English Course Descriptions
English 201
- Introduction to Narrative
Early Women Writers
Full course for one semester. In this course we will study a
generous selection of the significant corpus of writing produced by
women from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth
century. By examining women’s texts in a range of genres--from
saints’ lives, lyrics, romances, novels, and dramas to medical
texts, mystical visions, and autobiographies--we will consider the
ways in which pre-modern women construct gender identities and how
they formulate their relationship with misogynist discourses. Our
discussion of primary texts will be supplemented with some reading
in recent theories of gender. Writers may include Hrotsvitha of
Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Julian of
Norwich, Christine de Pisan, Margery Kempe, Anna Trapnel, Margaret
Cavendish, Mary Carleton, and Aphra Behn. Prerequisite: Humanities
110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Autobiography
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce problems
of narrative through the study of autobiography and memoir. The
emphasis will be on various strategies writers have employed to
describe the self, including the relation of gender to
autobiography, the rhetoric of self-representation, the function
and depiction of memory, problems of truth and fiction in
autobiography, the nature of confession, the relation of
performativity to identity, and the intersection of narrative and
ideology. We will examine the ways autobiographers have given
symbolic meaning and form to their experience in a variety of
discourses. Autobiographical texts for study will include such
works as Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Gertrude Stein’s
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sarraute’s
Childhood, De Quincey’s Confessions of an
Opium-Eater, Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Wright’s Black
Boy, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, Leiris’s
Manhood, and Kafka’s Letter to his Father. There will
also be readings in autobiography theory. Prerequisite: Humanities
110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Orality and Epic Traditions
Full course for one semester. The purpose of this course is to
examine conventional elements of narrative (the representation of
heroes and heroic action, material culture, the function of style)
in the context of oral-derived epics from the Greek, African, and
Icelandic traditions. We will focus in part on how these narratives
compare to one another as they define cultural norms and ideals. We
will also analyze the influence of orality on the stylistic
qualities of these texts, giving particular attention to the
relation between form and meaning. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or
sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Romance
Full course for one semester. What is romance? In this course we
will interrogate the problematic status of romance as a genre from
its twelfth century origins to more recent reformulations in the
English renaissance and the nineteenth century. We will
specifically address issues of narrative structure, chivalric vs.
heroic identity, and the representation of class, gender, and the
nation. Texts under consideration will include the romances of
Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and William Morris’s The
Wood Beyond the World. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or
sophomore standing, with a few places open to freshmen. Conference.
Not offered 2005-06.
Eighteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture
Full course for one semester. This course is designed to introduce
students to the literary and visual cultures of eighteenth century
Britain and their interconnections. Included in the readings are
prose by Defoe, Johnson, and Austen; poetry by Pope, Swift, Gray,
and Wordsworth; and discussions of aesthetics by Burke and
Reynolds. We will also look at the work of the artists Hogarth,
Stubbs, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffmann, and Wright of
Derby, and discuss approaches to writing about visual art. The goal
is to introduce students to the common culture shared by writers
and artists of the period while attending to the specific concerns
and practices of individual artists and writers. Prerequisite:
Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
English 205
- Introduction to Fiction
Portraits of Ladies
Full course for one semester. This course is designed as an
introduction to the basic concepts of narrative theory as
exemplified in 18th and 19th century British novels by Ann
Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George
Eliot, and Henry James. We will also focus specifically on the
construction of gender, and will analyze how and why ideas of
femininity and masculinity change in relation to authorial
sensibilities that are by turn gothic, historic, and sentimental.
Prerequisites: Hum. 110 or at least sophomore standing. Conference.
Not offered 2005-06.
American Gothic
Full course for one semester. What was haunting America in the
nineteenth century? Gothic literature stages the deepest fears and
anxieties in a culture. It exposes not only with the occult and
mysterious, but also crosses the line between this world and the
next, the known and the unknown, the speakable and the unspeakable.
This course will explore the specters haunting America through the
short stories and novels of Charles Brockden Brown, Washington
Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Charles
Chestnutt. This course serves as an introduction to literary
technique and narrative. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore
standing. Conference.
The American Short Story
Full course for one semester. This course will examine the genre of
the short story, especially its traditional and innovative
narrative techniques, its various ways of constructing authorial
point of view, its mode of plot compression and the relation of
literary structure to temporality, and its range of styles from
realism and naturalism to allegory, and to impressionism.
