| ENGL 110 |
| Creative Writing: Fiction |
| An introduction to fiction writing, critiques of student and professional work. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 111 |
| Creative Writing: Poetry |
| An introduction to the writing of poetry, workshop discussion of poems by students and established poets. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 204 |
| Introduction to American Literature I |
| A survey of literature, written and oral, produced in what is now the United States from the earliest times to around the Civil War. We will examine relationships among cultural and intellectual developments and the politics, economics, and societies of North America. Authors to be read include some that are well known—such as Emerson, Melville, Dickinson—and some who are less familiar—such as Cabeza de Vaca, John Rollin Ridge, and Harriet Jacobs. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 205 |
| Introduction to American Literature II |
| This course surveys major works of American literature after 1865, from literary reckonings with the Civil War and its tragic residues, to works of "realism" and "naturalism" that contended with the late 19th century’s rapid pace of social change, to the innovative works of the modern and postmodern eras. As we read works by authors such as Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, we will inquire: how have literary texts defined and redefined "America" and Americans? What are the means by which some groups have been excluded from the American community, and what are their experiences of that exclusion? And how do these texts shape our understanding of the unresolved problems of post-Civil War American democracy? For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 210 |
| Survey of English Literature I: Anglo-Saxon Period to 1700 |
| Through selected readings in works from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late 17th century, this course will study the development of English literature in the context of stylistic, cultural, and historical changes and influences. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 211 |
| Survey of English Literature II: 1700 to the Present |
| Through readings in novels, drama, poetry, and prose from the Restoration to the 20th century, this course will examine shifts in the forms, functions, and meanings of English literature in the context of cultural and historical changes. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 212 |
| Contemporary Black Women Writers |
| The past decade has witnessed a flowering of cultural production from young black women. This course locates contemporary black transnational women writers—from the 1990’s to the present—within a larger tradition of black women’s literary and cultural production and black feminist thought. We will consider issues of race, gender, sexuality, cultural trauma, subjectivity and aesthetics in the post-civil rights and postcolonial context in which these contemporary works of fiction arise. Our primary goal is to examine the ways in which these black women writers revise the political and aesthetic concerns of their predecessors. We will read texts from the US, the Caribbean and West Africa in order to engage the possibilities and limitations of theorizing from a black transnational frame of reference. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 214 |
| Slavery and Abolition in America |
| This course will trace 19th-century ideas about slavery, freedom, race, and identity through the writings of social activists and the exploration of cultural artifacts (speeches, newspapers, photographs, images, and icons). Authors will include Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 216 |
| Introduction to African American Literature, Part I |
| This course surveys African American literature in a variety of genres from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Through the study of texts by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Julia Collins, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Dunbar, Ida Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, we will explore how these writers represented and influenced the history of people of African descent in the U.S., from slavery and abolition to early struggles for civil rights; how their work has intervened in racial formation and imagined the black diaspora; how literary innovations have engaged with continuing political questions of nation, gender, sexuality, and class. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 217 |
| Introduction to African American Literature Part II |
| This course surveys African American literature in multiple genres from the 20th-century to the present. We will examine texts by both canonical and emergent writers, such as James Weldon Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimke, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, Rita Dove, August Wilson, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and others. Our discussions/strategies for reading will be informed by relevant social, historical, and political contexts. In addition to discussing issues of race, nation formation, diasporic identities, class, gender, and sexuality, we will identify/trace recurring ideas/themes, as well as develop a theoretical language to facilitate thoughtful engagement with these works. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 218 |
| Romantic Friendship |
| Romantic-era writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth were deeply invested in the question of ‘genius,’ of how artistic inspiration chooses and works upon an individual. This investment has affected our conception of Romanticism, most obviously in our continued focus on the “big six” male poets as defining the era’s literary production. This course pivots away from Romantic individuality to approach the era through friendship, collaboration, rivalry, and networks. Emphasizing the social nature of Romanticism, this course asks: How do relationships revise our ideas of Romantic authorship and authority? Is Romanticism still ‘Romantic’ when we emphasize connections over the myth of the individual genius? Readings may include works by Pope and Montagu, Smith and Haley, Wordsworth and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb, Polidori and Byron. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 220 |
| Crime and Passion: Studies in Victorian Literature |
| This course introduces students to major writers and issues from the British Victorian period (1837-1901). It will focus on texts–-fiction, non-fictional prose, and poetry-–in which notions of propriety and morality are in productive dialogue with crimes, threatening secrets, and subversive passions. Texts to be studied include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, D.G. Rossetti’s Jenny, and M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. (Please note: this course requires substantial amounts of reading; Victorian novels are long!) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 230 |
| Words Alive: Native American Literature |
| A survey of the rich traditions of oral and written literature created by North American Indians. We will begin with some classic texts of story, song, and autobiography, and move to contemporary fiction and poetry. We will also listen to recordings and view films of oral literature, chant, and the storytelling tradition. Course requirements include written responses to texts, an oral report, a midterm, and a final project. Participants must review a history of Native Americans before the class begins. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 234 |
| Renaissance in America |
| In the most general terms, a "renaissance" refers to a flowering of creative activity, a revival and revision of "classical" texts and themes, and a period of optimism regarding human potential. This course will focus on the 19th century "American Renaissance" and the "Harlem" or "New Negro" Renaissance of the 20th century, as well as several larger aesthetic, cultural, and political questions. These include: how, why and by whom is the definition of "classical" applied? By what means and to what ends are "old" artistic forms made "new"? What social, political, and artistic conditions define the cultural climate before, during and after a renaissance? Texts will include prose, poetry, and short fiction by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Chesnutt, DuBois, Schomburg, Locke, McKay, Toomer, Cullen, Hughes, and Hurston. We will also use the collections of The Wadsworth Atheneum to view key examples in the visual arts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 235 |
| Global Short Fiction |
| This course will introduce students to a cast of writers from a variety of backgrounds who have used the form of the short story to project dramatic experiences and convey sometimes unique cultural ethos. In addition to examining thematic concerns and stylistic choices, we will explore how different writers have adapted the conventions of the short story and incorporated elements of other traditions to suit their narrative purpose. We will read some North American and European writers, but the emphasis will fall on writers from traditionally underrepresented parts of the world. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 240 |
| 19th-Century British Romance |
| This course will examine the modes of romance and romanticism within 19th-century British literature. We will look at the popular forms of poetry, the novel, and the essay in order to examine gothic, fantastic, and psychologically interior elements that in Victorian literature sometimes work beyond a so-called “realistic”-exterior, that is, an explainable, socio-economically circumscribed kind of writing. We will look at characters that may not fit into our current notions about Victorian “respectability”; we will discuss the gothic and romantic structures that shape their sensibilities and subjectivities; and we will examine the relation between the visible and invisible, the canny and uncanny, and the tangible as well as the ghostly. Readings will include works by Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, G. G. Lord Byron, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Alfred Tennyson. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 244 |
| Inventing Literary Ireland |
| An account of Irish writing from the Irish Revival to the modernism of Joyce, from the realism of the 1930s and 1940s to the postmodernism of the Eoin McNamee. Rather than attempt to define a single Irish literature, this course will investigate the many versions of Ireland and Irish identity in writings by canonical figures such as Yeats and Joyce to contemporary writers such as Jennifer Johnston and Roddy Doyle. We will also consider the role of Irish film in the 1980s and 1990s. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 245 |
| Gender and Characterization in Victorian Novels and Poems |
| This course will look at evolving notions of literary heroines and heroes in British literature from the mid-19th through the early 20th centuries (1850-1925). During the time of industrialization, increasing urbanization, changing laws, growing Empire, and new ways of imagining social organization and personal subjectivity, there is a corresponding change in the types of characters, heroines and heroes included, in literature. Through our readings, we will explore various modes in novel writing, including verse novels, big novels, and humorous novels. We will also address formal innovation in poetry and fiction and consider the relationship between major trends in contemporary literary theory and Victorian literature. Readings will include works by such authors as Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Anthony Trollope, Charles Swinburne, Grant Allen, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 247 |
| Poetry Of(f) The Page |
| A close listening course which foregrounds poetry’s sound text by means of reading aloud, audio and videotapes, live poetry readings and Slams, and live class performance. We will explore: today’s audio-text in relation to early oral tradition; sound text and written text as two different texts generated by any given poem; sound as artistic medium; the place of the spoken poem in our current U.S.A. culture(s). The class community will do some writing, but the focus is on sound--speech, hearing, listening as embodiment of text. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 249 |
| Poetry's Ambassadors |
| This course will examine the work of United States poets laureate from 1986 to present. We will discuss the history of laureateship, investigate the process by which a U.S. laureate is selected, what the laureate’s duties are, and how a U.S. laureateship compares with the official functioning of poets in other parts of the world. Finally, we will explore the relationship between the official voice of poetry as embodied by the laureate, and the multiple voices of poetry in our diverse culture. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 256 |
| “I Am Here”: Poets in Exile |
| Through selected readings of exiled poets living in the U.S., and of U.S. poets living in exile, this course explores the dynamic of forced, or voluntary absence from one’s own country as it relates to the poet and the poem. We will discuss “exile” as not only a matter of citizenship, but also a matter of language. We will use the work of Czeslaw Milosz as a grounding force for our exploration. This is a reading intensive/writing intensive course. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 260 |
| Introduction to Literary Studies |
| This course introduces students to the fundamental techniques of close reading. The course will show students how to apply this critical vocabulary to a wide range of literary genres from different historical periods, and to develop the writing and research skills necessary for composing clear and compelling arguments in the interpretation of a text. Note: This course is required of all English majors. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the literature and psychology minor. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 263 |
| Performing History in Literature |
| Writers often reconstruct personal and private moments in the lives of historical figures. Playwrights in particular tend to indulge in dramatic flights of historical fancy, and audiences in turn get to play the voyeur. In this course, we will read plays that try to bring history to life. What are the limits (if any) on dramatic license? We will look at works by a range of playwrights, including Shakespeare, Sondheim, Stoppard, Brook, and Oyamo. This course is designed for students who love history, drama, and the challenge of re-imagining the past in intelligent and creative ways. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 264 |
| Victorian London: Center and Suburbs |
| In the 19th century, Britain became for the first time in history an urban nation. In this course, we will investigate literary responses to the transformation of Britain - some well-known, others more obscure. Discussions will center on questions such as: Who built the new suburbs, and why? Who chose to live in the cities, who preferred the suburbs, and why? How and in what ways did experiences of the cities and suburbs differ for men and for women? For the working, middle, and upper classes? What were the hopes of urbanization, and what were its problems? How were the cities and the suburbs represented in literature across the course of the period? What was the imagined, and what was the real, relationship between the center, the suburbs, and the slums? Students will complete three papers and several shorter response papers on this topic. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 265 |
| Introduction to Film Studies |
| This course provides a general introduction to the study of film and focuses on the key terms and concepts used to describe and analyze the film experience. As we put this set of tools and methods in place, we will also explore different modes of film production (fictional narrative, documentary, experimental) and some of the critical issues and debates that have shaped the discipline of film studies (genre, auteurism, film aesthetics, ideology). Note: Film screening only on Monday evenings. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing cultural context. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the film studies minor. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 267 |
| English in India/India in English |
| Thomas Macaulay's arrogant 1835 assertion that Britain's Indian subjects should be educated only in English because "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" highlights issues that remain pressing today: the cultural legacy of colonialism; the role of language and literature in education; the sources and influence of literary tradition; the use of literacy to maintain social hierarchy; and the question of what constitutes a "national" literature in a nation with more than 20 official languages. This course explores English literature's development in South Asia as a transaction between British writers like Macaulay, Kipling, and Forster, and colonial/postcolonial subjects writing in English, including Dutt, Gandhi, and Ghosh, who respond critically to British constructions of India. For English majors, this course fulfills the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 268 |
| Filmmaking Practice for Film Readers |
| This course focuses on close, specific analysis of only four films during a semester, in terms of filmmaking practice. Learn practical cinematography issues such as lens choice, camera position, motivated movement, and lighting; learn the theory and practice of film sound; learn the practical elements of the continuity system and other systems of organizing time and space on screen. The limited filmography for this course will consist of one classical Hollywood sound film, two international features which push the boundaries of the continuity system, and one contemporary movie. Class will consist of lectures with film clips, demonstrations, and discussion. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 270 |
| Introduction to Creative Writing |
| An introduction to imaginative writing, concentrating on the mastery of language and creative expression in more than one genre. Discussion of work by students and established writers. Beginning with the class of 2009, this is a required course for creative writing concentrators. Beginning in the spring 2014 semester, ENGL 270 must be taken before senior year with enrollment of juniors restricted to five students per section. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 271 |
| Recent American Fiction |
| An examination of tradition, trends, and trailblazing in American fiction since 1990. Along the way, we will ask and answer such questions as: What does American fiction suggest about our national identity as “the American century” closes and a new millennium unfolds? What distinguishes the contemporary novel as a unique vehicle of cultural transmission? And what is the status—and likely future—of serious fiction in the U.S.? Our reading will include novels and story collections by authors such as Tim O’Brien, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Alice McDermott, Francisco Goldman, Denis Johnson, Ha Jin, Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Lorrie Moore, and Gish Jen. This course satisfies the requirement of course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 273 |
| London: A Literary Life |
| This course will consider the wide variety of ways in which the city of London has been represented in British literature. We will read works ranging from early modern comedies and satires to modern murder mysteries and post-colonial novels. Our examination of these different literary genres will be supplemented by historical readings that illuminate the cultural contexts out of which London’s vivid literary character has emerged. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 274 |
| In Good Taste: Literature and Culinary Culture |
| The representation of food in literature often serves as a highly effective way in which to represent, in concrete and compelling terms, specific ideals and social problems, such as the role of the sacred in everyday life; developing definitions of “civilized” behavior and the idea of “good taste”; and issues of national, class, and ethnic identity. We will survey a range of poems, plays, novels, memoirs, cookbooks, and films that provide insight into the relationship of food, literature, community, and cultural identity. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 275 |
| Introduction to Poetry |
| In an attempt to demystify the art of reading poetry for those interested in both critical and creative writing, this class will focus on the various blocks out of which poems are built, and the various shapes a poem might take. Working with poems as ancient as the anonymous 14th-century lyric, "The Cuckoo Song," and as recent as Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons," we will begin to decipher the workings of meter and metaphor, diction and tone, image and line, and syntax and sound. From there, we will move to considering structural forms such as the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina, and thematic forms such as the ode, the elegy, and the pastoral. After that, we will think about the treatment of certain themes including religion, history, and politics in poetry through the ages. Through this work, participants should gain a firmer grasp of how poems are made, and how they might be more easily approached. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing poetry. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 276 |
| How Stories Get Told |
| This course examines theories and techniques of the art of narrative and its adaptations across media. Where do stories come from? How and why do they get told? What happens, for example, when Francis Ford Coppola transforms Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, or graphic novelist Alan Moore merges words and images to create Watchmen? What do we make of traditional literary theories of narratology when a contemporary Macbeth struts and frets upon a digital stage? We will look at a wide variety of narrative theories, stories, and storytellers as we test our own perceptions against the claim by Roland Barthes that “narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.” For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 277 |
| The Strange Meaning of Things |
| How important is your “stuff” to you? What does it mean? When is a thing just a thing, and when does it represent something else? In this course, students will examine the literary representations of material culture, including clothes, tools, collections of things, paintings, jewelry and books, in a range of works from the Renaissance to the present. We will analyze what different kinds of things mean at different periods of history, and how writers invest them with magical, religious, satirical and sentimental significance. Readings will include drama, novels, poetry, poltergeist tales, and journalism, as well as some history, and anthropological and literary theory. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 277 |
| Quest |
| From The Odyssey to The Lord of the Rings, quest narratives have been used to express a primal search for meaning and purpose. This course explores the concept of the journey—literal and figurative, physical and spiritual—as it relates to the human struggle to understand things such as good and evil, personal identity, and one’s place in the world. Assignments will include works by Homer, medieval writers of Arthurian legends and Grail quests, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Tennyson, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Tolkien, as well as contemporary film. Our primary texts will be supplemented by the work of scholars and mythologists such as Joseph Campbell and Jessie Weston. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 280 |
| Native American Renaissance |
| What are the problematics of the term "Native American Renaissance?" Who are major American Indian authors today, and how have their contributions redefined American literary history? Often forgotten or marginalized, Native American literatures present images of America which challenge conventional biases and encourage alternative ways of seeing and telling. This course will explore some myths and realities of Native American life through literature. Using oral tales, early political documents, and autobiographies as well as short stories, poetry, and novels, we will study literature in its historical and cultural context in an attempt to understand better the contemporary texts in this course. Writers studied will include N. Scott Momaday, Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Linda Hogan, and Diane Glancy. Special attention will be given to such issues as racism, cultural invisibility, split consciousness, gender roles, spiritual realism, survival, and empowerment through connection with land, community, and humor. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 284 |
| Studies in Poetry. In the Field: Poem and Environment |
| This course explores poems as they relate to the environment, and poems as created environments of their own. The reading consists of a broad selection of poems for background and range, and three books of poems for in-depth study. As the course title implies, the exploration occurs not only in the classroom, but out “in the field.” This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 285 |
| Scheming Poets |
| A close-reading and writing-intensive course that focuses on how poets use rhetoric to shape meaning. We will examine how poets play with language in order to persuade and move audiences. Topics will include the allure of musical effects, the hidden arguments in figures of speech, the mystery of voice on the page, and the subversive roles that poets create for readers. Class will be interactive and participatory, with informal poetry exercises, short analyses, and presentations. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 286 |
| European Modernist Cinema |
| The 30-year period from 1950-1980 is often regarded as the golden age of European cinema. Launched by the post-war epiphanies of Italian Neorealism, a new cinematic language, modernism, was forged both by movements of young radicals and older directors eager to transcend their past achievements. Embraced by an expanding audience of cinephiles (self-educated film-lovers), European modernist cinema became one of the most dynamic and significant phenomena of 20th century culture. This course offers an introduction to this essential area of film history and will situate key directors and movements within the exciting political and cultural contexts of the times. Directors to be examined may include Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Bunuel, Dreyer, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Has, Pasolini, Rosselini, Rivette, Tarr, Tarkovsky, Tati, Truffaut, and Wertmuller. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 287 |
| Lit in Context: Harlem Renaissance |
| Spanning the decade of the 1920's, the Harlem Renaissance was a movement of profound African American creative expression. This course approaches the Harlem Renaissance through its contradictions and conflicts, examining the way that differing aesthetic, political, and generational perspectives shaped the movement as a whole. One project in this class will focus on the journals and magazines of the time-Crisis, Opportunity, and Fire!!, to name a few-to investigate the cultural contexts that shaped the literature we will read. Other texts may include James Weldon Johnson's BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY, Alain Locke's THE NEW NEGRO,
poetry by Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset's PLUM BUN, Nella Larsen's PASSING, and Jean Toomer's CANE. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 288 |
| World Cinema |
| This course provides an introduction to the study of world cinema, with a focus on cinematic cultures other than those of the USA or Europe. We will begin by considering some of the theoretical questions involved in intercultural spectatorship and introducing/reviewing critical categories we can use to discuss the films. We will then proceed through a series of units based around specific cinematic cultures, focusing on movement, genres and auteurs and on the historical, cultural, and geopolitical issues that the films illuminate. Note: Film screenings only on Thursday evenings. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a literary theory course. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the film studies minor. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 290 |
| Introduction to Literature and Psychology |
Emphasizing the roots of literature’s power to generate emotional and aesthetic responses, and exploring the relationship between literary work and dream work, this course examines how literature transforms fantasies toward meanings. Authors to be studied include Shakespeare, Kyd, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Shelley, Poe, Virginia Woolf, Freud, Erikson, Holland, Stoppard, Plath, and Hughes. This course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the literature and psychology minor.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 291 |
| Bollywood and Beyond: An Introduction to Popular Indian Cinema |
| The course provides an introduction to Indian cinema, with a focus on popular Hindi cinema from World War II to the present, i.e. "Bollywood." For over 50 years Bollywood has dominated India's domestic market and made a huge impact in markets and cultures around the world: China and other Asian countries, the former Soviet Union, Africa, the Middle East, Greece, and the diasporic audiences of the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and North America. Understanding the global popularity of Bollywood cinema requires a journey through the films into Indian aesthetics, culture, society and history, a journey that will provide you with a unique set of perspectives on the contemporary world. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. This course fulfills the elective requirements of the template film studies major. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 293 |
| Tough Guys & Bad Girls: 20th Century American Crime Fiction |
| Crime fiction has been an amazingly resilient and pliable genre, a cultural barometer registering revisions to cultural fantasies about knowledge and power, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, violence and freedom. Its character types are interwoven into the fabric of popular culture, from the detective to the sociopath, the femme fatale to the street tough. This course will trace an alternative American history through the brutal, lurid, and stylish crime fiction of the 20th century. We will explore its pulp roots through Dashiell Hammett, its modernist peaks with Raymond Chandler, it post-war weirdness in Chester Himes and Patricia Highsmith, and its contemporary renaissance by Walter Mosley. Assignments may include book reviews, weekly responses, and a directed final project. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 301 |
| Literature and Meaning: from Aristotle to Queer Theory |
This course explores the different ways in which literature has been -- and can be -- interpreted and justified. Students will read critical theories from Platonism to feminism and queer theory, and will apply these theories to selected texts by Shakespeare, Keats, Austen, Conrad and others in order to define their own literary theory. This course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course.
Prerequisite: This course open only to juniors or seniors with C- or better in English 260 and one other 300- or 400-level course in English literature. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 301 |
| Literature and Meaning: from Aristotle to Queer Theory |
| This course explores the different ways in which literature has been—and can be—interpreted and justified. Students will read critical theories from Platonism to feminism and queer theory, and will apply these theories to selected texts by Shakespeare, Keats, Austen, Conrad, and others in order to define their own literary theory. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 303 |
| The Literature of Social Protest |
This course will consider American fiction and poetry that address the issues of social change and social protest. Among the works that may be discussed are Jack London's The Iron Heel, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, as well as poetry by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Denise Levertov, and Robert Bly. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 303 |
| Ante-Bellum Literature: Amistad and Other Rebellions |
The period leading to the Civil War witnessed intense conflicts not only about slavery and race but about the spread of capitalism, restrictions on women's economic and social rights, the growth of cities, and a variety of other social issues. "Literature" in this period was seldom seen as standing apart from these issues. On the contrary, art, politics, and social issues were generally seen as heavily intertwined. In this course we will look at the relationships between a number of issues prominent in ante-bellum America and works of art which at once expressed ideas about such issues and helped shape responses to them. The Amistad Affair will provide one instance; we will examine two or three others as well. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 304 |
| Studies in Film: Cinematic Realisms 1945 to the Present |
| What does it mean when we describe films as realistic? As realism? As neo-realism? Is it the way a film looks, how it represents characters and events, or what a film is trying to say? This course explores various films and filmmaking movements that have been labeled “realist” and/or “neo-realist” since the middle of the 20th century. Our reading and viewing will emphasize the historical transition from Hollywood studio-era filmmaking to a more diverse media environment that includes the experimental, independent and international film. Films to be studied will include the work of: William Wyler, Vittorio de Sica, Charles Burnett, Stan Brakhage, Nathaniel Dorsky, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Dogme 95, and others. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or of an elective. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 305 |
| Victorian Poetry |
| This course will focus on the achievements of Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Arnold, Swinburne, Hopkins, and Hardy in relation to nineteenth-century aesthetics and poetics. We will study the forms and history of specific lyric, dramatic, and epic genres as well as topics that have made Victorian poetry immensely popular and controversial: revivals of medieval and Italian Renaissance subjects and art; the relationship between poetry and the visual arts; socially conscious versus art-for-art's sake aesthetics; the gendering of lyric as feminine and epic as masculine; devotional poetics and the crisis of faith; and the impact of psychological theories and Darwinism. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 306 |
| Post-Colonial Literatures in English |
| Post-colonial literature broadly refers to writing from regions of the world that were once the colonial holdings of European powers. The exact definition of the term post-colonial, however, remains diffuse and the subject of intense and contentious debates. The literature written by authors under such categorization offers a compelling response to the effects of a colonial past and its dominant discourses: migration, slavery, oppression, resistance, representation, and difference. The purpose of this course is to develop, through readings of various texts, the historical and intellectual genealogy of the term and to acquire a sense of the central debates and ideas informing contemporary post-colonial discourse. Authors may include: Rudyard Kipling, Ama Ata Aidoo, Joseph Conrad, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Amitav Ghosh, Sembene Ousmane, V.S. Naipul, J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Tayeb Saleh. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 306 |
| Memory and History in African Literature |
| Through the close reading of eight works by African writers—encompassing a variety of forms and genres, touching on traditional Africa as well as contemporary ideas—the course will explore the variety of styles, forms, and themes in African writing. The course will examine narrative strategies, aesthetic choices, and the broader historical forces and cultural experiences informing the work of African writers. A good deal of the class will be devoted to exploring each writer's engagement with a facet of Africa’s historical or post-colonial experience, and how each author seeks to reshape historical experience in fiction, drama, or memoir. We shall also investigate writers' use of memory, their integration of folktale in their narrative, and their experimentation with the wider resources of orature. We will pay attention to the tension between the individual and community, how each text defines private and public spheres, and how each writer responds to the Euro-American canon. Through the texts, we will explore such broad subjects as the roots and impact of slavery; fault lines in indigenous African societies; the colonial subjugation of Africa; the emergence of neo-colonial nation-states in Africa; post-colonial anxieties and disillusionment, and the evolution of gender relations. For the English major, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context.
