ENGL 205-01. Advanced Fiction Workshop
Earley, T.
M 3:10-6:00

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.

ENGl 205-02. Advanced Fiction Workshop
Reisman, N.
T 3:10-6:00

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.

This course is designed to help experienced writers refine both their own aesthetics and their understanding of fiction's possibilities. We'll focus on literary fiction, primarily but not exclusively on short forms (we’ll also discuss approaches to novel writing), and examine how published writers and workshop member define ‘story’.  The heart of the course is the workshop, the development of your original fiction, and your exploration of new territory in form and subject. Our readings will be drawn from  international contemporary authors and essayists, and we’ll look closely at the way time, space, and perception can operate in fiction. The workshop will focus primarily on realist modes (extending to surrealism and magical realism), and we’ll also consider how work in other art forms might illuminate or inform our visions of fiction writing.  Previous experience with creative writing required;  fiction workshop experience highly recommended. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission. In late December or early January, I’ll contact interested students regarding submission of a brief writing sample.

ENGL 207-01. Advanced Poetry Workshop
Hilles, R.
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.

ENGL 208B-01. Representative British Writers
Gottfried, R.
MWF 9:10-10:00

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 209B-01. Shakespeare
Marcus, L.
MWF 10:10-11:00

This course considers approximately ten plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist?mostly tragedies and romances. Plays to be taught this semester will probably include Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Shakespeare started out as a humble actor.  He was a man of the theater who wrote for the theater. Major emphasis will be placed on plays in performance. Frequent DVD and VHS clips will be shown in class,  and students will be issued DVDs of several of the tragedies, so that they can view them in connection with our discussions of the plays in class.

ENGL 210-01. Shakespeare: Representative Selections
Enterline, L.
TR 2:25-3:50

NOTE: Counts as Department Honors Seminar.  A 3.25 cumulativeGPA is required.

Description forthcoming.

ENGL 212-01. Southern Literature
Kreyling, M.
TR 2:35-3:50

The premise of the course for this semester is that two decades of the 20th century, the 1930s and the 1960s, hold most if not all of what we need to know about the themes, authors, genres, and issues defining the larger topic, Southern Literature.

Readings (depending on availability) for the 1930s will include essays from the Agrarian manifesto I'LL TAKE MY STAND, Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, Zora Neale Hurston's THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, Faulkner's SANCTUARY and Erskine Caldwell's TOBACCO ROAD.

Readings for the 1960s will include Faulkner's THE RIEVERS,  Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, James Dickey's BUCKDANCER'S CHOICE (poems) and DELIVERANCE, Reyonolds Price's A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE.

To fill in the gaps we could use an anthology: A MODERN SOUTHERN READER, eds. Forkner and Samway.

Expect to take a final exam; to compile an annotated bibliography on the significant "soutnerness" of one of the two decades; and to write a critical essay based on a text or topic in the other decade.

ENGL 221-01. Medieval Literature
Plummer, J.
TR 9:35-10:50

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 230-01. The Eighteenth-Century Novel
Lamb, J.
TR 1:10-2:25

How an individual came to own things, ie made a property of portions of the material world, was a question which occupied theorists of civil society at the end of the 17th century. The word ‘own’ comprised the holding of the things and the account given of how they were held and had been obtained. We shall be looking at some key theoretical statements about owning, and then we shall read some poetry, plays and novels that both represent the acquisition of property as well as demonstrating the narrative possibilities of owning.

ENGL 232A-01. Twentieth-Century Novel
Young, P.
TR 9:35-10:50

ENGL 233-01. The Modern British Novel
Halperin, J.
MW 2:35-3:50
 
Authors studied in this course will be chosen from among the following:  Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, W. Somerset Maugham, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, and Kingsley Amis.  The course will focus on cultural, historical, and biographical backgrounds in an attempt to define Modernism; NO THEORY.  There will probably be two short (around six pages, depending on the size of the class) papers and a take-home final examination.  Discussion rather than lecture format.

ENGL 246-01. Feminist Theory
Kasibhatla, J.
MWF 2:10-3:00

Although feminist theory began as a study of women’s oppression it has developed into a method for studying the interrelatedness of gender, class, race and sexuality. In this course we will trace the key debates in feminist theory that place questions of gender in global perspective. We begin by analyzing the role of feminist theory in debates about U.S. multiculturalism. We then consider how feminists have responded to shifting patterns of migration, economic and political forms of globalization, and the impact of economic development on the environment. We will trace the differences between local and global feminist agendas, asking how feminism(s) might clash at some points and converge in others. Students who take this course will analyze the political, economic, and cultural forces that influence the terms of feminist debate both within and beyond the U.S./European context.