Additionally, we will see how diverse American experience is
represented through the form. Readings will be drawn from
Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner,
Flannery O'Connor, Malamud, Cheever, Carver, John Wideman, and Toni
Cade Bambara, as well as a collection of Best Short Stories of
2004. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing.
Conference.
Psyche and Society in American Fiction
Full course for one semester. In reading novels such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Herman Melville’s The
Confidence-Man, Henry James’s The American, and Edith
Wharton’s The House of Mirth in this course, we will reflect
upon connections and conflicts between individual psychological
demands and social values. Placing these texts within American
cultural traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, this course will address questions of religious
conviction and spirituality, self-reliance, manners, new
conceptions of the American community, and modern urbanization. We
will consider the unique features of different genres and
descriptive techniques, including romance, melodrama, realism, and
the modern psychological novel. Other writers may include Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathanael West. Prerequisite:
Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
The Post-War and Contemporary Novel
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce students
to the work of major British and American novelists from the
immediate post-World War II years as well as from the very recent
past (from the late 1940s to approximately 1990). We will begin by
focusing on novels that portray the experience of American and
British characters traveling or living abroad--that is, by focusing
on cross-cultural issues ("transatlantic connections"). The second
half of the semester will encompass a variety of narrative contents
and contexts. In the course of our readings we will consider
linguistic experimentation, mass culture, representations of race
and gender, colonial and postcolonial histories, postmodernism, and
the specific anxieties associated with the nuclear age. Novelists
may include Paul Bowles, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Doris
Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Toni Morrison, Salman
Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, and Cormac McCarthy. There will be numerous
short writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or
sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-06.
The Basics of the Novel
Full course for one semester. This course serves as an introduction
to the history of both the idea and the form of the English novel,
beginning in the early eighteenth century and continuing through to
roughly the present day. We will look at brief critical writings by
major narrative scholars in conjunction with examples of the
novel’s various sub-genres, including the gothic, the marriage
plot, the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, the detective
story, the modernist novel, and the postmodern novel. Major works
to be studied may include novels by Daniel Defoe, Matthew Lewis,
Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee. There will be numerous short
writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore
standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-06.
The Modern British Novel
Full course for one semester. This course examines the British
novel from approximately 1890 to 1940. We will study the emergence
and development of the modern novel in light of empire, war,
feminism, gender, psychoanalysis, avant-garde movements, mass
culture, and theories of the novel. We will also consider the
significance of innovative literary techniques such as point of
view, impressionism, stream of consciousness, and authorial
impersonality. Novelists to be studied will include Henry James,
Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H.
Lawrence, Jean Rhys, and E. M. Forster. Prerequisite: Humanities
110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference.
Genres of the Early Novel (1719–1847)
Full course for one semester. This course will look at the range of
genres explored by novelists in the period of the British novel in
its rise from marginal status to dominance in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth century. We will focus on the range of formal and
expressive possibilities the novel develops in this period, shaped
by the various forms it takes (realist, gothic, historical,
sentimental, and so on), and pursue the question of how genre
conventions and individual works interact. Major authors will
include Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry
Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, Walter
Scott, and Charlotte Brontë. Relevant short critical readings on
genre, realism, and the novel will be drawn from Auerbach, Bakhtin,
Frye, Shklovsky, Todorov, Watt, and others. Prerequisite:
Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.
English 211
- Introduction to Poetry and Poetics
English 213
- Introduction to Poetry
American Poetry
Full course for one semester. In this course we will consider the
historical development of selected forms and techniques in the
American poetic tradition. Poets will include Anne Bradstreet, Walt
Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound,
Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath,
Li-Young Lee, Essex Hemphill, and Luci Tapahonso. In addition we
will read selections from Aztec sorrow songs, Ghost Dance songs,
corridos, slave songs, the blues, and the poetry of Angel Island.
This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental
elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor,
tone, form, speaker, and audience. The course will emphasize close
reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing
assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing.