|
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 306 |
| Lit of Colonialism |
This course examines how 20th century "postcolonial" literature responds to a literary and political tradition of colonialism. We will read authors such as Kipling, Conrad, and Forster to preface our focus on postcolonial authors such as Coetzee, Rushdie, Suleri, Achebe, Kincaid, and Cliff, and theorists such as Fanon, Said, Anderson, and Glissant.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 307 |
| Race and Gender in Contemporary American Fiction |
A study of American fiction since the 1940s. Particular emphasis will be placed on the emergence of powerful new traditions of “minority,” “ethnic,” and women’s writing. Among the books to be read are works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Rolando Hinojosa, Junot Diaz, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Maxine Hong Kingston. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 308 |
| American Migration |
| In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, large-scale internal migration reshaped the human geography of the United States. Southerners moved north, farm-dwellers moved to cities, the displaced sought economic promise in new regions. The literature written by and about these migrants presents an opportunity to study the impact of geography and environment on human imagination and cultural practice. We will read narrative representations of historic departures and resettlements, including African-Americans' Great Migration to the industrial north and Dust Bowl refugees' flight to California, in texts by such authors as Willa Cather, William Attaway, John Steinbeck, Carlos Bulosan, and Harriette Arnow. We also will write our own migration narratives and explore representations of a more recent example of internal migration—the displacement of New Orleanians by Hurricane Katrina. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 308 |
| Culture of Adoption in America |
| While adoption has been an important part of American family life since the 19th century, it has recently become a matter of public fascination for contemporary Americans. From adoptive mother Rosie O'Donnell to the growing number of Chinese baby girls adopted by Americans to the "Internet Twins"--essentially sold by an adoption broker over the Internet--adoption invites all Americans to contemplate issues of family belonging, cultural identity, and national responsibility. In this class, we will view adoption through a variety of lenses, examining fiction, popular psychology, film, and history to study the impact of adoption on racial, gender, and national identity. Texts will include fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Charles Chesnutt, and Bharati Mukherjee, excerpts from adoption histories--Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction and Rickie Solinger's Wake Up, Little Susie--and films such as Flirting with Disaster, Mighty Aphrodite, and Catfish and Black Bean Sauce. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 309 |
| British Poetry After Modernism |
| A study of English and Anglophone poetry from the end of World War II to the present. After looking at the late work of key Modernists like Eliot and Auden, we will consider the rapidly changing and expanding notions of “British” poetry during the last five decades. Among topics to be examined are: expatriates who made their careers in America and elsewhere; writers who redefined “English” poetry for a new, post-war reality; and increasingly dominant voices from Ireland and the Commonwealth. Authors will include Dylan Thomas, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, and Derek Walcott. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 310 |
| The Epic and The Search for The Heroic |
| What does it mean to be a hero in The Iliad, Gilgamesh, and The Odyssey, and how do later poets revise or strive to match the values and standards of these poems? What makes an epic hero? Readings will include Milton, Virgil, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams, and other epics as well as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Gilgamesh. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 310 |
| 1816: A Romantic Microcosm |
| "The Year without a Summer," so named for the drastically cooler temperatures caused by a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, was also a remarkable one for British literature: in the space of one year, major works were composed or published by writers including Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Austen, Hunt, Scott, and Edgeworth. Sampling published works, letters, and journals, as well as the era's thriving periodical culture, this course focuses on a single crucial year to give students both a sense of day-to-day existence in the Age of Romanticism and a unique perspective on literary history. In addition to written assignments, students will make significant use of new resources in the digital humanities to map and contextualize the social and cultural events of 1816. For English majors, this course fulfills the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 311 |
| Afro-Asian Intersections |
| This seminar examines Asian American and African American literary and cultural production comparatively. We will look at primary texts, supplemented by theoretical and historical readings from various fields, including performance studies, literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, gender studies, legal studies, and post-colonial studies, in order to critique representations of racial formations relationally rather than as strictly defined categories of identity that have, traditionally, been studied in segregated disciplines (such as Black studies, whiteness studies, Asian and Asian American studies). Along these lines, we will also account for the ways in which race intersects with other categories of identity, such as sexuality, gender, nation, and class. Texts will include works by Ann Cheng, WEB Du Bois, Christina Garcia, Moon-Ha Jung, Bill Mullen, Mira Nair, Patricia Powell, Gary Okihiro, Vijay Prashad, and Anna Deveare Smith. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 311 |
| Literature of the African Diaspora |
| This course will look at modern representations of slavery and the Middle Passage in African, Caribbean and African American literature and film. We will explore the trauma of slavery as the “primal” scene for identity formation in the African diaspora. Additionally, we will cover issues of loss, migration and exile and consider the stakes of employing the theory of collective trauma to talk about black transatlantic identity formation. We will further consider issues of gender, class and sexuality as they continue to inform black transatlantic identities. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 312 |
| Modern Poetry |
| An introduction to British and American poetry, 1885-1945. In response to the challenges of modernity, poets produced work of unprecedented variety, experimental daring, and complexity. Authors will include Yeats, Pound, Eliot, H.D., Frost, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Crane, and Auden. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 313 |
| American Autobiography: Cross-Cultural Perspectives |
Drawing on recent autobiography theory, this course examines life-writing by a range of American authors with attention to cultural context. Topics we will explore include storytelling and self re-creation; the precariousness of memory in autobiographical practice; and the politics of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality in shaping personal experience and in determining modes of self-representation. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 313 |
| America the Multicultural |
| This course considers questions of identity, immigration, ethnicity, and race as they figure in a range of American texts. We will focus on authors who, by their own volition or not, have been identified as "minority writers" and who comprise an emerging multicultural canon. Among our questions: What is the usefulness, what are the limitations of various cultural categories? How do authors create and/or respond to the pressures of cultural identification? How do these pressures translate into aesthetic choices? And what are our responsibilities as diverse readers of diverse texts? Authors will include James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Martin Espada, as well as visual artists such as Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, and Shahzia Sikhander.
For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 314 |
| The Post-911 American Short Story |
| The short story has been described as a sensitive barometer of our social conditions – a form that chronicles our times and shows us new sensibilities. In this course we examine the resilient form of the American short story in the decade following September 11, 2001. Reading from a course packet made up of stories published in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, we will come to understand exactly how the genre has changed during its most recent period of growth. The course includes an American history of the form, comparisons of our stories to those from other decades and countries, a focus on close readings and the elements of craft, as well as attention to solid research skills, and full-class workshops of students’ essay drafts. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 314 |
| The Culture of Literary Modernisms |
This course examines how writers such as Virginia Woolf, in Bloomsbury, and James Joyce, in Dublin, sought to define themselves against Victorian culture and as part of a new ideology of "the modern." We will locate texts of
"High Modernism" in relation to debates over history, gender, nation, psyche, and aesthetics; and we will consider how and why these writers, instead of some of their comtemporaries, help define a Modernist canon.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 315 |
| Victoria's Gaze: Women & Colonialism in Literature |
The Victorian era (1837-1901) was a time of great societal complexity, industrial growth, and colonial expansion. While the historical record leaves us with a thorough portrait of Queen Victoria's ‘sons' and their tales of colonial triumph, her daughters' pages have been largely ignored. This course examines the literary portraits left of the women involved in the British colonial project who helped shape the East in the eyes of the West. While we will focus primarily on narrative accounts of life in India, we will also take a sampling of authors writing of other imperial outposts (as well as watch a number of films). Authors may include: Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Anna Leonowens, Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, E.M. Forster, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Paul Scott.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or Women's Studies 101. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 315 |
| Girls Growing Up in Victorian Literature |
| This course examines the evolution of the concept of adolescence in the Victorian period, focusing in particular on representations of girls growing up. What language did authors use, and what concepts did they employ, to capture young girls’ experiences in an era before the theorization of adolescent development? Answers will be sought in a broad range of texts, some canonical, some less well-known. Other major topics the course will address include matters of faith and doubt; the role of the private sphere in the creation of the self; the place of marriage in the social arrangement; cultural policies of inclusion and exclusion; imperial adventures and imperial invasions. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 316 |
| The Novella |
More expansive than the short story but more compressed than the traditional novel, the novella is a prose form with distinctive characteristics that has been practiced by many great writers, both classic and contemporary. In this hybrid creative writing/literature course, we will read works by a variety of authors, such as James Joyce, Lorrie Moore, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Willa Cather, George Saunders and Herman Melville, with the aim of studying and understanding the form. Additionally, each student will be required to complete a novella of his or her own (40-60 pages) by the end of the term. There will be a series of assignments, deadlines, individual conferences with the instructor, and workshop sessions, all of which will focus on the completion of this project. This course satisfies the requirement of a 300-level workshop for creative writing concentrators.
Prerequisite: C- or better in ENGL 270 or Permission of Instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 317 |
| Romantic Autobiography |
| How does Jane Eyre’s subtitle—“An Autobiography”—shape our reading of the novel? Why did contemporary readers and reviewers of Byron’s poetry confuse the deeds of his brooding heroes with those of the poet himself? Does the use of the former slave Mary Prince’s autobiography as abolitionist propaganda make it less – or more – “her” story? The Romantic period (1780-1830) is often credited with inventing both the modern individual and the genre that attempts to present the experience of this individual: autobiography. This course, however, will consider autobiography as a mode of writing and reading that cuts across generic lines, intersecting with poetry, literary criticism, nature writing, and the novel. Authors will include William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Byron, De Quincey, Mary Prince, and Charlotte Brontë, in addition to critical and contextual readings that suggest some of the complexities of autobiography as a technique for writing experience. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 317 |
| The Inward Journey/The Outward Reach |
| We will explore the discovery of self in tension with the development of cultural, social, and political awareness in contemporary poetry. The United States will be our focus, but we will turn our eyes to the world beyond as well. We will read poets such as Espada, Rich, Komunyakaa, Doty, and Brooks. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 318 |
| Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes |
| Examination of the lives, deaths, literary works, and legacies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a literary theory course. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the literature and psychology minor. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 318 |
| Literacy and Literature |
Literature is produced and consumed by literate people. Nothing could be more obvious. But how do the different ways writers and readers become literate influence the ways they write and read? How have writers depicted the process of acquiring literacy and imagined its importance? In this course, we will examine the nature of literacy and the roles texts play in the development of literacy. With a focus on the United States from the 18th century to the 20th, we will study schoolbooks, texts for young readers, and representations of literacy in literary works ranging from slave narratives to novels to films. We also will study theories of literacy from philosophical, cognitive, and educational perspectives. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or Permission of the Instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 319 |
| East Meets West |
| From pashmina shawls to the furniture of Pottery Barn, from Miss World competitions to Hollywood epics, "India" seems to be everywhere. In this course we will explore the ways in which "India" has been imagined and constructed by the East/West encounter starting in the latter half of the 19th century to the present day. We will chart the contradictory and competing construction of India (seen simultaneously as beautiful, spiritual, and pacifist as well as filthy, backward, and overpopulated). Through novels, travel narratives, and films the course will explore how we have come to inherit a set of ideas about India that powerfully resonate in contemporary literature and culture. Authors will include: Rudyard Kipling, Chitra Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arthur Conan Doyle, Paul Scott, Hanif Kureishi, Amitav Ghosh, and Tom Stoppard. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 319 |
| Time & Modern Novel |
| Readings will include Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves; James Joyce's Ulysses; Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and The Past Recaptured; and William Faulkner's Light in August and The Sound and the Fury. A study of concepts of time as reflected in the techniques of fiction-writing by the great novelists at the beginning of the 20th century. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 319 |
| Constructing Thought: A Short, Fun Course in Sentence Diagramming |
| This half-credit course is for language fanatics. Whether you are a "good" writer or a "bad" writer, "good" or "bad" at English grammar, if you love the shape and flow of sentences, this course is for you. For 75 minutes each week, we will gather and explore the structure of the basic unit of thought in written English. We will diagram rock lyrics; we will diagram Shakespeare; we will diagram Biblical quotations, we will diagram Joyce, we will diagram love letters. We will search out and diagram quirky sentences from the news and the internet. We will attempt to diagram undiagrammable sentences and discover why they fail to work as units of thought. We will find multiple ways to speak a diagrammed sentence, and multiple ways to diagram the same sentence and discover its varied meanings. |
|
0.50 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 320 |
| Black Women Writers |
Through readings in fiction, autobiography, essays and some poetry, this course will investigate the conditions and experiences shaping Black female identity in the United States. Although the focus will be on 20th century African American women writers, some selections by earlier writers, and by writers from outside the United States, will be included as a way of exploring similarities (and differences) that exist between Black women’s writings, experiences, and ways of knowing trans-historically and across the Diaspora. Among the recurring issues/themes we will investigate are the impact of race, class, gender, and sexuality on Black women’s experiences and artistic vision, the quest for self-determination and self-actualization, the significance of spirituality, and the politics of Black women’s roles within community, family, and nation. Writers studied will vary from semester to semester, but may include: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Gayl Jones, Harriet Jacobs, Jamaica Kincaid, Sapphire, Mariama Ba, Maya Angelou, Gloria Wade Gayles, June Jordan, Alice Walker, Harriet Wilson, Ann Petry, and bell hooks. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 320 |
| Ralph Ellison and American Modernism |
| This reading and writing intensive seminar offers an in-depth examination of the writings of Ralph Ellison. Attending closely to Ellison’s fiction and non-fiction, as well as to a good sampling of the relevant critical literature, students will attain the sort of familiarity with Ellison that can come only from detailed study of his work. We will also use Ellison as a point of entry to further explore the subject of American culture. We will pay particular attention to Ellison’s responses to migration, the function of culture, the role of the artist, the search for identity, and the meaning of America. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 320 |
| Contemporary Americans |
| This course will focus on important individual collections of contemporary or near-contemporary American poetry. Rather than scanning a selected or collected volume for highlights, we'll look at poems in their original context, considering the single volume as a unified project (a concept increasingly important to contemporary poets) rather than simply a gathering of miscellaneous pieces. Working at a rate of roughly one poet/collection per week, we'll consider classics such as Louise Glück's The Wild Iris, C.K. Williams's Tar, Philip Levine's What Work Is, Yusef Komunyakaa's Magic City, and Jorie Graham's Erosion. We will also consider at least one very recently published collection and one first or near-to-first book. These readings will be supplemented by some theory on the state of contemporary poetry from both poets and critics. For English majors, this course would fulfill the requirement of a course emphasizing poetry and/or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 321 |
| Curiosity and Literature |
| This course will examine the way curiosity transformed literature and culture in the age of inquiry, when Peeping Tom was invented, modern science was institutionalized, and the detective novel was born. We will read texts that explore both approved and unapproved kinds, such as witchcraft, voyeurism, and the exhibition of monsters. Texts will include drama, journalism, poetry, satire, and novels by Aphra Behn, Defoe, Johnson, and others. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 and for a course emphasizing poetry. Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 322 |
| Revisions of Shakespeare |
| Examination of works by Chekhov, Bergman, Wilde, Carne, Pirandello, Woolf, Freud, Jones, Olivier, Cukor, Stoppard, Bate, Allen, Branagh, and others in light of selected plays by Shakespeare. Course themes include creativity in the theater, life as a dream, sex roles and gender as performance, the presentation of self in everyday life, and performativity as being. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the literature and psychology minor, as well as for fulfillment of the English major requirement for a theory course or of a course concentrating on literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 322 |
| Southern Gothic Tales |
| This course will explore Southern Gothic literature and film, including a range of works from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe to the fiction of Cormac McCarthy and the pop culture images of HBO’s True Blood. With a focus on murder, madness, freaks, and vampires, the genre pushes toward what Flannery O’Connor called “the limits of mystery” in its attempts to deal with the tragic extremes of human behavior and the comic twists of the grotesque. We will establish the cultural context, survey the media’s fascination with stereotypes of the southern United States, and study the narrative structuring of terror and horror, the textual and visual encoding of characters overwhelmed by anxiety and alienation, and the embedding of political allegories and themes of social disorder. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 323 |
| Theories of the Sister Arts |
| In the classical tradition, painting is the sister to poetry. According to this formulation, poetry is a speaking picture, while painting is a silent poem. London in the 18th century saw a massive increase of visual material--from illustrated books, to private exhibitions, to museums, to giant panoramic landscapes. In addition to reviewing some of the spectacular visuals of the period, we will look at poems about paintings, writing about art, and theories of taste, seeing and reading. Expect to learn about Protestant iconoclasm, ekphrasis, iconicity, antitheatricality and literary pictorialism. Primary source materials will include works by Lessing, Hogarth, Winckelmann, Pope, Addison, Reynolds, Hume and Blake. Contemporary theory will include works by W.J.T. Mitchell, Heffernan, Jay and Berger that explicitly consider "ways of seeing" in addition to works by Bourdieu, Foucault, Barthes, and Williams that help us place the sister arts into the larger context of cultural studies. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 323 |
| Potmodernism in Film and Literature |
| The theoretical concepts associaed with the term postmodernism attempt to understand the unique features of global culture as it has evolve since 1957 - and can allow us to better understand our own engagement with that culture. By examining the work of important theorists (Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Debord, Fukuyama and others), key films (Jaws, Bladerunner, Blue Velvet, Brazil, Pulp Fiction and others) and works of literature (by Borges, Pynchon, De Lillo, Foster Wallace, Murakami and others) we will develop a historical perspective on the contemporary world we live in now - and a clearer understanding of the possibilities and difference contained in the culture of the past. For Englih majors, this course satifies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 323 |
| (Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the “Color-Line” |
| This course aims to cross literary boundaries, considering the ways we can productively discuss English Renaissance and modern African-American literary texts simultaneously. Historical distance did not prevent black authors like Adrienne Kennedy or W.E.B. Du Bois from acknowledging (or, perhaps, responding to) Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Thus, we will read specific Renaissance and modern works alongside one another, examining how authors handled similar issues in disparate historical contexts. Among other topics, we will discuss: miscegenation, sexuality, parentage, death, passing, homosexual/homosocial bonds, and race. Possible author pairings may include: Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro; Marlowe’s Edward II with Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; The Tempest with Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus; and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi with Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 324 |
| The Resisting Reader |
| Using feminist, narratological, and reader-response approaches, we will re-examine a number of canonical American texts read “against the grain.” That is, we shall pay attention to the inadvertent ways in which both central and marginal figures are distorted in order to create stories that re-enact central American myths of adventure, manliness, conquest, and manifest destiny. Authors will include Sherwood Anderson, Henry James, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, and possibly Stowe, Cather, Richard Wright, Mailer, and Erdrich, among others. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 326 |
| Representations of Miscegenations |
| The course examines the notion of miscegenation (interracial relations), including how the term was coined and defined. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will consider the different and conflicting ways that interracial relations have been represented, historically and contemporaneously, as well as the implications of those varied representations. Examining both primary and secondary texts, including fiction, film, legal cases, historical criticism, and drama, we will explore how instances of interracial contact both threaten and expand formulations of race and “Americanness” in the U.S. and beyond. How is miscegenation emblematic of other issues invoked, such as gender, nation, and sexuality? How do enactments of interracial contact complicate the subjects that they “stage”? |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 327 |
| The Literature of Daily Experience |
This writing course explores the art of storytelling as it relates to real events and real people. Students will write several papers ranging from personal essays to descriptions of place to profiles of people whose lives, examined in the context of social change, tell a compelling and illuminating story. Students will also write analytical essays on books and articles by Joseph Mitchell, Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe, Madeleine Blais, David Hays, Alice Walker, Tracy Kidder, Lary Bloom, John McPhee, Cindy Brown Austin, Wally Lamb, and others.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 327 |
| Reading and Writing Women's Fiction |
| This is both a course on literary interpretation and an opportunity for creative fiction writing. We will read a series of women’s texts, from Jane Austen onwards, as literary critics and as practitioners, thinking about themes, trends, preoccupations, and the practical application of technical excellences. For English majors, this course counts as an elective. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 327 |
| Seeing the World Through Non-Fiction |
| This writing course explores the literature about our lived experience. The class will alternate between reading and writing assignments. We will "reverse engineer" pieces by documentarians including Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, Tracy Kidder and John McPhee to understand how their prose does its work. Class members will apply those techniques to personal essays of their own and fan out through the campus and across Hartford to tell compelling stories. . |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 328 |
| The Contemporary Novel: Fantastic Realities |
| The "post-modern" decades have been a period of perpetual yet extraordinarily fertile "crisis" in the novel: a form that some repeatedly condemn to death and irrelevancy repeatedly reinvents itself. The contemporary "experimental" novel is a wide-open territory, where some of literature’s most venerable forms—allegory, myth, fantastic fable—might be appropriated alongside or in combination with such popular contemporary expressions as comic books and science fiction, in spirits ranging from playful self-referential irony to utmost, if also unavoidably ironic, seriousness. "What is this new territory?" asked Roberto Bolaño (Chile-Mexico-Spain), an undisputed "superhero" of the contemporary novel. "The same as always, but a different one, which is the same as saying I don’t know. In whatever case, it’s the territory where the bones of Cervantes are found, and it’s the undiscovered territory, the territory of the dead and of adventure." We will read a number of writers who have dared to "advance into that territory," whose books (by Bolaño’s definition) are "alive." The reading list will include two or three works chosen from among Garcia Marquez, Dick, Nabokov, Grass, Morrison (who are considered as recent, very present, in some cases adversarial, predecessors) and the rest from among Saramago, Perec, Coetzee, Pelevin, Sebald, Pamuk, Murakami, Aira, Bolaño, Ishiguro, Amis, Self, Pynchon, Roth, Rushdie, Whitehead, Lethem, Chabon, Gaitskill, and Houlbecque. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 328 |
| Contemporary Fiction: Not Realism |
| Two competing aesthetics have dominated American and English fiction during the past century—realism, and everything that is not realism, from the rigorously avant-garde or "post-modern" to pop sci-fi and fantasy and "high-low" hybrids. In much of the rest of the world, realism is regarded as an outdated or minor form. In class we will examine some of the reasons for this split, though our readings will be almost entirely of non-realist works that explore and interrogate the imaginative, verbal and formal possibilities of fictional narrative. We will begin with some writings by still influential precursors and writers of the past century (selections from among Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Bernhard, Nabokov, Calvino, Dick) to contemporary writers such as Coetzee, Murakami, Rushdie, Bolaño Aira, Foster Wallace, Markson, and younger writers such as Junot Díaz, Tom McCarthy, Marissa Pessl, and Rivka Galchen. There will be a selection of critical readings as well. Recommended for creative writing students and enthusiastic readers of fiction from other disciplines. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of an elective. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 329 |
| Novel-in-Stories |
The novel-in-stories is a literary book-length form that lies somewhere between the traditional novel and the short story collection. In it, individual stories inform one another through common elements to suggest a larger whole while still functioning independently of one another. In this hybrid creative writing/literature course, we will explore the works of authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Alice Munro, Tim O’Brien, Junot Díaz, Margaret Atwood, Victor LaValle, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Stephanie Vaughn, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Edwidge Danticat. The class will run as a workshop, and each student will write a sequence of interconnected stories (35 page minimum) by the end of the term. Recommended for advanced creative writing students.
Prerequisite: C- or better in ENGL 270 or Permission of Instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 329 |
| Listening on the Lower Frequencies |
| The last words of Ralph Ellison’s "invisible man" are these: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you." An African American, he finds himself invisible in American culture; nevertheless, he suspects that his plight is, on the lower frequencies, ours. In this course on Southern literature and culture, we will try to amplify those frequencies so that we can hear how they transmit the voices and values of women and of African Americans. We will examine some studies of Southern culture, read some novels (Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Chopin’s The Awakening, and Welty’s Delta Wedding, among others), listen to some blues and country music, and read at least one play by Tennessee Williams. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 330 |
| Amer & Brit Detective Lt |
| This course examines three crucial moments in the development of detective fiction in America and Britain: (1) the "invention" of the form by Dickens and Poe in the 1840s and 1850s; (2) the refinement of it in the Golden Age at the turn of the century by figures like Doyle, Conrad, and Christie; and (3) the reconstruction of the literary detective in the period between the wars by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We will also consider later experiments with the form by figures like Himes and Paretsky. In each case, we will concentrate upon evolving discourses of personal and national identity, racial and sexual difference, and political and economic destiny. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 330 |
| Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture: Science, Technology, and Power |
| Nineteenth-century Americans witnessed dramatic cultural shifts that made a largely rural, agrarian, deeply-religious nation into an increasingly urban, industrial, and secular one. Science and technology became dominant popular concerns, especially because they offered new kinds of social and political power. They promised members of a fast-changing society the ability to explain and control the world around them. In this course we will read literary and cultural texts of the 19th century that responded to and participated in the scientific and technological revolutions of the period. Through our reading, we will examine how a diverse American population confronted this age of science with both enthusiasm and fear. We will be particularly concerned with asking how science and technology shaped race, class, and gender identities – how social relationships were determined by new theories, discoveries, and inventions. Course texts may include works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Henry James, Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Zitkala-Ša, and Charles Chesnutt. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 330 |
| After Beloved: Black Women Writers in the 21st Century |
| This course considers the critical acclaim for and commercial hype over black women’s writing in the 20th century as a jumping off point for discussions of black women’s literature since 2000. Considering the rich diversity of aesthetic and thematic approaches in 21st century African American women’s texts, we will consider what is distinctive about this work, as well as if and how it forms a continuum with an earlier canon. Some topics for discussion will include class identity, genre, the avant-garde and the influence of Oprah Winfrey. We will read poetry by Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander and Claudia Rankine, fiction by Octavia Butler, ZZ Packer, Kim McClarin and Jamaica Kincaid, and the work of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. In order to form a basis for comparison, we will read a handful of foundational works published in the 20th century: Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and poetry collections by Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 330 |
| Sex, Violence and Substance Abuse: Mexico by Non-Mexicans |
| Some of the greatest and most lasting depictions of México in fiction, non-fiction, cinema and photography have been produced by non-Mexicans. Rather than exposing any lack of significant Mexican creators in all these genres, such works reflect the strong pull, the attraction and at times repulsion, exerted by this complicated country and culture on outsiders. We will choose readings from such twentieth and twenty-first century works such as John Reed's Insurgent México, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, DH Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, the short-stories of Katherine Anne Porter and Paul Bowles, the novels of B. Traven, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridien, the poetic meditations on Pre-Colombian México by recent French Nobel Prize winner Le Clézio, the contemporary México novels of the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, and, in Ana Castillo’s fiction, a U.S. Chicana's return to México, as well as other contemporary writings. Movies will be chosen from among A Touch of Evil, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Wild Bunch, Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Night of the Iguana, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Sín Nombre. The emphasis will be on the prose, novels especially, with three or four movies, and a class devoted to photography. We study the works themselves, their relation to their own literary-cultural traditions, their depiction of México, and the multiple issues raised by their status as works created by "foreigners." Supplemental readings, some by Mexicans. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 331 |
| The Art of Argument |
| An advanced interdisciplinary workshop in argumentation, with frequent practice in writing and speaking. Students will explore the dynamics of language and logic in a variety of contemporary contexts, as well as engage in interactive debates on both academic and "real world" topics. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 332 |
| The Contemporary Short Story |
This course is an exploration of the short story in recent years, as it has moved away from traditional realism toward more fluid notions of plot, character, and theme. Our emphasis will be on form and its limits as much as on content. We shall not attempt a historical overview, but will begin with such masters as Kafka, Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor and move to contemporary practitioners including Atwood, Carver, Dubus, Dybek, Erdrich, Ishiguro, Garcia Márquez, LeGuin, Updike, and Tobias Wolff. We shall also consider the story cycle as a unique form. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 332 |
| Short Story Masterpieces |
| In this course we examine the resilient form of the short story through a wide selection of both classic and contemporary writers. To list just some examples, we will read work by Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Borges, Welty, Cheever, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, and Ha Jin. Our main text is The Art of the Short Story (Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn). We will perform close textual readings, use various critical approaches and literary terms, and set the stories in the context of their historical periods and literary traditions. What is also important in this course is that we view the works from the authors' perspectives, and learn to read like a writer through the analysis of some of the basic elements of short fiction. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 333 |
| Creative Nonfiction |
In this writing workshop, we explore the genre of creative nonfiction. The term "nonfiction" implies that the writer is telling the truth--that the reader can assume and trust that the writer is describing people who are real and events that have happened. The writer strives for accuracy, even if the nature of that accuracy remains within the bounds of human limitations. The adjective "creative" refers to the fact that in creative nonfiction there is an important transformation of life into art, through the use of poetic and fictional techniques. Our readings will enhance our understanding of how creative nonfiction essays are constructed; they will also serve as springboards for writing exercises. In writing workshops, the main focus of the course, we will produce various types of creative nonfiction. For English literature concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of an elective. For English creative writing concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of a 300-level workshop. For writing, rhetoric,and media arts minors, it counts as a core course. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers.
