ENGL 100 - 01
Composition
Harris, J.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
For students who need to improve their writing. Emphasis on writing skills, with some analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 100 - 03
Composition
McColl, K.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
For students who need to improve their writing. Emphasis on writing skills, with some analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 100 - 04
Composition
"Forging" Collective Identities
Nessler, M.
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
This composition course will examine the relationship between rhetoric and individuals' relationships with and manipulations of/by larger social groups. During the semester, we will examine different kinds of social groups, including, but not limited to, families, reenactment troupes, and nations.
ENGL 100 - 05
Composition
Childress, S.
TR 1:10 - 2:25
For students who need to improve their writing. Emphasis on writing skills, with some analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 01
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Morrell, J.
MWF 8:10 - 9:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 03
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"Images of Self in African American Literature"
Birdsong, D.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
This particular 102 course will focus on the poetry, prose, and drama of African American literature. We will look at pieces from a wide range of historical periods, but will focus on the themes that, for the most part, seem endemic to this genre of literature, including, but not limited to: the politics of self-representation, the cultural work of social/racial equality, women's and gender roles (as defined by the culture within and the culture without), and issues of class and its effects on the African American community as a whole. You will be expected to write several papers, quizzes and brief reflection writings are also a possibility.
ENGL 102W - 04
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Covington, E.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 05
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"Lost at Sea: Shipwrecks, Castaways, & Other Interrupted Journeys"
Packard, B.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
In this class we will engage a selection of poetry, drama, and long and short fiction, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, through the common link of shipwrecks, castaways, and other ocean disasters. It is discussion-based and aims to increase writing comfort and capability through reading and writing about literature. Among the questions and concerns we will encounter are the following: Does the isolation of being shipwrecked change people for the better, or does it bring out the worst in us? Can castaways create a better world than the one they left behind, or do they make the same mistakes? Why do castaways often end up writing their life stories? If stripped of all of the stuff we use every day, how would we mentally and physically survive? Why do we find cannibalism so repulsive? Other authors and texts include: S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
ENGL 102W - 06
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"For Love or Money: The Intersection of Financial and Affective Economies"
Meadows, E.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
The objective of this course is to develop critical thinking and writing skills by exploring the intertwined themes of love and money in literature from the early modern period to the late twentieth century. Texts include The Merchant of Venice, Pride and Prejudice, “Goblin Market,” Doctor Thorne, and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
ENGL 102W - 07
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Hines, E.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 08
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Staff
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 09
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Chuang, A.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 10
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Haynes, J.
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 11
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Warren, M.
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 12
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"Literature of the Arctic"
Spoth, D.
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
This class will examine the historical literary tradition in the circumpolar region (most prominently Alaska and Northern Canada) as well as some examples of contemporary writing. We will focus on such issues as environmentalism, wilderness survival, representations of the North in popular media, how to survive bear attacks, and the ever-present possibility of freezing to death.
ENGL 102W - 14
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Krause, J.
MWF 12:10 - 1:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 15
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"Negotiating Social Prides and Prejudices"
Neckles, C.
MWF 1:10 - 2:00
In this section we will examine the ways different authors and filmmakers use quarreling romantic couples to focus a wide variety of social critiques and methods of artistic expression. Course texts include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Film screenings will include The Shop Around the Corner and Bride & Prejudice.
As this is an introductory writing course, course assignments will ask you to combine detailed literary analysis with powerful academic argumentation; coursework is designed to help you develop both skills. To tie the two aims of our class together, we will discuss how the romantic quarrels that anchor our course texts both reflect and depart from the types of arguments we make in academic writing.
ENGL 102W - 16
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Thompson-Spires, N.
MWF 2:10 - 3:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 17
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Rejack, B.
MWF 2:10 - 3:00
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 19
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Kersh, S.
TR 8:10 - 9:25
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 20
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"Garden States"
Hagood, A.
TR 8:10 - 9:25
In this course, we will explore some of the imaginative spaces opened by the idea of the garden in literature. We will then put these thoughts into practice through expository and creative writing exercises, and with field trips to a local community gardening initiative.
ENGL 102W - 21
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
Baca, B.
TR 9:35 - 10:50
An examination of literary themes through a variety of genres: fiction, drama, poetry; close analysis of modern nonfiction writing.
ENGL 102W - 22
Literary Themes, Forms and Techniques
"Imaginary Homelands"
Choi, Y.
TR 11:00 - 12:15
This course will examine some key American texts from the nineteenth and twentienth centuries that question what "home" means, where as well as how we locate and define it. We will be using Salman Rushdie's essay "Imaginary Homelands" as a touchstone. Key issues in this course are race, immigration, and displacement as well as the literary forms available for constructing "imaginary homelands."
ENGL 116W - 01
Introduction to Poetry
Staff
MWF 8:10 - 9:00
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication.
ENGL 116W - 02
Introduction to Poetry
Wollaeger, M.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
This writing-intensive course is designed to teach you the skills necessary to read poems with greater understanding and pleasure. These skills will serve you well in any major, as will your growing confidence as a writer of essays; the course is, however, designed to fulfill the gateway requirement to the English major. Beyond the general skills necessary for thorough "close reading" (we'll discuss what that means), this course will also devote attention to the shift from late Victorian poetry (i.e., late nineteenth-century poetry in England) to modern poetry. This will entail some attention to the cultural movement known as modernis (roughly from 1880-1945).