ENGL 252A-01. Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
Orr, B.
MW 11:00 - 12:15

This course will explore the pervasive performativity and theatricalization of  eighteenth-century culture, the period in which celebrities first appear as an ornament to a developing commercial society.  We shall read plays by Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve; essays by Shaftsbury, Addison, Steele and Johnson; novels by Defoe, Sterne and Burney and poetry by Swift and Pope.  We shall also examine the spectacular careers of a highwayman (Wild), an actor/manager (Garrick), an actress (Siddons) and a pair of scandalous aristocrats (Beckford and the Duchess of Devonshire).

ENGL 260-01. Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
Dicker, R.
MW 1:10-2:25

ENGL 266-01. Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Levy, E.
MW 1:10-2:25

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were radicals, in life as in art, and yet they were also the founders of a poetic tradition. They seemed to come out of nowhere, yet were also very much of their time. We will explore the paradoxical character of these two American originals through our reading of their poems and prose. We will also take a look at some of the writers who influenced them, like Emerson and Wordsworth, the poems of their more conventional contemporaries, and finally, read the work of such traditionally untraditional heirs of the Dickinson-Whitman line as Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Lorine Niedecker, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Sylvia Plath.

ENGL 271-01. Caribbean Literature
Goudie, S.
MWF 2:10-3:00

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-03. Movements in Literature: English Reformation Literature
Moore, R.
MWF 1:10-2:00

The transformation of England from a Catholic to a Protestant nation was, to say the least, a disruptive phenomenon.  Monks and nuns were cast out of their monasteries, Catholic and Protestant martyrs suffered public tortures and executions, and Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament.  Religious enmities ran high, and intolerance was the order of the day.  In this course, we will analyze the impact of the English Reformation on the literature of early-modern England.  We will begin with two early texts (Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man) to explore competing sixteenth-century versions of how a “reformed” world might look.  We will then study a series of anti-Catholic dialogues, lampoons, and satires (including works by John Bale, Richard Weaver, Robert Crowley, William Baldwin and the mysterious “Luke Shepherd”) as well as Catholic writings against Protestantism.  Religious violence and the responses to it will demand much of our attention; we will look carefully at selections from John Foxe’s popular Book of Martyrs as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and the literature that emerged after the Gunpowder Plot.  In the last third of class, we will read canonical texts (Book I of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, selections from Sidney’s Defense of Poesy) whose engagement with Reformation themes and doctrines is significant.  Assignments will include tests, a couple of essays, and a research project. 

ENGL 272E-04. Movements in Literature:
TOPIC: Renaissance Novels: Violence, Sex, and Narrative Experiments
Schwarz, K.
TR 1:10-2:25

Prose fiction was a thriving industry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Authors including Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Mary Wroth, Miguel de Cervantes, and Margaret Cavendish produced works that range in form from pastoral comedy to travel narrative, from utopia to social satire to thinly-veiled sexual exposé.  These works were often wildly popular and sometimes strongly controversial:  Shakespeare based As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale on the writings of Lodge and Greene; Wroth was forced to withdraw her romance Urania from public circulation because it too closely described scandals at court; Cervantes had to contend with a pirated sequel to Don Quixote; Cavendish earned the nickname “Mad Madge”.  Many of the qualities that we think of as postmodern—metaphors that come to life; characters who know they are in books; surreal thought experiments—characterize these early novels, as does a sometimes startling frankness about the relationships among political power, social convention, and erotic desire.  Both formally and thematically these novels are deliberately provocative, continually expanding the boundaries of representation.

 Course requirements include a presentation and related short paper, a longer, research-based paper, and regular class participation.

ENGL 273-02. Problems in Literature: From the Plantation to the Penitentiary:
Interpretation, Literature, and the Law
Dayan, C.
MW 11:10-12:25

This course explores the redefinition of civil life in nineteenth-century America by concentrating on how punishment, prisons, and incapacitation not only became critical to the ideology of democracy and freedom, but also shaped a genealogy of property and possession essential to what Thomas L. Dumm in *Democracy and Punishment* called "the American Project."  We will be expanding our understanding of what constitutes this exclusive locale throughout the semester.

Some of the questions crucial to our investigations follow:  How do narratives of the past get told by law?  How does the mobilization of history trump arguments about justice?  What are the legitimate rigts of te state over the liberty interests of the incarcerated?  What is the relation between the status of criminal as "slave of the state" and slave as property or thing? 
Using primary and secondary historical materials and legal texts, as well as fictional re-enactments of incarceration and criminality, the course will attempt to make sense of the diverse and contradictory images of law that intervene in everyday life, especially its strategies of containment and exclusion.