Lecture-conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry by Women
Full course for one semester. Reading a wide range of innovative
twentieth-century women poets, we will explore how questions of
poetic form intersect, illumine, and problematize questions of
gender, race, class, and national identity. Beginning with the
expatriate community in Paris during the teens and reading up
through to work by women poets writing presently, we will ask how
poetry specifically offers a forum for re-thinking being in the
world and challenging power structures. Our readings of poetry will
be complemented by philosophy and theory by women. Prerequisite:
Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
English 242
- Introduction to Drama
Modern European I
Full course for one semester. An examination of the beginnings of
modern European drama from the mid-nineteenth century forward.
Plays will be read from a number of countries to give the full
range of drama and show how modernism was expressed differently in
different places. Likely authors will include Georg Büchner, August
Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Alfred Jarry, and Oscar
Wilde. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Modern European II
Full course for one semester. This course continues from Modern
European I, again looking at work from a number of countries. We
will begin with the last two works of Chekhov, The Three
Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, and continue into the
early decades of the twentieth century. Likely authors will include
Gorky, Synge, Yeats, Shaw, and Pirandello. Prerequisite: Humanities
110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Modern European III
Full course for one semester. This course continues from Modern
European II, looking at work from a number of countries and trying
to see it in its social and political context. We will concentrate
on work from the decade of the 1930s and the approach of World War
II. Likely authors include Garcia Lorca, Eliot, Artaud, Coward, and
Brecht. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Modern European IV
Full course for one semester. This course continues from Modern
European III, which covers works up to 1940. Here we will look at
playwrights whose first major work appeared between 1942 and 1952.
Major themes will be existentialism and the absurd. Likely authors
will include Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Max Frisch, Jean
Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. Prerequisite: Humanities
110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Modern European V
Full course for one semester. This course takes up where European
IV ended, the aftermath of World War II. This semester we will look
primarily at the work of writers whose first major plays appeared
between 1954 and 1957. This semester’s concentration will be on
England and the movement known as "the angry young men." Writers
will include Brendan Behan, Friedrich Durrenmatt, John Osborne,
Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or
sophomore standing. Conference.
Shakespeare
Full course for one semester. An examination of six to eight plays
by Shakespeare, representing comedies, histories, and tragedies,
and (if possible) to include one or more plays to be seen in
performance at local and regional theaters. Attention will be given
to dramatic and literary conventions, sources, and influences, with
special reference to classical and Christian contexts previously
studied in Humanities 110, as well as to some historical, cultural,
and theoretical approaches. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or
sophomore standing. Conference.
English 301
- Junior Seminar
The Fallen World: The Anglo-American Literary Tradition
This course, a study of the methods and a sample of the materials
of English literary history, will focus on the fictional treatment
of the postlapsarian condition following the example of John
Milton’s Paradise Lost. There will be substantial reading in
literary theory. We will consider questions about genre, tradition
and innovation, canon formation, authority, and influence.
Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200
level or above.
Theories of the Novel
Full course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sampling
of the materials of literary history focusing on major theories of
the novel over the last century. Critical readings will be drawn
from Lukacs, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Frye, Watt, Jameson, and Moretti.
These will be read alongside novels by Fielding, Austen, Balzac,
and Dickens, as well as some shorter works, as a means of examining
the effectiveness of particular critical claims about what the
modern novel is and does. We will also discuss modes of narration
and literary structure, stylistic change and formal innovation in
the novel, and the nature of the relationship between ideology and
the aesthetic. This course is primarily for English majors, for
whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end
of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English
courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
English 302
- Junior Seminar
Epic and Novel
Full course for one semester. This course offers a study of the
methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history
focusing on epic and novel, with texts that may include Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, Chaucer’s "Wife of Bath’s Tale," Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and a novel
by Toni Morrison. In addition, there will be substantial reading in
literary theory. We will consider questions about genre, literary
authority, tradition and innovation, canon formation,
intertextuality, and the role of gender in epic and novel.
Primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is
usually required no later than the end of the junior year.
Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200
level or above. Conference.
Paradise After Milton--The Anglo-American Tradition
Full course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sample
of the materials of English literary history using the
Anglo-American epic tradition from Milton onwards. Texts include
Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude,
Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. D.’s Trilogy, and
Morrison’s Paradise. In addition, there will be substantial
reading in literary theory and an extensive critical bibliography
project. We will consider questions of genre, influence, authority,
tradition and innovation, canon formation, and modernity. Primarily
for English majors and required no later than the junior year.
Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200
level or above. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Studies in Nonfiction Prose
English 303
- American Studies Seminar: The Promised Land
Studies in British Culture
English 337
- Studies in British Culture: Eighteenth-Century Geographies
Studies in Fiction
English 333
- Studies in Fiction
Postmodern Culture
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce the field
of postmodern studies--in connection with cultural studies and
post-structuralism--and a number of issues associated with
postmodernity and postmodernism in their cultural, aesthetic, and
political dimensions. While the focus is on postmodernist fiction
and theory, we will also examine films and television programs.
Prominent among the topics this course covers from the perspective
of postmodernism are globalization, mass culture, simulation,
virtual reality, the cyberpunk aesthetic, conspiracy, hybridity,
pastiche, "the death of the author/subject," intertextuality, and
nostalgia. We will read fiction by Don DeLillo, J. G. Ballard,
Ishmael Reed, Ursula K. Le Guin, Salman Rushdie, William Gibson,
Kathy Acker, Thomas Pynchon, and Donald Barthelme along with
selected theoretical writings of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida,
Donna Haraway, Homi K. Bhabha, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler,
Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Slavoj Zizek. We will
screen several films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Prerequisite:
two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the
instructor. Conference.
The Modern Novel
Full course for one semester. The focus of this course is a study
of seminal modernist fictional texts. We will read novels by James,
Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Woolf, and Beckett. We will
examine such modernist strategies as the use of nonlinear time,
stream of consciousness, self-fragmentation, and disjunctive
narrators. Included will be discussion of the relation of aesthetic
programs to the employment or obliteration of history, and we will
read a number of theoretical interventions into the discourse of
literary modernism. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200
level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
The British Novel 1770–1830
Full course for one semester. This course will cover the diverse
forms the British novel takes in the final decades of the
eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth
century--sentimental, gothic, realist, historical,
"experimental"--and attempt to work out an effective way of
understanding both individual novels and this multiplicity of forms
as a response to particular historical conditions and
possibilities. There will be a substantial number of critical and
theoretical readings on genre, aesthetics, ideology, and the
problem of literary evaluation. Authors read will include most of
the following: Sterne, Burney, Lewis, Radcliffe, Austen, Edgeworth,
Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Scott, Hogg, and Shelley. Prerequisite: two
English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
The Politics and Ideologies of Modernism
Full course for one semester. This course will address issues
associated with political modernism, concentrating on the modern
novel. We will begin by considering the ideological conflicts of
the twentieth century as responses to imperialism, World War I,
socialism, fascism, and the Spanish Civil War, which will allow us
to read the political content of fiction closely. We will also
relate individual novels to topics such as aesthetic ideology, the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School, psychological analyses of
totalitarianism, censorship, and the extent of the modern writer’s
engagement with politics. Authors will include Thomas Hardy, D. H.
Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Rebecca West,
and Wyndham Lewis. Additional readings on ideology will be drawn
from the work of theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze. Prerequisite:
two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Edwardian Fictions: British Modernism until World War
I
Full course for one semester. This course will examine selected
fictions of Edwardian England (1901–10), the decade that marked the
transition to modernism in British fiction. We will read novels of
the period such as Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, H.
G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and E. M. Forster’s Howards
End by relating them to the contexts of modern British
psychology, feminism, Fabian socialism, industrialism, aesthetic
decadence, and the pervasive cultures of advertising and
journalism. Additionally, our consideration of these novels will be
framed by the closely related historical contexts of late Victorian
society and World War I. In tracing both late Victorian
anticipations of Edwardian cultural trends and the subsequent
legacy of the Edwardians, we will read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then, in the
final phase of the course, Rebecca West’s The Return of the
Soldier and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (along with
shorter works by Lawrence). Other writers may include William
Morris, Thomas Hardy, and Lytton Strachey. Prerequisite: two
English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
The Social World of the Victorian Novel
Full course for one semester. The Industrial Revolution, the
entrenchment of the bourgeoisie, and the two Reform Bills made
possible tremendous transformations in the social worlds of
Victorian Great Britain. This course will examine how these changes
were both documented and reimagined in the novels of several
writers of the High Victorian period, including Charles Dickens,
Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and
Anthony Trollope. We pay particular attention to the ways these
novelists figure communities around the workplace, the home, the
beau monde, the church, the law, and the state. There will be
substantial historical, critical, and theoretical readings in
addition to the novels. Prerequisite: two English courses at the
200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
The Victorian Fin de Siècle
Full course for one semester. For the British Empire, the 1890s
were a tremendous transitional decade between the Victorian and
modern periods during which notions of art, the family, men’s and
women’s social roles, and empire itself were radically reconceived.