ENGL 116W - 03
Introduction to Poetry
Garcia, H.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
The main goal of English 116W is to provide a foundation for a “close reading” of various types of poems written in different historical periods. This requires that we primarily focus on the elements of poetry--how the parts work together--as a way of learning the necessary skills and terms used to support an academic argument in literary studies. The major premise of this course is that we can only understand the content of a poem (what a poem might “mean”) through an analysis of basic diction, style, and poetic device. Towards this end, the first half of this course will focus on a few selections of poetry per week in order to grasp terms such as rhyme, meter, image, symbol, tone, and persona as well as basic verse forms such as the free verse, ballad, and sonnet. The second half of the course will focus on the theme of “crossing borders” as it appears in the works of Western and non-Western poets. Afterwards, we will spend time studying the career of Julia Alvarez. We will analyze her poems in their published and manuscript version, with special attention to the revision process that is involved in the crafting of poems. By the end of the semester, we will read Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922) with two critical issues in mind: the social, racial, and political implications of the sonnet form and how the collective publication of these sonnets shapes our interpretations.
This course requires heavy participation. There will be two essays (a poem explication and a comparison and contrast), a midterm and cumulative final exam, and one group presentation project.
ENGL 116W - 04
Introduction to Poetry
Jarman, M.
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication.
ENGL 116W - 05
Introduction to Poetry
Garcia, H.
MWF 12:10 - 1:00
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication.
ENGL 116W - 06
Introduction to Poetry
Porter, D.
Wordsworth is famous for saying there is no essential difference between poetry and prose. In this course, we’ll use this claim to begin our exploration of what makes a poem poetic. We’ll begin by reading (aloud!) poems from the Renaissance to the 21st century to develop a vocabulary for analyzing and writing about poetry. As you become familiar with verse forms (sonnet, elegy, ballad, ode, blank verse) and poetic figures, you will hone your skill at close reading and crafting argumentative essays. We’ll also consider questions of imitation, originality, and tradition by examining poems in dialogue--whether these are conversations between contemporaries (like Anne Finch’s “Answer” to Alexander Pope) or modern poets responding their long-dead predecessors. We’ll conclude the course with a discussion of poetry and politics in eighteenth-century satires, WWI poetry by Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot, and the work of Native American poet Simon Ortiz.
ENGL 116W - 07
Introduction to Poetry
Hearn, A.
TR 9:35 - 10:50
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication.
ENGL 116W - 08
Introduction to Poetry
Dayan, C.
TR 11:00 - 12:15
A writing workshop concentrating on the long poem, or modern poetic sequence. We'll read selections from works including Pound's Pisan Cantos; William Carlos Williams, Maximus Poems; Adrienne Rich, Dream of A Common Language; T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets; Jorie Graham, Materialism; and Derek Walcott, Another Life and Schooner Flight.
ENGL 116W - 09
Introduction to Poetry
Bachmann, B.
TR 1:10 - 2:00
Description forthcoming.
ENGL 116W - 10
Introduction to Poetry
Hearn, A.
TR 2:35 - 3:50
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication.
ENGL 116W - 11
Introduction to Poetry
Hearn, A.
TR 4:00 - 5:15
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication
ENGL 117W - 01
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Kim, J.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
Selected critical approaches to literature.
ENGL 117W - 02
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Long, C.
MWF 1:10 - 2:00
"I Hate My Job and Want to Die": White collar office work as seen through the prism of Marxist cultural theory.
ENGL 117W - 03
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Cosner, K.
MWF 3:10 - 4:00
Selected critical approaches to literature.
ENGL 117W - 04
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Cosner, K.
TR 4:00 - 5:15
Selected critical approaches to literature.
ENGL 118w - 01
Literary and Cultural Analysis
Topic: Medicine & Literature
McBay, M.
MWF 8:10-9:00
The course has three main foci, each explored through literature: Writing, cultural analysis and medicine (including the notion of ‘medical culture’.) “Literature” is construed to mean any published literary quality writing, including fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Thus, writings from both famous authors and medical professionals are taken under consideration for their literary and cultural significance. Medicine, through these genres, is explored from the perspective of human meaning, ethical relationships, health and power, and literary intrigue.
Students are introduced to Cultural Analysis and learn its specific uses as a form of literary criticism. Cultural analysis is also explored as a meta-theory through which medical culture may be viewed in comparison and contrast to other professional and cultural groups.
Finally, writing about literature is viewed as a specific writing methodology. Creativity in textual interpretation is encouraged and framed within the evidence of the text under study, as well as within the larger body of available literary criticism regarding specific authors and texts undertaken. Cultural criticism is brought to bear in each writing assignment, in a variety of ways.
ENGL 118W - 02
Literary and Cultural Analysis
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
Kinard, A.
ENGL 118W - 03
Literary and Cultural Analysis
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
Kim, J.
ENGL 118W - 04
Literary and Cultural Analysis
MWF 1:10 - 2:00
Clement, J.
ENGL 118W - 05
Literary and Cultural Analysis
Topic: "Medicine and Literature"
MWF 2:10 - 3:00
McBay, M.
The course has three main foci, each explored through literature: Writing, cultural analysis and medicine (including the notion of ‘medical culture’.) “Literature” is construed to mean any published literary quality writing, including fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Thus, writings from both famous authors and medical professionals are taken under consideration for their literary and cultural significance. Medicine, through these genres, is explored from the perspective of human meaning, ethical relationships, health and power, and literary intrigue.
Students are introduced to Cultural Analysis and learn its specific uses as a form of literary criticism. Cultural analysis is also explored as a meta-theory through which medical culture may be viewed in comparison and contrast to other professional and cultural groups.
Finally, writing about literature is viewed as a specific writing methodology. Creativity in textual interpretation is encouraged and framed within the evidence of the text under study, as well as within the larger body of available literary criticism regarding specific authors and texts undertaken. Cultural criticism is brought to bear in each writing assignment, in a variety of ways.
ENGL 118W - 06
Literary and Cultural Analysis
"Jazz Literature"
Meyer, A.
TR 8:10 - 9:25
An examination of the intersection of two forms of artistic expression, jazz music and literature, this course will provide both a history of jazz and a look at how American writers have responded to that music in their texts, either through depictions of particular jazz musicians or the jazz milieu, or through their attempts to emulate some of the properties of jazz in their writings. We will examine poems, short stories, novels, and even writings by jazz musicians themselves.
