ENGL-205-01 - Advanced Fiction Writing
T. Earley
M - 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-205-02 Advanced Fiction Workshop
N. Reisman
T 3:10-6:00
This course is designed for experienced fiction writers and offers writers a chance to refine their aesthetics and their understanding of fiction's possibilities. Now that you're familiar with the basics of craft and technique, how might you apply them with greater subtlety and finesse? Experiment with narration, point of view, language, rhythm, form, structure? What traditions interest you the most? What kinds of innovations? What approaches might lend greater complexity to your fiction, and to a reader's experience of the work? How might work in other arts inform or illuminate your vision of fiction writing? We'll focus on literary fiction, primarily on short stories and other short forms, and will adapt the format for those writers working on novels or novellas. Admission to the class will be by instructor permission, based on writing samples submitted before the term begins. Writers should have Intermediate Fiction Workshop experience.
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-207-01 - Advanced Poetry WorkshopK. Daniels M - 6:10-9:00 p.m.
This is a poetry writing workshop for experienced poets. A maximum of 15 students will be admitted. Workshop will meet once a week for three hours, and students will be expected to attend at least three conferences with the instructor, as well as meet in ad hoc groups outside of class for solo peer review.
Students need not be English majors, or creative writing majors. They need not even be enrolled in the College of Arts and Science. However, they must have experience in writing and reading poetry, and at least a basic familiarity with the critical vocabulary that enables discussions of poems. The success of a creative writing workshop depends on the participation of all members, and a mutual commitment to the intertwined processes of private composition and public critique. It is recommended (but not required) that interested students take English 123: Introduction to Poetry Writing and/or English 2005: Intermediate Poetry Writing before enrolling in English 2006.
The class will operate as a writing workshop, and will convene in the round. Each week, several poems written by students will be discussed by the group at large. Although there will be regular occasions when I speak about formal/craft issues that arise from the discussion of particular poems, there is no lecture component of the class per se. The form is informal and organic. Much of the work that goes on in this class is conducted out of class and autonomously when the student sits down to his or her desk to compose. A high degree of self-discipline, accompanied by a serious interest in creative writing, are both required to succeed in English 2006.
Each student will design and plan a writing project for the entire semester, in consultation with fellow students, and with me. A "contract" will be written between each of you and me, defining the scope, and creating a bibliography. Projects and contracts are both subject to revision, of course. All students are expected to attend the semester's literary events, sponsored by the English Department.
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-208B-01 - Representative British Writers
R. Gottfried
MWF - 9:10-10:00 a.m.
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-210-01 - Shakespeare Representative Selections
L. Marcus
MW - 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Topic: Interactive Shakespeare
This version of Shakespeare 210 will be taught in a computer lab and will allow students to explore DVDs of famous performances as part of their study of seven major Shakespearean plays. Plays to be included will probably be Richard III, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Othello. Students will also explore two DVD versions of each play, and other online resources that can enrich our understanding of the plays in cultural context.
ENGL-211-01 - Representative American Writers
D. Nabers
MWF - 12:10-1:00 p.m.
ENGL-212-01 - Southern Literature
M. Kreyling
TR - 2:35-3:50 p.m.
The Last Southern Literature Course: Why do we teach this course? Why
are you even thinking of signing up? Nobody actually wants to be
southern these days. Probably, in years and decades past they would
have been something else if they could have. Who in her/his right might
would actually choose the burdens of guilt, economic struggle, cultural
inferiority, the stigma of always being ranked in the bottom tier of
any survey that measured civilization and progress, the shame of being
so low even Paris Hilton could make fun of you?Tony Horwitz,
Confederates in the Attic, William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, James Agee
and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Dorothy Allison,
Bastard Out of Carolina, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (the
novel, not the film, and the whole 1000+ pages), and more of the
cultural record as kept by Hollywood, by documentary filmmakers and
photographers, by songwriters, by cooks. A modest midterm test, a more
ambitious final exam, a semester-capping essay on the meanings of
southernness.
ENGL-221-01 - Medieval Literature
J. Plummer
TR - 9:35-10:50 a.m.
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 exams, a
paper of 8-10 pages, and an in-class presentation.