The decade has accordingly become the locus of much critical
interest for contemporary literary scholars, particularly those
working within the fields of gender, queer, and postcolonial
theory. This course will look at this great period of literary and
cultural decadence, reading works by such important figures of the
age as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Bram Stoker, alongside a variety of
historical, critical, and theoretical writings. Prerequisite: two
English courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
333 Studies in Fiction: Desire, Sexuality, and the
Twentieth-Century British Novel
This course will examine the British novel’s preoccupation with the
expression of human desire during the last century, when the
discourses surrounding sex and sexuality greatly altered. We will
study both sexuality and desire as they are formulated within the
modern and contemporary British novel, in works by such authors as
E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell,
Iris Murdoch, J. R. Ackerley, Angela Carter, and Sarah Waters.
There will be substantial theoretical, historical, and critical
readings. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or
permission of the instructor.
Desire, Sexuality, and the Twentieth-Century British
Novel
This course will examine the British novel’s preoccupation with the
expression of human desire during the last century, when the
discourses surrounding sex and sexuality greatly altered. We will
study both sexuality and desire as they are formulated within the
modern and contemporary British novel, in works by such authors as
E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell,
Iris Murdoch, J. R. Ackerley, Angela Carter, and Sarah Waters.
There will be substantial theoretical, historical, and critical
readings. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or
permission of the instructor.
Narrative and Description
Full course for one semester. This course will focus on the
structural and functional relations between description and
narration in the novel. In what ways does description serve or
alter the narrative drive? In what ways might description assert
its separate purposes? After a brief introduction to classical and
medieval models of description, we will examine their
transformation in realist, naturalist, and modernist narratives.
Texts may include Hardy’s The Return of the Native,
Dickens’s Hard Times, Zola’s Germinal, Balzac’s
Peau de Chagrin, Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple,
Melville’s Typee, Woolf’s The Waves, and Stein’s
Three Lives. Additional readings will be drawn from
theorists and critics such as Gerard Genette, Michel Beaujour,
Svetlana Ålpers, W.J.T. Mitchell, and David Freedberg. Frequent
writing assignments and active participation are required.
Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
The Raj and After: Fictions of English India
Full course for one semester. For almost 100 years, nearly the
entirety of the Indian subcontinent was under the direct political
control of the British Empire; through one of the most astonishing
imperialist exercises in world history, hundreds of millions of
people were thus ruled by a comparative handful of foreign
administrators. This course seeks to examine this period through
the rich and varied fictional responses to it by British and Indian
writers alike both during and after the Raj. We will
consider such topics as the mutual assimilations of both the ruling
and the ruled cultures, the gathering strength of the independence
movement, the gradual decline of imperialist vigor, the problems of
linguistic impasse, and the intersections of gender, sexuality, and
race within discourses concerning foreign rule and Indian
nationalism. Major writers to be studied will include Rudyard
Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, E. M. Forster, Raja Rao, Paul Scott,
Salman Rushdie, and Monica Ali. Prerequisites: two English courses
at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
English 334
- Studies in Fiction
George Eliot and Charles Dickens
Full course for one semester. This course will be devoted to a
comparative examination of two major novelists from the Victorian
period. We will consider distinct visions of society: Eliot’s
representation of the provincial community and Dickens’s
representation of London and urban experience. At the center of
this course will be our close readings of Eliot’s
Middlemarch and Dickens’s Bleak House. Other novels
may include Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Silas
Marner, and Dickens’s Hard Times and Our Mutual
Friend. Throughout the semester we will review and evaluate
influential contributions to the criticism on Eliot and Dickens.
Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or
consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
Full course for one semester. This course will examine the works of
the two most influential figures associated with the modernist
British and Irish novel. Both writers’ contributions to the
contemporary critical understandings of modernism, consciousness,
narrative form, gender, sexuality, and history will be stressed.