ENGL 118W - 07
Literary and Cultural Analysis
"Thresholds—Mixed Race Memoir & Autobiography in American Literature"
TR 9:35 - 10:50
McBay, M.
For many mixed race authors, historical narrative as regards “the mulatto” has been a source and reflection of social damage. By way of reading both “damaged” narrative and the recovering narratives of mixed race authors in American literature, we will observe the social construction of race, alongside a specific set of challenging voices—the voices of mixed race authors—made accessible through memoir and autobiography.
The course design presumes the “truth” of narrative repair—the idea, simply stated, that literature and thus writing can be a form of healing for both individuals and groups (Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities: Narrative Repair). In order to engage cultural analyses at the level of social repair, we will examine (1) the philosophical works of mixed race authors forced to assume one racial identity, both Black and “passing for White”; (2) the stereotyping of the “mulatto” in American fiction, (3) short stories in which mixed race society is featured as “problematic” to the racial identity of others; and finally, (4) upon the ground breaking memoirs of authors seeking to claim “privilege” and recognition in all the races of their heritage and/or as a new race. We will closely read/view works from non-fiction, fiction, drama, docu-drama and poetry—all as a means for reading mixed race memoir and autobiography in context.
Students’ writing requirements will include writing one’s own memoir of race—incorporating the literature studied in class, along with individual research pertinent to their personal areas of literary interest. Interdisciplinary research is strongly encouraged. One does not have to be mixed race in order to gain important literary and social meanings from the course reading and writing assignments. The course is open to all with this caveat: one must submit to the rules of diplomatic discourse. “Peer review” will be limited to issues of conceptual clarity.
ENGL 118W - 08
Literary and Cultural Analysis
Chen, T.
TR 11:00 - 12:15
This cultural studies course has two goals: 1) to examine how witchery functions as a mark of racial and sexual difference in American literary and cultural representations of women and 2) to review and consolidate writing skills. Utilizing such diverse texts as religious and political tracts, fairy tales, legends, short stories, films, plays, and novels, the course will interrogate the figure of the woman as witch and uncover the multiple cultural representations wherein the witch embodies those issues of blood, race, destiny, development, and difference that have proven formative in the making of American literature and culture. The course identifies various incarnations of the witch—the bewitching seductress; the Devil-worshipper; the conjure woman; the wise woman; the healer—and investigates the historical and social contexts that give such incarnations meaning. We will expose the ways in which cultural constructions of the witch reveal discursive and ideological connections between notions of race, sex, and Otherness. Keeping in mind Shakruh Husain’s definition of a witch (“a woman who is true to herself, using her magic and her foresight to maximise [sic] her own experience of life, even if she pays heavily for it in the end”), we will also concentrate on the ways in which contemporary feminist writing refigures the idea of "witch women."
ENGL 118W - 09
Literary and Cultural Analysis
Lopez, L.
TR 1:10 - 2:25
Dorothy Allison writes, “The inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion… to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it.” This course explores the effects of this condition—compounded by challenges imposed by family dysfunction, race, and gender—as a source of adversity and inspiration on women propelled by writing to live beyond their beginnings. In so doing, we will explore a variety of texts by contemporary women writers: memoir, fiction, poetry, and film. In addition to primary texts, we will read and apply essays on feminist theory and articles on social class. Our goal in this course is to apply literary, critical, and cultural texts toward greater understanding of the impact of social class and gender on cultural production and developing into more effective thinkers, readers and writers. (Cross-listed with Women and Gender Studies)
ENGL 118W - 10
Literary and Cultural Analysis
"New Perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance"
Nwankwo, I.
TR 2:35 - 3:50
What is “real” Black culture? Is it the culture of the everyday people or that of the “talented tenth?” Should only “positive” representations of Black culture and life be publicly aired? Who has the right to decide that and to define a “positive” image? What did Harlem Renaissance era writers, musicians, and intellectuals have to say about these issues? How were their views similar to or different from those of the average African American or even from each other? Are their views still valid today? Do and did Black writers and thinkers from other countries share those perceptions?
In this course, we will gain new perspectives on this distinctive era often thought to be one of the most pivotal in the American cultural history. During this period, young Black writers, musicians, workers, and soldiers from New York as well as from the U.S. South and the Caribbean, many calling themselves “New Negroes,” birthed exciting innovations in literature, popular music, film, dance, business, and politics. They showed and showed off what they viewed as the inherent richness and modernity of their cultures. As they did so, they asked key questions about how Black culture should be understood and should be presented in the public sphere.
By closely examining key literary texts, songs, films, newspapers, and other direct-from-the-source materials from this era, we will explore these questions and gain insight into these new ideas about Black culture and identity as well as into their impact on and relevance for today’s debates about cultural authenticity, about popular culture and whether it advances or hinders political progress, and about the relationship between African American culture, in particular, and American culture, more broadly.
The course is structured both to guide you though the development of your own intellectual/research agenda in this area, and to provide you with opportunities to try out and showcase the results of your efforts. Reading/Listening/Viewing List includes: Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Caribbean Calypso music by Atilla the Hun and Roaring Lion, Paul Robeson in Emperor Jones; Assignments to include: Periodic close readings and research reviews; Presentation/Discussion Leading; Final Research Project/Paper
ENGL 118W - 11
Literary and Cultural Analysis
Schwarz, K.
TR 2:35 - 3:50
ENGL 118W - 12
Literary and Cultural Analysis
Orange, T.
TR 4:00 - 5:15
ENGL 120W - 01
Intermediate Compositon
Staff
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
ENGL 120W - 02
Intermediate Composition
Hoffer-Wood, L.
TR 2:35 - 3:50
ENGL 122 - 01
Beginning Fiction Workshop
Earley, T.
TR 4:00 - 5:15
Introduction to the art of writing prose fiction.