ENGL-246-01 - Feminist Theory
J. Kasibhatla
MWF - 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Global Feminism
This course will be a study of feminist issues in a global context. The goal of the course will be to examine how gender functions in critical responses to economic, cultural and political change. We conduct our study in four general areas of inquiry: globalization and women’s labor, rights and religious difference, the discourse of war, and the struggle for rights. We will explore these phenomena by reading a wide variety of sources, including literature, autobiography, history and critical theory. Literary texts may include work by: Jamaica Kincaid, Buchi Emecheta, Rosario Castellanos, Mariama Bâ, Nawal el Sadaawi, Meena Alexander and Zoe Wicomb. Our theoretical and historical sources will include work by Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi (on the dynamics of gender in the Muslim world) Rigoberta Menchú (on the rights of indigenous peoples) Maria Teresa Tula (on women’s resistance to state-sponsored violence), Arundhati Roy and Wangari Maathai (on ecofeminism).
In general, students who take this course will gain an understanding of the broad range of feminisms that exist beyond the U.S./European context and be able to assess how gender-based critiques respond to specific historical, economic and cultural contexts.
ENGL-249-01 - Seventeenth-Century Literature
R. Moore
MWF - 11:10-12:00 p.m.
In this course we will read a variety of non-dramatic texts from the seventeenth century. Poets covered include John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Aemilia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Richard Lovelace. Prose writers discussed include Donne, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Izaak Walton, Jeremy Taylor, Margaret Fell Fox, John Milton and John Bunyan. We will pay attention to classification of poetic and prose style and also examine such issues as the construction of identity, the significance of melancholy and despair, the understanding of embodiment, the place of ritual and ceremony, and the varieties of spiritual experience.
ENGL-250-01 - English Renaissance: The Drama
D. Kezar
TR - 9:35-10:50 a.m.
Topic: Against Shakespeare: The Other Renaissance Drama
What was the professional and artistic context in which Shakespeare’s plays first appeared? How has our own notion of English Renaissance Drama distorted the customer’s-eye view of a sixteenth-or seventeenth-century theatergoer? Drama never appears in a social vacuum, and yet our reading of Shakespeare always threatens to render his a solitary voice, ‘not of an age but for all time,’ etc. One thrust of this course, then, will be supplementary and contextual: we will try to understand some of the rich and varied dramatic literature against which, and through which, Shakespeare should be read. A coextensive concern will be the reevaluation of our notions of Shakespeare’s greatness through the evidence of less celebrated plays.
Our playwrights include Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Marston, Cary (Falkland), Webster, Ford, Massinger. Organizing interests include: revenge tragedy, city comedy, masque, the War of the Theaters, antitheatricalism, and the roles of women in Renaissance drama.
Requirements: A longish paper, reading quizzes, and a final examination.
ENGL-251-01 - Milton
D. Kezar
TR - 2:35-3:50 p.m.
Paradise Lost will be this course’s center of attention. We will read Milton’s longer epic with attention to the genres within the poem, and the theological and political concerns within and around the poem. An overarching question will be, What does the word ‘culture’ (frequently spoken and written in the academy today) means to Milton? What does it mean in the poem? These questions may have multiple and contradictory answers, and will certainly take us to heaven and hell.
Requirements: Regular attendance, a substantial paper, occasional quizzes.
ENGL-254A-B - The Romantic Period
M. Schoenfield
MWF - 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Performing the Individual
From the political crisis of the French Revolution to Lord Byron's meditations on performing lordship, the public figures of the Romantic Period recognized theatricality not only as a useful metaphor for social agency, but as a key component of social and psychological life. Reading novels, poems, journalism, and drama of the period, we will explore how theatricality helped organize aesthetic, political, and psychological issues for both canonical and non-canonical authors. Our reading will range from the Gothic paranoia of Caleb Williams (and the subsequent, wildly successful adaptation, the melodrama, The Iron Chest) to Lord Byron's comic epic Don Juan, from Mary Robinson (flamboyant mistress of the Prince of Wales)'s The Natural Daughter to Austen's theatrically self-conscious Emma .
Designed around intensive class discussions, the course will include a variety of short writing assignments and one long paper.
ENGL-258-01 - Contemporary British and American Poetry: Auden and After
M. Jarman
TR - 11:00-12:15 p.m.