Prerequisite: C- or better in ENGL 270 or Permission of Instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 333 |
| Creative Nonfiction |
| In this writing workshop, we explore the genre of creative nonfiction. The term "nonfiction" implies that the writer is telling the truth—that the reader can assume and trust that the writer is describing people who are real and events that have happened. The writer strives for accuracy, even if the nature of that accuracy remains within the bounds of human limitations. The adjective "creative" refers to the fact that in creative nonfiction there is an important transformation of life into art, through the use of poetic and fictional techniques. Our readings will enhance our understanding of how creative nonfiction essays are constructed; they will also serve as springboards for writing exercises. In writing workshops, the main focus of the course, we will produce various types of creative nonfiction. For English literature concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of an elective. For English creative writing concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of a 300-level workshop. For writing, rhetoric, and media arts minors, it counts as a core course. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 334 |
| Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction |
Students will write and rewrite fiction. The class is run as a workshop, and discussions are devoted to analysis of student work and that of professional writers. For English creative writing concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of a 300-level workshop. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers.
Prerequisite: C- or better in ENGL 270 or Permission of Instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 335 |
| Literary Nonfiction Narrative |
| This workshop explores the form of writing that combines the craft of fiction writing with the skills and practices of the journalist. We will read some of the foremost 20th-century and contemporary practitioners of this form of writing (V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Mitchell, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Rory Stewart, Alma Guillermoprieto, Susan Orlean, Jon Lee Anderson, etc., and selections from some of their important precursors: Stephen Crane, Jose Marti) and discuss, often, the form's complex relation to literary fiction, the tensions and difference between journalism and imaginative works, and so on. The workshop will begin with practical writing assignments: first paragraphs, setting, character, how to develop meaning, short pieces, etc., with the final goal being to produce a New Yorker magazine-like (in length and craft) piece using some aspect of the city of Hartford. NOTE: For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of an elective. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 336 |
| Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry |
Students will do in-class exercises, and write and revise their own poems. The class is run as a workshop, and discussions are devoted to analysis of student work and that of professional writers. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers. This course satisfies the requirement of a 300-level workshop for creative writing concentrators.
Prerequisite: C- or better in ENGL 270 or Permission of Instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 337 |
| Writing for Film |
| An introduction to the craft of screenwriting with a strong emphasis on story selection and development. Students will complete a full-length screenplay over the course of the semester. We will read and analyze scripts that have been made into films, and we will workshop student work through the semester. Writing experience recommended. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of an elective. This course can be counted toward fulfillment of requirements for the film studies minor. Not open to first-year students. Prerequisite: Permission of Instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 337 |
| Literary Journalism |
In this writing workshop, we will deeply explore one form of creative nonfiction: literary journalism. Our readings, springboards for initial writing exercises, will enhance our understanding of the scope and meaning of the term. In workshops, the main focus of the course, each student will produce three essays in draft form on subjects of his or her choice. We might write about travel/study abroad experiences or human rights; we might try our hands at investigative reporting or ethnography. These are only some examples. Whatever we write, our subject matter will be sculpted and transformed through our great attention to language into pieces of art. Passion is a prerequisite! Significant revision and the submission of polished final products are essential to success in this class. For English literature concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of an elective. For English creative writing concentrators, this course satisfies the requirement of a 300-level workshop. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers.
Prerequisite: C- or better in ENGL 270 or Permission of Instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 338 |
| Political Rhetoric and the Media |
| George Orwell called political language “the defense of the indefensible,” and yet democracies need a lively public culture of argument and debate in order to come to terms with complex issues, define values, make decisions, and solve problems. This course will explore the contemporary state of our political rhetoric in the United States, with a focus on the dynamic interactions of television, radio, print, and cyberspace. Students will participate in electronic discussions with peers across the country as they debate current issues generated by national election campaigns. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 339 |
| Festival and Drama |
| This course will examine ways in which performance is in many cultures linked to the festivals of many different kinds. More basically, it will examine the ethos of what can be called “the festival world” in contrast to the “workaday world.” We will consider ways of regulating time (festival time vs. clock time), the demands of vocation vs. leisure, play vs. work. In addition to studying festival drama, we will examine the idea of festivity and play as establishing an alternative to the “public” world of politics and vocation in selected works of literature. Specific works to be studied will include Euripedes’ Antigone in the context of Greek festivals, German faschtnachspiele, or carnival plays by Han Sachs, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, and Dickens’ Hard Times. Particular attention will be paid to Caribbean Carnival as street theater, evolving from emancipation festivals in the 19th century. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 340 |
| Childhood in America |
An investigation of the changing conception of childhood in America as reflected in a variety of textual and graphic materials for and about children. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing emphasizing cultural context or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Prerequisite: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 340 |
| Jazz in American Literature |
| Hailed by some as America’s most significant cultural contribution, jazz has occupied a place of tremendous importance in the cultural life of the 20th century. This course examines representations of jazz in American literature in order to understand a few of the many ways American writers have drawn on jazz to enrich their themes and enliven their style. In addition to familiarizing themselves with the music of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, students will read works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, Norman Mailer, Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Harper, and Toni Morrison. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 341 |
| Possessions: Mysticism and British Empire |
This course will examine how British literature represents mystical life in relation to concepts of the British social body in the 19th century. Gothic works, loss-of-faith novels, spiritualist fiction, and literature with mystical amalgams of distinct belief systems (such as spiritualist Buddhism) will be covered. Central questions we will ask include how do expressions of mystical life relate to national identity and how does an increase in faith perspectives in the late 19th century relate to the expansion of the British Empire? The readings include works by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sheridan LeFanu, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Marie Corelli, and Cora Linn Daniels.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 341 |
| American Literary Modernism and the Great War |
| This course will consider the impact of the Great War on American literary modernism. Grappling with apocalyptic devastation in Europe, massive shifts in global politics, and dramatic changes in technology, the Lost Generation responded with enduring and enigmatic works, haunted by wounds both psychic and spiritual. We will consider canonical writings by Ernest Hemingway and e.e. cummings, lesser-known works by Jessie Redmon Fauset and Edith Wharton, and first person accounts by combatants such as Thomas Boyd. As our focus will be on introducing the aesthetics of modernism through the context of the war itself, we will study maps, songs, photographs, newspapers, and other historical materials alongside traditional literary objects. Assignments will include a creative research project, weekly responses, and short essays. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 342 |
| Native American Writers |
| Using a variety of texts including poetry, biography, literature, and criticsm, we will examine the stereotypes disseminated of Native American peoples and the way Native artists work to combat these stereotypes. The voices we will read will complicate the narrative of America, the American dream, and even American identity - whatever that may be. Works will include Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, Susan Power, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, and Louise Erdrich, among others. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 342 |
| Tragedy and Metatheatre |
| Through close reading works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Racine, Pirandello, and Tom Stoppard, and by examining commentaries by Aristotle, Freud, Frye, Winnicott, and Girard, this course analyzes violence and the sacred, role-playing, and the relationship between play-watching and dreaming. This course satisfies the requirement of course emphasizing literature written before 1800. This course may be used to fulfill literature and psychology minor requirements. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 343 |
| Women and Empire |
| This course examines women's involvement in British imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. What part did ideologies of femininity play in pro-imperialist discourse? In what ways did women writers attempt to “feminize” the imperialist project? What was the relationship between the emerging feminist movement and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century? How have women writers in both centuries resisted imperialist axiomatics? How do women authors from once colonized countries write about the past? How are post-colonial women represented by contemporary writers? Authors to be studied include Charlotte Brontë, Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Alexander McCall Smith. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 344 |
| Representing the Old World and the New 1500-1700 |
How did encounters with the indigenous cultures of the Americas shape the literary, religious, scientific, and political imaginations of European writers? This course will focus in particular on the works of early modern English writers from More to Behn; English works will also be juxtaposed against selected Incan, Aztec, Spanish, and French texts (read in translation) that illuminate the broader contexts within which writers were shaping a distinctly English imagination of the nature and significance of colonial conquest. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 345 |
| Chaucer |
A study of The Canterbury Tales and related writings in the context of late medieval conceptions of society, God, love, and marriage. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 346 |
| Dream Vision and Romance |
A study of two major medieval genres as they are developed in the works of Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, and Malory. The course will explore the structural and stylistic as well as the political, social, and psychological issues raised by these genres and the individual authors' treatments of them. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 347 |
| After Beloved: Black Women Writers in the 21st Century |
| This course considers the critical acclaim for and commercial hype over black women’s writing in the 20th century as a jumping off point for discussions of black women’s literature since 2000. Considering the rich diversity of aesthetic and thematic approaches in 21st-century African American women’s texts, we will consider what is distinctive about this work, as well as if and how it forms a continuum with an earlier canon. Some topics for discussion will include class identity, genre, the avant-garde and the influence of Oprah Winfrey. We will read poetry by Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Claudia Rankine, fiction by Octavia Butler, ZZ Packer, Kim McLarin, and Jamaica Kincaid, and the work of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. In order to form a basis for comparison, we will read a handful of foundational works published in the 20th century: Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and poetry collections by Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 348 |
| Women Writers of the Middle Ages |
This course will study works in a variety of genres, from the lyric and the romance to the autobiography and the moral treatise, written by medieval women in England, Europe, and Asia. In addition to analyzing the texts themselves, we will be examining them within their social, historical, and political contexts as we discuss such issues as medieval women's literacy, education, and relationships to the male-authored literary traditions of their cultures. Through the term, we will be trying to determine the degree to which we can construct a recognizable woman's literary tradition for this period. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 349 |
| Other Selves: Friendship, Gender, and Identity in Early English Literature |
| This course explores how idealistic traditions of male friendship and brotherhood, dating back to classical antiquity, influenced relationships between men and women in a wide range of medieval and Renaissance texts. Our discussions of gender and sexuality will be framed by the overarching questions of identity raised by friendship’s often extreme rhetoric of unity and duplication, beginning with Aristotle’s declaration that “a friend is another self.” Depending on the literary context, this notion of “another self” can offer both the promise of transcendent selfless union and the threat of a collapse into self-love and solipsism. Spanning a variety of styles and genres, readings include Aristotle, Cicero, Chaucer, Malory, selections from the Romance of the Rose and other medieval romances, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Spenser, Philip Sidney, and Katherine Philips. Our study of these texts will shed light on how friendship positions the individual with respect to “other selves” of both genders. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 349 |
| Colonialism/Postcolonialism |
| An introduction to literature and cultural theory by writers engaging with the British Empire, both past and present. While familiarizing ourselves with Anglophone works from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, we will also look at English representations of imperialism from the 19th and 20th centuries. What is the relationship between imperial identity and national identity? How have historically marginalized figures responded to different forms of oppression, both by colonial forces and by governing structures and institutions? Authors include Salman Rushdie, Bessie Head,V.S. Naipaul, Tsitsi Dangarembga, George Orwell, Tayeb Salih, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Williams, Laura Chrisman, and Jamaica Kincaid. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 350 |
| Lost Worlds: Fiction & Film |
| The idea of a “lost” or undiscovered world has remained compelling from the adventures of Odysseus onward to the films of Steven Spielberg. Writers and filmmakers use images of a lost world to represent the “primitive,” the powerful, the mysterious, the ideal -- whatever is not everyday experience. The course will compare a number of such representations, both in fiction and in film, examining how the media shape particular images as they do. Among the texts will be novels by Herman Melville, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, James Hilton, and Michael Crichton, and films like Lost Horizon, Jurassic Park, and both versions of The Lost World. Students should plan to be available on Monday evenings for film screenings. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 351 |
| Shakespeare |
In this course we will study selected Shakespeare plays, with an emphasis on understanding cultural contexts and on plays in performance. We focus on Shakespeare's language and the language of the theater and the drama of his age, with an eye also to helping you understand why these plays and this dramatist have earned such an extraordinary place in the cultural history of so many people and places, from Russia to Africa. Plays to be studied may include: King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest. These choices are subject to change. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, or a literary theory course.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 352 |
| Shakespeare |
Through close study of a variety of Shakespeare’s works and analysis of selected performances on video, this course addresses definitions of the Shakespearean and examines the constitution of Shakespearean theater. The course pays particular attention to the coherence of Shakespearean dramas around vivid patterns of imagery, to the psychology and arts of Elizabethan and Jacobean characterization, to representations of Elizabethan social and political hierarchies, and to British Renaissance poetic will synthesizing Classical, Medieval, and Celtic source materials. This course fulfills the English major requirement for a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 or a literary theory course. This course may be used to fulfill literature and psychology minor requirements.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 352 |
| Shakespeare: Tragedy and History |
| Shakespeare's tragedies and British histories are plays fraught with bloody political violence, desperate soul searching, and the unyielding weight of human suffering. The course builds a narrative about the shaping of modern subjectivity as influenced by Protestantism, literacy, and early modern English politics. We will supplement careful textual analysis with critical secondary readings, and we will pay special attention to the ways in which Shakespeare used and manipulated the conventions of genre. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 353 |
| Challenging Authority: Literature of the 17th Century |
The early 17th century was one of the most important and contentious periods in English history, and literature was a formative part of its rich culture of debate and innovation. The Stuart monarchy was trying to establish an absolutist culture, and the resistance to it led to the first political revolution in modern Europe. The 17th century also witnessed the movement of women into public life and print as highly vocal poets, preachers, prophetesses, and political theorists. Advances in scientific inquiry reshaped how writers thought about the cosmos and their place in it. Readings will include works by Donne, Jonson, Marvell, the women poets Lanyer and Bradstreet, the quasi-scientific writings of Bacon and Burton, and samplings from the period's rich popular literature and pamphlet wars. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 354 |
| 17th Century Poetry |
| A study of the relationship between the individual poetic voice and society during a century of violent social change. Readings will include Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Marvell, and Milton. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 354 |
| The Age of Orientalism |
| This course will study the figure of “the Orient” in 19th-century British literature and culture. In contrast to “Asia” or more specific place names such as “Turkey” or “India,” “the Orient” designates no fixed geographical location, but rather an (at times wholly) imaginary place. We will examine how the Oriental idea corresponds to, interacts with, and is projected onto the set of “real” places these specific names point to. We will read texts from a variety of genres and authors (including Coleridge, Kipling, Arnold, and Wilde) that imagine the Oriental as an important part of British culture, both at home and abroad. We will think about the popularity of Orientalist themes in the period, and why many of these texts were and continue to be considered beneath “serious literature.” Finally, we will consider the persistence of some 19th-century ideas about the Orient in contemporary literature, popular culture, and politics. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 354 |
| Cloud Atlas: A Journey through Genre |
This course uses David Mitchell's magisterial novel Cloud Atlas as a touchstone for the exploration of genre, literary appropriation, and the postmodern revaluation of fictional form. In addtion to interleaving sections of the novel with its genre sources in both classical and contemporary genre texts (Melville, Huxley, Waugh, Amis, Cornwell, Hoban, and others), we will also explore theories of imitation and remix. The course culminates in viewing and discussion of the 2012 film adaptation. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or Permission of the Instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 355 |
| Narratives of Disability in U.S. Literature and Culture |
| This course introduces students to the ways in which disability has been used to represent both "normalcy" and extraordinariness in literature. We will consider how "tales told by idiots," as framed in Shakespeare's Hamlet, often supply the unique and insightful perspective that mainstream characters cannot see, hear, or experience because of their own limitations. We will look at how the notion of disability has been aligned with other aspects of identity, such as Charles Chesnutt's representation of race as a disability in his turn of the century literature or of slaves using performances of disability to escape from the horrid institution during the 19th-century. We will read a variety of genres, fiction, memoir, and some literary criticism to come to a clearer understanding of the ways in which the meaning of disability and its representation in a variety of texts echoes a broader set of beliefs and practices in the U.S. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 356 |
| Milton |
In this course, we will consider the works of John Milton, with attention to how his prose and poetry synthesizes long-standing intellectual and literary traditions and grapples with issues that still engage us today: the relation of men and women, the realities of loss and mortality, the concept of significant individual choice, and the power and limitations of language as the tool with which we forge an understanding of the world. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or Permission of the Instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 357 |
| Urban Culture & Rural Retreat in Renaissance Literature |
Many literary texts of the English Renaissance represent the dynamic relationship of urban and rural spaces. Cities were important centers of political and cultural significance, but also thought of as places of corruption. The rural countryside was often juxtaposed against the city as a place of retreat -- and, potentially, as a place of political resistance. This course will consider literary genres -- such as the pastoral poem, romantic comedy, city comedy, satire, and the country house poem -- that focus on the urban and rural setting and its symbolic significance. We will read works by writers such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Lanyer, and Nashe, as well as others.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 358 |
| Nine Major British Poets: Pope to Browning |
| We will read important works by Pope, Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning along with a few of the many significant biographical and critical essays. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 359 |
| Victorian Heroines |
In an era characterized by the prominence of women writers and by its female monarchy, this course will investigate the variety of ways Victorian writers construct heroines and other exceptional women. Our focus will be on literary texts (fiction and poetry), but we will read them in the context of selected other Victorian writings: conduct literature, biographical texts, aesthetic debates, the Crimean War, and writings by and about Queen Victoria. The course's goal is to give students a detailed knowledge of some Victorian literature, and to enable them to read these works in dialogue with Victorian history: specifically, with attention to the gendered economics of the literary marketplace, to the emerging feminist movement in England, to the role of women in wartime, to the conditions of the working-class, and to the authorizing (and disabling) presence of Queen Victoria. Texts will include: Bronte's Jane Eyre, Tennyson's The Princess and Maud, Barrett Browning's Mary Barton, Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Shaw's Candida, and selected writings by Hemans, Carlyle, Ruskin, Jameson, Mill, Ellis, and some recent critics.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 360 |
| Shakespeare on Film |
In this course, we will study selected films based on Shakespeare plays. Though we will read the Shakespeare plays as prelude to film analysis, the films will be studied as independent texts. The film script (adapted from or based on a Shakespeare play) will be treated as one aspect of the text. Students will concentrate on analyzing camera angles, mise-en-scene, lighting, sound, editing, and script as aspects of a composite text. We will also discuss film genres and look at the signature work of specific directors, such as Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. Plays may be selected from Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 361 |
| The Enlightenment |
| A study of English and French writers of the 18th century including Swift, Pope, Boswell, Johnson, Voltaire, Fielding, Rousseau, and Sterne. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 362 |
| Victorian Readers & Spectators |
This course will study 19th century texts (fiction, poetry, and criticism) that reflect on the experiences of readers and spectators in Victorian England. Against the background of aesthetic theories and social constructions of race, class, and sexuality, we will examine representations of theater and theatricality, travel abroad, museums, the Great Exhibition of 1851, education, and taste. Authors include: Ruskin, Pater, Carlyle, Dickens, Eliot, the Brownings, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Wilde.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 363 |
| William Blake: The Poet as Radical |
| A study of the poet’s exploration and elaboration of radical political, social, religious, and poetic alternatives to established opinion and institutions. Readings in all of Blake’s poetry include the visionary epics (the illuminated books), Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as Locke and The Bible. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 and for a course emphasizing poetry. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 363 |
| Mark Twain and the Making of America |
| Mark Twain’s fiction often acted as a moral seismograph registering the intense shifts in American cultural, political, and economic life in the post-Civil War era. His memoirs became a kind of public narrative describing what it meant to be an American – for both a national and a world audience. This course will consider a large swath of his works, including Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Life on the Mississippi, against the backdrop of the social transformations of the late 19th century in the United States. We will also explore Twain’s aesthetic innovations and techniques in the context of literary history. The class will make a visit to the Mark Twain House in the second half of the session; assignments will include shorter writing opportunities as well as a self-directed and substantial seminar paper. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 364 |
| Literary Transformations in the 18th Century |
How do writers transform traditional literary forms to express new perceptions of identity, sexuality, society, and nature? In this course, we will examine the way the poets, playwrights, journalists, and fiction writers of Restoration and 18th-century England imitated, reworked, and finally rejected old genres to forge new kinds of literary expression. Readings include works by Aphra Behn, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, and Goldsmith. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 365 |
| Jane Austen and the Romantic Period |
| Is Jane Austen a Romantic or a rationalist? A conservative or a feminist? Why is she so popular now and how was she regarded in her own time? This course will analyze Jane Austen’s entire opus while exploring what influences that helped to shape her world and her writing. Readings will include all of Austen’s work, Romantic poetry, 18th-century novels, and theoretical, critical, and historical texts. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, or a critical theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 367 |
| American Novel/Gothic to Postmodern |
This course will examine the American novel in its many incarnations. To some extent the form seems to evolve in keeping with movements in England and the Continent, but there are clear undercurrents or native impulses which seem to define or justify the category "American." We will trace developments in the use of point of view, character and plot, the move away from the improbability of the romance toward the "verisimilitude" of the realistic novel, the growing emphasis on character and subjectivity, and the rejection of conventional reader-friendly narrative techniques in favor of strategies which challenge the reader to engage with the peculiar logic of the text. We will also look at developments in critical theory, including genre criticism, narratology, and reception theory, and we will examine the relationship between social and political developments and the emergence of new literary forms. Writers will include Hawthorne, Kirkland, James, Faulkner, Morrison, Oates, and Pynchon.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 367 |
| Nineteenth-Century British Gothic |
| This course will examine the gothic novel in late-18th and 19th-century British literature. With plots involving suspense, mystery, crime, the supernatural, incest, impersonation, vampirism, theft, and murder, gothic novels constitute the conventions of the 19th-century domestic romance gone wild. The deception and disorder that make these plots so enticing also subvert fixed domestic and social order characterizing fears about a rapidly changing Victorian world. Readings will include works by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, George Eliot, and Bram Stoker. We will also cover trends in criticism of the gothic that rely on contemporary gender, queer, and postcolonial theory. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 368 |
| "Cross-Cultural" Writing |
We live in a time of unprecedented migrations and intermingling of formerly separate peoples, of dissolving borders, of the collapsing sense of distances. For at least two decades now, world literature has been revitalized by the cross-cultural experiences of many new writers, who in their works straddle more than one culture in unprecedented ways. What makes for literary originality at a time when so many are writing out of a similar, highly politicized, cultural context? We will begin by reading “predecessor” writers who were driven to reach from one culture to another, often in the face of political and cultural pressures to which they responded in such highly original ways that they initiated their own lines of literary tradition. We will study their works, but also the writers themselves, and the environments that shaped them. We will then move on to contemporary writers. Readings will be drawn from such predecessors as José Marti, Machado de Assis, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, V.S. Naipaul; and such more recent writers as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jhumpa Lahiri, André Aciman, Jessica Hagedorn, Junot Diaz, Dagoberto Gilb, José Manuel Prieto, and Zadie Smith. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 369 |
| Readng Along Borderlands |
| This class will look at the concept of borderlands in American literature and culture and its usefulness for analyzing both. We will read quasi--chronologically from Cabeza de Vaca through Gloria Anzaldua and Sandra Cisneros to see how different writers construct their own identity and that of others. We will emphasize primary sources but include secondary material for context and approach. The class will begin with a regional focus--the Southwestern borderlands-and then examine how the concept might be applied to reading ethnic communities located elsewhere, such as Chicago, Boston, and Hartford. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 369 |
| Latino Literature: Rewriting the Americas in the 21st Century |
| Latino fiction of the past 15 years has come a long way from civil rights conversations and autobiographical narratives of growing up as “the other.” Latinos in the United States are employing innovative textual and linguistic strategies to imagine and define a new place for themselves in U.S. society and in the Americas. Textual narratives from authors Hector Tobar, Alfredo Vea, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Achy Obejas, Coco Fusco, José Rivera, Erika Lopez, Dagoberto Gilb, Demetria Martínez, Salvador Plascencia, et al, will assist us in understanding this new positioning, in tandem with visual narratives from youtube, film, and performance art. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 370 |
| Reading Stowe and Hawthorne: Tragedy, Romance, Haunted Houses, Passionate Reformers, Weird Science |
| In this course, we will study in relation to one another the antebellum novels, short works, and personal writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These major American authors both produced fascinating, suspenseful, moving, and eerily-weird writing, so first and foremost, we will have some fun reading. We will examine the development, associations, and cultural significance of these two authors. Hawthorne and Stowe grappled with some of the most influential ideologies and political debates of their historical moment; they thought a lot about what makes good writing and what writing can do for human beings; and they both connected themselves to vital writing communities and traditions in America and abroad. Reading their work will tell us a lot about 19th-century literary movements and antebellum American culture. We will also use our explorations of these two writers to gain a better understanding of American literature and culture in general. Scholars have looked to their works as important reflections of American ideals and American identity. While reading and discussing Stowe and Hawthorne, then, we will be able to discuss how American literature and culture has developed, as well as how the study of American literature has changed over time. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 371 |
| Versions of Amer Sublime |
| This course will examine the work of American writers from the 17th century to the present who have represented and negotiated with the idea of crossing boundaries. From religious ecstasy to gothic excess, from grand obsession to practical mysticism, from communion with nature to virtual reality, we will seek answers to the question, posed by poet Wallace Stevens, "How does one stand/To behold the sublime?" This will also take us to issues of race, gender, ethics, and perhaps the changing nature of the human need to surpass and trespass in the face of religious, cultural and social prohibitions. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 371 |
| English-Language Writing in the Era of Globalization |
| Five centuries of European colonization spread the European languages across the planet. English is now virtually our global lingua franca. With immigration, global mass media and the internet blurring borders and ideas of national and cultural identity as never before, it is obvious that the “borders” between national literatures are blurring as well. This class will study the work of contemporary writers from around the world—Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America, Oceania— who, sometimes because it is their first language and sometimes as a matter of (anguished) choice, write in English, often in order to depict worlds that can seem alien to that language. Some of these writers are immigrants to England or the United States whose works express bi-national, bi-cultural or bilingual sensibilities; some are firmly rooted in one particular place; some seem determined to free themselves from specific national or cultural contexts. The writers whose work we will study will be drawn from the following: Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Wole Solinka, J.M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Richard Rodriguez, Richard Flanagan, Alma Guillermo Prieto, Monica Ali, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat and Monica Truang. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 372 |
| The Harlem Renaissance |
| This course treats a selection of novels, essays, short fiction, and poetry by African American writers of the period, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jesse Fauset, and Jean Toomer. Emphasis is on identifying the characteristics that unify this body of literature and on investigating the significance of the Harlem Renaissance within the African American literary tradition. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 373 |
| Feminist Literary Theory |
| This course will survey the field of feminist literary theory, tracing topics such as recovering female literary traditions, the intersection of race, class and gender, women’s creativity and silence, gender and genre, sexuality and embodiment, globalization, and literature as activism. Authors studied may include: Audre Lorde, Patricia Williams, Joan Scott, Diana Fuss, Jane Tompkins, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Chandra Mohanty, Assia Djebar, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Bonnie Zimmerman, Alice Walker, and Nancy Armstrong, among others. This course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 373 |
| Irish Poetry Since Yeats |
| We’ll consider the blossoming of Irish poetry in English since the foundation of the Irish Free State. Given his centrality to both the state and the art form, we’ll begin by considering the work of W.B. Yeats. From Yeats, we’ll move up through the 20th century, looking at work by Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNiece, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Durcan, Eamon Grennan, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Vona Groarke, and Sinéad Morrissey. We’ll consider the poems through the lens of Irish independence and cultural identity, the Troubles, tensions over religion and class, the urban/rural divide, and the place of women within the tradition. We will also consider the poems as aesthetic objects, governed by different schools and traditions within the art form, Irish or otherwise. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context and a class that emphasizes poetry. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 374 |
| Escape and Exile: Caribbean Fiction |
| In this course we will focus on themes of exile, immigration, the colonial notion of the "mother country," and the elusive concept of home in Caribbean novels and short stories. Our discussions will also be informed by literary portrayals of national, racial, religious, and gender identity. We will read classic novels by Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Samuel Selvon, and V.S. Naipaul, contemporary narratives of displacement by Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Andrea Levy, and Opal Palmer Adisa. Finally we will read essays by George Lamming and Caryl Phillips, as well as Audre Lorde's "biomythography." For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 375 |
| American Short Fiction—19th Century |
| In this course we will read short fiction by both canonical writers, like Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, and Crane; lesser-known writers, like Alice Cary, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charles Chesnutt, and John Milton Oskison; and some writers who have in recent times reemerged from obscurity, like Jack London, Kate Chopin, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. We will consider how fiction changed in the course of the 19th century and in what ways, if any, race, gender, ethnicity, and geography shape modes of narrative. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 376 |
| Home Fires Burning: America in Fiction 1945-1975 |
A survey of American fiction from the end of World War II, through the Cold War 1950s, 60s, 70s, and concluding in the aftermath of U.S.-Vietnam War. Included will be novels and short stories by Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, E.L. Doctorow, Robert Stone, and Joyce Carol Oates. Students should be prepared and willing to read a novel a week, or its equivalent, as well as occasional secondary readings for historical context. Evaluation will be through a combination of quizzes, short papers, mid-term, and final exam. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context.