ENGL 273E-01. Problems in Literature: Shakespearean Sexuality
Schwarz, K.
TR 11:00-12:15

This course will take up the question of sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays.  Sexuality can be understood in a number of ways:  as gendered identity; as erotic desire or choice; as a particular kind of relationship between bodies and the contexts they inhabit.  The issues raised by sexuality are particularly rich and complicated in Shakespearean drama, which is preoccupied with mistaken identities, connections between eroticism and violence, marriage plots, crises of political authority, and self-conscious theatricality.  We will consider the place of sexuality in a range of plays, examining, among other topics, the ways in which that place shifts or remains constant across categories of genre and moments in historical time.  From the clich­és of masculinity and femininity to the biological and social imperatives of reproduction, from the relationship between homoeroticism and heteroeroticism to the intricacies of marriage, sexuality matters in these plays.  Our recurring questions will be why and how.  

Course requirements include a presentation and related short paper, a longer, research-based paper, regular class participation, and acceptable performance on reading quizzes.

ENGL 274-02. Major Figures in Literature: Joyce
Gottfried, R.
MWF 11:10-12:00

NOTE: Counts as Department Honors Seminar.  A 3.25 cumulativeGPA is required.

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 274E-01. Major Figures in Literature: Jane Austen and the Gothic Novel
Halperin, J.
MW 11:10-12:25
 
The course will begin with several late eighteenth-century gothic novels and at least one novel of "sensibility," then move on to Jane Austen's response to these genres--and to other matters--in her six novels, and conclude with some stories by Henry James to see what becomes of the  Gothic at the end of the nineteenth century.  The focus will be on cultural, historical, and biographical backgrounds; NO THEORY.  There will be at least one in-class essay and a take-home final examination; number and length of papers will depend on the size of the class.  Discussion rather than lecture format.

ENGL 275-01. Latino-American Literature
TOPIC: Latino Sleuths
Lopez, L.
TR 2:35-3:50

The course examines a selection of mystery and detective novels by Latino writers as what critic Ralph Rodriguez terms, “reflections not only on criminal mysteries, but also queries into the mystery of identity” for members of the most rapidly growing cultural group in this country.   As readers and critics, we will assume the role of detectives in investigating how Latino authors have employed this genre to comprehend the shifting political, social, and cultural landscape of our times, as well as interpret evidence of the criminality that pervades the detective novel as a reflection of the alienation, criminalization, and violence surrounding Latinos in both urban and rural environments.  Literary models by authors such as Rolando Hinojosa, Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, and Michael Nava will be placed within a cultural and historical context in order to provide a sense of the continuities of American literature within the genre.

ENGL 278-01. Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature
Kasibhatla, J.
MWF 10:10-11:00

How do writers of fiction engage with the problems of politics and how do they understand the relation between literature and political activism? We will explore this question by reading a body of texts that represent the complex conditions of colonialism and its aftermath, known as “postcolonial literature.” Because conditions of colonialism vary greatly by region, we will combine our reading of literary texts with a rigorous study of the historical background out of which the texts emerge. We will ask the following questions: in what ways does literature construct or dismantle notions of national identity? How do fictional texts represent history? What is the relationship, if any, between the formal qualities of a text and its conception of politics or political struggle? What are the advantages or disadvantages of using an aesthetic medium to pose political questions? Readings may include works by: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, Amos Tutuola, Buchi Emecheta, Michael Ondaatje, Nawal el Saadawi, Naguib Mahfouz.

ENGL 280G-01. Workshop in English and American Literature
TOPIC:  Crossing Cultural Borders
Bell, V. & Messier, R.
TR 11:00-12:15

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 287-01. Investigative Writing America
Rawls, W.
T 3:10-5:00

"Vanderbilt Register" article about Wendell L. Rawls

ENGL 288-01. Special Topics in English and American Literature
TOPIC: Metamorphosis
Lamb, J.
TR 9:35-10:50

The problem of change, whether it is change for the better or for the worse, and what precipitates it, and whether it is to be encouraged or deprecated, have occupied writers such as Ovid, Apuleius, Spenser and Kafka. We shall read them, and some others, and consider the nature of change: how radical and irreversible it may be under certain circumstances; how beneficial in some respects, and in others how uncomfortable or terrifying.

ENGL 288-02. Special Topics in English and American Literature
TOPIC: Plots and Conspiracies
Tichi, C.
TR 2:35-3:50

ENGL 288-03.  Special Topics in English and American Literature
TOPIC:  The Country Song Encountered: a lyrical perspective.
Randall, Alice
W 4:10 - 7:00

 

A survey of the themes and strategies evident in country song lyrics. Each week the class will explore a group of country songs centering around a specific theme. We will seek to develop a heightened awareness of the language and signficance of the country song lyric. Topics to be considered will include: How does the country song lyric enhance our understanding of the South? Of America? Of feminism? Of work? Of modernization? Of friendship? Of marriage? Of family? Of violence in families? Of class in America? Can a Country Song lyric be recognized as  ?country? typed on a page? What are the dominant rhetorical strategies of the genre? Who are the acclaimed writers of the genre? What are the most acclaimed works?  Extensive listening required. Final project.

ENGL 290B-01. Honors Thesis
Schoenfield, M.
M 12:10-2:00

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.