ENGL 122 - 02
Beginning Fiction Workshop
Randall, A.
W 9:10 - 12:00
Are you a writer? Would you like to be? What is it like to write creative short fiction? What invites your muse to your shoulder? How does structure serve inspiration? What themes most deeply concern you as a writer of fiction? What is the character of your writing voice? Would you like the opportunity to schedule the writing of creative fiction into your day? Would you like to be introduced to some of the basic theory regarding writing strategies and techniques? Would you like to read some masterpieces of short fiction with the eyes of an aspiring writer? Would you like to have available to you a trustworthy group of thoughtful readers who are committed to reading and commenting upon the fiction you create? Would you like to work with a novelist with a taste for high and low culture? Are you ready to be respectful of and engaged with your own creations and respectful of and engaged by the creations of the other members of a workshop? If these questions intrigue you welcome to WORKSHOP!
This workshop has three specific goals: to help you discover your subject; to help you discover your voice; and to introduce you to the craft of short fiction-- both by reading some of the masters of the art and by reading and discussing theories of structure and technique.
ENGL 123 - 01
Beginning Poetry Workshop
Hilles, R.
M 3:10 - 6:00
Introduction to the art of writing poetry.
ENGL 123 - 03
Beginning Poetry Workshop
Bachmann, B.
TR 9:35 - 10:50
Introduction to the art of writing poetry.
JS 135W - 01
Introduction to Hebrew Literature
Schachter, A.
MW 1:10 - 2:25
A look at the origins and development of Hebrew literature from the environs of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century to post-modern Israeli literature written at the end of the twentieth century. Participants will trace both the developments and disjunctures in this literature history, paying attention to the relationship between historical transformations and literary form.
ENGL 201 - 01
Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Guralnick, P.
W 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 is a workshop on Creative Nonfiction, which revolves around the writing of the participants, with additional readings in work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Stanley Booth, Louis Menand, Jill Lepore, and Wil Haygood.
It will focus in particular on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in the same way that fictional narrative can. This is a workshop in which we are all interdependent on each other's efforts. Three major pieces of 2500-3000 words will be required, along with the possibility of some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the other students' papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. Class participation is the second most important element of the class (after the writing itself), so attendance is of the highest importance. Most of all, the workshop is a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing (irrespective of the level of achievement) should make it engaging -- and fun -- for all. The only prerequisite is a commitment to effort and honest self-expression.
ENGL 205 - 02
Advanced Fiction Workshop
Lopez, L.
T 3:10 - 6:00
Due to limited enrollment, students will be screened during first week of class on the basis of writing samples. Registered students must contact the instructor before the first day of class.
This advanced section of creative writing 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. This course is designed to help students hone skills, such as, but not limited to developing effective characterization, using perspective judiciously and consistently, proportioning summary (exposition) appropriately to scene, developing imagery that resonates metaphorically, as well as selecting and applying significant detail to enhance scene, characterization, 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 closely reading and critiquing work from peers.
ENGL 207 - 01
Advanced Poetry Workshop
Jarman, M.
M 2:10 - 5:00
Admission by consent of instructor. Please submit three samples of your work, i.e. three poems, once you register for the class.
Continuing instruction in poetry writing.
ENGL 208B - 01
Representative British Writers
Gottfried, R.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
From 1660 to the present. Provides a broad background for more specialized courses and is especially useful for students considering advanced studies in literature.
ENGL 209B - 02
Shakespeare
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Garrett, J.
MWF 12:10 - 1:00
Primarily tragedies and romances.
ENGL 210 - 01
Shakespeare: Representative Selections
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Neill, M.
MWF 1:10 - 2:00
Shakespeare: Tragedies
This course is designed to introduce students to the extraordinary range of Shakespeare’s tragic writing, from the bold apprentice-work of Titus and Romeo, through Hamlet and the ‘mature tragedies’, to Anthony and Cleopatra with its unexpected anticipations of the later romances. The restless experimentation that marks the dramatist’s approach to tragedy will serve as a springboard to an investigation of wider issues of genre.
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Coriolanus
Anthony and Cleopatra
[Recommended editions: Oxford Shakespeare (World’s Classics paperbacks) for all texts except King Lear (Arden Shakespeare paperback, ed. R.A. Foakes). Recommended background reading: Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge)]
ENGL 210W - 01
Shakespeare: Representative Selections
"Language, History, Performance"
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Garrett, J.
MWF 3:10 - 4:00
The interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays have evolved significantly during the past thirty years, reflecting developments in the study of literature more broadly. Close attention to the poetic details of his work remains crucial, and the language of his plays will remain at the heart of our interpretative endeavors in this class. We will also examine how literary scholars have redefined the ways in which we treat the historical context of Shakespeare's work, primarily by setting the plays among other historical materials as part of a broader cultural dialogue, rather than regarding history as mere background or source material. And as much as studying the texts of these plays will challenge and stimulate us, they were, after all, intended to be enjoyed in the theater and not just on the page. Questions of performance, specifically an understanding of performances as interpretations of the plays, will provide the third critical component of this course. The past couple decades have witnessed a period of renewed interest in these plays among filmmakers as suitable for mass consumption - which is only fitting since Shakespeare's plays were originally intended for popular appreciation. Since filmmakers employ a distinctive set of strategies to convey meaning, students will study some basic vocabulary of visual analysis from film theory. Texts will likely include Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Twelfth Night, Henry V, Othello, King Lear and The Tempest.
ENGL 211 - 01
Representative American Writers
Meyer, A.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
A historical survey of the main currents in American literature from the pre-colonial period to the present. Students will be exposed to the traditional canon as well as to texts by those who have previously been excluded from that canon, such as female and minority writers. Particular attention will be paid to the idea of "America" and the still-vexing question of who is, and what it means to be, an "American." Class will be conducted in a discussion format; graded work will consist of a series of short response papers, two five-page papers, and two tests.