Not open to first-year students. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 377 |
| Surviving Ulysses |
This is a course in the major works of High British Modernism. The poetry and prose of this period were characterized by tremendous ambition, radical experimentation, the questioning of conventions and the creation of new ones. In the first half we concentrate on a single author, James Joyce, reading his major fiction (excluding Finnegan’s Wake). In the second half we will assess the challenge Joyce -- specifically his masterpiece Ulysses -- presented to his contemporaries: poets influenced by his use of myth (Eliot, Pound, H.D.); Irish writers confronted with a self-proclaimed national epic (Yeats, Beckett); other aspirants to the High Modern novel (Huxley, Woolf).
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 377 |
| The Revolutionary Generations: American Literature from 1740 to 1820 |
| Hannah Arendt suggested that the United States failed to remember its revolutionary tradition because it failed to talk about it. This course will recover those memories by reading the texts that founded the American rebellion, the writings produced in the aftermath of independence, and the creative works crafted in the wake of revolution. Our focus will be on the literature from 1740 until 1820 that struggled to define ways of being in the world that seemed specifically American; therefore, we will look beyond the context of New England to consider the roles played by Africa and the Caribbean in the cultural imagination, and we will trace how social class, race, and gender inflected the output of American writers in a post-1776 world. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 379 |
| Character and Conditions: Fiction of the Gilded Age |
Horatio Alger’s books for boys set the ground rules for American upward mobility: hard work, honesty, and a little luck led to success. This course examines this American premise through the lens of novels written by men and women, by blacks and by whites, and by immigrants and first-generation Americans as well as by members of old established families.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 379 |
| Melville |
| Though a superstar during his early career, Herman Melville watched his reputation decline as his literary ambitions escalated. One review of his seventh novel bore the headline, "Herman Melville Crazy." Not until the 20th century did even his best-known work, Moby Dick, attract considerable attention, but it now stands at the center of the American literary pantheon. Melville's work merits intensive, semester-long study not only because he is a canonical author of diverse narratives—from maritime adventures to tortured romances to philosophical allegories—but also because his career and legacy themselves constitute a narrative of central concern to literary studies and American culture. Through reading and discussion of several of his major works, we will explore Melville's imagination, discover his work's historical context, and think critically about literary form. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 380 |
| Scribbling Women: 19th-Century American Women Writers |
| This course will trace the rich and diverse tradition of women’s writing in 19th-century America. Reading novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as cultural artifacts such as newspapers and photographs, we will consider the contexts that influenced women’s writing and evaluate women authors’ contributions to literary, political, and social movements during the 1800s. We will pay particular attention to representations of race, class, ethnicity, and gender in women’s writing. African American, Euro-American, Hispanic, Native American, middle- and working-class women authors will be studied, and may include Maria Stewart, Maria Cummins, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Zitkala-Ša, Louisa May Alcott, Caroline Kirkland, Frances E.W. Harper, Emily Dickinson, and Nancy Prince. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context or of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 381 |
| Symbolists, Aesthetes, and Decadents |
| The study of the major tradition of poetry and prose running from Poe in the United States through Baudelaire and the French symbolists Verlaine and Mallarme, to British aesthetes and decadents—Rossetti, Swinburne, Hopkins, Wilde, Conrad, and Symons—and to modern poets such as Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell. This course will explore the history, poetics, and aesthetics of this international literary movement. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 381 |
| The Brontës |
| Blending emotional intensity, social consciousness, and formal innovation, the writings of the Brontë sisters offer a bridge between the Romantic and Victorian eras in British literature. Their careers illustrate the changing status of women as authors, readers, and subjects of literary representation in the 19th century. This course studies the major novels by Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë (including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Villette, among others), as well as poetry by all three sisters, and their early writings set in the imaginary kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 383 |
| Modern British Fiction |
This is a course in British fiction between 1890 and 1945. The prose (novels and stories) of this period is characterized by tremendous ambition, radical experimentation, the questioning of old conventions and the creation of new ones. Authors will include Wilde, Conrad, Ford, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 384 |
| Modernism/Modernity |
Concurrent with the growth of Modernist studies in the last 15 years or so has been decreasing agreement about the nature of Modernism itself. In this course, we will consider the various competing accounts of Modernism (the artistic movement) and Modernity (the period) current in cultural theorists' attempts to reshape the Modern canon; we will also examine influential interpretations of modernist politics, aesthetics, technologies, and media. Readings will be divided equally between literature (familiar and less-familiar authors) and theory/philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno, Bourdieu, Jameson and others).
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 386 |
| Approaching the Victorian Novel |
We will take as our object of study middle- and late-Victorian novels that are notable for their popularity, their controversial nature, or their status as representative Victorian novels. Some themes of particular note in our readings will be utopian visions, possessive individualism, gothic approaches, and novels about the ghostly (the ectoplasmic). We will view these novels through various lenses, including cultural studies, commodity culture, and queer theory. We will practice various collaborative ways of thinking, writing, and speaking theoretically about Victorian novels as opposed to learning about how to apply theory to fiction. Readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Sheridan LeFanu, George Eliot, George Meredith, Henry James, Charles Darwin, and John Stuart Mill. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 387 |
| Ben Jonson and His World |
| This course will focus on the life and works of Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Rivaling his fellow-playwright William Shakespeare in his comic artistry (and far surpassing Shakespeare in his explicit representation of life in early modern London), Jonson worked in court, playhouse, and printing house to make a name for himself as England's first poet laureate. The study of his plays, poems, and masques provides insight into the dynamics of social and political change that were shaping early modern English society; study of Jonson's critical reception in turn illuminates key facets of an English literary tradition. We will be reading a range of works by Jonson, poems by the self-identified "Sons of Ben," and contemporary critical commentaries by scholars, poets, and directors. For English majors, this course fulfills the requirement for a pre-1800 course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 388 |
| Hysteria and Literature |
| This is a literature and psychology course examining the relationship between memory disturbances, trauma and literary form in works by Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, Helene Cixous, Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Path, Juliet Mitchell, and Kenneth Branagh. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 391 |
| Transatlantic Correspondence:Commonalities and Disparities in Contemporary Irish and American Poetry |
| Using form as our jumping off point, we will examine the work of contemporary Irish and American poets in terms of conversations that seem to be happening both across the Atlantic divide and exclusively within either tradition. Looking at work by Seamus Heaney, C.K. Williams, Paul Muldoon, Galway Kinnell, Ciaran Carson, Jorie Graham, Michael Longley, Robert Hass, Eamon Grennan, and Charles Wright among others, we will consider the sorts of structures, traditional or otherwise, the poems seem to be inhabiting, and how the subject matter under consideration is determining the shape of that habitation. Rather than taking the poets up one by one, we will work out of compelling clusters of poems that seem to develop from a shared concern—responses to major shifts in history in the work of Heaney or Kinnell, attempts to wrestle with cultural identity in Williams or Muldoon, meditative dealings with the natural world in Wright and Longley, and so on. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 392 |
| Tolkien and Modern British Culture |
In the wake of three blockbuster movies, J.R.R. Tolkien’s position in popular culture is more robust than ever. His status within academia, however, remains a matter of sharp controversy. All but absent from college curricula, his works are still left mainly to readers of science fiction and fantasy novels. This course will reconsider his claims as a "serious" author. We will read, in its entirety, the fiction he published during his lifetime. In addition, we will consider him in a series of contexts: his influences, his times, our times. We will read him alongside his contemporaries: can the literature of his period be reconfigured to make a place for his work? For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 398 |
| Literary Studies: The State of the Art |
Why should anyone write about literature? How does the field of literary studies contribute to greater understanding of literature, culture, and the world? In this course, students practice methodologies for archival literary research and study the hallmarks of convincing original arguments about literary history, genre, interpretation, and canon. The course is organized around a series of case studies, each of which involves a literary text, an influential work of literary scholarship, a presentation by or discussion with a guest professor, and a writing assignment in which students enter into a current conversation in literary studies. For the final project, each student will develop a proposal and work plan for an original research project (which may become his or her senior thesis). For English majors, this course fulfills the requirement of a course in literary theory.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 399 |
| Open Semester |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
4.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 399 |
| Literary Studies in Action |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 399 |
| Independent Study |
| A limited number of individual tutorials in topics not currently offered by the department. Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office and the approval of the instructor and chairperson are required for enrollment. |
|
0.50 units min / 1.00 units max, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 401 |
| Theories and Methods of Literary Studies |
| This seminar is designed to introduce students to the field of literary studies at the graduate level, to provide a perspective on varied critical vocabularies, and to explore the development of literary theories and methods from classical to contemporary times. Emphasis will be placed on a broad examination of the history and traditions of literary theory, the ongoing questions and conflicts among theorists, and practical applications to the study of works in literature. Students will write weekly, have opportunities to lead class discussion, and work in stages to compose a substantial critical essay based on research and the development of their own perspective on understanding and evaluating a literary text. (Note: English 401 and English 801 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course or an elective. For the English graduate program, this course is required of all students and we recommend that entering students enroll in this course during their first year of graduate study. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 402 |
| Intrepid Explorers, Unruly Natives, and Tacky Tourists: American Travel Writing, 1800-2000 |
Navigating the Mississippi River, the Oregon Trail, or the Transatlantic crossing as well as constructions of race, class, and gender, American travel writers assert personal and national identity in their texts. Our exploration will begin with the quintessentially masculine figure of the traveler and then turn to women travel writers who question traditional femininity and African American and Asian American authors who challenge racism and social injustice. Finally, we will consider the perspective of the “natives” and their response to travel accounts written by tourists and colonists. We will also study the growing field of travel criticism and address issues of colonialism, globalization, and tourism. Authors may include: Mary Louise Pratt, Jamaica Kincaid, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, William Wells Brown, Nancy Prince, June Jordan and selected contemporary travel writers. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a course emphasizing cultural context.
Prerequisite: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 402 |
| Theories & Methods of Rhetoric & Media Arts |
| Aristotle defined Rhetoric over 2,000 years ago as “the art of discovering, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.” This seminar is designed to introduce the theoretical traditions of this art of persuasion and its development across the media arts from classical to contemporary times. Students will examine representative examples of literary texts, political discourse, contemporary films, and digital modes of communication in popular culture and the public sphere. Emphasis will be placed on exploring media semiotics and the dynamics of evolving cultural concepts of page, voice, and screen—ranging from classical orations to televised speeches and hypertext webs. Students will write weekly, have opportunities to lead class discussion, and develop a substantial project on a rhetorical topic of interest to them. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 403 |
| Amistad and Other Rebellions |
The period leading to the Civil War witnessed intense conflicts not only about slavery and race but about the spread of capitalism, restrictions on women's economic and social rights, the growth of cities, and a variety of other social issues. "Literature" in this period was seldom seen as standing apart from these issues. On the contrary, art, politics, and social issues were generally seen as heavily intertwined. In this course we will look at the relationships between a number of issues prominent in ante-bellum America and works of art which at once expressed ideas about such issues and helped shape responses to them. The AMISTAD affair will provide one instance; we will examine two or three others as well. (English 403 and English 830 are the same course.) Note: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. Students other than English majors who wish to enroll in this course must have Professor Lauter sign a Course Exception/Override form. Also listed under American Studies Graduate Program. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. For graduate students, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary history course.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 405 |
| American Literature: The Remix |
| In this course, students will examine the ways in which a series of books are in direct and indirect conversation with another. We will do so by reading several classics of 19th and 20th-century American literature side-by-side with both contemporary and modern authors whose own work echoes or rewrites those classics in especially startling or suggestive ways. Given these concerns, we will be as interested in issues of continuity as we will be in matters of distinction. Another aim of this course will be to challenge insufficiently dynamic understandings of culture and the artificial barriers that have together served to separate American Literature from various Ethnic American and African American literatures.
For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 406 |
| Contemporary Composition Studies |
| Language and literacy, and their transmission from one generation to the next, have always served as lightning rods for social and political issues, as well as for conflicts of theory and practice in education. This course will explore the contemporary teaching of writing, with attention to the range of current pedagogies in US schools and colleges. We will examine the influences of the 20th-century revival of rhetoric, process and post-process writing, cultural and feminist studies, cognitive theory, the digital revolution, and the implications of "the global turn" for 21st-century students and teachers of writing. Beginning with Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy’s classic study of the first wave of open-admissions students at New York’s City College in the late 1960s, we will test theory against practice in the accounts of real-life classrooms, in literacy narratives written by teachers and students, and in our own experiences of learning to write. For English graduate students, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. For undergraduate English majors, this course counts as an elective. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 407 |
| Remixing Literature |
| Will “the remix” become a defining art form of the twenty-first century? This course will examine a variety of classic literary works and their adaptations and appropriations across multiple media arts, ranging from redactions of oral folktales to cinema blockbusters, digital mashups, and transmedia storytelling. Among the most popular current literary remixes are Beowulf, Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre. We will study these texts and linked remixes, explore the reasons for their continued popularity, and address topics in remix theory, creativity and originality, the aesthetics and politics of sampling, and the rhetorical dynamic of intertextuality in digital culture. Students will help choose contemporary remixes and have opportunities to experiment individually and collaboratively with crafting their own literary remixes and mashups. (Note: English 407 and English 807 are the same course.) For English majors, this course counts as an elective. For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major. NOTE: For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. For the graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 408 |
| American Realism and Urban Life |
| In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, American cities enjoyed the benefits of explosive economic growth but suffered the consequences of widespread poverty and class polarization. As both literal places and imagined spaces, cities embodied the excitement and opportunity of the "American dream" even as they provoked profound social and cultural anxieties. With immigrants arriving by the million and poor industrial workers living in striking proximity to the capitalists whom industry enriched, American cities were powder kegs of ethnic, racial, and class animosity—and frequently they exploded. During the same period, the school of literature we now call realism flourished, and realist authors wrote novels preoccupied with urban life. In this course, we will consider why rapid urbanization may have provoked literary realism and how literary realism in turn shaped our understanding of the urban center. Reading texts by authors such as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, John Dos Passos, and Richard Wright, we will examine the ways realist novels represent the covert tensions and outright unrest of the turn-of-the-century American metropolis. We will grapple with questions including: What is the fate of individualism in a crowd? How do developments such as factories, mass transit, department-store shopping, and the expansion of mass media change the ways people think about themselves and their membership in a social class or ethnic group? How does city life shape people's cognition of the world around them and the ways art and culture represent that world? (Note: English 408 and English 808 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track and an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 409 |
| William Faulkner |
| A study of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Go Down, Moses with emphasis on style, structure, and the writer’s response to culture and history. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 409 |
| The Problems of the "American Renaissance" |
| Within a few years in the early 1850s, U.S. authors published some of the most famous works in literary history, including The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Leaves of Grass. In the 1940s, a literary critic dubbed this period the “American Renaissance.” The name stuck, and it shaped the American literature curriculum for generations of students. It also raised questions: were some authors unjustly left out? Does the hopeful image of a “renaissance” make sense for literary culture in a nation careening toward civil war? In this class, we will study several literary texts from the 1850s (some famous, some less so), as well as the work of scholars who have sought to define, redefine, and challenge the idea of the “American Renaissance.” (Note: English 409 and English 809 are the same course.) |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 410 |
| What is Romanticism? |
| Between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the passing of the First Reform Bill in 1832, Europe experienced unending social and political turbulence, and produced perhaps the first truly international artistic movement: Romanticism. In this course, we will examine the literary and theoretical production of this brief but eventful period, looking as much at the rivalries and disagreements between authors as at their points of overlap. Focus will rest on major British writers (Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, the Shelleys, and especially Wordsworth), but we will also consider marginal or forgotten figures, as well as important continental voices. (Note: English 410 and English 810 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural context in the literary studies track or an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 411 |
| Electric English |
| In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift satirizes attempts to invent a machine that would enable anyone to write books using an enormous wooden frame filled with wires and random words on movable bits of paper. While our contemporary machines are made of plastic, not wood, and seem so much more sophisticated and powerful than Swift’s imaginary device, the rhetorical and literary questions raised by his satire are more relevant than ever in the digital age. This seminar will explore what happens when writers and readers go online. How do the new media arts affect the way we read and understand literature? What changes when literary protagonists become avatars of story? What do we make of hypertext novels and poetry machines on the Web? We will seek to establish whether there is a distinctively new phenomenon that can be called “digital literature.” If so, how do we define and evaluate it, and how do we place it in relation to a history of literature and literary aesthetic? We will ground our conversations in a small sampling of traditional works of fiction and poetry from print culture, comparing these texts with a range of rhetorical and literary experiments taking place online. NOTE: English 811 and English 411 are the same course. For the graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. For undergraduate writing, rhetoric, and media arts minors, it counts as a core course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 412 |
| Modern Poetry |
“It appears that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.” When T. S. Eliot wrote these lines in 1921, “difficulty” was self-evidently a term of praise: it signaled a willingness to grapple with the intellectual, esthetic, moral, and erotic complexities of modernity. Today, however, that same difficulty gives poetry of the early 20th century its somewhat scary reputation. Why read tough texts when so much else goes down easily? A premise of this course is that the excitement, the beauty, and the sheer greatness of modern poetry are inseparable from the challenges it poses to the reader. Between 1885 and World War II, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Crane, Moore, Bishop, Williams, Stevens, Frost, and Auden made poetry possible for modern life. We read their work. (Note: English 412 and English 812 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of an advanced class in literature written after 1800. It also satisfies the requirement of a poetry course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a course in American literature or British literature for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, or media arts track.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 413 |
| Practical Criticism |
| An analysis of complex texts by a variety of writers and from many periods and genres. The texts will be chosen by the participants. (Note: English 413 and English 813 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For graduate English students, this course counts as an elective for either the literary studies track or the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 414 |
| Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams: Representative American Dramatists |
| In this course we will study selected plays by Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, with a focus not only on the individual plays but on the broader dramatic and cultural contexts in which these two authors wrote and in which their plays were initially performed. We will consider some early sea plays of O’Neill’s as well a selection of his mythic and autobiographical plays. Plays of Williams will include THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, THE GLASS MENAGERIE, and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, among others. We may view films of major plays. This course is open to undergraduates with permission of instructor. For graduate students, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the Literary Studies track of the English M.A. It serves as an elective for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Media Arts track of the English M.A. For undergraduate students, this course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a cultural contexts course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 417 |
| Southern American Women Writers |
| Beginning with Margaret Mitchell's epic novel and film Gone with the Wind, this course will examine the ways in which southern women writers have depicted the culture of the south in the 20th century. We will focus on the shorter fiction of six writers, tentatively including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and one or two selected recent writers. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 418 |
| 17th-Century Poetry |
The poets of the early modern period made their contribution to an English literary tradition against a dynamic context of religious, political, and social change. Poets studied in this course will include Lanyer, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, Philips, Bradstreet, and Milton. (Note: English 418 and English 818 are the same course.)For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. For the English graduate program, this course fulfills the requirement of a course emphasizing English literature or a cultural context for the literary studies track. It counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 419 |
| Literature and Controversy: British Readers and Writers, 1798-1837 |
| The Romantic period witnessed numerous and persistent controversies in the fields of art and politics, from the heated responses to the revolution in France to the often bitter reviews that filled the pages of newspapers and magazines. This seminar examines the culture of "controversialism" in Romantic-era England by attending to particular debates, such as the "Pope controversy" and what Coleridge called "the whole long-continued controversy" over the Lyrical Ballads. In addition to literary texts, we will consider political speeches and critical reactions that reflect the historical context of a Great Britain increasingly divided along lines of cultural identity, ideology, and, importantly, "taste." Why, we will ask, is art such a charged category for Romantics? How do authors reflect and re-imagine reader relations? In what ways have we inherited and challenged Romantic visions of art and society? (Note: Engish 419 and English 819 are the same course.) Open to undergraduates with permission of instructor. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 420 |
| Wars of the Mind: Romantic and Rational Impulses from Voltaire to World War I |
| In this course, we will focus on the ways in which Romantic writer re-configured many of the major tenets of European Enlightenment thought, focusing in particular on attitudes toward freedom and restraint, on the notion of the individual, on concepts of the will, and on the conception of individual identity in relationship to social process. We will read works by Voltaire, Goethe, Blake, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Thomas Mann, and Shaw. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 421 |
| Immigration Stories - Then and Now |
| The United States is mainly a country of immigrants; hence the stories immigrants tell, especially about their migration, reception, and settlement, reveals a great deal about this country. This course will focus on the stories immigrants tell. We will concentrate on two periods of large-scale immigration: first, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and writers like Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far, and Carlos Bulosah; and second, the years since immigration laws were significantly altered in 1964 and the work of more recent writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, and Junot Díaz. (Note: English 421 and English 821 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 423 |
| Southern Gothic Literature and Film: Case Study in Genre Theory |
| Southern Gothic literature and film provide an excellent case study for exploring theories of genre. With the tools of modern genre criticism, this course will seek to define and map a controversial and disputed literary and cinematic territory, one that focuses on a culture of terror and horror as it spins tales of murder, madness, freaks, and monsters. It is a narrative mode that pushes what Flannery O’Connor called “the limits of mystery” in attempts to deal with tragic extremes of human behavior and comic twists of the grotesque. Readings include works by Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Cormac McCarthy, along with contemporary Southern “pop-gothic” movies such as Deliverance, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. (Note: English 423 and English 823 are the same course.) For Literature and Film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. For English graduate students, this course counts as a core course in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective in the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 423 |
| Shelleys, Woolfs, Plath/Hughes |
| This course examines the works, lives, and cultural contexts of Mary and Percy Shelley, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Themes of discussion include literary collaboration and inspiration, the history and psychology of marriage, archival work on these three literary marriages, and how Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern gender roles inform literary texts and their reception. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 424 |
| Studies in Victorian Literature |
This course encourages students to deepen their appreciation for the Victorian literary landscape by combining the study of canonical works (by, for example, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot) with less well-known texts (by writers including Felicia Hemans, Anthony Trollope, and Eliza Lynn Linton). Themes for discussion will include religious controversies, gender politics, imperialism, representations of human subjectivity, and literary experimentation. In the later part of the semester students will seek out-of-print materials through a range of Internet resources and will use these texts as the basis for an in-class presentation and an end-of-term research paper. (Note: English 424 and English 824 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English Graduate Program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the liteary studies track; it satisfies the requirement of an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. It satisfies a literary history requirement for the old requirements, predating fall 2004.
Prerequisite: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 424 |
| Reading Victorian Narratives |
| This course offers an advanced investigation into major writers and issues from the British Victorian period (1837-1901). We will concentrate on texts—fiction, non-fictional prose, poetry—in which notions of propriety and morality are in productive dialogue with crimes, threatening secrets, and subversive passions. In seminar sessions and in written work we will interrogate textual constructions of sexuality and gender, considering the potential for slippage between high-conservative ideals and actual lived experiences. Our readings will be informed by a range of modern critical, theoretical, and socio-historical examinations of Victorian literature and culture. Note: For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 424 |
| Sensational Literature of Victorian Suburbia |
| One of the most extraordinary phenomena of the Victorian period was the growth and development of the suburbs. "The great suburban sea-change" that began around the middle of the 18th century picked up rapid pace after Waterloo, and between 1861 and 1891 the London suburbs grew as much as fifty percent per decade. Greater London absorbed one-quarter of the net increase of the population of the entire country in the 1890s; the nation would never be the same again. In this course students will investigate literary responses to this transformation - some well-known, but others far more obscure. Discussions will center on questions such as: who built the suburbs, and why? Who chose to live in suburbia,and why? What did daily life in suburbia look like? How and in what ways did experiences of suburbia differ for men and for women? For the working, middle, and upper classes? What were the hopes of suburbia, and what were its problems? What was the relationship between the suburbs and slums? How did suburbia gain its eventual reputation for dullness and stagnancy? Students will complete two long papers and several shorter response papers; they will also be responsible for presenting independent research on suburbia to the class. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 425 |
| Postmodernism in Film and Literature |
| “Postmodern” is the term used most often to describe the unique features of global culture (art, architecture, philosophy, cinema, literature) since the 1970s. And yet there is practically no agreement about what those features might be: is postmodernism ironic or serious, flat or deep, real or hyper-real, alive or defunct? In this course we will examine competing and often contradictory views of postmodernism, with the goal of developing a historical perspective on the contemporary world we live in now. Texts will be divided evenly between philosophy/theory (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, Fukuyama, Hutcheon), cinema (possible films: Bladerunner, Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction) and literature (possible authors: Borges, Pynchon, Barthelme, Murakami, Foster Wallace).(Note: English 425 and English 825 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. For Literature and Film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. This course fulfills the requirements toward the film studies major. For Film Studies majors this course will count as a senior seminar. NOTE: Monday evenings screenings only. For the English graduate program, this course counts as an elective in the literary studies track; it counts as an elective in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 426 |
| Victorian Literature and Materiality |
| In this course we will read objects as well as literature. An imagist poet, William Carlos Williams, wrote, “(No ideas/but in things),” and this will be, in turn, a central premise of the course. Just as the 19th century is marked by a huge increase and proliferation of printed text, it is also marked by commodity culture and the domain of things. We will explore innovative reading practices in this course for getting a better handle on both texts and objects through units focused on museums; labor and commodities; houses; objects of desire; and electricity and ephemera (or immaterial culture). We will try to re-imagine Victorian literature by (re)touching our reading practices. As an ancillary benefit, the course will continually interrogate the nature of objects, ownership, subjectivity, and desire. Readings are likely to include works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Marie Corelli, and Oscar Wilde. (Note: English 426 and English 826 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 430 |
| Performing Heritage: (Self) Representation, Otherness, and Power |
| The issue of personal and cultural identity and self-representation shall be discussed in relation to specific performative practices, both in the spheres of hegemonic power and subaltern resistance. We will consider the double-edged aspect of representation: on the one hand, as a colonial instrument designed to invent and classify "the other," and also as a vehicle of empowerment for subaltern groups and subjects. In the latter sense, self-representation is often conceived as a way of achieving political and cultural representation within a dominant society. But we might then interrogate to what extent, for example, indigenous people are able to appropriate technologies of representation, and how they can (if at all) control the reception others have of their work. Our discussion will consider how the struggle for indigenous self-representation may lead to social agency and empowerment and the implications it has within the framing of an "intangible heritage." This course satisfies the requirements of a cultural context course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 431 |
| Writing Women of the Renaissance |
| The course will focus on literary works written by Renaissance women, as well as key representations of gender found in selected plays and poems by male writers of the same period. (Note: English 431 and English 833 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it satisfies the requirement of an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. It satisfies the literary history requirement for the old requirements, predating fall 2004. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 432 |
| Turns in the South |
| This course will emphasize representations of the US South in literature and film throughout the twentieth century. The course will begin with V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South; it will include works by Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams. Films will include A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Gone with the Wind, and Tomorrow (an adaptation of a Faulkner short story). (Note: English 432-01 and English 832-01 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, or an elective in the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 435 |
| Reading Films: Style, Genre, and Historical Context |
| This course will concentrate on developing the reading skills basic to film studies — focusing on understanding the language of film within the context of various styles, genres, and historical periods and developments. The course will concentrate primarily on American films, but will introduce selected foreign films, genres, and styles for comparative purposes. We will look at Film Noir, gangster films, social problem films, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave, among others. Directors whose films will be introduced include Fritz Lang, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Francis Ford Coppola, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Spielberg, and Ridley Scott. NOTE: For the graduate program, this course counts as a basic course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. (Note: English 435 and English 835 are the same course.) For English majors, this course counts as a cultural context course or a course emphasizing work after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 436 |
| 19th-Century Gothic Fiction |
| In this course, you will become acquainted with the castles, mansions, monasteries, lunatics, ghosts, and monsters that kept (and continue to keep) readers awake with a light on at night. Authors will include members of the Shelley circle in England (poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, fiction writers Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and John Polidori), Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James. The reading will be supplemented by historical and critical reading, which will help us to establish what was at stake in the genre in the past and why it still persists in the present. Topics will include how gothic represents threats to the social order, cloaks and exposes taboo sexuality; approaches or evokes the sublime; constructs the alienated self; anticipates Freudian concepts of the "unconscious" and "uncanny"; and demonizes peoples (ancestors, ethnicities, races, etc.). We will also consider how present day literary critics and theorists have constructed male versus female traditions of gothic and treated the genre as political allegory. Open to undergraduates with permission of the instructor. For graduate students, this course satisfies the requirement of author-centered study; for undergraduates, a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 437 |
| Writers of the American South |
| This course will focus on 20th century U.S. Southern writers, within the context of the complex history of various regions of the South. Beginning with V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, authors to be studied may include Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Cormac McCarthy. We will view selected films of a few of the novels read.