Major works to be studied may include Dubliners, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, The
Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, and Between the
Acts. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or
above. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Studies in American Literature
English 341
- Studies in American Literature
Frontier Literature
Full course for one semester. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson
Turner declared that "The existence of an area of free land, its
continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement
westward explain American development." He also declared that the
frontier was closed. In this course we will investigate the ways
nineteenth-century American writers used the frontier to formulate
notions of America, Americans, and American manhood. How did the
myth of the frontier evolve as it traced the movements of
explorers, sailors, gold miners, and cowboys? What role did women
and the dispossessed play in this romance? We will cover both
classical representations of the frontier by Lewis and Clark,
Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Louise Clappe, Caroline Kirkland, and
Owen Wister, as well as views from the dispossessed by Black Hawk,
John Rollin Ridge, and Deadwood Dick. We will address the
frontier’s legacy in American popular and literary culture in the
20th century. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or
higher, or sophomore standing and any course in American history,
or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Native Literacies
Full course for one semester. How did Native Americans understand
the early American contact period and in what forms did they record
their views? How do pre-contact Native traditions influence early
post-contact texts? This course compares the alternative literacies
of the Culhua Mexica (Aztec) of Mesoamerica and the Algonquians of
Colonial New England. We will examine a variety of communicative
and textual traditions ranging from letters, histories,
autobiographies, poems, wills, and conversion narratives to
pictographic works and material culture. This course fulfills the
"before 1700" requirement for English majors. Prerequisite: two
English courses at the 200 level or higher, or any one of the
following: Anthropology 348, Anthropology 372, History 359, History
386, or Spanish 353, or consent of instructor. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
Shepard and Wilson
Full course for one semester. This course will be an in-depth study
of the major works of two of the most significant American
playwrights of the late twentieth century, Sam Shepard and August
Wilson. Each will be studied in the context of the times in which
he was writing. Shepard’s works include Buried Child,
True West, and The Curse of the Starving Class.
Wilson’s works will include Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,
Fences, and The Piano Lesson. Prerequisites:
Humanities 110 and two 200-level English courses. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
"The Woman Question" in Nineteenth-Century American Prose
Full course for one semester. Henry James writes that "the most
salient and peculiar point in our social life … was: the situation
of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on
their behalf." This course will examine the many possible
interpretations of James’s claim through close readings of
nineteenth-century novels, domestic manuals, and essays. We will
pay special attention to the representation of women’s
participation in the economic, social, and political realms
available to them. Works read will include those by Lydia Maria
Child, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott,
Margaret Fuller, Henry James, and others. Weekly writing
assignments and active participation in conference are required.
Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of
the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
The Beat Generation
Full course for one semester. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a
group of writers arose who were responsible for a major critique of
American culture in the post World War II-cold war years. This
critique was not only cultural (against the sense of conformity),
but political (against the ferocious anti-communist rhetoric of
McCarthy and stretching to anti-Vietnam activity). Thus, this is a
course in literature as well as cultural history. We will examine
the work of the three major writers (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
and William Burroughs) in the first half of the semester; we will
then cover as many other writers as we can, which may include Gary
Snyder, Philip Whalen, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Ted Joans, Diane
diPrima, and Joanne Kyger. Many of these writers were involved in
the study of Zen Buddhism, and so this will be part of our focus as
well. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
English 356
- Studies in African-American Literature
Studies in African-American Literature: James Baldwin
Full course for one semester. Baldwin has written that "Truth is a
two-edged sword--and if one is not willing to be pierced by that
sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s
intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and
dangerous fraud." In the 1950s and 1960s, Baldwin was one of the
primary truth tellers about race and American society. He not only
wrote about it, but publicly acted on his beliefs. We will be
reading all of Baldwin’s major fiction and essays, including Go
Tell it on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son,
Giovanni’s Room, Nobody Knows My Name, Another
Country, The Fire Next Time, Going to Meet the
Man, and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.
Students should read on their own Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200
level. Conference.