ENGL 212 - 01
Southern Literature
Kreyling, M.
TR 9:35 - 10:50
I was watching a BBC production of a police crime show set in Edinburgh, and the lead detective, walking into a grim and seedy housing block, paused and cocked an ear. His partner gave him a look. “Thought I heard dueling banjoes,” the Scots cop said. They both smiled. How did an allusion to an American film (Deliverance) based on a novel by James Dickey (a Vanderbilt M.A.) get into a BBC television script set in Scotland in the 21st century? A good question, maybe good enough to work as a plan for this semester’s version of Southern Lit.
So, I’ve put together a reading list of books that, in part or in whole, have supplied our culture “at large” with wisecracks, symbolic moments, signature characters or situations that mean (or meant in years past) "southern.” The envelope please:
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Thomas Dixon, The Clansman, a Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.
William Faulkner, Light in August.
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind.
James Dickey, Deliverance.
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand
Alice Walker, Meridian.
There is a lot of reading here. I will only say in advance that some of these books will not be covered in lecture/discussion word-for-word. As we take up each title, I’ll let the class know how to read selectively, when and if necessary.
Expect to sit for a final exam that will test your ability to recognize allusions to southern lit such as the one I describe in the first paragraph. Expect also to write a couple of critical essays (the topic and approach we can discuss) based on issues that arise in class discussion. These two essays will add up together to about 15 pages of prose.
ENGL 214B - 01
Literature and Intellectual History
"Representing American Slavery"
satisfies ethnic/nonwestern literature requirement for major
Salvant, S.
MWF 1:10 - 2:00
This course considers various literary strategies for representing the historically-important and politically-charged institution of American slavery. We will consider the formal structures and thematic emphases of literary narratives about slavery as well as the politics of these representations. We will compare representations across periods, genres and media as we consider how the various lenses through which the institution is viewed continue to shape our understanding and connection with this era of American history. Readings by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison.
ENGL 221 - 01
Medieval Literature
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
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 exam, a paper of 8-10 pages, and an in-class presentation.
ENGL 230 - 01
18th Century British Novel
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Lamb, J.
MW 1:00 - 2:35
Starting with some ideas of property framed by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, we shall see how property emerges in English literature, particularly the novel, both as a theme and as a new commodity in the literary marketplace: print. We shall consider questions of commodity, value, exchange and consumption. Property also emerges as an articulate first person, having things to say and claims to make, and even giving its own narrative in novels such as Adventures of a Guinea and Adventures of a Hackney Coach. So we’ll be looking also at the possible independence and personality of things, together with the reverse phenomenon, the transformation of human beings into things or animals. Along the way we shall take time to look at pictures of property and things, such as Dutch still life and the satirical work of William Hogarth and James Gillray. Overall the intention will be to expose students to a panorama of an age which witnessed revolutions in the political and artistic spheres over the issue of property, determining the importance of what belongs to us, and how we represent it.
ENGL 232B - 01
20th Century American Novel
"The American Novel in the Latter Half of the 20th Century"
Kreyling, M.
TR 2:35 - 3:50
I’ll present eight novels from that time period, seven of which have in common winning the National Book Award for Fiction. Each one is significant for making a breakthrough (large or small) in the form or content of “The American Novel.” I work from the theory that “the novel,” especially when read in retrospect, is an indispensable chronicle of what happened to us and how we coped with it. And not everything “that happens to us” gets on the news the same day.
Here are the novels:
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus. (1960)
Joyce Carol Oates, them (1970)
Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (1979)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
John Updike, Rabbit is Rich (1982)
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001).
P.S. The eighth novel is Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). If it were a person, it would have grandchildren by now. At the time, it was considered scandalous for its explicit discussion of sexuality.
Format: Lecture with discussion.
Writing: Expect one “medium” length essay (1000-1500 words) in which you situate a novel in its time by using a generous sampling of reviews, and another slightly longer (2000 words min.) using any approach you choose to any of the novels on the reading list. Both probably due in the second half of the semester.
Exam: A final to test recall of information about the novels and basic critical understanding.
ENGL 235 - 01
Contemporary British Literature
Kasibhatla, J.
MW 11:10 - 12:25
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 include texts by the following writers: Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis, Phillip Larkin, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi, Seamus Heaney, Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson.
ENGL 243 - 01
Literature, Science and Technology
"Genetics in Literature and Film"
Clayton, J.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
The revolution in contemporary genetics has generated enormous media attention on topics such as Dolly the cloned sheep; newly discovered genes for breast-cancer, homosexuality, and long life; ecological and religious protests against gene tampering; controversies about evolution; insurance problems arising from genetic screening; the patenting of genes; DNA forensic evidence in criminal cases and paternity suits; the prospect of cloning a wooly mammoth; and eco-terrorism over genetically modified food.
In this course we explore novels, films, and popular cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with these intriguing issues. These texts will come from a number of different genres, including postmodern novels, science fiction movies and novels, advertising, and critical essays on contemporary science, evolution, and medicine.
No expertise in genetics, biology, or evolutionary theory is required. Students will be introduced to the basic concepts of genetics and evolution through science writing by people such as Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, and James Watson, and, as well as in accessible works by some of the pioneers of the new genetics. Novels will include Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Philip Kerr's A Philosophical Investigation, Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf, Zadi Smith's White Teeth, and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.
ENGL 249 - 01
17th Century Literature
“Seventeenth-Century Selves”
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Moore, R.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
In this course we will examine the concept of selfhood in the seventeenth century and will explore the variety of ways in which poets, dramatists, and prose writers attempted to construct a meaningful identity in the face of insistent religious, political and social pressures. The Protestant Reformation brought the concept of the self, both its nature and responsibilities, into sharper focus. The loss of traditional ways of worshiping and thinking in the wake of the Reformation led some in England to exalt the freedom and power of the self, while it led others to experience the self as frail, anxious, and limited; we will see writers on both ends of this spectrum and some who chart a middle way. We will look at the dramas and conflicts that attend the articulation of the self and will pay particular attention to the ways in which these “selves” respond to, and challenge, established authorities. The semester will begin with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, a late sixteenth-century play whose rhetoric of power and transcendence will be repeated and interrogated throughout the seventeenth century. Subsequent readings will include: John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified, and selections from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the poetry of George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. Requirements include two papers, a research project, and a mid-term exam.