NOTE: Satisfies the requirements of a cultural context course or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 438 |
| Modernism/Modernity |
| What was Modernism? Concurrent with the growth of Modernist studies in the last 15 years or so has been decreasing agreement about the nature of Modernism itself. In this course, we will consider the various competing accounts of Modernism (the artistic movement) and Modernity (the period) current in cultural theorists' attempts to reshape the modern canon; we will also examine the influential interpretations of modernist politics, aesthetics, technologies, and media. Readings will be divided equally between literature (familiar and less-familiar authors) and theory/philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno, Bourdieu, Jameson, and others). (Note: English 438 and English 838 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in British literature, or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Topics in Film: Outsider Auters |
| The subject of this course will be the films of three directors working far from Hollywood and the First World metropole: Indian director Satyajit Ray, Cuban filmmaker Tom87s Guti8Errez Alea, and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. We will study and discuss the form, style and themes of each director’s films; but focus as well and as much on the complex relationships between those films, the national cinemas from which they emerge, and the globalized art-house and critical circuits through which they gain international reputations for their creators. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Topics in Film:Documenting Diversity |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: The City Scene |
| This course will focus on the representations of "the city" in literature and on film. Beginning with the 2002 Todd Haynes film Far from Heaven, a tribute to Douglas Sirk films set in the Hartford of the 1950s, this course will involve students in field work in the City of Hartford itself, as part of the focus on understanding the urban scene. Each student will develop a project that involves the City of Hartford, either through an exploration of a specific street (such as Park Street, near the campus) or through an association with a Hartford institution, government office, business, or arts organization. Students may either do a film or photography project for this unit, or they may write a paper in which they analyze what they have discovered on the street or learned through an institutional connection. They will pay attention to the way in which this unit interfaces with the representations of Hartford and other cities in the literature and film studied in the course. Other works of literature and film may be chosen from Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1925), Dickens, Bleak House, Dreiser, Sister Carrie with William Wyler's 1952 film adaptation, Edwin Torres' novel Carlito’s Way with the Brian De Palma film adaptation (1993). Other films may include Joan Micklin Silver, Hester Street (1975), David Lynch, The Elephant Man (1980), Scorsese, Mean Streets (1973) and New York New York (1977). We will also read David Clark¹s Urban World/Global City as well as other theoretical reading focused on the appropriation and deployment of urban space, with an emphasis on the contrast between neighborhood and urban infrastructure and on the notion of the urban streets; liaison will be made with the Trinity Hartford Studies Project, particularly to utilize and show students some of the footage of Hartford available through this program. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: Documentary Film and Urban Life |
| This seminar will offer students a vehicle for the exploration of many facets of urban life in Hartford. It will introduce students to the history, theory, and critical analysis of documentary film; it will give students the opportunity to practice this film genre by producing and directing their own short documentary films. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: Queer Theory and Queer Cinema |
The term "New Queer Cinema" was inaugurated in 1992 in order to recognize a then—recent movement of independent cinema—in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere—that was generating formally innovative and politically-challenging representations of gay, lesbian, and queer sexualities. At virtually the same moment, in the early 1990s, the field of scholarship known as queer theory was gaining traction as an established discipline with its own foundational texts, its own vocabularies, methodologies, and contradictions, and increasing numbers of curricula and conferences appearing across academia. "New Queer Cinema" has since died away as a label, but the energies and the aesthetics it described are more vital than ever. Queer cinema and queer theory have always been closely linked projects, citing each other frequently, and often confronting the same riddles and challenges around identity, sexuality, and textuality. They have worked to address such public crises as AIDS and widespread homophobic violence, even as they have worked to define queer sexuality as something that isn't a crisis, a trauma, or a disease. Rather than privileging either cinema or theory above the other, this course seeks to offer a helpful and reasonably varied introduction to both the scholarship and the cinema, with each field serving to illustrate, enrich, and complicate the other. No past experience with either queer theory or film studies is presumed; indeed, the unique background and expertise of each student will be a welcome aid in developing our conversations. Films to be screened include The Celluloid CLoset, Me and Rubyfruit, Paris Is Burning, All About Eve, High Art, All About My Mother, Beau Travail, Brother to Brother, and Boys Don't Cry. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing cultural conttext. Also fulfills the integration course required for the completion of the film studies minor.
Prerequisite: English 265, Introduction to Film Studies or French 320, French Cinema. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: The Western |
| This course will focus on the tradition of “the Western,” primarily in film but also as a written narrative form. The course will include some early representations of the West, the cowboy figure, train robberies, etc., in early narrative filmmaking (including The Great Train Robbery [1903]). It will focus on the evolution of the Western in the late 1930s, including Reuben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936), with attention to the making of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and development through subsequent Ford films, including The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and The Searchers. The course will also include the Sergio Leone trilogy of “spaghetti Westerns” featuring Clint Eastwood (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; A Fistful of Dollars; A Few Dollars More). It will include Eastwood’s own film The Unforgiven, along with other classic Western films. It will end with Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. (Note: English 439-08 and English 839-04 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this is a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, or as an elective in the literary studies track. This course counts toward the film studies minor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: Film and Race |
| This course will focus on ways in which persons of color have been represented both in commercial films, made in Hollywood and elsewhere, and in other film traditions — films more broadly from the Americas and Europe. Films will be chosen from a historical selection beginning with D. W. Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation (1915) and ending with a range of contemporary films, perhaps but not necessarily including To Kill a Mockingbird, In the Heat of the Night, and Crash. The course will also include a selection of theoretical readings that contextualize and analyze the varied representations of race in the films. (Note: English 839-03 and 439-07 are the same course.) Open to advanced undergraduates, it counts as a course emphasizing literature after 1800, a course emphasizing cultural context, or a literary theory course for the English major. It counts toward the film studies minor. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, or as an elective in the literary studies track. Students are allowed to take multiple sections of English 839 and 439, as each "section" is a different course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Film Noir and Its Literary Antecedents |
| This course will focus on the American genre of film called Film Noir and on a few of the hardboiled detective novels that influenced the development of the genre, as well as German Expressionistic film strategies that were encoded in the genre itself. We will look at the French naming of the genre and track noir films from the early ‘40s through what is usually thought of as their last mainstream examples in the late ‘50s. Films to be studied include The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, The Girl in the Window and Scarlet Street, The Third Man, A Touch of Evil, and Vertigo. We will read a selection of novels by Dashiell Hammett, as well as some secondary materials
Note: For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and as an elective for the literary studies track. For the undergraduate program, it satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course or a course emphasizing literature after 1800 for English majors, and it counts toward the Film Studies minor or the literature and film track in the English major. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: Cinematic Melodrama |
| Since the beginning of the 20th century, melodrama has been the narrative form Hollywood film has most often used to address social issues and ethical questions. But cinematic melodrama is not just a narrative form; it is also a visual aesthetic and a rhetorical mode. We will examine the generic descriptions of melodrama that film studies has developed for different bodies of film and eras of filmmaking, and trace the changes and continuities in the genre over time. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. Thursday meeting is film screening only. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: Making Movies, Making War |
| How have U.S. film industries represented America, and Americans, at war? This course is a historical survey of documentary and non-fiction film production, in the context of U.S. military involvement in World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. This course examines how "true stories" of war, wartime, and soldiers' lives have been important to the development of the "social problem" film, the cinematic realism of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary independent documentary production. Films to be studied may include: Why We Fight, The Battle of San Pietro, Hearts and Minds, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Fog of War, and My Country, My Country. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a cultural context course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or an elective. For the English graduate program, this course serves as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, and as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: More than Noir |
| Course description: English 439-10/839-07. Special Topics in Film: More than Noir. In this course, we will examine a selection of American films grounded in Film Noir, with emphasis on the urban setting, the visual and metaphorical darkness, and other central aspects of this style. Some of the films to be studied include the first recognized color Noir “masterpiece” Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock) juxtaposed with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); Alan Pakula), Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski Blue Velvet (1986) and one or two more recent films. Students taking this course will be asked to view Citizen Kane (1942, Orson Welles), The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston), Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder), The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed), and A Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles). Satisfies the requirements of a core course for the Graduate English M.A. Writing, Rhetoric, or Media Arts track or an elective for the Literary Studies track. Satisfies the requirements of a course featuring literature after 1800 or a literary theory course for undergraduate English majors. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: The Evolution of the Western Film |
| The course examines how the Western genre emerged from global popular culture at the end of the 19th century to become one of the most powerful and complex forms for expressing the experience of Modernity. After a careful consideration of the political and philosophical implications of the Western, we will track the development of the genre as it responds to the ideological contradictions and cultural tensions of 20th-century American history, focusing on broad trends within the mainstream, the contributions of individual directors, and the global dissemination of generic elements. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Filming the City |
| This course will examine ways of representing cities in film throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will begin with D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and end with one or two recent films that focus on the city. We will additionally read some central secondary texts that focus on urban development during the period under question. Films will focus on New York City, Rome, Paris, and possibly London. The films will be primarily, but not exclusively, American in origin and will include a mixture of styles and directorial emphases. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Reading Texts: Film and Literature |
| This course will focus on reading strategies for both films and literary texts, with a focus on American literature and American films, with some comparative reading and literature. We will examine analogues between the language of film and that of literature, as well as central contrasts in both styles and reading strategies. This course will be cross-listed in American Studies. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 439 |
| Special Topics in Film: The Documentary |
| Documentary films chronicle varied cultural, social, and political realities, from coal miners’ strikes and social revolutions to the development of musical genres. Documentary styles range from fictionalized recreations (docudramas) to narrative reenactments to non-narrative commentaries. This course will examine key documentary strategies through representative films, which may include Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976) and Shut Up and Sing (Kopple and Cecilia Peck, 2006), Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl (Ahmad Jamal and Ramesh Sharma, 2006): segments of The Battle of Algiers, Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (Renee Bergan and Mark Schuller), Jazz (selected episodes) (Ken Burns, 2001), Say Amen, Somebody (George Nierenberg, 1982), An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2008), and Fair Game (Doug Liman, 2010). Note: English 439-16 and English 839-12 are the same course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies a post-1800 distribution requirement, a literary theory course, or a core course for the literature and film concentration. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 440 |
| Localism Unrooted |
| Immanent in the expansion of the British empire during the 18th and 19th centuries was an increased movement of plants, soil, and seeds—the essential elements of a garden—throughout the colonies of the British empire. In this course we will examine this convergence of colonial and ecological history through examples of what we might call nature writing from Great Britain and its former colonies, from the 18th century to the present. We will analyze the changing representations of what one scholar has termed “ecological imperialism”—the physical impacts of colonial expansion on the ecology of Britain and its colonies, as well as the subtle effects of imperialism on ecological thinking. Readings may include works by Pope, Blake, Keats, Dutt, Rhys, Césaire, Coetzee, and Kincaid. (Note: English 440 and English 840 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies an advanced course in literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 442 |
| Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean Diaspora |
| This course will look at the literary and filmic production of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cuban Americans in the United States, from the 19th-21st centuries. Through the literature and cinema of these groups we will not only study the socio-cultural situation and history of this heterogeneous Diaspora but will also explore and come to question central themes traditionally used to discuss Latinos in the US: identity, language, culture, community, exile, space, and memory. In examining a literary and cultural production that spans three centuries, we will read texts in translation from the original Spanish, bilingual texts, and texts originally written in English. A reading knowledge of Spanish helpful but not essential. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 443 |
| Theaters of the Urban Streets |
| This comparative drama course will focus on the relationships between varied forms of drama that originated in festival or other communally based open-air, urban theater settings, ranging from Ancient Greece to the modern Americas. We will consider basic concepts of social and cultural organization, but the main focus of this course will be "reading" both literary texts and cultural events as if they were texts. We will pay particular attention to epistemologies associated with imagination (as the guiding principle of theater) and logic or reason (as the alternative epistemology). The literature read in the course will include plays by Sophocles and Euripides, medieval Corpus Christi plays, and German fastnachtspiele or carnival plays, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, contemporary American performance art, and festivals, and play cycles such as carnival or Ramleela that have their origins in the distant past. (Note: English 443 and English 843 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, literary theory, or cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing cultural context in the literary studies track, or an elective in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 443 |
| 1939: The Amazing Year in Films |
| It is a commonplace that 1939 was an extraordinary year in film production, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. This course will feature films released in 1939, primarily but not entirely in the United States, some of which shared directors, producers, etc. We will examine the factors of filmmaking that led to this astonishing year. Films to be studied may include Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln; The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men Only Angels Have Wings; Rules of the Game (Renoir), Story of Last Chrysanthemum (Mizoguchi), and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Available both to undergraduate and graduate students. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 444 |
| British Romanticism |
| Vast and icy oceans, fields of daffodils, dark satanic mills—the Romantic period was fraught with contradictions, including country and city, nature and art, beauty and sublimity, revolution and reaction. Authors of the period used their writing to make sense of these and other seemingly irresolvable splits in their world. Coleridge's Kubla Khan has constructed an ordered pleasure garden atop a sublime ice cave; William Blake suggested the marriage of heaven and hell. This class will examine some of the major poetry, novels and tracts that shaped the period. Sometimes portraits of hearth and home and sometimes tales of violence and horror, these texts demonstrate a psychological complexity and an understanding of literature and authorship that signals modernity. To better understand its historical conditions, we will supplement our readings with visual art and other cultural productions in an attempt to define and understand the period in a way of thinking and writing which we have come to call Romanticism. Authors will include the major Romantic poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth) as well as Smith, Inchbald, Wollstonecraft, Lewis, Austen, and Burke. Critical readings will accompany the primary texts. (Note: English 444 and English 844 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 445 |
| From Moll to Mother, Rake to Rhett: Gender and Culture in Selected Novels |
| In this course, we will examine female and male stereotypes in selected novels form the beginning of the 18th through the middle of the 20th centuries. Novels to be studied include Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, North and South, The Portrait of a Lady, Sister Carrie, The Age of Innocence, and Gone with the Wind. The final novel will be chosen by the students in the course from a selection of novels written within the last decade. The course will emphasize the relationship of fictional representations to a variety of cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 450 |
| Living Writers |
| Students will read work by selected authors giving readings or lectures at Trinity and in the vicinity; attend events featuring the authors themselves; and write both response papers and more contextualized literary critiques of living authors. Each student will also prepare for and conduct an interview with a selected author, for both class and written presentation. For students interested in contemporary prose and poetry and in placing creative writing within the context of both current trends and deep traditions in literature. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 451 |
| The Harlem Renaissance |
| This course will explore the flourishing of black literary and cultural production from the 1920s until late-1930s known as the Harlem Renaissance or "New Negro" Movement. We will look at the aesthetic, social, psychological and political objectives of the period and how these goals are addressed through essays, literature, music and visual art. We will also interrogate the construction of a “New Negro” identity. How is such an identity defined? What artists are deemed acceptable models of this identity? What artists or modes of cultural expression are excluded or silenced? How do issues of gender, class and sexuality factor into the construction of a New Negro identity? In addressing these questions, we will examine the Harlem Renaissance as a precedent for other black aesthetic movements in the later part of the 20th century. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 451 |
| Queer Harlem Renaissance |
| This course approaches the Harlem Renaissance or "the New Negro" Movement through the lens of sexuality, paying particular attention to the ways in which understandings of racial identity were filtered through representations of sex and gender. We will consider how writers of the Harlem Renaissance explored notions of sexuality and gender given the history of slavery and exploitation that generated rigid formulations of race and gender. How did cultural producers challenge, reinforce, question and imagine sexuality and its intersection with other aspects of identity, such as class, gender, and national origins. Writers/artists include, Wallace Thurman, Carl Van Vechten, Bessie Smith, Angelina Weld Grimke, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Langston Hughes, and Bruce Nugent. Note: For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program. This course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 452 |
| Politics, Literature and Film |
| With the presidential election looming near, this course will focus on questions about politics and culture reflected in film and literature. Beginning with Primary, the documentary that tracks the 1960s primary campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, readings and films will include Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, with its film adaptation, ending with George Clooney’s recent The Ides of March, among others. This course would serve as a good prelude to Colin McEnroe’s fall course on the Presidential Election, but stands as well on its own.
Note: For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and as an elective for the literary studies track. For the undergraduate program, it satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course or a course emphasizing literature after 1800 for English majors, and it counts toward the Film Studies minor or the Film and Literature track in the English major. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 453 |
| Frontier to Factory: Defining America in 19th-Century Literature |
| Interrogating American identity in the national or individual sense requires that we grapple with the places that so often define what we consider to be American experience. As 19th-century American authors wrestled with the difficulty of fully representing what it means to be American they frequently depicted and revised our ideas of quintessentially American places—the frontier, the home, the city, the factory, the countryside, and the contrasting idea of "abroad." For example, reading Upton Sinclair, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' various portrayals of the factory helps us understand not only how the factory functions as a symbolic site in American consciousness, but also how diverse authors build and challenge the meaning of labor, class, race, and nation. Reading widely across the 19th century and into the 20th, we will trace the literary conversations that construct and constantly rewrite our understandings of these American spaces and ask how they contribute to our ideas about American identity. We will consider the impact of race, class, and gender on these literary conversations and read a diverse group of authors that may include: Washington Irving, Thomas Detter, Zitkala-Ša, Frank Webb, Stephen Crane, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Upton Sinclair, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, and Henry David Thoreau. (Note: English 453 and English 853 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 454 |
| The Phenomenon of Literary Popularity |
| Why is Shakespeare considered great? Why is Jane Austen so popular? Or Romantic Poetry? Or Alice Sebold? In this course students will explore the way theorists and critics from Aristotle to Edward Said have understood literary value and meaning while they also read key texts in British literature. Students will have the chance to develop their own literary theories and apply them to their favorite texts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 455 |
| Gendered Projections |
| What is gender, or what do we imagine gender to be? Is there any difference between these two questions? In what specific ways is gender socially constructed? How and by whom are these constructs instilled and maintained, and how do competing forces of history, politics, economics, race, class, region, sexuality, and nationality influence and complicate each person's experience of gender? This course will chase some answers to these and other questions, exploring 20th-century literature, playwriting, and cinema for the different and often unstable notions of gender that these works "project" for us. As a seminar in literature, the course aims to highlight how various projections of gender are inseparable from such seemingly formal considerations as voice, genre, style, and point of view. Also, because gender itself constitutes such a dense network of social relations, we will assess the ways in which literature and art generate their own social relations, with important implications not only for gender but for countless other concepts and ideologies. Thus, in each of the seminar's four units—loosely focused around Anglo-American, African American, Latin American, and expatriate American literature—we will read and analyze texts in order to detect their particular concepts of gender, or the questions they raise about gender. Throughout the course, we will think critically about how differences in form, era, or cultural context affect the varying conclusions or implications related to gender in these works. Primary texts shall include Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Memory Mambo, Lolita, the films American Beauty and Butterflies on a Scaffold, as well as important essays in gender theory, feminist and gay/lesbian studies, psychoanalysis, critical memoir, and other branches of scholarship. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; for the undergraduate program it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 457 |
| Novels into Film |
| : In this course we will examine the process of adapting novels into films, using several signature, significant film adaptations of major novels to study various aspects of the process of adaptation. Works will include The Godfather (Puzo novel; Coppola film), The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck novel, John Ford film); To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee novel, Robert Mulligan film), and at last one film by Martin Scorsese and a recent adaptation. We will examine the different language of analysis used for literature and film as well as the cultural implications of the films and novels and the process of adaptation itself. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 459 |
| Ethnic Cultures and American Literatures |
This seminar will examine both fiction written by “ethnic” American writers and other texts that discuss issues of ethnicity, race, borders, bilingualism, biculturalism, immigration, and the like. Writers whose work might be studied include Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Lan Cao, Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Goldstein, Grace Paley, Rolando Hinojosa, and Gloria Anzaldúa. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or Permission of the Instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 460 |
| Tutorial |
| Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office and the approval of the instructor and chairperson are required for enrollment. |
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 464 |
| McLuhan 5.0—Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Revolution |
| This course will look at the ways in which Old Media are in decline. Alas, chances are good that we will be able to study the shuttering of a major newspaper in real time. We will examine the new tricks some older outlets are using to revive themselves. Of course, we will look at the structure, nature and implication of Web 2.0 models and whatever sits beyond that. We will use the work of McLuhan to give us a tree of theory on which to hang our new ornaments. Participants should be willing to blog and participate on sites such as Facebook. (Note: English 464 and English 864 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or as an elective; for writing, rhetoric, and media arts minors, this course counts as a core course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 465 |
| The Media and the Presidential Election |
| In this course, students will use the current presidential election as a living laboratory as they explore the role of the media in shaping perceptions, presenting content, and providing criticism. Students will follow the election in each news medium (including the Internet), interview consultants and "spin doctors," analyze television broadcasts, including television election ads, and prepare a talk radio show. The course will focus also on such issues as media bias, corporate ownership, and FCC regulation. We will also look at the nature of "content" in the political process and how it corresponds (or doesn’t) to literary notions of "text." Note: English 465 and English 865 are the same course. This course will count as a core course in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and an elective for the literary studies track in the English M.A. This English course also counts towards the American Studies graduate program. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 466 |
| Teaching Assistantship |
| Students may assist professors as teaching assistants, performing a variety of duties usually involving assisting students in conceiving or revising papers; reading and helping to evaluate papers, quizzes, and exams; and other duties as determined by the student and instructor. See instructor of specific course for more information. Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office and the approval of the instructor and chairperson are required for enrollment. |
|
0.50 units min / 1.00 units max, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 468 |
| O'Neill and Williams |
| This course will focus on selected plays by two American Playwrights: Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. We will focus primarily on aspects of the plays that define and characterize the work of these two individual authors, but we will also emphasize the work of these two individual authors, but we will also emphasize aspects of their plays that characterize American drama of the 20th-century generally, and aspects that might be linked to their own regional as well as individual, backgrounds. Plays to be studied will include but not be limited to a selection of early O’Neill sea plays, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, A Touch of the Poet, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. For the graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of American Literature course or a course emphasizing cultural context for the Literary Studies track; it counts as an elective for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Media Arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course counts as a course emphasizing cultural context or a post-1800 course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 468 |
| Edith Wharton and Henry James |
| Their lives stretched from a pre-industrial time of horses and carriages to a modern era of automobiles and skyscrapers. As members of social and cultural elites, they were front-line observers of the original Gilded Age (to which many have likened our own historical moment). With Victorian mores on the wane, they and their characters contended with complicated and shifting ideas about gender and marriage. In this course, we will study the work of two American writers who represented these profound social changes in intricate psychological dramas written in some of the most stylistically accomplished prose in the English language. By reading and discussing short stories, novels, and essays by Edith Wharton and Henry James, we will consider their influence on each other and on the literary categories of realism and modernism; their works’ implications about gender, identity, and power; and the historical and economic context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Note: English 468-05 and English 868-17 are the same course.) For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it satisfies the requirement of an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 468 |
| Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson |
| Nothing that precedes them in the American literary tradition quite prepares us for the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will steep ourselves in the verse of these two literary iconoclasts. At the same time, we will trace the critical history of both, reading essays from the 19th century to the present which have made the complex works and lives of Whitman and Dickinson more legible. The final class period will be reserved for reading selections from 20th-century poets -- not all of them American -- who have openly professed a debt to Whitman's and Dickinson's experimental and often exhilarating poems.