We will study British and American poetry from World War II to the present day by focusing on six major figures. The preeminent figure is W. H. Auden, the last poet writing in English who could be said to have had an international influence during his lifetime. He was born in England and became an American citizen after World War II. This course used to be called “Auden and After,” in recognition of his importance to modern and contemporary poetry. The other English poet we will study is Philip Larkin, considered by many in the United States and in the United Kingdom to have been the preeminent poet in English when he died 20 years ago. We will also read the 1995 Nobel Laureate in literature, Seamus Heaney, born a British subject in Northern Ireland, whose poetry addresses the conflict in that country. The three American poets will be Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath. Lowell is the leader of the 20th century’s most famous generation of American poets, men and women who introduced highly personal subject matter into poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has profoundly influenced generations of African American poets that have followed her. Sylvia Plath, associated with the confessionalism of Robert Lowell, is of interest for the legend that has sprung up around her short life and how it affects the way we read her poetry.
Though these poets are distinct from one another, they have in common a strong sense of personal style and vision with which they construct a unique sense of self. In some cases this self reaches mythic proportions; in others it is deliberately modest. In every case, the poet, contending with a modern world that continues to be fragmented and chaotic, is trying to impose some sense of unity and order. We will try to determine how each poet creates a self and its sense of order and unity through his or her poetry.
Two papers and a final exam, plus participation in class discussion, will determine your grade.
ENGL-269-01 - Special Topics in Film
P. Young
TR - 9:35-10:50 p.m.
Topic: Hitchcock in England and America
Well known as “The Master of Suspense” thanks to his television programs and persistently popular films like North By Northwest and Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s early career as England’s most acclaimed and innovative filmmaker is more obscure to American spectators. This course examines important Hitchcock films produced on both shores, with three main critical approaches to guide us:
1. Hitchcock as technician and innovator in film form, style, and narration;
2. Hitchcock as a director-artist?an auteur?whose thematic and aesthetic concerns unify his films; and
3. Hitchcock’s films as a set of cultural documents?lenses through which we might understand both British and American history and culture in a new light.
Critical and theoretical texts on Hitchcock (including historical, ideological, and feminist interpretations of his work) will be read and discussed along with the films.
ENGL-269-02 - Special Topics in Film
S. Girgus / K. Conkwright
T 1:10-4:00
Topic: Documentary Vanderbilt
Students will make a documentary about Vanderbilt as part of a study of both documentary film and the university. The course will have multiple objectives: the study of documentary as a cinematic and cultural form; learning documentary production; examining Vanderbilt as a university and community; encouraging student involvement in university affairs and development. The course will up-date a previous project, In Loco Amicis: The New Vanderbilt Story, a student-made film about Vanderbilt that was screened in 2004 at the Nashville Film Festival.
Students interested in the course should speak to the instructor before registration.
The course will study documentary film as an artistic and cultural form for representing, recording, and interpreting modern experience. Braced between classic documentary realism and fiction, documentary examines history and culture. The course will consider the history of theories and practices of documentary in America as well as in other countries and cultures. Documentary films will be studied and analyzed throughout the course, while students will be encouraged to develop a documentary sensibility and way of thinking for conceptualizing, organizing, and articulating ideas and information.
This semester, “Documentary Vanderbilt” will be team taught with Kathy Conkwright, Nashville Public Television documentary producer and Vanderbilt film instructor.
ENGL-272-01 - Movements in Literature
C. Tichi
TR - 1:10-2:25 p.m.
Topic: The Guilded Age
NOTE: Counts as departmental honors seminar; a 3.25 cumulative GPA is required.
ENGL 272-02 - Movements in Literature
M. Jarman
TR 2:35-3:50
Topic: From Frost to Dove; Storytelling in American Verse
This course will examine a vital but undervalued strain of American poetry: short and long poems that tell stories. Modernism had little use for the apparent linearity of narration in poetry, associating it with the epic attempts of Tennyson and Longfellow during the 19th century. And yet modern American poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and Robinson Jeffers wrote storytelling verse of various lengths, from Robinson's sonnets to Jeffers's book-length poems, and some of these were enormously popular in their day. Although narrative continued to crop up throughout the middle decades of the century, in the work of poets like Robert Penn Warren and Gwendolyn Brooks, the most exciting experimentation with the form has occurred in the last two decades by such contemporary practitioners as Kate Daniels in Four Testimonies, Rita Dove in Thomas and Beulah, and Andrew Hudgins in After the Lost War. We will attempt to understand the narrative tradition in American poetry as it grows out of the 19th century, encounters Modernism, goes underground, and enjoys a revival at the end of the 20th century. Our texts will include some of those mentioned above, plus selections from Robinson, Frost, Jeffers, Robert Penn Warren, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.