ENGL 250 - 01
English Renaissance: Drama
"Tragedies of the English Renaissance"
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Neill, M.
MWF 9:10 - 10:00
This course introduces students to a brilliant selection of tragedies by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The course will have a pronounced theatrical bias, encouraging students to think of the plays as artefacts designed for stages, playing conditions, and acting styles significantly different from those of the modern world.
Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Anon. Arden of Faversham
Marlowe Dr Faustus
The Jew of Malta
Anon. The Revenger's Tragedy
Webster The Duchess of Malfi
Middleton and Rowley The Changeling
Ford ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
[Recommended editions: New Mermaid paperbacks for all texts. Recommended background reading: Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge)]
ENGL 252B - 01
Restoration and the 18th Century
"Literature and Empire"
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Orr, B.
TR 9:35 - 10:50
During the eighteenth century, Britain's literary, theatrical and visual culture developed in tandem with its growing colonial power. In this course, we shall read texts that represented, criticized and celebrated empire and all its epiphenomena: war, trade, slavery, luxury, creolism, nabobry and colonial rebellion. Texts include those authored by writers positioned very differently in relation to colonialism, including spies, slaves and a diplomatic spouse as well as the more predictable journalists and literati.
Readings will include Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, The Recruiting Officer, the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Ignatius Sanchez, Gulliver's Travels, poetry by Pope, Gray, Seward and Wheatley and essays by Addison, Steele and Johnson.
ENGL 254B - 01
The Romantic Period
Porter, D.
MWF 10:10 - 11:00
The Romantic period (1780-1832) witnessed a blossoming of historical consciousness, a newly awakened sense of the importance of the past to both the immediate present and the hoped-for future. From William Wordsworth's probing into his past selves to Walter Scott's gothic mansion filled with ancient relics, "looking back" was a quintessential Romantic activity. In its many forms- historical novels, lyric meditations on childhood, essays devoted to selective remembering and forgetting, poems celebrating classical antiquity, and chivalric romances infused with irony and nostalgia-an engagement with the past saturated the period's literature. This survey of Romantic period literature will take up canonical and lesser-known works to map the effect of thinking historically on literary writing. Through verse and prose by Godwin, Blake, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, John Keats, and Jane Austen, we will explore how literary authors used and abused the "facts" of history, how they envisioned and created personal, national, and global pasts, and where their ideas of history, memory, and individuality converge.
ENGL 256 - 01
Modern British and American Poetry
HONORS
Bell, V.
TR 11:00 - 12:15
“Modern British and American Poetry” in the spring of 2008 will focus on the work of four poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. What holds these otherwise very different poets
together in a package is the fact that they are all philosophical poets in the sense that they focus their thought in their poems on ways of being in the world—ways of being in the world especially once modernity has invaded consciousness and all the stable paradigms have been disrupted. This will be discovered to be true even in poems that don’t at first seem to be philosophical at all, as in this lovely, witty poem of Robert Frost’s called, “The Armful”:
For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns --
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.
Each of the poets will be approached on his own terms. There will be no dominating theme that each poet will be forced to conform to. (Given their differences this wouldn’t work anyway). However, as a general, modernist statement of agenda, this reflection (in a diary) by W. B. Yeats can serve us as a kind of point of departure: “I am always feeling a lack of life’s own values behind my thought. They should have been there before the stream began, before it became necessary to let the work create its values.” The “work” that he is speaking of is the work of the poet (and artist and philosopher). What that work is and how, formally, in each case, it is achieved will be the subject of our analyses and discussions.
Three papers will be required, each a close reading of a substantial poem by one of our four poets: one on a Yeats poem, one on an Eliot poem, and one on a poem by either Frost or Stevens. Some outside reading will be required, as well, most of this biographical. There will be no mid-term, but there will be a final which will have roughly the same weight in the final grade as each of the three papers.
This particular section of 256 is classified as an English Honors course, but anyone who qualifies with the required grade-point average is more than welcome to come in.
ENGL 263 - 01
African American Literature
HONORS
satisfies ethnic/nonwestern literature requirement for major
Baker, H.
TR 1:10 - 2:35
African American and Diaspora Narrative offers a course in development, experimental, expansive, and free flowing. Much of what we accomplish will depend upon the astuteness and energy of group participation as we construct a sui generis view of the creativity of men and women authors of African descent in the African Diaspora. We shall read across genres – autobiography, fiction, social science and social history, biography, and perhaps more. Readings will also range across chronologies from the nineteenth- to the twenty-first century. Authors will include at least the following: Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, Earl Lovelace, Opal Palmer Odisa, Gloria Naylor, John Wideman, Alice Walker, and others. We shall read in criticism, theory, and history. We shall use both documentary and feature film DVDs. There will be individual and collaborative class presentations. A guest lecturer or two will join us to enlarge our fields of knowledge.
ENGL 265 -01
Film and Modernism
Girgus, S.
MWF 2:10 - 3:00
T 4:00 - 6:30 (screenings)
W 6:00 - 8:00 (screenings)
Film originated with the modernist movement and grew to maturity with the great modernists of art, literature, and philosophy. The course will study the structure, aesthetics, and cultural significance of film from the perspective and within the context of the major themes of modernism: the divided self, the break between language and realism, nihilism and the search for belief, narrative space and time in film, ideology and identity, politics and aesthetics, the body and film. Suggested texts will include classic studies of modernism and the modern tradition as well as recent theories of cinema and modernism. We will read these authors in the modern tradition in conjunction with studying the cinema of modernism as seen in the films of Bergman, De Sica, Godard, Truffaut, Bunuel, Ford, Eisenstein, Capra, among others.