Note: English 868-16 and English 468-06 are the same course. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 470 |
| Film Theory: An Introduction |
| This course introduces the most important theoretical models which have been used to explain how films function as art, ideology, language, history, politics and philosophy. Some theorists are mainly concerned with the aesthetic potentials of the cinema: How do categories such as realism, authorship and genre explain and enhance our experience of films? Other theorists are focused on the relations between films and the societies that produce them, or on general processes of spectatorship: How do Hollywood films address their audiences? How do narrative structures shape our responses to fictional characters? As the variety of these questions suggests, film theory opens onto a wide set of practices and possibilities; though it always begins with what we experience at the movies, it is ultimately concerned with the wider world that we experience through the movies. Theorists to be examined include Munsterberg, Eisenstein, Burch, Kracauer, Balazs, Bazin, Altman, Gunning, Mulvey, Metz, Wollen, Havel, Benjamin, Pasolini, Deleuze and Jameson. For English majors, this course fulfills the requirement of a literary theory course or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. This course fulfills requirements toward the film studies minor. Film screenings to be discussed at the first class meeting. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 470 |
| Classic American Films and Their Literary Antecedents |
| This course will focus on a few “classic” American films, made as adaptations of novels, with an emphasis on reading the literary text and then understanding the film adaptation as a “text” in its own right. The course will introduce the rhetoric of film analysis and is open to students who have taken previous film courses and students who have not. Text to be studied include The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird. Others to be determined. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 472 |
| The U.S. Civil War and Its Afterimage |
| Amid the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the U.S. is awash in remembrances of a pivotal historical moment. But how does American culture remember the Civil War, and why? This course will touch on military and political events, but it is not a history course; it is a course about representation and public memory. By studying the work of novelists, poets, short-story writers, and filmmakers from the 1860s through the present, students in this course will consider how—and to what ends—historical memory gets fashioned and revised by culture. In addition to reading an array of literary texts, students will develop individual research projects and examine other registers of public memory, such as war memorials, historic sites, museum exhibits, and popular culture. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 475 |
| Orwell, Auden |
| Near contemporaries, George Orwell and W.H. Auden were, respectively, the most important social critic and leading British poet of their generation. Although they were close on many views, each regarded the other with wariness or outright hostility. This course follows their careers from the 1930s to the 1950s, tracing their agreements and disagreements on important issues of the day: the proper role of the British Left; the position of the artist in society; the best way to resist Fascism before and during World War II; the new world that emerged after war’s end. We will read widely in the critical and literary work of both authors. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a British literature course or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track or an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 476 |
| Blogging On |
| More than eight million Americans have created and maintained "blogs" which Merriam-Webster defines as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks." But what is a blog? What kind of writing goes on there, and how does it differ, rhetorically, from other kinds? How does information pass from blog to blog and what is the impact of this new activity on mainstream culture? Participants in this seminar will read and analyze blogs. Most students will, in lieu of a final paper, produce and maintain a blog (although those who wish to do a more traditional analytical paper will be accommodated). Other readings in the course will include The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore as we work on a theoretical framework for understanding the way information spreads. (Note: English 476 and English 866 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or as an elective. For writing and rhetoric minors, this course counts as a core course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, and as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 477 |
| The Sixties in Film, Fiction and Poetry |
“The Sixties” have taken on iconic status as a representation of progressive social change. In fact, quite varied images of The Sixties have been constructed in poetry, fiction, film, and other creative forms, a good deal of it composed during the years 1958-1974 or so. In this course we will read such works, examining the roles of creative texts in defining and carrying out the social and political conflicts of the era–and in shaping our own time. Authors to be read will likely include Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg. (Note: English 477 and English 877 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. For Literature and Film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track.
Prerequisite: ENGL 260 with minimum grade of C- and Junior or Senior status. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 478 |
| Adolescent Literature: What we read, what they read. |
| We will read a range of works intended primarily for adolescent readers, beginning with classic texts that appeal to both adolescent and adult readers, and ending with more recent works. Steinbeck, The Red Pony, Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, Golden, Lord of the Flies, Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a selection of Judy Blume books, Patterson, Bridge to Terabithia, Zampino, Holes, Hesse, Out of the Dust, Lowry, Number the Stars, and a selection of recent popular adolescent literature. The final texts of the course will be decided in consultation with students in the course. When available, we will also watch and analyze films adapted from or related to the literary works. Available to both graduate and undergraduate students.
Enrollment Limit 15 students – 7 undergrads/8 grads, the standard enrollment for hybrid English graduate/advanced undergraduate seminars. The number of graduate and undergraduate students may be adjusted as necessary to meet the limit of 15. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 480 |
| Literary Losers |
| Why is it that certain writers, very well-known in their own times, later disappear from view or are trivialized as, for example, “The Sweet Singer of Hartford” or “stuff for boys who don’t read”? In this course we will examine a number of case studies of such writers: Lydia Sigourney, Alice Cary, Jack London, Amy Lowell, and, happening right now, Tillie Olsen. We will also consider the extent to which such writers have come back into view. And we will look at one or two contrary cases: writers who were not seen as terribly important in their own times but who later became central to American literary study, like Herman Melville. In other words, we will study the question of “canon formation” in depth. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 488 |
| Hysteria and Literature |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 490 |
| Research Assistantship |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
0.50 units min / 1.00 units max, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 492 |
| Fiction Workshop |
Advanced seminar in the writing of fiction. Class discussions devoted primarily to the analysis of student fiction, with some attention to examples of contemporary short stories. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers, and an advanced creative writing workshop. This course satisfies the requirement of a 400-level workshop for creative writing concentrators.
Prerequisite: English 270 and one of the following English 333, 334, 336, Film 337, or Theater and Dance 345. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 494 |
| Poetry Workshop |
Advanced seminar in the writing of poetry. Class discussions devoted primarily to the analysis of student work, with some attention to examples of contemporary poetry. One requirement of this class is attendance at a minimum of two readings offered on campus by visiting writers, and an advanced creative writing workshop. This course satisfies the requirement of a 400-level workshop for creative writing concentrators, and a senior project.
Prerequisite: English 270 and one of the following English 333, 334, 336, Film 337, or Theater and Dance 345. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar |
| Senior English majors may, if they wish, take more than one senior seminar. These courses are ordinarily restricted to senior English majors, but non-seniors may petition individual instructors for admission. For English majors, the Senior Seminar satisfies the requirement of a senior project. |
|
0.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Innocence Abroad |
A study of the ways in which American writers have persisted in constructing their exemplary American protagonists as moral innocents by playing out their stories against the background of Europe. Beginning with the very different model of Jefferson and Franklin, eager to be accepted as American philosophes in Paris, this course moves on to examine a century of innocence, from Hawthorne's The Marble Fawn on through James and Twain and Wharton, and then to the writers who, like Dos Passos and Hemingway, tested that innocence against the backdrop of the First World War. The course concludes with more tarnished visions of American innocence, from Fitzgerald to James Baldwin.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Amistad and Other Rebellions |
The period prior to the Civil War witnessed intense conflicts not only about slavery and race but about the spread of capitalism, restrictions on women’s economic and social rights, the growth of cities, and a variety of other social issues. "Literature" in this period was seldom seen as standing apart from these issues. On the contrary, art, politics, and social issues were generally seen as heavily intertwined. In this seminar we will look at the relationships between a number of issues prominent in antebellum America and works of art which at once expressed ideas about such issues and helped shape responses to them. The Amistad affair will provide one instance; we will examine two or three others as well. This course satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
This course open to seniors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Ulysses |
| We will study Ulysses closely, reading it twice, and will examine how critics have gone about interpreting it. This course satisfies the requirement for a senior project. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Everything about Texts |
This is your final year as an English major; this course is your senior seminar. There are books and authors, that, once upon a time, you thought every English major should have encountered. But you still haven't. One of this seminar's main purposes is to allow you to do so. One of its other purposes is to ask, and, we'll hope, to answer the question: Why? Why did you or do you think that every English major should have read this book or author? Why haven't you? Why, now, has or hasn't the text satisfied your great expectations? Along the way, we will also be discussing related issues such as canonicity and canon changes, the structure of the major in English, and the (perhaps changing) reasons why you're in this major. Obviously, the students in this course will generate (and debate) its reading list and syllabus. The instructor will generate the requirements.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Practical Criticism |
An analysis of complex texts by a variety of writers and from many periods and genres. The texts will be chosen by the participants. This course satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar |
Senior English majors may, if they wish, take more than one senior seminar. These courses are ordinarily restricted to senior English majors, but non-seniors may petition individual instructors for admission. For English majors, the Senior Seminar satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
0.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: James Joyce |
The complete works of the great 20th-century author, supplemented by critical and theoretical readings. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Novels of William Faulkner |
A study of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Go Down, Moses with emphasis on style, structure, and the writer's response to culture and history.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Louise Erdrich's Fiction |
After Louise Erdrich published Love Medicine in 1984, she quickly became the best-known Native writer in America. Since then, through eight novels, three volumes of poetry, works for children and young adults, and nonfiction books and articles, she has carved a place for herself in the American mythos. Her North Dakota novels, particularly, bear comparison to Faulkner, and all of her works forge links between the deep mythology of the Ojibwe culture and the material of living history and vibrant family relationships. This course will focus on the quintology—Tracks, Four Souls, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace—but will also cover the Argus novels, The Beet Queen, and The Master Butchers Singing Club, as well as some of Erdrich's poetry. We will contextualize our reading by discussing works of Ojibwe and Trickster history and mythology from which Erdrich draws. This course satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Wordsworth: Rewriting Wordsworth |
| How does literature change over time? How do earlier writers exercise an influence, for good or ill, over their successors, and how do those later writers grapple with their most powerful forerunners? In this seminar, you will be invited to think in the abstract, theoretically, about these large questions, which have formed a subtext to your work in the major thus far. To focus our discussion, we will concentrate on Romantic and Modern poetry. In the first half, we will read through the major works of William Wordsworth, the most influential English language poet since (at the very least) Milton. Then, in the second half, we will look at how the greatest Modern poets, both British and American, struggled with Wordsworth's legacy – sometimes going so far as to rewrite specific Wordsworth poems, sometimes denying Wordsworth's importance altogether. Modernists will include Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Moore, Bishop, Stevens and Auden. In the final project, you will have the opportunity to apply our broader conclusions to your work in the major over the last four years. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a senior project. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Making of Anthologies |
| How are literary canons established—or changed? What roles are played by textbooks in general and by anthologies in particular? To what extent and in what ways do course syllabi function to shape literary canons? These and related questions will be the subject matter of this seminar. Because I am the general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature and am currently engaged in revising the anthology for its 7th edition, we will be able to use that material as the core of our study, and will also be able to consider the roles of publishing as an industry in the shaping of anthologies and the determination of what students and critics learn to value and read. This course satisfies the requirement of a senior project. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Meanings in Literature and History: The Phenomenon of Literary Popularity |
| Why is Shakespeare considered great? Why is Jane Austen so popular? Or Romantic Poetry? Or Stephen King? In this course students will explore the way theorists and critics from Aristotle to Edward Said have understood literary value and meaning, while they also read key texts in British literature. Students will have the chance to develop their own literary theories and apply them to their favorite texts. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 495 |
| Senior Seminar: Curiosity & Literature |
| This course will examine the literary themes, forms and characters that manifest curiosity from the Renaissance to the 21st century. We will analyze the concept of curiosity, explore the way curiosity transformed both literature and culture in the age of inquiry, when Peeping Tom was invented, modern science was institutionalized, and the detective novel was born, and read accounts of both approved and disapproved kinds, such as witchcraft, voyeurism, and the exhibition of monsters. Texts will include drama, journalism, poetry, satire, and novels by Shakespeare, Defoe, Johnson, Jane Austen, Dickens and others. Assignments include oral presentations, and students will conduct original research on a related topic of their choice for their final essays. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: American Auteurs |
| This course explores and celebrates the work of classic American film directors and constitutes an introduction to the critical methodology of the auteur theory. The directors to be examined in Spring 2014 are Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock. After an introduction to various approaches to the auteur, we will use the work of Fuller, Hawks and Hitchcock to explore the history and creative potential of these approaches. Emphasis will be given to contemporary developments that integrate a focus on auteurs with the practices of experimental cinephilia and philosophy. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a Senior Seminar. For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Evolution of the Western Film |
| This course examines how the Western genre emerged from global popular culture at the end of the 19th century to become one of the most powerful and complex forms for expressing the experience of Modernity. After a careful consideration of the political and philosophical implications of the classic Western, we will track the development of the genre as it responds to the ideological contradictions and cultural tensions of 20th century history, focusing on broad trends within the mainstream, the contributions of individual directors (such as John Ford, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher and Sergio Leone) and the dissemination of generic elements into global cinema. For English majors, this course fulfills the senior project. Film screening only on Monday evenings. Open to American Studies undergraduates with permission of instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: The Poems of W.B. Yeats |
| We will read Yeats's poems, a play or two, and some of his prose, along with biographical, cultural, and critical background. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For senior English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a senior project. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Dickens/Chaplin |
| Charles Dickens was undoubtedly the most popular artist of the 19th century. The fictional worlds and characters he created formed a mythology that addressed and made sense of the experiences of early modern life for millions around the world; the adjective "Dickensian" testifies to how familiar his characteristic blend of comedy and melodrama has become. Like Dickens, Chaplin was his century’s most popular global artist, his work addressed some of the fundamental issues of contemporary social life, and he also employed a blend of comedy and melodrama that merited its own adjective ("Chaplinesque"). This course considers the evolution of these two major artists over the course of their careers. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a senior project. For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major. Tuesday evenings for film screening only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Renaissance Travel Writing |
| As European explorers, adventurers, traders and settlers migrated to every corner of the globe, they set in motion profound historical changes. In fact, aspects of the mental, social, and cultural paradigms forged then still haunt us today. This course explores their legacy by foregrounding the question of how the growth of global travel, trade, and colonial exploitation shaped and was shaped by the literary imaginations of early modern English writers. Careful and close analysis of literary texts and their relation to a wide variety of cultural and critical contexts will be a crucial component of this course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Over the Rainbow |
| Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow is, despite its sprawling length and mind-numbing complexity, arguably the most important and influential literary text to emerge from the U.S. of the 1960s. Both individually and in groups, concentrating on both social and literary contexts, we will use the methods of British cultural studies to investigate the conditions and constituents out of which Pynchon’s daffy and difficult novel emerged, as well as the contexts in the discourses through which it was declared a “masterpiece” and endowed with literary value. Students taking this course should be skilled close readers and eager researchers, capable of thinking and arguing for themselves, yet also able and willing to work together to inventory one text’s raw materials and enabling conditions, and map out that text’s cultural meanings and effects. For the English Graduate Program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Meanings in Literature and History: The Phenomenon of Literary Popularity |
| Why is Shakespeare considered great? Why is Jane Austen so popular? Or Romantic Poetry? Or Stephen King? In this course students will explore the way theorists and critics from Aristotle to Edward Said have understood literary value and meaning, while they also read key tests in British literature. Students will have the chance to develop their own literary theories and apply them to their favorite texts. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Wordsworth. Rewriting Wordsworth. |
| How does literature change over time? How do earlier writers exercise an influence, for good or ill, over their successors, and how do those later writers grapple with their most powerful forerunners? In this seminar, you will be invited to think in the abstract, theoretically, about these large questions, which have formed a subtext to your work in the major thus far. To focus our discussion, we will concentrate on Romantic and Modern poetry. In the first half, we will read though the major works of William Wordsworth, the most influential English language poet since (at the very least) Milton. Then, in the second half, we will look at how the greatest Modern poets, both British and American, struggled with Wordsworth's legacy – sometimes going so far as to rewrite specific Wordsworth poems, sometimes denying Wordsworth's importance altogether. Modernists will include Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Moore, Bishop, Stevens and Auden. In the final project, you will have the opportunity to apply our broader conclusions to your work in the major over the last four years. This course satisfies the requirement of a senior project. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Frontiers in American Travel Writing |
Navigating the Mississippi River, the Oregon Trail, or the Transatlantic crossing as well as examine constructions of race, class, and gender, American travel writers assert personal and national identity in their texts. Our exploration will begin with the quintessentially masculine figure of the traveler and then turn to women travel writers who question traditional femininity and African American and Hispanic authors who challenge racism and social injustice. Finally, we will consider the perspective of the "natives" and their response to travel accounts written by tourists and colonists. We will also study the growing field of travel criticism and address issues of colonialism, globalization, and tourism.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Sem:What You Should Have Read |
This is your final semester as an English major, and this senior seminar will provide you with an opportunity to reflect back on the intellectual paths you have and have not taken. What texts do you consider true classics, but have not yet read? This course will give you a chance to address those perceived gaps in your literary education, as students in the course will generate the primary reading list. What has led you to think of these specific works as central to the study of English literature? In addition to our list of selected classics, we will read critical essays that discuss issues of canonicity, the history of the English major, and the fate of literature (and literary study) in this latest "information age." Writing requirements will include weekly responses to assigned reading, class presentations, and a longer seminar paper. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
This course open to senior English majors only. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar: Innocence Abroad |
| A study of the ways in which American writers have persisted in constructing their exemplary American protagonists as moral innocents by playing out their stories against the background of Europe. Beginning with the very different model of Jefferson and Franklin, eager to be accepted as American philosophes in Paris, this course moves on to examine a century of innocence, from Hawthorne's The Marble Fawn on through James and Twain and Wharton, and then to the writers who, like Dos Passos and Hemingway, tested that innocence against the backdrop of the First World War. The course concludes with more tarnished visions of American innocence, from Fitzgerald to James Baldwin. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 496 |
| Senior Seminar |
| Senior English majors may, if they wish, take more than one senior seminar. These courses are ordinarily restricted to senior English majors, but non-seniors may petition individual instructors for admission. For English majors, their Senior Seminar satisfies the requirement of a senior project.
|
|
0.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 497 |
| One-Semester Senior Thesis |
| Individual tutorial in writing of a one-semester senior thesis on a special topic in literature or criticism. Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office and the approval of the instructor and the chairperson are required. |
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 498 |
| Senior Thesis Part 1/Senior Colloquium |
| This course is designed to teach senior English majors the techniques of research and analysis needed for writing a year-long essay on a subject of their choice. It is intended to help the students to write such year-long theses, and to encourage them to do so. It will deal with problems such as designing longer papers, focusing topics, developing and limiting bibliographies, working with manuscripts, using both library and Internet resources, and understanding the uses of theoretical paradigms. This course is required of all senior English majors who are planning to write two-semester, year-long theses. Please refer to the department's website for more information. Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office and the approval of the instructor and the chairperson are required. (2 course credits are considered pending in the first semester; 2 course credits will be awarded for completion in the second semester.) |
|
2.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 499 |
| Senior Thesis Part 2 |
| Individual tutorial in the writing of a year-long thesis on a special topic in literature or criticism. Seniors writing year-long, two-credit theses are required to register for the second half of their thesis for the spring of their senior year. Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office and the approval of the instructor and chairperson are required for each semester of this year-long thesis. (2 course credits are considered pending in the first semester; 2 course credits will be awarded for completion in the second semester.) |
|
2.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 801 |
| Theories and Methods of Literary Studies |
This seminar is designed to introduce students to the field of literary studies at the graduate level, to provide a perspective on varied critical vocabularies, and to explore the development of literary theories and methods from classical to contemporary times. Emphasis will be placed on a broad examination of the history and traditions of literary theory, the ongoing questions and conflicts among theorists, and practical applications to the study of works in literature. Students will write weekly, have opportunities to lead class discussion, and work in stages to compose a substantial critical essay based on research and the development of their own perspective on understanding and evaluating a literary text. (Note: English 401 and English 801 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course or an elective. For the English graduate program, this course is required of all students and we recommend that entering students enroll in this course during their first year of graduate study.
Prerequisite: Course is open only to English majors |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 802 |
| Theories & Methods of Rhetoric & Media Arts |
| Aristotle defined Rhetoric over 2,000 years ago as “the art of discovering, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.” This seminar is designed to introduce the theoretical traditions of this art of persuasion and its development across the media arts from classical to contemporary times. Students will examine representative examples of literary texts, political discourse, contemporary films, and digital modes of communication in popular culture and the public sphere. Emphasis will be placed on exploring media semiotics and the dynamics of evolving cultural concepts of page, voice, and screen—ranging from classical orations to televised speeches and hypertext webs. Students will write weekly, have opportunities to lead class discussion, and develop a substantial project on a rhetorical topic of interest to them. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 803 |
| Advanced Filmmaking |
| A course focused on the process of moving from film script through production to a complete film, drawing on and assuming skills and knowledge from other film studies courses. Note: All students must have access to use of a videotape camera for the course, and must know how to operate the camera. All students must have access to a video editing program for their computer, and understand how to operate this software. All students must be able to write a script, in script format. Some equipment will be available for students to share through Media Technology Services (formerly known as Audio Visual); there are also editing stations available to students in various Trinity spaces. Students do not need to own a camera, and if they are comfortable editing in a shared space, they may use Trinity’s editing stations. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 805 |
| Theories and Narratives of Disability in U.S. Literature and Culture |
| This course examines how disability has been used to represent both “normalcy” and extraordinariness in literature. We look at the historical and theoretical foundations of Disability Studies as a disciplinary arena. And, we will consider how “tales told by idiots,” as framed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, often supply the unique and insightful perspective that mainstream characters cannot see, hear, or experience because of their own limitations. We will look at how the notion of disability has been aligned with other aspects of identity, such as William and Ellen Craft’s narrative, in which they document their performances of race, class, disability and gender in order to escape slavery in 1848. We will read a variety of genres, including theory, history, fiction, memoir, literary criticism, etcetera to develop a shared understanding of the ways in which the meaning of disability and its representation in a variety of texts echoes a broader set of beliefs and practices in the U.S. (and globally, for that matter). Students will engage in a class presentation, and will write several papers, including a longer piece at the end of the semester that will require them to identify and evaluate a text that is not included on the syllabus. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 807 |
| Remixing Literature |
| Will “the remix” become a defining art form of the twenty-first century? This course will examine a variety of classic literary works and their adaptations and appropriations across multiple media arts, ranging from redactions of oral folktales to cinema blockbusters, digital mashups, and transmedia storytelling. Among the most popular current literary remixes are Beowulf, Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre. We will study these texts and linked remixes, explore the reasons for their continued popularity, and address topics in remix theory, creativity and originality, the aesthetics and politics of sampling, and the rhetorical dynamic of intertextuality in digital culture. Students will help choose contemporary remixes and have opportunities to experiment individually and collaboratively with crafting their own literary remixes and mashups. (Note: English 407 and English 807 are the same course.) For English majors, this course counts as an elective. For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major. NOTE: For literature and film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. For the graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 808 |
| American Realism and Urban Life |
| In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, American cities enjoyed the benefits of explosive economic growth but suffered the consequences of widespread poverty and class polarization. As both literal places and imagined spaces, cities embodied the excitement and opportunity of the "American dream" even as they provoked profound social and cultural anxieties. With immigrants arriving by the million and poor industrial workers living in striking proximity to the capitalists whom industry enriched, American cities were powder kegs of ethnic, racial, and class animosity—and frequently they exploded. During the same period, the school of literature we now call realism flourished, and realist authors wrote novels preoccupied with urban life. In this course, we will consider why rapid urbanization may have provoked literary realism and how literary realism in turn shaped our understanding of the urban center. Reading texts by authors such as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, John Dos Passos, and Richard Wright, we will examine the ways realist novels represent the covert tensions and outright unrest of the turn-of-the-century American metropolis. We will grapple with questions including: What is the fate of individualism in a crowd? How do developments such as factories, mass transit, department-store shopping, and the expansion of mass media change the ways people think about themselves and their membership in a social class or ethnic group? How does city life shape people's cognition of the world around them and the ways art and culture represent that world? (Note: English 408 and English 808 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track and an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 809 |
| The Problems of the "American Renaissance" |
| Within a few years in the early 1850s, U.S. authors published some of the most famous works in literary history, including The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Leaves of Grass. In the 1940s, a literary critic dubbed this period the “American Renaissance.” The name stuck, and it shaped the American literature curriculum for generations of students. It also raised questions: were some authors unjustly left out? Does the hopeful image of a “renaissance” make sense for literary culture in a nation careening toward civil war? In this class, we will study several literary texts from the 1850s (some famous, some less so), as well as the work of scholars who have sought to define, redefine, and challenge the idea of the “American Renaissance.” (Note: English 409 and English 809 are the same course.) |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 810 |
| What is Romanticism? |
| Between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the passing of the First Reform Bill in 1832, Europe experienced unending social and political turbulence, and produced perhaps the first truly international artistic movement: Romanticism. In this course, we will examine the literary and theoretical production of this brief but eventful period, looking as much at the rivalries and disagreements between authors as at their points of overlap. Focus will rest on major British writers (Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, the Shelleys, and especially Wordsworth), but we will also consider marginal or forgotten figures, as well as important continental voices. (Note: English 410 and English 810 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural context in the literary studies track or an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 811 |
| Electric English |
| In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift satirizes attempts to invent a machine that would enable anyone to write books using an enormous wooden frame filled with wires and random words on movable bits of paper. While our contemporary machines are made of plastic, not wood, and seem so much more sophisticated and powerful than Swift’s imaginary device, the rhetorical and literary questions raised by his satire are more relevant than ever in the digital age. This seminar will explore what happens when writers and readers go online. How do the new media arts affect the way we read and understand literature? What changes when literary protagonists become avatars of story? What do we make of hypertext novels and poetry machines on the Web? We will seek to establish whether there is a distinctively new phenomenon that can be called “digital literature.” If so, how do we define and evaluate it, and how do we place it in relation to a history of literature and literary aesthetic? We will ground our conversations in a small sampling of traditional works of fiction and poetry from print culture, comparing these texts with a range of rhetorical and literary experiments taking place online. NOTE: English 811 and English 411 are the same course. For the graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. For undergraduate writing, rhetoric, and media arts minors, it counts as a core course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 812 |
| Modern Poetry |
| “It appears that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.” When T. S. Eliot wrote these lines in 1921, “difficulty” was self-evidently a term of praise: it signaled a willingness to grapple with the intellectual, esthetic, moral, and erotic complexities of modernity. Today, however, that same difficulty gives poetry of the early 20th century its somewhat scary reputation. Why read tough texts when so much else goes down easily? A premise of this course is that the excitement, the beauty, and the sheer greatness of modern poetry are inseparable from the challenges it poses to the reader. Between 1885 and World War II, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Crane, Moore, Bishop, Williams, Stevens, Frost, and Auden made poetry possible for modern life. We read their work. (Note: English 412 and English 812 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of an advanced class in literature written after 1800. It also satisfies the requirement of a poetry course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a course in American literature or British literature for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, or media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 812 |
| Caribbean Civilization |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 813 |
| Practical Criticism |
| An analysis of complex texts by a variety of writers and from many periods and genres. The texts will be chosen by the participants.(Note: English 413 and English 813 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course counts as an elective for either the literary studies track or the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 814 |
| Studies in Drama |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 814 |
| Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams: Representative American Dramatists |
| In this course we will study selected plays by Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, with a focus not only on the individual plays but on the broader dramatic and cultural contexts in which these two authors wrote and in which their plays were initially performed. We will consider some early sea plays of O’Neill’s as well a selection of his mythic and autobiographical plays. Plays of Williams will include THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, THE GLASS MENAGERIE, and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, among others. We may view films of major plays. This course is open to undergraduates with permission of instructor. For graduate students, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the Literary Studies track of the English M.A. It serves as an elective for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Media Arts track of the English M.A. For undergraduate students, this course emphasizing literature written after 1800 or a cultural contexts course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 815 |
| Festival and Drama |
| This course will examine ways in which performance is in many cultures linked to the festivals of many different kinds. More basically, it will examine the ethos of what can be called “the festival world” in contrast to the “workaday world.” We will consider ways of regulating time (festival time vs. clock time), the demands of vocation vs. leisure, play vs. work. In addition to studying festival drama, we will examine the idea of festivity and play as establishing an alternative to the “public” world of politics and vocation in selected works of literature. Specific works to be studied will include Euripedes’ Antigone in the context of Greek festivals, German faschtnachspiele, or carnival plays by Han Sachs, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, and Dickens’ Hard Times. Particular attention will be paid to Caribbean Carnival as street theater, evolving from emancipation festivals in the 19th century. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800 or a literary theory course. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 816 |
| From Papyrus to Cyberspace |
| How do the various means by which we create and transmit information affect what we know and how we know it? How, more specifically, has the field of literature been redefined as new methods of written publication--the manuscript, the printed book, the electronic text - have developed? We will begin with a close examination of the technology of the codex book. What design elements make it a highly effective means of conveying information? We will then read selected texts with particular emphasis on how changes in western literary culture relate to material changes in publication practice. Critical readings will include essays on the relationship of orality and literacy, the origins and spread of printing, the development of a mass readership, and life after the codex book in an "information age." |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 817 |
| Poetry of Paradise |
| This course will focus on representative works of 17th-century English literature, with particular emphasis on the literary, historical, and cultural contexts that help to inform our understanding of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in British literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. Open to undergraduates with Permission of Instructor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 818 |
| 17th-Century Poetry |
| The poets of the early modern period made their contribution to an English literary tradition against a dynamic context of religious, political, and social change. Poets studied in this course will include Lanyer, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, Philips, Bradstreet, and Milton. (Note: English 418 and English 818 are the same course.)For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. For the English graduate program, this course fulfills the requirement of a course emphasizing English literature or a cultural context for the literary studies track. It counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 819 |
| Literature and Controversy: British Readers and Writers, 1798-1837 |
| The Romantic period witnessed numerous and persistent controversies in the fields of art and politics, from the heated responses to the revolution in France to the often bitter reviews that filled the pages of newspapers and magazines. This seminar examines the culture of "controversialism" in Romantic-era England by attending to particular debates, such as the "Pope controversy" and what Coleridge called "the whole long-continued controversy" over the Lyrical Ballads. In addition to literary texts, we will consider political speeches and critical reactions that reflect the historical context of a Great Britain increasingly divided along lines of cultural identity, ideology, and, importantly, "taste." Why, we will ask, is art such a charged category for Romantics? How do authors reflect and re-imagine reader relations? In what ways have we inherited and challenged Romantic visions of art and society? (Note: English 819 and English 419 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 820 |
| Imagining Home: A Comparative Novel Cours |
| In this course, we will study a selection of comparative novels that create conceptions of home, ranging from a desire for a place of one’s own to the notion of home as either an idealized retreat from an unpleasant public sphere or a place of imprisonment. Authors to be studied include Dickens, V.S. Naipaul, Kate Chopin, Paule Marshall, Sinclair Lewis, and one recent American author to be determined. These issues will be considered within the context of various ethnic, racial, and cultural distinctions as well as individual choices.