Two papers and a final exam, plus participation in class discussion, will determine your grade.
ENGL-272-03 - Movements in Literature
M. Kreyling
TR - 11:00-12:15 p.m.
Topic: The 1960s: Cultures of Dissent
Before “The Greatest Generation” got its name, before the “heroes,”
there was the sixties: the generation that caused all the problems, or
the generation that had all the fun. “I’m not going to try to describe
to you what it felt like in those days,” says private detective V. I.
Warshawsky to an older cop in Sara Paretsky’s novel Killing Orders
(1985), “you don’t have much sympathy for the causes that consumed us.
I think sometimes that I’ll never feel so -- so alive again.” (105-06)
OK: you’ve heard enough from the sixties geezers about how it was the
best of times. This course attempts a dispassionate investigation into
the “causes” (anti-war and civil rights movements), the “us’s” (the
identity groups and subcultures formed in the 1960s), and the styles of
self-consumption (music, organizing, dropping out). The field for study
is wide and deep: films such as The Graduate, novels such as One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, manifestoes such as The Port Huron Statement
and the conservative response The Sharon Statement, memoirs from the
Left by Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden, and others, and from the Right by
William F. Buckley and others; memoirs of the Civil Rights movement by
Anne Moody, John Lewis, and others; of course, Dylan, Hendrix, Janis
Joplin, The Beatles, The Beach Boys; new journalism by Joan Didion and
Hunter S. Thompson; and Charles Manson and his “family.” Depending on
the enrollment numbers, this class will either be a seminar format (if
numbers are low) or lecture/discussion (if they are high). Requirements
will differ depending on the outcome of registration. Whatever that
outcome, expect to write and talk -- which is what the 60’s generation
did a lot of.
ENGL 272 - 04 Movements in Literature: Utopian Fictions
J. Kasibhatla
MWF 2:10-3:00 BT 205
In this course, we will move across literary genres and periods to develop a genealogy of the concept of utopia in literature. This course is organized into three sections that correspond to the guiding themes of the course: the concept of territory, the construction of social personhood and the idea of the body in the political imagination. In the first section, entitled “A New World Order,” we will consider how the tropes of discovery and the conquest of “new” lands function in narratives of utopia. In the second section, entitled “Citizen Satirist,” we will focus on the ways in which satire is an expression of citizenship. In the final section, “The Body Politic” we will explore how utopian fictions imagine the body as a locus of change and as a symbol of emancipation. We will ask how notions of gender, race and sexuality operate in conceptions of the body in each of the narratives. Throughout the course, we will focus on understanding the generic conventions of each of the texts we study, and relate the concept of genre to the project of thinking beyond the present. Students who take this course will become familiar with the philosophical foundations of utopian literature and will also develop a strong foundation in the study of genre. The requirements for the course include: 3 essays (5-7pgs), 1 in-class presentation and regular class participation. Texts include: Plato’s Republic,Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest,, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
ENGL-272E-01 - Movements in Literature
K. Schwarz
TR - 1:10-2:25 p.m.
In this course we will consider the presence of revenge—what Francis
Bacon calls "a kind of wild justice"—in Renaissance drama. We will
discuss the structure of revenge not only within the limits of tragedy,
but as it influences such other genres as comedy and romance, using the
figure of the revenger to address a range of dramatic and historical
issues. These issues will include the function of the body as an agent
and a victim of violence, representations of sexuality and gender
roles, the implications of revenge for the political state, and the
connections between revenge and other kinds of physical, erotic, or
social transgression. Our discussion will give particular attention to
questions of violence, gender, and agency; the role of the victim as
motive and as ghost; and the relationship between revenge and
theatricality. Readings may include Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Marlowe,
The Jew of Malta; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Jonson, Volpone;
Middleton/Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy; Heywood, A Woman Killed
With Kindness; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; Middleton, The
Changeling; Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Requirements: participation,
presentation, paper related to presentation, and final paper.
ENGL-272G-01 - Movements in Literature
T. Chen
MWF - 1:10-2:00 p.m.