ENGL 269 - 01
Special Topics in Film Studies
"Nashville Documentary"
Girgus, S. / Conkwright, K.
T 1:10 - 4:00
T 4:00 - 6:00 (screenings)
W 6:00 - 8:30 (screenings)
Students will make Nashville their laboratory and stage for studying and filming the life and people of the city. They will investigate and research specific problems and issues in the city and the people and groups involved with them. Designed for both beginning and advanced students, the course anticipates the filming and editing of documentaries that will be presented for the university and wider communities at the end of the semester. Such issues as immigration, health care, women, families, education, among others, will be open for study and filming. In their work, students will be encouraged to imagine Nashville as the “City of Dreams” for the people who live and work there. The course is directly related to and supported by a grant called “Filming Nashville: Student Documentaries on People, Life, and Community” that is funded by the Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies. The course and project will include the participation of “com-mentors,” mentors from the community to provide assistance and guidance, as well as documentary professionals to assist in the learning and practice of documentary filmmaking. Guest speakers will address this and other related classes.
ENGL 271 - 01
Caribbean Literature
"Life and Literature in the Caribbean Diaspora"
satisfies ethnic/nonwestern literature requirement for major
Nwankwo, I.
TR 11:00 - 12:15
This course brings together texts produced out of Caribbean communities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Latin America that have their roots in a variety of Caribbean sites including Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Barbados, and Cuba. Our objective is to gain an understanding of the ways in which Caribbean descended writers, filmmakers, and everyday people balance their connections to the Caribbean and to their nation of residence. These communities are the product of the initial migrations/diasporas from Africa to the Caribbean and the diaspora from the Caribbean to North America and the U.K. The resulting identities are therefore a mixture of multiple cultures and affinities. We will, therefore, examine how they represent Caribbean migrants’ approaches to creating and re-creating identities out of, in spite of, and because of multiple migrations and dislocations.
We will explore questions such as: How is home defined? As a place in the Caribbean? As the nation of residence? As an imagined site between the two? Is that site created through memories? Through language? Through return visits? We will also consider what differences their nation of residence makes in their definitions of home and community and what powers or forces at home, in the Caribbean, or abroad, affect this self-definition. These writers and filmmakers (and their characters) as well as everyday people live in the U.S., Canada, England, and Latin America, so they are not just Caribbean but they are also U.S. American, Canadian, British, and Latin American. This means that their identities are at least partially determined by the racial and ethnic infrastructures of the societies in which they live. A person considered "black" in the United States, for example, may not have identified himself as such at home. The class, then, is as much an exploration of Black U.S.ness, Canadianness, Britishness, and Central Americanness as it is of migratory Caribbeanness.
The reading list includes short stories, novels, poetry, and autobiography. Short films and scholarly readings in each unit will introduce you to the key terms, concepts, issues, and methods that will help you to interpret these Caribbean Diasporan texts and experiences. Visits by guest speakers will also supplement our readings. Assignments to include: Periodic close readings; Presentation/Discussion Leading; Midterm Project/Paper; Final Project/Paper
ENGL 272 - 01
Movements in Literature
"Postwar American Poetry"
Mikkelsen, A.
MWF 1:10 - 2:00
William Carlos Williams may be best known as the author of poems such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” (from the 1923 "Spring and All") but his later experimental yet intensely personal aesthetics inspired a wide range of younger American poets, including Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov. This course charts the explosion of post-World-War II American poetry that began with Williams’s "Paterson" (1946-58) and continued in the work of the Confessionals, New York School, Beats, Black Mountain School, and San Francisco Renaissance, continuing into the 60s, 80s, 90s and early 21st century with the emergence of the Black Arts movement, a mainstream lyric tradition, performance poetry, and the LANGUAGE group. Citing Williams as one point of origin, the course will also consider poets working in alternate, parallel poetic traditions that intersect and engage with the work of poets identified with such (often avant-garde) movements. Additional poets will likely include Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, David Antin, and Lyn Hejinian.
ENGL 273 - 02
Problems in Literature
"Memory and Literature"
Schachter, A.
MW 11:00 - 12:25
In this class we will examine literary works whose narratives are influenced by the associative and subjective qualities of memory. Many of the texts that we will read are responses to the major historical crises of Modernity, in particular World War I, World War II, and the Holocaust. We will ask how memory emerges as a narrative mode to represent historical crisis? We will consider different categories of memory, including collective, cultural, and personal. We will also look at how literary memory intersects with multiple genres and mediums, including, memoir, autobiography, photography, and the graphic novel. As we examine memory’s influence on literary form, we will consider whether this influence has fundamentally transformed the relationship between literary representation and historical actuality. Readings will include works by the following writers: Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, Art Spiegelman, Orham Pamuk, Nathalie Sarraute, Virginia Woolf, and David Grossman.
ENGL 273E - 01
Problems in Literature
"Starcrossed Lovers"
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Plummer, J.
TR 11:00 - 12:15
"Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth."
-- A Midsummer Night's Dream
As Lysander in Shakespeare's play claims, literature is filled with unhappy, unlucky, tragic loves. This course will examine some of the most famous of these, and enquire into the varieties of "crossings," or impediments to true love as well as exploring reasons for the popularity of the motif. Some of the literary texts I have in mind to include are these:
Tristan and Isolde (as told by Béroul, Thomas, and Gottfried von Strassburg)
Selections from Malory's Works, especially "The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenevere" and "The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Saunz Guerdon."
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Midsummer Night's Dream.
Versions of the story of Orpheus and Euridice including Ovid's (Metamorphoses), Boethius' (Consolation of Philosophy), the Middle English Sir Orfeo, Cocteau's Orphée [play and film], and the Brazilian film Black Orpheus.