Note: This English course counts toward the American Studies Program. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 821 |
| Immigration Stories - Then and Now |
| The United States is mainly a country of immigrants; hence the stories immigrants tell, especially about their migration, reception, and settlement, reveals a great deal about this country. This course will focus on the stories immigrants tell. We will concentrate on two periods of large-scale immigration: first, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and writers like Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far, and Carlos Bulosah; and second, the years since immigration laws were significantly altered in 1964 and the work of more recent writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, and Junot Díaz. (Note: English 421 and English 821 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 822 |
| Edmund Spenser |
| Spenser's poems, written at the height of the English Renaissance, continue to amaze readers with their fantastic imagination of unseen worlds both mythic and divine. Moreover, Spenser's poetic evocations of geographically specific places, including Ireland and America, reflect Spenser's powerful engagement with issues related to English plantation and territorial expansion. In this course we will consider how Spenser's eclectic and allusive works connect to a variety of literary, cultural, and critical contexts, with particular attention to their status as "colonial texts". |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 822 |
| Spenser's Visionary Geographies: Texts and Critical Contexts |
| Spenser's poems occupy an important place in the English literary canon, in part because they continue to amaze readers with their fantastic imagination of unseen worlds both mythic and divine. Moreover, his poetic evocations of geographically specific places, including Ireland and America, reflect Spenser's powerful engagement with issues related to English plantation and territorial expansion. In this course, we will consider how Spenser's eclectic and allusive works connect to a variety of literary, cultural, and critical contexts, with particular attention to their status as "colonial texts." |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 823 |
| Shelleys, Woolfs, Plath/Hughes |
| This course examines the works, lives, and cultural contexts of Mary and Percy Shelley, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Themes of discussion include literary collaboration and inspiration, the history and psychology of marriage, archival work on these three literary marriages, and how Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern gender roles inform literary texts and their reception. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 823 |
| Southern Gothic Literature and Film: Case Study in Genre Theory |
| Southern Gothic literature and film provide an excellent case study for exploring theories of genre. With the tools of modern genre criticism, this course will seek to define and map a controversial and disputed literary and cinematic territory, one that focuses on a culture of terror and horror as it spins tales of murder, madness, freaks, and monsters. It is a narrative mode that pushes what Flannery O’Connor called “the limits of mystery” in attempts to deal with tragic extremes of human behavior and comic twists of the grotesque. Readings include works by Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Cormac McCarthy, along with contemporary Southern “pop-gothic” movies such as Deliverance, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. (Note: English 423 and English 823 are the same course.) For Literature and Film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. For English graduate students, this course counts as a core course in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective in the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 824 |
| Sensational Literature of Victorian Suburbia |
| One of the most extraordinary phenomena of the Victorian period was the growth and development of the suburbs. "The great suburban sea-change" that began around the middle of the 18th century picked up rapid pace after Waterloo, and between 1861 and 1891 the London suburbs grew as much as fifty percent per decade. Greater London absorbed one-quarter of the net increase of the population of the entire country in the 1890s; the nation would never be the same again. In this course students will investigate literary responses to this transformation - some well-known, but others far more obscure. Discussions will center on questions such as: who built the suburbs, and why? Who chose to live in suburbia,and why? What did daily life in suburbia look like? How and in what ways did experiences of suburbia differ for men and for women? For the working, middle, and upper classes? What were the hopes of suburbia, and what were its problems? What was the relationship between the suburbs and slums? How did suburbia gain its eventual reputation for dullness and stagnancy? Students will complete two long papers and several shorter response papers; they will also be responsible for presenting independent research on suburbia to the class. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 824 |
| Studies in Victorian Literature |
| This course encourages students to deepen their appreciation for the Victorian literary landscape by combining the study of canonical works (by, for example, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot) with less well-known texts (by writers including Felicia Hemans, Anthony Trollope, and Eliza Lynn Linton). Themes for discussion will include religious controversies, gender politics, imperialism, representations of human subjectivity, and literary experimentation. In the later part of the semester students will seek out-of-print materials through a range of Internet resources and will use these texts as the basis for an in-class presentation and an end-of-term research paper. (Note: English 424 and English 824 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English Graduate Program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the liteary studies track; it satisfies the requirement of an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. It satisfies a literary history requirement for the old requirements, predating fall 2004. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 824 |
| Reading Victorian Narratives |
| This course offers an advanced investigation into major writers and issues from the British Victorian period (1837-1901). We will concentrate on texts—fiction, non-fictional prose, poetry—in which notions of propriety and morality are in productive dialogue with crimes, threatening secrets, and subversive passions. In seminar sessions and in written work we will interrogate textual constructions of sexuality and gender, considering the potential for slippage between high-conservative ideals and actual lived experiences. Our readings will be informed by a range of modern critical, theoretical, and socio-historical examinations of Victorian literature and culture. Note: For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 825 |
| Writing the Self: American Ethnic and Racial Identities |
| Autobiography, "autoethnography," and autobiographical novels have all served to construct ideas of what ethnic and racial identity mean in the United States. In this course we will read a number of literary and critical texts that take as their subject writing the self. We will explore a variety of genres, from slave narratives to spiritual autobiographies to social realist novels to postmodern collages. We will explore how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and national origin intersect to build an American identity. Texts may include Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; George Copway, The Life of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh; Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road; Jo Sinclair, Wasteland; John Okada, No-No Boy; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, as well as theoretical work by Hazel Carby, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 825 |
| Postmodernism in Film and Literature |
| “Postmodern” is the term used most often to describe the unique features of global culture (art, architecture, philosophy, cinema, literature) since the 1970s. And yet there is practically no agreement about what those features might be: is postmodernism ironic or serious, flat or deep, real or hyper-real, alive or defunct? In this course we will examine competing and often contradictory views of postmodernism, with the goal of developing a historical perspective on the contemporary world we live in now. Texts will be divided evenly between philosophy/theory (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, Fukuyama, Hutcheon), cinema (possible films: Bladerunner, Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction) and literature (possible authors: Borges, Pynchon, Barthelme, Murakami, Foster Wallace).(Note: English 425 and English 825 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. For Literature and Film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. This course fulfills the requirements toward the film studies major. For Film Studies majors this course will count as a senior seminar. NOTE: Monday evenings screenings only. For the English graduate program, this course counts as an elective in the literary studies track; it counts as an elective in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 826 |
| Victorian Literature and Materiality |
| In this course we will read objects as well as literature. An imagist poet, William Carlos Williams, wrote, “(No ideas/but in things),” and this will be, in turn, a central premise of the course. Just as the 19th century is marked by a huge increase and proliferation of printed text, it is also marked by commodity culture and the domain of things. We will explore innovative reading practices in this course for getting a better handle on both texts and objects through units focused on museums; labor and commodities; houses; objects of desire; and electricity and ephemera (or immaterial culture). We will try to re-imagine Victorian literature by (re)touching our reading practices. As an ancillary benefit, the course will continually interrogate the nature of objects, ownership, subjectivity, and desire. Readings are likely to include works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Marie Corelli, and Oscar Wilde. (Note: English 426 and English 826 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 827 |
| Wars of the Mind: Romantic and Rational Impulses from Voltaire to World War I |
| In this course, we will focus on the ways in which Romantic writer re-configured many of the major tenets of European Enlightenment thought, focusing in particular on attitudes toward freedom and restraint, on the notion of the individual, on concepts of the will, and on the conception of individual identity in relationship to social process. We will read works by Voltaire, Goethe, Blake, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Thomas Mann, and Shaw. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 830 |
| Amistad and Other Rebellions |
The period leading to the Civil War witnessed intense conflicts not only about slavery and race but about the spread of capitalism, restrictions on women's economic and social rights, the growth of cities, and a variety of other social issues. "Literature" in this period was seldom seen as standing apart from these issues. On the contrary, art, politics, and social issues were generally seen as heavily intertwined. In this course we will look at the relationships between a number of issues prominent in ante-bellum America and works of art which at once expressed ideas about such issues and helped shape responses to them. The AMISTAD affair will provide one instance; we will examine two or three others as well. (English 403 and English 830 are the same course.) Note: For English majors, English 260 with a grade of C- or higher. Students other than English majors who wish to enroll in this course must have Professor Lauter sign a Course Exception/Override form. Also listed under American Studies Graduate Program. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. For graduate students, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary history course.
Prerequisite: C- or better in English 260 or permission of instructor |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 830 |
| Senior Seminar: Amistad and Other Rebellions |
| The period prior to the Civil War witnessed intense conflicts not only about slavery and race but about the spread of capitalism, restrictions on women’s economic and social rights, the growth of cities, and a variety of other social issues. "Literature" in this period was seldom seen as standing apart from these issues. On the contrary, art, politics, and social issues were generally seen as heavily intertwined. In this seminar we will look at the relationships between a number of issues prominent in antebellum America and works of art which at once expressed ideas about such issues and helped shape responses to them. The Amistad affair will provide one instance; we will examine two or three others as well. This course satisfies the requirement of a senior project. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 830 |
| Performing Heritage: (Self) Representation, Otherness, and Power |
| The issue of personal and cultural identity and self-representation shall be discussed in relation to specific performative practices, both in the spheres of hegemonic power and subaltern resistance. We will consider the double-edged aspect of representation: on the one hand, as a colonial instrument designed to invent and classify "the other," and also as a vehicle of empowerment for subaltern groups and subjects. In the latter sense, self-representation is often conceived as a way of achieving political and cultural representation within a dominant society. But we might then interrogate to what extent, for example, indigenous people are able to appropriate technologies of representation, and how they can (if at all) control the reception others have of their work. Our discussion will consider how the struggle for indigenous self-representation may lead to social agency and empowerment and the implications it has within the framing of an "intangible heritage." This course satisfies the requirements of a cultural context course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 831 |
| Southern American Women Writers |
| Beginning with Margaret Mitchell's epic novel and film Gone with the Wind, this course will examine the ways in which southern women writers have depicted the culture of the south in the 20th century. We will focus on the shorter fiction of six writers, tentatively including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and one or two selected recent writers. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 832 |
| Turns in the South |
| This course will emphasize representations of the US South in literature and film throughout the twentieth century. The course will begin with V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South; it will include works by Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams. Films will include A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Gone with the Wind, and Tomorrow (an adaptation of a Faulkner short story). (Note: English 432-01 and English 832-01 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a literary theory course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, or an elective in the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 833 |
| Writing Women of the Renaissance |
| The course will focus on literary works written by Renaissance women, as well as key representations of gender found in selected plays and poems by male writers of the same period. (Note: English 431 and English 833 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it satisfies the requirement of an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. It satisfies the literary history requirement for the old requirements, predating fall 2004. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 834 |
| Victorian Fiction, 1851-1867 |
| The years from the Great Exhibition (1851) to the Second Reform Bill (1867) were a period of enormous vitality in the English novel. The explosion of serial publication and circulating libraries; the rise of consumer capitalism at home and imperial dominance abroad; and the variety of worship and readership resulted in the production of novels with narrative power and cultural authority. Within this period, we will survey many of the major authors of Victorian fiction while attending closely to a specific set of historical developments, class relations, and gender issues. We will read eight representative works of fiction: Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53); Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852); Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853); Gaskell's North and South (1854-55); Collins's The Moonstone (1860); Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862); George Eliot's Felix Holt, The Radical (1866); and Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866-67). These texts include industrial novels, sensation fiction, multi-plot novels, fictional autobiographies, historical fiction, and mysteries, demonstrating the enormous formal variety hidden under the deceptive phrase "nineteenth-century realism." In addition, students will present two oral reports, one on a major critical book treating the fiction of this period, another on an important intellectual document. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 835 |
| American Autobiography: Cross-Cultural Perspectives |
| Drawing on recent autobiography criticism and theory, this course examines ways that life-writing by a cross-section of mostly 20th Century American authors continues to expand and re-vision the “conditions and limits of autobiography” in the western literary tradition. Topics we will explore include the relationship between storytelling and self re-creation; the precarious role of memory in autobiographical practice; and the politics of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality both in shaping personal experience and in determining modes of self-representation. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 835 |
| Reading Films: Style, Genre, and Historical Context |
| This course will concentrate on developing the reading skills basic to film studies — focusing on understanding the language of film within the context of various styles, genres, and historical periods and developments. The course will concentrate primarily on American films, but will introduce selected foreign films, genres, and styles for comparative purposes. We will look at Film Noir, gangster films, social problem films, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave, among others. Directors whose films will be introduced include Fritz Lang, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Francis Ford Coppola, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Spielberg, and Ridley Scott. NOTE: For the graduate program, this course counts as a basic course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. (Note: English 435 and English 835 are the same course.) For English majors, this course counts as a cultural context course or a course emphasizing work after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 836 |
| 19th-Century Gothic Fiction |
| In this course, you will become acquainted with the castles, mansions, monasteries, lunatics, ghosts, and monsters that kept (and continue to keep) readers awake with a light on at night. Authors will include members of the Shelley circle in England (poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, fiction writers Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and John Polidori), Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James. The reading will be supplemented by historical and critical reading, which will help us to establish what was at stake in the genre in the past and why it still persists in the present. Topics will include how gothic represents threats to the social order, cloaks and exposes taboo sexuality; approaches or evokes the sublime; constructs the alienated self; anticipates Freudian concepts of the "unconscious" and "uncanny"; and demonizes peoples (ancestors, ethnicities, races, etc.). We will also consider how present day literary critics and theorists have constructed male versus female traditions of gothic and treated the genre as political allegory. Open to undergraduates with permission of the instructor. For graduate students, this course satisfies the requirement of author-centered study; for undergraduates, a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 836 |
| Making Whiteness Visible |
| This course examines the idea of "whiteness" and how various writers on the margin - Native American, African American, Chinese American and Chicano - try to subvert it. How does "whiteness" mark itself? How does it make its power felt? We will strive to understand what the recent secondary literature on whiteness is arguing and how it can help us understand marginalized writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 837 |
| Writers of the American South |
| This course will focus on 20th century U.S. Southern writers, within the context of the complex history of various regions of the South. Beginning with V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, authors to be studied may include Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Cormac McCarthy. We will view selected films of a few of the novels read. For the English graduate program, this course
satisfies the requirements of a core course in the literary studies track or an elective in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirements of a cultural context course or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 838 |
| Modernism/Modernity |
| What was Modernism? Concurrent with the growth of Modernist studies in the last 15 years or so has been decreasing agreement about the nature of Modernism itself. In this course, we will consider the various competing accounts of Modernism (the artistic movement) and Modernity (the period) current in cultural theorists' attempts to reshape the modern canon; we will also examine the influential interpretations of modernist politics, aesthetics, technologies, and media. Readings will be divided equally between literature (familiar and less-familiar authors) and theory/philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno, Bourdieu, Jameson, and others). (Note: English 438 and English 838 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in British literature, or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: The City Scene |
| This course will focus on the representations of "the city" in literature and on film. Beginning with the 2002 Todd Haynes film Far from Heaven, a tribute to Douglas Sirk films set in the Hartford of the 1950s, this course will involve students in field work in the City of Hartford itself, as part of the focus on understanding the urban scene. Each student will develop a project that involves the City of Hartford, either through an exploration of a specific street (such as Park Street, near the campus) or through an association with a Hartford institution, government office, business, or arts organization. Students may either do a film or photography project for this unit, or they may write a paper in which they analyze what they have discovered on the street or learned through an institutional connection. They will pay attention to the way in which this unit interfaces with the representations of Hartford and other cities in the literature and film studied in the course. Other works of literature and film may be chosen from Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1925), Dickens, Bleak House, Dreiser, Sister Carrie with William Wyler's 1952 film adaptation, Edwin Torres' novel Carlito’s Way with the Brian De Palma film adaptation (1993). Other films may include Joan Micklin Silver, Hester Street (1975), David Lynch, The Elephant Man (1980), Scorsese, Mean Streets (1973) and New York New York (1977). We will also read David Clark¹s Urban World/Global City as well as other theoretical reading focused on the appropriation and deployment of urban space, with an emphasis on the contrast between neighborhood and urban infrastructure and on the notion of the urban streets; liaison will be made with the Trinity Hartford Studies Project, particularly to utilize and show students some of the footage of Hartford available through this program. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| The Streets and I: Documentary Film and Urban Life |
| This seminar will offer students a vehicle for the exploration of many facets of urban life in Hartford. It will introduce students to the history, theory, and critical analysis of documentary film; it will give students the opportunity to practice this film genre by producing and directing their own short documentary films. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, and an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: Film and Race |
| This course will focus on ways in which persons of color have been represented both in commercial films, made in Hollywood and elsewhere, and in other film traditions — films more broadly from the Americas and Europe. Films will be chosen from a historical selection beginning with D. W. Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation (1915) and ending with a range of contemporary films, perhaps but not necessarily including To Kill a Mockingbird, In the Heat of the Night, and Crash. The course will also include a selection of theoretical readings that contextualize and analyze the varied representations of race in the films. (Note: English 839-03 and 439-07 are the same course.) Open to advanced undergraduates, it counts as a course emphasizing literature after 1800, a course emphasizing cultural context, or a literary theory course for the English major. It counts toward the film studies minor. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, or as an elective in the literary studies track. Students are allowed to take multiple sections of English 839 and 439, as each "section" is a different course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: The Western |
| This course will focus on the tradition of “the Western,” primarily in film but also as a written narrative form. The course will include some early representations of the West, the cowboy figure, train robberies, etc., in early narrative filmmaking (including The Great Train Robbery [1903]). It will focus on the evolution of the Western in the late 1930s, including Reuben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936), with attention to the making of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and development through subsequent Ford films, including The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and The Searchers. The course will also include the Sergio Leone trilogy of “spaghetti Westerns” featuring Clint Eastwood (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; A Fistful of Dollars; A Few Dollars More). It will include Eastwood’s own film The Unforgiven, along with other classic Western films. It will end with Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. (Note: English 439-08 and English 839-04 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this is a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, or as an elective in the literary studies track. This course counts toward the film studies minor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Film Noir and Its Literary Antecedents |
| This course will focus on the American genre of film called Film Noir and on a few of the hardboiled detective novels that influenced the development of the genre, as well as German Expressionistic film strategies that were encoded in the genre itself. We will look at the French naming of the genre and track noir films from the early ‘40s through what is usually thought of as their last mainstream examples in the late ‘50s. Films to be studied include The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, The Girl in the Window and Scarlet Street, The Third Man, A Touch of Evil, and Vertigo. We will read a selection of novels by Dashiell Hammett, as well as some secondary materials
Note: For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and as an elective for the literary studies track. For the undergraduate program, it satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course or a course emphasizing literature after 1800 for English majors, and it counts toward the Film Studies minor or the literature and film track in the English major. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: Making Movies, Making War |
| How have U.S. film industries represented America, and Americans, at war? This course is a historical survey of documentary and non-fiction film production, in the context of U.S. military involvement in World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. This course examines how "true stories" of war, wartime, and soldiers' lives have been important to the development of the "social problem" film, the cinematic realism of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary independent documentary production. Films to be studied may include: Why We Fight, The Battle of San Pietro, Hearts and Minds, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Fog of War, and My Country, My Country. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a cultural context course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or an elective. For the English graduate program, this course serves as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, and as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: Cinematic Melodrama |
| Since the beginning of the 20th century, melodrama has been the narrative form Hollywood film has most often used to address social issues and ethical questions. But cinematic melodrama is not just a narrative form; it is also a visual aesthetic and a rhetorical mode. We will examine the generic descriptions of melodrama that film studies has developed for different bodies of film and eras of filmmaking, and trace the changes and continuities in the genre over time. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. Thursday meeting is film screening only. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: More than Noir |
| Course description: English 439-10/839-07. Special Topics in Film: More than Noir. In this course, we will examine a selection of American films grounded in Film Noir, with emphasis on the urban setting, the visual and metaphorical darkness, and other central aspects of this style. Some of the films to be studied include the first recognized color Noir “masterpiece” Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock) juxtaposed with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); Alan Pakula), Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski Blue Velvet (1986) and one or two more recent films. Students taking this course will be asked to view Citizen Kane (1942, Orson Welles), The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston), Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder), The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed), and A Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles). Satisfies the requirements of a core course for the Graduate English M.A. Writing, Rhetoric, or Media Arts track or an elective for the Literary Studies track. Satisfies the requirements of a course featuring literature after 1800 or a literary theory course for undergraduate English majors. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Reading Texts: Film and Literature |
| This course will focus on reading strategies for both films and literary texts, with a focus on American literature and American films, with some comparative reading and literature. We will examine analogues between the language of film and that of literature, as well as central contrasts in both styles and reading strategies. This course will be cross-listed in American Studies. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: The Evolution of the Western Film |
| The course examines how the Western genre emerged from global popular culture at the end of the 19th century to become one of the most powerful and complex forms for expressing the experience of Modernity. After a careful consideration of the political and philosophical implications of the Western, we will track the development of the genre as it responds to the ideological contradictions and cultural tensions of 20th-century American history, focusing on broad trends within the mainstream, the contributions of individual directors, and the global dissemination of generic elements. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Filming the City |
| This course will examine ways of representing cities in film throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will begin with D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and end with one or two recent films that focus on the city. We will additionally read some central secondary texts that focus on urban development during the period under question. Films will focus on New York City, Rome, Paris, and possibly London. The films will be primarily, but not exclusively, American in origin and will include a mixture of styles and directorial emphases. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 839 |
| Special Topics in Film: The Documentary |
| Documentary films chronicle varied cultural, social, and political realities, from coal miners’ strikes and social revolutions to the development of musical genres. Documentary styles range from fictionalized recreations (docudramas) to narrative reenactments to non-narrative commentaries. This course will examine key documentary strategies through representative films, which may include Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976) and Shut Up and Sing (Kopple and Cecilia Peck, 2006), Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl (Ahmad Jamal and Ramesh Sharma, 2006): segments of The Battle of Algiers, Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (Renee Bergan and Mark Schuller), Jazz (selected episodes) (Ken Burns, 2001), Say Amen, Somebody (George Nierenberg, 1982), An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2008), and Fair Game (Doug Liman, 2010). Note: English 839-12 and English 439-16 are the same course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies a post-1800 distribution requirement or a literary theory course, or a core course for the literature and film concentration. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 840 |
| Localism Unrooted |
| Immanent in the expansion of the British empire during the 18th and 19th centuries was an increased movement of plants, soil, and seeds—the essential elements of a garden—throughout the colonies of the British empire. In this course we will examine this convergence of colonial and ecological history through examples of what we might call nature writing from Great Britain and its former colonies, from the 18th century to the present. We will analyze the changing representations of what one scholar has termed “ecological imperialism”—the physical impacts of colonial expansion on the ecology of Britain and its colonies, as well as the subtle effects of imperialism on ecological thinking. Readings may include works by Pope, Blake, Keats, Dutt, Rhys, Césaire, Coetzee, and Kincaid. (Note: English 440 and English 840 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies an advanced course in literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 840 |
| Writing "Black" Britain |
| When the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury docks in 1948, it brought the first wave of post-war immigration into labor-scarce Britain. Massive labor recruitment from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies brought tens of thousands of “commonwealth subjects” who changed and challenged British culture and politics. The collective experience of becoming "black" British citizens, the continuous struggle to define what that meant. and the process of redefining "Britishness" for the culture as a whole, has been at the very center of cultural production by those who are still disparagingly referred to as "immigrants." This course will focus on the ways in which black British culture forged for itself an identity and political agenda and has resisted the assault of the British "mainstream" and fundamentally called into question "authentic forms of Englishness." We will be attentive to the shifts in political and theoretical debates of the past several decades in order to map what Frederic Jameson has usefully described as the "social ground of a text." Authors will include: CLR James, Sam Selvon, George Lamming, VS Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Meera Syal, Hanif Kureishi, and Beryl Gilroy. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 841 |
| Literary Losers |
| Why is it that certain writers, very well-known in their own times, later disappear from view or are trivialized as, for example, “The Sweet Singer of Hartford” or “stuff for boys who don’t read”? In this course we will examine a number of case studies of such writers: Lydia Sigourney, Alice Cary, Jack London, Amy Lowell, and, happening right now, Tillie Olsen. We will also consider the extent to which such writers have come back into view. And we will look at one or two contrary cases: writers who were not seen as terribly important in their own times but who later became central to American literary study, like Herman Melville. In other words, we will study the question of “canon formation” in depth. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 842 |
| Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean Diaspora |
| This course will look at the literary and filmic production of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cuban Americans in the United States, from the 19th-21st centuries. Through the literature and cinema of these groups we will not only study the socio-cultural situation and history of this heterogeneous Diaspora but will also explore and come to question central themes traditionally used to discuss Latinos in the US: identity, language, culture, community, exile, space, and memory. In examining a literary and cultural production that spans three centuries, we will read texts in translation from the original Spanish, bilingual texts, and texts originally written in English. A reading knowledge of Spanish helpful but not essential. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 843 |
| Theaters of the Urban Streets |
| This comparative drama course will focus on the relationships between varied forms of drama that originated in festival or other communally based open-air, urban theater settings, ranging from Ancient Greece to the modern Americas. We will consider basic concepts of social and cultural organization, but the main focus of this course will be "reading" both literary texts and cultural events as if they were texts. We will pay particular attention to epistemologies associated with imagination (as the guiding principle of theater) and logic or reason (as the alternative epistemology). The literature read in the course will include plays by Sophocles and Euripides, medieval Corpus Christi plays, and German fastnachtspiele or carnival plays, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, contemporary American performance art, and festivals, and play cycles such as carnival or Ramleela that have their origins in the distant past. (Note: English 443 and English 843 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, literary theory, or cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing cultural context in the literary studies track, or an elective in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 843 |
| 1939: The Amazing Year in Films |
| It is a commonplace that 1939 was an extraordinary year in film production, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. This course will feature films released in 1939, primarily but not entirely in the United States, some of which shared directors, producers, etc. We will examine the factors of filmmaking that led to this astonishing year. Films to be studied may include Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln; The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men Only Angels Have Wings; Rules of the Game (Renoir), Story of Last Chrysanthemum (Mizoguchi), and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Available both to undergraduate and graduate students. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 844 |
| British Romanticism |
| Vast and icy oceans, fields of daffodils, dark satanic mills—the Romantic period was fraught with contradictions, including country and city, nature and art, beauty and sublimity, revolution and reaction. Authors of the period used their writing to make sense of these and other seemingly irresolvable splits in their world. Coleridge's Kubla Kahn has constructed an ordered pleasure garden atop a sublime ice cave; William Blake suggested the marriage of heaven and hell. This class will examine some of the major poetry, novels and tracts that shaped the period. Sometimes portraits of hearth and home and sometimes tales of violence and horror, these texts demonstrate a psychological complexity and an understanding of literature and authorship that signals modernity. To better understand its historical conditions, we will supplement our readings with visual art and other cultural productions in an attempt to define and understand the period in a way of thinking and writing which we have come to call Romanticism. Authors will include the major Romantic poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth) as well as Smith, Inchbald, Wollstonecraft, Lewis, Austen, and Burke. Critical readings will accompany the primary texts.(Note: English 444 and English 844 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 846 |
| Making Americans: Ethnicity in American Literature |
| From the moment Crevecoeur recorded his impressions of "the American, this new man" in 1782, people within and outside the United States have continued his effort to define what it means to be an American. Over the course of this country's history, American identity has been shaped by complex racial, ethnic, and social tensions and interactions. This course will treat ethnic American literature of the 20th century as a series of engagements with ideas of nation and belonging. We will look at these texts as attempts by Americans-newly arrived immigrants as well as Native and African Americans, the earliest of the United States' marginalized people-to carve out space for themselves within normative ideas of American nationhood while attempting to preserve their cultural pasts. Course texts may include Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, John Okada's No-No Boy, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Fistfight in Heaven, and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 846 |
| Double Consciousness and American Identity |
| Originally defined as an internal conflict facing African Americans, double consciousness-as W.E.B. Du Bois described it in 1903-has evolved over the course of the 20th century. Borrowed extensively by feminist and ethnic authors to define their own identity conflicts, double consciousness has become one of America's prevailing articulations of marginalized identity. In this course, double consciousness will be the theoretical framework for our examination of American racial, ethic, and gender identity in the last two hundred years. We will explore the development of double consciousness as a concept-in DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and in its 19th-century antecedents-and then trace its trajectory in fiction and criticism of the 20th century. Some of the authors we will read include Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Gloria Anzaldua, Patricia Hill Collins, Ralph Ellison, and Danzy Senna, among others. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 847 |
| The Literature and Culture of Adoption in 20th Century America |
| America's fascination with adoption has become a public phenomenon in recent years. From Rosie O'Donnell to the growing number of Chinese baby girls adopted by Americans to the "Internet Twins"--essentially sold by an adoption broker over the Internet--adoption requires us to reconsider cultural attitudes toward family. In addition, adoption in American literature invokes broader questions of alienation, identity conflict, and self-fashioning. In this course, we will examine representations of adoption in a variety of fictional and autobiographical texts spanning the century, including Charles Chesnutt's The Qyarry, William Faulkner's Light in August, Betty Jean Litton's Twice Born, and Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven. In addition, we will pay close attention to the social and historical contexts out of which these adoption narratives emerge. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 849 |
| Contemporary American Poetry |
| Since 1970, American poetry--always a rich polyphony of voices--has become even more diverse. We will take a close look at some of the poets who have transformed the formal shape, political vision, and aesthetic consciousness of American verse. Among the writers whose work we will read and discuss: Adrienne Rich, Lyn Hejinian, Audre Lorde, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Andrew Hudgins, Jorie Graham, Gary Soto, Czeslaw Milosz, Donald Justice, and Joy Harjo. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 850 |
| From Moll to Mother, Rake to Rhett: Gender and Culture in Selected Novels |
| In this course, we will examine female and male stereotypes in selected novels form the beginning of the 18th through the middle of the 20th centuries. Novels to be studied include Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, North and South, The Portrait of a Lady, Sister Carrie, The Age of Innocence, and Gone with the Wind. The final novel will be chosen by the students in the course from a selection of novels written within the last decade. The course will emphasize the relationship of fictional representations to a variety of cultural contexts. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 851 |
| The Harlem Renaissance |
| This course will explore the flourishing of black literary and cultural production from the 1920s until late-1930s known as the Harlem Renaissance or "New Negro" Movement. We will look at the aesthetic, social, psychological and political objectives of the period and how these goals are addressed through essays, literature, music and visual art. We will also interrogate the construction of a “New Negro” identity. How is such an identity defined? What artists are deemed acceptable models of this identity? What artists or modes of cultural expression are excluded or silenced? How do issues of gender, class and sexuality factor into the construction of a New Negro identity? In addressing these questions, we will examine the Harlem Renaissance as a precedent for other black aesthetic movements in the later part of the 20th century. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 851 |
| Queer Harlem Renaissance |
| This course approaches the Harlem Renaissance or "the New Negro" Movement through the lens of sexuality, paying particular attention to the ways in which understandings of racial identity were filtered through representations of sex and gender. We will consider how writers of the Harlem Renaissance explored notions of sexuality and gender given the history of slavery and exploitation that generated rigid formulations of race and gender. How did cultural producers challenge, reinforce, question and imagine sexuality and its intersection with other aspects of identity, such as class, gender, and national origins. Writers/artists include, Wallace Thurman, Carl Van Vechten, Bessie Smith, Angelina Weld Grimke, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Langston Hughes, and Bruce Nugent. Note: For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program. This course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 852 |
| Politics, Literature and Film |
| With the presidential election looming near, this course will focus on questions about politics and culture reflected in film and literature. Beginning with Primary, the documentary that tracks the 1960s primary campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, readings and films will include Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, with its film adaptation, ending with George Clooney’s recent The Ides of March, among others. This course would serve as a good prelude to Colin McEnroe’s fall course on the Presidential Election, but stands as well on its own.