Topic: Ethnic American Literature: Fantasy and Phantasms
Critic Kathleen Brogan has written that “[l]ike history, ghost stories attempt to bring the dead back to life.” This class will examine the validity of this assertion by looking at the specters that haunt contemporary Ethnic American literary production and by theorizing the ways in which the texts themselves haunt the landscape of American history and culture. We will investigate the different shapes that ghosts assume in Ethnic American literary texts and speculate about the issues—of storytelling and history, of survival and death, of trauma and mourning, of cultural loss and cultural translation—such phantasmic presences mark. As part of our work in this class, we will study rituals by which ghosts are summoned: the collective efforts of the Ghost Dance, the shamanistic invocation of spirits, the textual call for ancestral help. Additionally, we will consider the ways in which the ghosts in contemporary Ethnic American literature signify both fragmentation—of identity, history, culture—and a fantasy of wholeness.
ENGL-274-02 - Major Figures in Literature
R. Gottfried
MWF - 11:10-12:00 p.m.
Topic: Joyce and Religion
The aim of this course is to read and engage fully Joyce's "Ulysses," one of the best known and best regarded novels of the twentieth century. To that end, we will read some early stories from "Dubliners" as preparation, and then begin a close and detailed reading (and re-reading) of the novel.
The course is intended to be a reading seminar, in which the class, as a group, reads and responds to representative passages. In addition to active participation, there will be two papers (seven pages each) and a brief book report on secondary material.
ENGL-274-03 - Major Figures in Literature
S. Goudie
TR - 1:10-2:25 p.m.
Topic: Melville
In an 1851 letter to his close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Melville writes in melodramatic tones about the ill effects of his
readers and publishers on his literary production: “What I feel most
moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether,
write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all
my books are botches.” What splendid botches! If Melville felt
unappreciated in his own day, in recent times perhaps no single author
has provoked a more lively response from students of nineteenth-century
American literature than Melville. Melville and sentiment; Melville and
gender and sexuality; Melville and race and slavery; Melville and
nation and empire building: these are but a few of the topics
motivating an unprecedented reassessment of Melville’s impressive
corpus. In this seminar, we will read heavily and widely from the early
to the late Melville. Texts we might treat include: Typee, a
fictionalized travel narrative set in the Polynesian islands; short and
long fiction about discipline aboard densely figured merchant and naval
vessels, works like White-Jacket, Bill Budd, Sailor, and—what would a
Melville seminar be without it?!—the hulking Moby-Dick; the novella
“Benito Cereno,” a haunting shadow play about race and slavery; Pierre,
a—for many readers of Melville—seemingly screwy, claustrophobic
experiment with the sentimental novel; Battle-Pieces, a powerful verse
meditation on the Civil War and its aftermath, and several other works.
We will also examine writings authored by Melville’s contemporaries and
by his twentieth-century textual inheritors, including Charles
Johnson’s National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage. As we
proceed, we will attempt to gauge simultaneously Melville’s artistic
achievement and his elaborate inventories of the ways in which
knowledge gets packaged and conveyed in the turbulent American
nineteenth century.
ENGL 274G-01 Major Figures in Literature
T. Goddu
TR 4:00-5:15
Topic: Toni Morrison
This honor’s seminar will examine the works and career of Toni Morrison. Beginning with Morrison’s early novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula, the seminar will move chronologically through Morrison’s oeuvre, focusing especially on her most recent novels, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love. We will also read her children’s literature, non-fiction, and literary criticism. We will be concerned with developing an argument about the particular issues and problems that recur in her works: issues of race, gender, and class, geography and migration, history and memory (to name just a few). We will also use Morrison as a case study of how an author becomes popularized and canonized: how do the professional aspects of a writer’s career affect their writing and its reception? How does winning the Nobel Prize or being chosen for Oprah’s Book Club help to (re)construct Morrison’s stature and her writing?
Students will be expected to read the primary texts with care as well as to attend to the secondary criticism on Toni Morrison. Requirements will consist of several short papers, a group presentation, and a final project.
NOTE: Counts as departmental honors seminar: a 3.25 cumulative GPA is required.
ENGL-277-01 - Asian American Literature
T. Chen
MWF - 11:10-12:00 p.m.
Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature and Culture
This course introduces students to the diversity of Asian American literature while focusing on gender and sexuality as both important thematic preoccupations and categories of inquiry in 20th-century Asian American literary production. The course explores how gender and sexuality have traditionally been used to define Asian American experiences in the U.S., emphasizing the historical contexts delineating such definitions (e.g. immigration restrictions and exclusions creating the phenomena of bachelor societies and picture brides) as well as surveying popular sexual stereotypes of Asian Americans. Also, this course will examine the ways in which Asian American writers deal with the effects of such representation by focusing on gender and sexuality as categories of anxiety, revision and critique.
ENGL-278-01 - Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature
L. Marcus
MWF - 2:10-3:00 p.m.
This course will consider key works in English from the Indian
sub-continent from before, during, and after the movement for Indian
and Pakistani independence. We will concentrate on novels that analyze
the role of Gandhi—both positive and negative--and the Partition of
India. Along the way we will consider some of the most fascinating and
contested elements of traditional South Asian culture—the caste system,
the role of women, and the relationships between Hindus and Muslims.
Works to be included are Satthianandhan, Kamala: The Story of a Hindu
Child-Wife; Tagore, The Home and the World; Gandhi, Experiments with
Truth; Anand, Untouchable; Narayan, Waiting for the Mahatma, Rushdie,
Midnight’s Children (selections); Roy, The God of Small Things; and
Suri, The Death of Vishnu.
ENGL-282-01 - Bible in Literature
J. Plummer
TR - 1:10-2:25 p.m.
A look at the great variety of ways the Bible and biblical imagery have
functioned in literature and the plastic arts, in both "high culture"
and popular culture, from Old English poems to modern poetry, drama,
fiction, film, cartoons, and political rhetoric. We will read some of
the most influential biblical texts and a broad selection of literary
texts drawn from all genres and periods of English literature.
ENGL 287 - 01 - Special Topics: Investigative Journalism in America
Joseph T. Hallinan
Alternate Fridays (beginning January 13, 2006) 1:00-3:00 p.m. Duncan Library, Benson Hall room 329
1 credit hour (limit: 12 students)
Traditions and practice of investigative writing. Students will explore the techniques and concepts of the detective work that is fundamental to investigative journalism--and gain skills in the narrative writing of investigative news stories. Readings will include books, newspaper, and magazine articles by major investigative writers. This course will be taught by Joseph T. Hallinan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the "Wall Street Journal" and author of the book, "Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation."
ENGL-288-01 - Special Topics in English and American Literature
D. Nabers
MWF - 2:10-3:00 p.m.
Topic: American Narrative: Hollywood Fiction and Film: 1929 to the Present
NOTE: Counts as departmental honors seminar; a 3.25 cumulative GPA is required.
ENGL-288-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature
N. Reisman
TR 11:00-12:15
Topic: Story Borders and Border-Crossings: Forms of Prose Fiction
What are the possibilities and boundaries of flash fiction? Short stories? Novels? Novellas? What impulses and techniques does fiction share with poetry, memoir, drama, film, or other arts? In this course, we'll investigate the internal workings of fiction by a number of contemporary writers and consider a range of artistic impulses. How do different writers represent time, consciousness, or perception? We'll explore prose fiction architecture, narrative tensions, narrative authority, characterization, the integration of lyricism and storytelling, as well as ways contemporary fiction writers claim received forms or re-invent them. This course is designed especially for emerging fiction writers and for literature students interested in the art of fiction writing. Work for the course will include a few brief creative pieces, in addition to short discussion papers and longer projects.
ENGL 288G-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature
S. Salvant
MWF 10:10-11:00
Topic: African American Autobiography
Issues of memory, experience, embodiment, trauma, identity, and narrative will be considered in our study of the representation, performance, and development of the self in autobiographies and autobiographical fictions by African American writers. Readings (subject to change) by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Julia Foote, Richard Wright,
Malcolm X, Jamaica Kincaid, James Weldon Johnson.
ENGL-290B-01 - Honors Colloquium
M. Schoenfield
W 12:00-2:00
In consultation with an individual advisor as well as the course instructor, each student designs, researches, and writes a thesis on an individually selected subject. Throughout the semester, students work in independent reading groups and tutorials in which they help one another with brainstorming, editing, and other aspects of the writing process. After submitting the penultimate draft of the thesis, usually between 40-80 pages, the honors candidates participate in oral exams tailored to their specific subjects. Each completed, bound thesis is presented to the English department where it is publicly available.
Open only to those students who competed 290A; does not count toward the major, but required for Honors or High Honors in English.
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