contemporary British Fiction
Kasibhatla, J.
TR 2:35-3:50
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, racial conflict and immigration policy. Readings may include texts by the following writers: Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Martin Amis, Roddy Doyle, Hanif Kureishi, Seamus Heaney, Joan Riley, Will Self, Sunetra Gupta, Jonathan Coe, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson.
ENGL 248-01. Sixteenth Century
Enterline, L.
TR 11:00-12:15
ENGL 250-01. English Renaissance: The DramaSchwarz, K. MWF 3:10-4:00
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 include Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Cary, Middleton, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, and Ford.
Course requirements include a presentation and related short paper, a longer, research-based paper, regular class participation, and acceptable performance on reading quizzes.
ENGL 254A-01. The Romantic Period
Schoenfield, M.
TR 9:35-10:50
In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, bolstered by the transformations in legal and scientific discourse, the structure of work and the concept of the worker was transformed. Personally anxious about the meaning of being a professional (or amateur) writer, poets and novelists explored the complex relations of class, identity, and power, and in doing so, reinvented poetic and prose genres. They contributed to the debates on abolition, the marriage market, child labor, economics and domesticity. In exploring the intersections of ideas and literary form, we will read novels by Jane Austin and Mary Shelley, poetry of William Blake and John Keats, and a variety of other forms, by writers famous, infamous, and all but forgotten.
ENGL 268A-01. America on Film: Art and Ideology
Girgus, S.
MWF 2:10-3:00
The course studies American culture and character on 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 discussion of the structure and composition of film as an art form, the course also will consider the relationship of film to American studies, ethical philosophy, and culture. Thus, it will relate visual images and cinetext to cultural and philosophical contexts. We will examine how films treat basic American themes such as the individual and community; frontier and urban violence; race, ethnicity, and minorities; the representation and role of women; visual desire and sexual exploitation; the family and authority. We will study directors from the classic era of Hollywood, including Frank Capra, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Elia Kazan as well as the work of current filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Clint Eastwood.
ENGL 272-01. Movements in Literature: Poets and Painters
Levy, E.
MW 1:10-2:25
"Poetry was declining/ Painting advancing/ We were complaining/ It was 1950." What does poet Frank O'Hara's report from the cultural battlefield tell us about the dynamic between poetry and the visual arts in the twentieth century? In this course, we will take a close look at poets whose work was shaped by this dynamic, especially as it played out in and around the New York art world both before and after the Second World War. Our discussions will center on the high moderns William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens and late moderns John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, as well as the artists who inspired them, including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock. We will consider the relationship of poetry and painting to concepts, institutions, and social developments in modernism and modernity, from collage to consumer culture to the Museum of Modern Art. Besides poetry, readings will include poets' prose and selected art criticism and theory.
ENGL 272-04. Movements in Literature: Culture of Modernism
Wollaeger, M.
TR 1:10-2:25
NOTE: Counts as Department Honors Seminar. A 3.25 cumulativeGPA is required.
This course will study not only major modernist literature by writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot but also the culture from which the modernist movement sprang. Thus in conjunction with readings in modernist literature we will also explore representative works of philosophy (e.g., Henri Bergson and William James), art (Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse), sociology (Simmel and Durkheim), and psychology (Freud). Particular attention will be paid as well to modernist manifestos, that is, declarations of artistic ideals and intent. Modernism is the name we now give to a massive outpouring of cultural energies across multiple domains, and we'll want to examine connections among these domains both for their intrinsic interest and for the light they shed on literature. Two essays, regular online posts, and a comprehensive take-home final. Though the course fulfills requirements for the English Honors program, it is open to anyone with a 3.25 GPA (and non-honors students enjoyed the course last time I offered it).
ENGL 273G-01. Problems in Literature:
Captivity in American Literature and Culture, 17th-Century to the PresentGoudie, S. TR 2:35-3:50
NOTE: Counts as Department Honors Seminar. A 3.25 cumulativeGPA is required.
In this honors seminar we will consider works of “captivity” from the seventeenth century to the present. By “captivity,” we mean works—poetry, fiction, drama, and film—wherein figures represent, or are represented in, moments of bondage, helplessness, dependency, incarceration and/or victimization on racial, sexual and/or gender levels. The course is comprised of four units: Native America and Captivity; Slavery and Captivity; Patty Hearst and Asian America in Captivity; and Captivity in/of the Orient and Middle East. Within each unit, we will treat a range of primary texts—works such as Mary Rowlandson’s Puritan captivity narrative, Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, and Susanna Rowson’s early play Slaves in Algiers about Americans in captivity in the Orient; more recent works we will examine include poems on Pocahontas and Patty Hearst by Pamela White Hadas, Charles Johnson’s award-wining novel Middle Passage, a fictionalized account of the slave trade, fictions centered on Japanese American Internment, and narratives emanating from the 9/11 Crisis and the U.S. “War on Terror.” As we proceed, a central preoccupation of the course will be to determine the ways in which constructions of U.S. national identity pivot on “captivating” notions about gender, race and ethnicity, and whether or not “captivity” narratives unsettle such prepossessing ideas.