Note: For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and as an elective for the literary studies track. For the undergraduate program, it satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course or a course emphasizing literature after 1800 for English majors, and it counts toward the Film Studies minor or the Film and Literature track in the English major. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 853 |
| Frontier to Factory: Defining America in 19th-Century Literature |
| Interrogating American identity in the national or individual sense requires that we grapple with the places that so often define what we consider to be American experience. As 19th-century American authors wrestled with the difficulty of fully representing what it means to be American they frequently depicted and revised our ideas of quintessentially American places—the frontier, the home, the city, the factory, the countryside, and the contrasting idea of "abroad." For example, reading Upton Sinclair, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' various portrayals of the factory helps us understand not only how the factory functions as a symbolic site in American consciousness, but also how diverse authors build and challenge the meaning of labor, class, race, and nation. Reading widely across the 19th century and into the 20th, we will trace the literary conversations that construct and constantly rewrite our understandings of these American spaces and ask how they contribute to our ideas about American identity. We will consider the impact of race, class, and gender on these literary conversations and read a diverse group of authors that may include: Washington Irving, Thomas Detter, Zitkala-Ša, Frank Webb, Stephen Crane, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Upton Sinclair, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, and Henry David Thoreau. (Note: English 453 and English 853 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 854 |
| The Phenomenon of Literary Popularity |
| Why is Shakespeare considered great? Why is Jane Austen so popular? Or Romantic poetry? Or Alice Sebold? In this course students will explore the way theorists and critics from Aristotle to Edward Said have understood literary value and meaning while they also read key texts in British literature. Students will have the chance to develop their own literary theories and apply them to their favorite texts.(Note: English 454 and English 854 are the same course.) For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or a literary theory course.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 855 |
| Gendered Projections |
| What is gender, or what do we imagine gender to be? Is there any difference between these two questions? In what specific ways is gender socially constructed? How and by whom are these constructs instilled and maintained, and how do competing forces of history, politics, economics, race, class, region, sexuality, and nationality influence and complicate each person's experience of gender? This course will chase some answers to these and other questions, exploring 20th-century literature, playwriting, and cinema for the different and often unstable notions of gender that these works "project" for us. As a seminar in literature, the course aims to highlight how various projections of gender are inseparable from such seemingly formal considerations as voice, genre, style, and point of view. Also, because gender itself constitutes such a dense network of social relations, we will assess the ways in which literature and art generate their own social relations, with important implications not only for gender but for countless other concepts and ideologies. Thus, in each of the seminar's four units—loosely focused around Anglo-American, African American, Latin American, and expatriate American literature—we will read and analyze texts in order to detect their particular concepts of gender, or the questions they raise about gender. Throughout the course, we will think critically about how differences in form, era, or cultural context affect the varying conclusions or implications related to gender in these works. Primary texts shall include Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Memory Mambo, Lolita, the films American Beauty and Butterflies on a Scaffold, as well as important essays in gender theory, feminist and gay/lesbian studies, psychoanalysis, critical memoir, and other branches of scholarship. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; for the undergraduate program it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 857 |
| Novels into Film |
| : In this course we will examine the process of adapting novels into films, using several signature, significant film adaptations of major novels to study various aspects of the process of adaptation. Works will include The Godfather (Puzo novel; Coppola film), The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck novel, John Ford film); To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee novel, Robert Mulligan film), and at last one film by Martin Scorsese and a recent adaptation. We will examine the different language of analysis used for literature and film as well as the cultural implications of the films and novels and the process of adaptation itself. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 858 |
| Heroism to Horror: Coming of Age in the Great War |
| This course will examine the period roughly from 1890 to 1925, focusing on a selection of novels, poems, songs, plays, and expository writings from England, Germany, and (to a lesser extent) America that bridge what has come to be called The Great War. We will consider the neo-Romantic idealization of death leading into the war, the period of disillusionment during the war, and the aftermath, with some consideration given to the idea of Weimar culture in Germany. Authors to be considered may include: Ibsen, Thomas Mann, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Remarque, Wilfrid Owens, Siegfried Sassoon, and Vera Brittain. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 859 |
| Ethnic Cultures and American Literatures |
| This seminar will examine both fiction written by “ethnic” American writers and other texts that discuss issues of ethnicity, race, borders, bilingualism, biculturalism, immigration, and the like. Writers whose work might be studied include Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Lan Cao, Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Goldstein, Grace Paley, Rolando Hinojosa, and Gloria Anzaldúa. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 860 |
| Reading in Film: Hitchcock |
| In this basic film theory course, we will examine selected films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The focus will be on reading the films as texts, with an emphasis on auteur signature styles and genres, within the canon of American films. This English course counts toward the American Studies Program.
This course counts as a basic requirement course for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Media Arts track of the English Master’s degree, and as an elective for Literary Studies, the other English track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 860 |
| Classic American Films and Their Literary Antecedents |
| This course will focus on a few “classic” American films, made as adaptations of novels, with an emphasis on reading the literary text and then understanding the film adaptation as a “text” in its own right. The course will introduce the rhetoric of film analysis and is open to students who have taken previous film courses and students who have not. Text to be studied include The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird. Others to be determined. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 864 |
| McLuhan 5.0--Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Revolution |
| This course will look at the ways in which Old Media are in decline. Alas, chances are good that we will be able to study the shuttering of a major newspaper in real time. We will examine the new tricks some older outlets are using to revive themselves. Of course, we will look at the structure, nature and implication of Web 2.0 models and whatever sits beyond that. We will use the work of McLuhan to give us a tree of theory on which to hang our new ornaments. Participants should be willing to blog and participate on sites such as Facebook. (Note: English 464 and English 864 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or as an elective; for writing, rhetoric, and media arts minors, this course counts as a core course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and as an elective for the literary studies track.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 865 |
| The Media and the Presidential Election |
| In this course, students will use the current presidential election as a living laboratory as they explore the role of the media in shaping perceptions, presenting content, and providing criticism. Students will follow the election in each news medium (including the Internet), interview consultants and "spin doctors," analyze television broadcasts, including television election ads, and prepare a talk radio show. The course will focus also on such issues as media bias, corporate ownership, and FCC regulation. We will also look at the nature of "content" in the political process and how it corresponds (or doesn’t) to literary notions of "text." Note: English 465 and English 865 are the same course. This course will count as a core course in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track and an elective for the literary studies track in the English M.A. This English course also counts towards the American Studies graduate program. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 866 |
| Blogging On |
| More than eight million Americans have created and maintained "blogs" which Merriam-Webster defines as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks." But what is a blog? What kind of writing goes on there, and how does it differ, rhetorically, from other kinds? How does information pass from blog to blog and what is the impact of this new activity on mainstream culture? Participants in this seminar will read and analyze blogs. Most students will, in lieu of a final paper, produce and maintain a blog (although those who wish to do a more traditional analytical paper will be accommodated). Other readings in the course will include The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore as we work on a theoretical framework for understanding the way information spreads. (Note: English 476 and English 866 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context, or as an elective. For writing and rhetoric minors, this course counts as a core course. For the English graduate program, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track, and as an elective for the literary studies track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 868 |
| American at Home and Abroad: Selected Novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton |
| In this course, we will read selected titles by two of America's leading writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wharton - greatly influenced by James - shared with her predecessor a sense that her characters as Americans had to come to terms with preconceptions about the relationship between the United States and Europe. We will examine how both writers deal with and often challenge American and European stereotypes in their fiction. Works to be read include James's Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl and Wharton's The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 868 |
| O'Neill and Williams |
| This course will focus on selected plays by two American Playwrights: Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. We will focus primarily on aspects of the plays that define and characterize the work of these two individual authors, but we will also emphasize the work of these two individual authors, but we will also emphasize aspects of their plays that characterize American drama of the 20th-century generally, and aspects that might be linked to their own regional as well as individual, backgrounds. Plays to be studied will include but not be limited to a selection of early O’Neill sea plays, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, A Touch of the Poet, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. For the graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of American Literature course or a course emphasizing cultural context for the Literary Studies track; it counts as an elective for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Media Arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course counts as a course emphasizing cultural context or a post-1800 course. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 868 |
| Edith Wharton and Henry James |
| Their lives stretched from a pre-industrial time of horses and carriages to a modern era of automobiles and skyscrapers. As members of social and cultural elites, they were front-line observers of the original Gilded Age (to which many have likened our own historical moment). With Victorian mores on the wane, they and their characters contended with complicated and shifting ideas about gender and marriage. In this course, we will study the work of two American writers who represented these profound social changes in intricate psychological dramas written in some of the most stylistically accomplished prose in the English language. By reading and discussing short stories, novels, and essays by Edith Wharton and Henry James, we will consider their influence on each other and on the literary categories of realism and modernism; their works’ implications about gender, identity, and power; and the historical and economic context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Note: English 468-05 and English 868-17 are the same course.) For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it satisfies the requirement of an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 868 |
| James Joyce |
| The complete works of the great 20th-century author, supplemented by critical and theoretical readings. For the English Graduate Program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature for the literary studies track; it can count as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 868 |
| Mark Twain |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 868 |
| Virginia Woolf |
| In this course we will read most of Woolf's novels, and selections from her non-fiction. We will read intensively, exploring her textual strategies and other aesthetic choices through the lenses of various theoretical perspectives, particularly feminist and psychoanalytic. Students will write informally in class and on a class listserv as part of their learning, and will have some opportunity for peer feedback on essay drafts. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 868 |
| Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson |
| Nothing that precedes them in the American literary tradition quite prepares us for the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will steep ourselves in the verse of these two literary iconoclasts. At the same time, we will trace the critical history of both, reading essays from the 19th century to the present which have made the complex works and lives of Whitman and Dickinson more legible. The final class period will be reserved for reading selections from 20th-century poets--not all of them American--who have openly professed a debt to Whitman's and Dickinson's experimental and often exhilarating poems. Note: English 868-16 and English 468-06 are the same course. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a literary theory course, or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 869 |
| Senior Seminar: Over the Rainbow |
| Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow is, despite its sprawling length and mind-numbing complexity, arguably the most important and influential literary text to emerge from the U.S. of the 1960s. Both individually and in groups, concentrating on both social and literary contexts, we will use the methods of British cultural studies to investigate the conditions and constituents out of which Pynchon’s daffy and difficult novel emerged, as well as the contexts in the discourses through which it was declared a “masterpiece” and endowed with literary value. Students taking this course should be skilled close readers and eager researchers, capable of thinking and arguing for themselves, yet also able and willing to work together to inventory one text’s raw materials and enabling conditions, and map out that text’s cultural meanings and effects. For the English Graduate Program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 870 |
| Hysteria and Literature |
| This course examines the relationship between trauma, memory, drama, and narrative in works by Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, Helene Cixous, Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, Juliet Mitchell, and Kenneth Branagh. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 870 |
| Film Theory: An Introduction |
| This course introduces the most important theoretical models which have been used to explain how films function as art, ideology, language, history, politics and philosophy. Some theorists are mainly concerned with the aesthetic potentials of the cinema: How do categories such as realism, authorship and genre explain and enhance our experience of films? Other theorists are focused on the relations between films and the societies that produce them, or on general processes of spectatorship: How do Hollywood films address their audiences? How do narrative structures shape our responses to fictional characters? As the variety of these questions suggests, film theory opens onto a wide set of practices and possibilities; though it always begins with what we experience at the movies, it is ultimately concerned with the wider world that we experience through the movies. Theorists to be examined include Munsterberg, Eisenstein, Burch, Kracauer, Balazs, Bazin, Altman, Gunning, Mulvey, Metz, Wollen, Havel, Benjamin, Pasolini, Deleuze and Jameson. (Note: English 470 and English 870 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course fulfills the requirement of a literary theory course or a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course can count as an elective for the literary studies track, or a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. This course fulfills requirements toward the film studies minor. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 871 |
| Post-Colonial Approaches to Victorian Literature |
| This course examines Victorian literature through the lens of colonialism and postcolonial theory. Readings and class discussions will address the various definitions given to such terms as empire, colonialism, and imperialism and also consider the relation between metropole and colony in order to better understand the literature and culture of Victorian Britain. Additionally, the course focuses, in part, on depictions of religious practices, especially the unique ways in which Victorian literature often fictionalizes these practices, blending such traditions as Christianity, Spiritualism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam to refigure personhood through imagining global spirituality. Finally, this course will introduce students to primary special collections research, allowing each student to devise his or her own research project on literary depictions of the British Empire. Readings will include works by Wilkie Collins, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Cora Linn Daniels, and Elizabeth Gaskell. This course is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 872 |
| The U.S. Civil War and Its Afterimage |
| Amid the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the U.S. is awash in remembrances of a pivotal historical moment. But how does American culture remember the Civil War, and why? This course will touch on military and political events, but it is not a history course; it is a course about representation and public memory. By studying the work of novelists, poets, short-story writers, and filmmakers from the 1860s through the present, students in this course will consider how—and to what ends—historical memory gets fashioned and revised by culture. In addition to reading an array of literary texts, students will develop individual research projects and examine other registers of public memory, such as war memorials, historic sites, museum exhibits, and popular culture. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 875 |
| Orwell, Auden |
| Near contemporaries, George Orwell and W.H. Auden were, respectively, the most important social critic and leading British poet of their generation. Although they were close on many views, each regarded the other with wariness or outright hostility. This course follows their careers from the 1930s to the 1950s, tracing their agreements and disagreements on important issues of the day: the proper role of the British Left; the position of the artist in society; the best way to resist Fascism before and during World War II; the new world that emerged after war’s end. We will read widely in the critical and literary work of both authors. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a British literature course or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track or an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 877 |
| The Sixties in Film, Fiction and Poetry |
| “The Sixties” have taken on iconic status as a representation of progressive social change. In fact, quite varied images of The Sixties have been constructed in poetry, fiction, film, and other creative forms, a good deal of it composed during the years 1958-1974 or so. In this course we will read such works, examining the roles of creative texts in defining and carrying out the social and political conflicts of the era–and in shaping our own time. Authors to be read will likely include Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg. (Note: English 477 and English 877 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural context. For Literature and Film concentrators, this course fulfills the requirement of an advanced course toward the major, and counts as a course in literature and film. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in American literature or a course emphasizing cultural context for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 878 |
| Adolescent Literature: What we read, what they read. |
| We will read a range of works intended primarily for adolescent readers, beginning with classic texts that appeal to both adolescent and adult readers, and ending with more recent works. Steinbeck, The Red Pony, Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, Golden, Lord of the Flies, Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a selection of Judy Blume books, Patterson, Bridge to Terabithia, Zampino, Holes, Hesse, Out of the Dust, Lowry, Number the Stars, and a selection of recent popular adolescent literature. The final texts of the course will be decided in consultation with students in the course. When available, we will also watch and analyze films adapted from or related to the literary works. Available to both graduate and undergraduate students.
Enrollment Limit 15 students – 7 undergrads/8 grads, the standard enrollment for hybrid English graduate/advanced undergraduate seminars. The number of graduate and undergraduate students may be adjusted as necessary to meet the limit of 15. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 880 |
| Poetry Writing |
| The American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once said that “To have written one good poem….it’s like sitting out in the yard in the evening and having a meteorite fall in one’s lap.” The aim of this course is to encourage the fall of one such meteorite into each class member’s lap. Beginning and more advanced writers, teachers, and professionals curious about how writing poetry might improve their prose, may all find this course useful. As part of our search for useful and relevant models, we will read poems from the whole of the world literature, from Sappho to Czeslaw Milosz, with particular attention paid to modern and contemporary American poetry. The course will be taught workshop-style, built around weekly writing assignments and in-depth discussion of poems produced by class members. A final portfolio will be required. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 881 |
| Women Writers of the Middle Ages |
| This course will study works in a variety of genres, from the lyric and the romance to the autobiography and the moral treatise, written by medieval women in England, Europe, and Asia. In addition to analyzing the texts themselves, we will be examining them within their social, historical, and political contexts as we discuss such issues as medieval women's literacy, education, and relationships to the male-authored literary traditions of their cultures. Through the term, we will be trying to determine the degree to which we can construct a recognizable woman's literary tradition for this period. For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800. |
|
1.00 units, Lecture
|
| ENGL 883 |
| Shakespeare, in England and America |
| This course will involve close reading of selected Shakespeare comedies, tragedies, and history plays. We will pay attention to the internal structure of the plays, to generic differences between comedies, tragedies, and histories, and to nuances of language, while also considering the plays within the context of the Renaissance culture. We will examine cultural contexts largely by looking at how issues framed thematically within the texts interface with issues of the 1590s and early 1600s. We will also pay attention to production histories of selected plays and to modern filmic representations of some plays. American Studies students taking this course will focus on Shakespeare in America, i.e. they will trace production histories of the plays we study through the 19th and 20th centuries in America. Toward this end we will study the shift in cultural focus of Shakespeare from "lowbrow" to "highbrow." This course satisfies the requirement of an author-centered, literary theory, or cultural contexts course. Also listed under American Studies Graduate Program. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 884 |
| Contextualizing Shakespeare |
| In this course, we will read selected Shakespeare plays, with an emphasis on the culture of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. We will also examine ways in which the cultural contexts of readers/actors/directors/filmmakers in various countries and different centuries have affected interpretation of the plays. Students will be asked to consider questions of interpretation in terms of their own individual backgrounds as well. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 884 |
| Shakespeare on Film |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 884 |
| Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare |
| This course will examine from a psychoanalytic viewpoint the concept of character dramatized in Shakespeare's works and Shakespeare himself as a character in works by other writers. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 884 |
| Teaching Shakespeare |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 891 |
| Contemporary Composition Studies |
| Language and literacy, and their transmission from one generation to the next, have always served as lightning rods for social and political issues, as well as for conflicts of theory and practice in education. This course will explore the contemporary teaching of writing, with attention to the range of current pedagogies in US schools and colleges. We will examine the influences of the 20th-century revival of rhetoric, process and post-process writing, cultural and feminist studies, cognitive theory, the digital revolution, and the implications of "the global turn" for 21st-century students and teachers of writing. Beginning with Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy’s classic study of the first wave of open-admissions students at New York’s City College in the late 1960s, we will test theory against practice in the accounts of real-life classrooms, in literacy narratives written by teachers and students, and in our own experiences of learning to write. For English graduate students, this course counts as a core course for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track; it counts as an elective for the literary studies track. For undergraduate English majors, this course counts as an elective. |
|
1.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 898 |
| Internship |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 933 |
| Graduate Teaching Assistantship |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 940 |
| Independent Study |
| A limited number of tutorials are available for students wishing to pursue special topics not offered in the regular graduate program. Applications should be submitted to the department chairperson prior to registration. Written approval of the graduate adviser and department chairperson is required. Contact the Office of Graduate Studies for the special approval form. |
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 952 |
| Thesis Colloquium |
| As part of the culminating two-credit requirement for the MA in English, the colloquium is designed to provide support for students who are completing an academic thesis or final project. The colloquium functions as a structured community within which students can test their ideas, solve process issues, and serve as writing peers for each other. The colloquium instructor does not take the place of the student’s thesis/project advisor or departmental readers, but rather facilitates the research and writing process and provides individualized help in the context of each student’s work. The colloquium, together with the thesis or project, carries a pending grade of IP (In Progress); a final grade is awarded for 2.0 credits for successful completion of the thesis or project in English 955. |
|
0.00 units, Seminar
|
| ENGL 953 |
| Research Project |
| The graduate director, the supervisor of the project, and the department chairperson must approve special research project topics. Conference hours are available by appointment. Contact the Office of Graduate Studies for the special approval form. One course credit. |
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 954 |
| Thesis Part I |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 954 |
| Thesis Part I |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 955 |
| Thesis Part II |
| Continuation of English 954 (described in prior section). |
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 956 |
| Thesis |
|
No Course Description Available.
|
|
2.00 units, Independent Study
|
| ENGL 999 |
| Connecticut Historical Society Internship |
| The Connecticut Historical Society offers graduate internships to matriculated English students in five key areas: Museum Collections, Library, Public Programs, Exhibitions, and Technology. Interested students should contact the Office of Graduate Studies for more information. |
|
1.00 units, Independent Study
|
|
|