Versions of the story of Abelard and Eloise, including Pope's "Eloïsa to Abelard.
Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses 4).
In addition to the films mentioned above we may view some other films (Casablanca comes to mind) and film/video versions of stage productions of plays, and perhaps view some opera.
The course will probably be small, and I expect to lead discussion more than lecture. I will give quizzes and exams, and require a fairly substantial paper.
ENGL 278 - 01
Colonial and Post-colonial Literature
Kasibhatla, J.
MWF 2:10 - 3:00
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? Readings may include works by: Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, Buchi Emecheta.
ENGL 280G - 01
Workshop in English and History
"Crossing Cultural Borders"
satisfies ethnic/nonwestern literature requirement for major
Bell, V. / Messier, R.
TR 1:10 - 2:00
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. Relevant films (like Lawrence of Arabia) will be viewed and discussed as well. 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. Simple-minded quizzes will be given regularly on your readings for class. 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 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 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 Muslin account of Jesus's crucifixion); Crescent: A Novel by Diana AbuJaber (about Iraqi immigrants in America); poems by Rudyard Kipling; Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (about using western texts in Iran to raise the consciousness of young 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 over property rights); And End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra (a slightly different take on western values from the perspective of modernized Buddhism).
There are numberless options for texts 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 282E - 01
Bible in Literature
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Gottfried, R.
MWF 11:10 - 12:00
An examination of ways in which the Bible and biblical imagery have functioned in literature and fine arts, in both "high culture" and popular culture, from Old English poems to modern poetry, drama, fiction, cartoons, and political rhetoric. Readings include influential biblical texts and a broad selection of literary texts drawn from all genres and periods of English literature.
ENGL 286A - 01
20th Century American Drama
Chen, T.
TR 2:35 - 3:50
This course introduces students to twentieth-century American drama by juxtaposing the theatrical work of canonical American playwrights (Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller) with the dramatic texts of contemporary Ethnic American playwrights and performance artists (Wakako Yamauchi, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, 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 288 - 01
Special Topics in English and American Literature
"Magical Realism"
Kutzinski, V.
T 3:10 - 6:00
Magical realism, also known as marvelous realism, has enjoyed remarkable popularity among writers and readers since the mid-20th century. Before taking hold as a global phenomenon, magical realism was associated primarily with the New World, notably with Latin America and the Caribbean. This seminar explores how novels and short stories in this category play at and with the limits of reason and rationality, suggesting different ways of understanding and ordering our world. Discussion will focus on the following questions: What precisely are the differences between realism and magical realism, and between magical realism and fantasy? Is magical realism a “proper” literary genre? Is it a discourse of escape and of consolation, or of revolutionary change? What are the politics of magic realism when it comes to gender, sexuality, and race? Considering these questions in the context of magical realism’s historical roots will help explain why this form of writing has been so successful. Readings include Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits; Erna Brodber, Louisiana; Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps); William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Carlos Fuentes, Aura; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock; Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist’s Tale; Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. Requirements: weekly 500-word response papers, one 5-page paper, and one 10–12 page paper. All readings will be in English, but anyone who prefers to read the Latin American texts in Spanish may of course do so.
ENGL 288 - 02
Special Topics in English and American Literature
"Questioning Academic Life: Laughter and Responsibility in Fictional and Real Worlds"
Barsky, R.
W 3:10 - 6:00
This course will focus on LAUGHTER, laughing, humor, the belly-bouncing reaction we have to what is funny or odd or unnerving. The literary example we'll be using for our discussion comes from fictional representations of life in the Academy, as portrayed in 20th Century British and American novels, and upon questions concerning the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. On the literary side, students will be treated to the foibles and conquests of professors in literature departments as represented in novels by authors associated with a range of movements, including contemporary feminism, the Angries, the Beat Generation, and the postmodern period, while on the theory end there will be discussions of laughter, politics and literary theory appropriate to the matters raised in the novels.
Readings
Novels:
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, Penguin.
Jane Smiley, Moo, Ivy Books.
David Lodge, Small World. Penguin.
Robert Grudin, Book: A Novel. Penguin, 1992.
Richard Russo, The Straight Man. NY: Random House, 1997.
Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, The Beat Book, Shambhala Pubns, 1999.
Approaches (excerpts from these books will be handed out and discussed in class):
Mikhail Bakhtin, Carnival and Plebian Culture, U of Texas Press.
Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, Black Rose Books Ltd; ISBN: 0921689349
Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture, Vintage Books; ISBN: 0679741011
Assignments:
Participation, including a presentation on material to be discussed that week (accompanied by a brief write-up) 30%.
First paper 30%
Second paper 40 %
Secondary Materials
There is a secondary reading list comprised of photocopied texts and secondary readings, all of which are on reserve in the library. They fall under a range of categories deemed central to the course, and are available for consultation for those interested in broadening their knowledge of particular issues. One primary concern, of course, is laughter, for which a number of texts are recommended.
Laughter:
Breaking up (at) totality : a rhetoric of laughter, by Diane Davis
The senses of humor : self and laughter in modern America, by Daniel Wickberg
Subversive laughter : the liberating power of comedy, by Ron Jenkins
Rabelais and his World, by Mikhail Bakhtin
ENGL 288 - 03
Special Topics in English and American Literature
"Country Music Lyric in American Culture"
Randall, A.
W 4:10 - 7:00
Country music, is it, as I ask in the introduction to My Country Roots, a "hard music for a hard people, or a cliche' music for a sentimental people? Do all country songs sound alike, or is country music as diverse as the nation that birthed it? Three chords and the truth, or reverb, synthesizers, and platitudes? Intricate psychological, social, and political observations, or rants about Mama, Prison, and Work? Racist or class-conscious or both?" Wildly chauvinistic or blatantly feminist?
English 288 is a chance to encounter the Country Song lyric while discoverin
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