ENGL 273-01. Problems in Literature:
The Silver Fork Novel: Fiction and High Society
Halperin, J.
MW 2:35-3:50
The class will focus on matters of class and how class is determined and characterized in representative fiction from Britain, France, and the United States. What roles do money, property, and birth play in these matters? Many of the novels will be set among what is considered the upper classes in these cultures, though some (for contrast) will not. The authors we read may include Jane Austen, Honore de Balzac, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, James M. Cain, John O'Hara, Ian McEwan, and Zoe Heller. There will probably be two short (6-8 pages) papers and either a mid-term or a take-home final. Discussion rather than lecture format. Emphasis on historical, cultural, and biographical concerns; NO THEORY.
ENGL 274-02. Major Figures in Literature: Melville and the Americas
Dayan, J.
TR 11:00-12:15
In this course we will tackle the prose and poetry of Herman Melville, especially *Moby Dick* (1851); *Pierre, or the Ambiguities* (1852); *Israel Potter* (1855); *the Piazza Tales* (1856); *The Confidence Man* (1857); *Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War* (1866). Popularity followed the publication of *Typee* and *Omoo,* his early stories of travels in the South Seas. But the works we'll read guaranteed his disappearance from the literary scene. Reviewers were outraged by *Pierre,* his rather wild story of love,incest, and death. An obsessive and philosophical writer, preoccupied with legal slavery, rituals of belief, and the false benevolence of his time, Melville demands that we reconsider the writings of those who influenced him, as well as those contemporaries with whom he remained in dialogue. Our collateral readings include: John Locke, David Hume, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Orville Dewey, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the legal opinions of his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, as well as other cases connected with slavery and emancipation. What counts most in this class is a willingness to read closely, to participate in class discussion, and to write a number of papers in preparation for the final essay (12-15 pages).
ENGL 288G-02. Special Topics in English and American Literature
TOPIC: Pacific Island Literature and Culture
Orr, B.
TR 2:25-3:50
This course examines aspects of recent South Pacific culture, including novels, films and visual material produced by Maori, Tongan and Samoan writers, directors and artists. Texts include novels by Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera, Epeli Hau'ofa and Sia Figiel; the films Utu, Once Were Warriors and Whale Rider; and visual works by Ralph Hotere, Shane Cotten, Peter Robinson, John Pule and Chris Heaphy. We will discuss the ways in which these texts constitute an evolving indigenous or newly hybrid Pacific culture.
ENGL 290A-01. Honors Colloquium
Schoenfield, M.
M 12:10-3:00
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 common readings—Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” and the autobiographical History of Mary Prince—, we will explore critical theories, methods, and questions that culminate in the designing of an argument and outline for the thesis. Through class discussion, short papers, and small-group interactions, students will interrogate issues of literature and culture, of aesthetics, of poetics and form, of the interactions between literary, political, and other forms of 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.
ENGL 296A-01. Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature
Plummer, J.
MWF 9:10-10:00
We will study the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) language, culture, history, and of course literature: excerpts from chronicles, sermons, biblical paraphrases, and poetry, including selections from Beowulf.
AMST 294: Topics in American Studies: Living Indians
Dana Nelson
English major credit can be granted for this course upon petition to the English Department Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Blackfeet writer James Welch sold thousands of copies of Fools Crow, a novel that follows the Blackfeet people in the years just prior to their official subjugation by the US government, but readers were simply not interested in his novel, published four years later, about a “living” Indian, Indian Lawyer. Why? United States culture has an ongoing love affair with dead Indians, the noble Indians of America’s past, in loin clothes and feather headdresses, in beads and moccasins, standing next to their tipis, or a buffalo, silhouetted on the Plains, the “last of the” Mohicans (or Sioux, or Apaches, or Navajos). Indians, in the US imagination, are frozen in time, the time when white Europeans and Americans first made contact with them. Living Indians, those who survive into today, are, to reverse a common phrase, forgotten, but not gone.
This course concentrates on the history, sociology, politics and artistic creations of living Indians. We’ll read contemporary literature by Native Americans, view movies by Native Americans, study art by Native Americans, listen to music by Native Americans, think about Red English, and learn about the social, cultural and political situations that concern Indians living today. This course will be interdisciplinary in its topics and its methodology: students will study the broad contours of white/US history, learn about and present on various Native American cultures, analyze a variety of Indian artistic productions, go to an Intertribal powwow, and figure out how to think about and see living Indians. Requirements include group projects and presentations, out-of-class movie viewing and powwow, final research project. This course is required for juniors in the American Studies Major.
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