Twentieth-century African-American Literature: Contemporary
African-American Cultural Criticism
Full course for one semester. A lot of recent attention has been
paid to the "phenomenon" of the black public intellectual. What
does this say about the position of African-Americans? Who are
these people and why are they important? Are there really young
African-Americans who instead of wanting to "be like Mike" now want
to "be like Skip"? We will attempt to answer these questions by
looking at the work of Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Cornel West, bell
hooks, Angela Davis, Stanley Crouch, Hazel Carby, Manning Marable,
and others. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or
above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
Twentieth-century African-American Literature: Black Women
Writers
Full course for one semester. An examination of writing by black
women beginning in the eighteenth century and going to the Harlem
Renaissance. Do women write differently from men? Are there themes
or patterns peculiar to women? Do women address political issues
differently from men? We will examine these and many other topics.
Likely authors will include Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Wilson,
Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells,
Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale
Hurston. Prerequisites: two 200-level English courses. Conference.
Not offered 2005-06.
Studies in Medieval Literature
English 352
- Studies in Medieval Literature
Problems in Medieval Narrative
Full course for one semester. This course is primarily intended
for, though not limited to, upper-division students who have had at
least one other course in English literature. This course will
examine central works in late medieval English literature
(exclusive of the Canterbury Tales) with particular
attention to the narrator and problems of narrative. In the light
of a variety of contemporary critical approaches (Jauss, Todorov,
Irigaray, Bakhtin), we will read widely in a variety of genres:
dream vision, autobiography, narrative poem, romance, and
historical narrative. Primary texts will include Langland, Piers
Plowman; Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; Gower,
Confessio Amantis; one or more works by the Pearl poet; and
Julian of Norwich, Revelations. Other topics in this subject
may include Chaucer, Arthurian literature, feminist theory, and the
early English text. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200
level, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
Canterbury Tales
Full course for one semester. In this course we will study a
selection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle
English. We will pay careful attention throughout to Chaucer’s
representation of gender and class through his use of irony, his
manipulation of genre, and his development of a poetics of
instability. Particular tales for consideration will include "The
Knight’s Tale," "The Miller’s Tale," "The Wife of Bath’s Tale,"
"The Nun’s Priest’s Tale," "The Pardoner’s Tale," and the often
overlooked "Tale of Sir Thopas," among others. Prerequisite: two
English courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor.
Conference.
Studies in Shakespeare
English 361
- Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Film
English 363
- Studies in Shakespeare
Shakespeare and the Politics of the Theatre
Full course for one semester. This course examines Shakespeare’s
place within larger cultural controversies--both early modern and
twentieth century--about the way that theatre can shape or subvert
public and private identity. Though we will sample this larger
discussion, the course will focus on how Shakespeare incorporates,
implies, and perpetuates the controversy within his own work. Plays
to be discussed include Richard II, Henry IV,
Henry V, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure,
Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Cymbeline,
and The Winter's Tale. Prerequisite: two English courses at
the 200 level, or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Shakespearean Skepticism
Full course for one semester. A study of the way in which
Shakespearean theater engages what Stanley Cavell calls the
"catastrophe of the modern advent of skepticism." Among the
questions to be addressed are epistemological problems as they
relate to tragedy, crises of belief and authority, and the
gendering of skepticism. Plays to be read include King Lear,
Othello, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing,
All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Winter’s Tale.
Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of
the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Shakespeare and the Discipline of Culture
Full course for one semester. In early modern England a vigorous
debate occurred about the effects of theater on character, a debate
that finds its echo in modern discussion of the political and
ethical effects of Shakespeare and his place in the canon. After a
brief discussion of some central documents in both early modern and
contemporary debates, we will examine several of Shakespeare’s
plays with particular attention to the way in which they implicitly
shape a political subject and a moral self. Among the plays
addressed will be Richard III, Henry IV Part I,
Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth,
Hamlet, The Tempest, and Cymbeline.
Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or
consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Studies in Poetry
English 366
- Studies in Poetry
Pound and H.D.: Varieties of Modernist Experience
Full course for one semester. This course approaches modernism
through an in-depth study of two of the most important modernist
poets, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Hilda Doolittle (1886-1971). We
will look at the full trajectories of their careers, the
connections and disparities between them, as well as the ways they
address issues common to modernism more generally. Issues we will
consider are: the development of their poetry out of
nineteenth-century and other traditional modes; the place of
translation; their conceptions and practice of imagism; the
disruptive effects of both world wars; their understanding of
gender; their interest in non-poetic media, especially visual art,
music, and in the case of H.D., fiction and film; the development
of avant-garde linguistic techniques and forms, especially in their
work on long poems (i.e., Pound’s Cantos and H.D.’s Helen
in Egypt and Trilogy); and their critical reception.
Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above,
preferably including English 211, or consent of the instructor.
Conference.
The Ecology of Poetry
Full course for one semester. This course begins by examining
American imaginations of wilderness, from the Puritan typology of
Thomas Hooker’s "howling wildernesses" to Frederick Law Olmsted’s
meditations on the cultural necessity of Central Park to Aldo
Leopold’s conception of an encompassing bio-organism inseparable
from human habitation. We will explore key issues in the
environmental movement and in environmental science by authors such
as Nabhan, Carson, and Muir alongside poetries and poetics that not
only engage ecological concerns but also engage ecological
processes. We will read the work of artists who engage poetry as a
wild space that is intelligent, dynamic, resistant, baffling, and
sometimes threatening—a poetry in which the process of creation
includes the author but remains open to other or wild compositional
voices. Authors will include Lorine Niedecker, H.D., Gary Snyder,
Robert Grenier, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Robert Duncan, Susan Howe,
Nathaniel Mackey, Rodrigo Toscano, and Tina Darragh. Prerequisite:
two English courses at the 200 level or above, preferably including
English 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
Ethnopoetics
Full course for one semester. The purpose of this course is to
introduce students to the complexity and pleasure of African
American and Native American poetry. We investigate the influence
of Western and non-Western forms, aesthetics, and poetic strategies
through a discussion of spirituals, nommo, dialect, blues, jazz,
collage, narrative cycles, and oral style. We will read poetry by
Paul Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Amiri
Baraka, Essex Hemphill, Elizabeth Alexander, Sherman Alexie, Louise
Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and Leslie Marmon Silko. We will use historical
circumstances and theories of ethnicity to help us understand the
political choices behind poetic allusions, language, genre,
diction, rhythm, and figurative language. Our aim will be to
understand how the various techniques and genres open to poets
allow them to produce works of art that speak to us and push us to
think. There will be frequent writing assignments and an advanced
stylistics workshop integrated into the course. Prerequisites: two
English courses at the 200 level or above (English 211 highly
recommended) or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
English 378
- Free Verse
English 384
- Poetry and History
Contemporary American Poetry
Full course for one semester. This course is devoted to the
works of American poets writing since 1945, beginning with the work
of writers such as James Wright, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and
others. We will be concerned with mapping the broad features of
various poetic traditions and practices in the United States in the
last half of the twentieth century and with an emphasis on the
heterogeneous nature of current poetic practice. Prerequisite:
English 211 and one upper-division English course in poetry, or
consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Romantic Revolutions
Full course for one semester. A course in which we will examine the
arguments, tropes, and rhetoric of the American and French
Revolutions (in what is called the revolution controversy) and the
project and style of lyric poetry, especially in England. In
particular, we will explore late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century claims about the relationship between poetic and
political revolution. Writers may include the Wordsworths (William
and Dorothy), the Shelleys (Mary and Percy Bysshe), Burke, Thomas
Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Mary
Hays, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Barbauld. Prerequisite: two
200-level English courses (English 211 highly recommended), or
consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
American Modernism
Full course for one semester. Virginia Woolf wrote that on "or
about December, 1910, human character changed," voicing a widely
shared excitement over an anticipated revolution in the arts. The
American poets who stayed in the U.S. shared this excitement, but
also faced unique cultural circumstances. We will do close readings
of poetry by Williams, Moore, and Stevens; look at how they were
responding to and helping shape American attitudes about the arts;
and evaluate the poets’ ideas about poetry’s place and function.
Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or English 211
and an American history course, or consent of the instructor.
Conference.
Literary Theory
English 393
- Literary Theory
Thinking through Literature
This course will attempt a fairly systematic analysis of some
central problems in literary theory. Four main topics will be
addressed: signs and communication; tropes; narration; spectacle
and theatricality. Among others, these philosophers, critics, and
theorists will be discussed: Aristotle, Bal, Burke, Davidson,
Debord, deMan, Derrida, Grice, Norris, Quintilian, and Weber.
Conference. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or
higher, or Literature 400, or consent of the instructor.
Theory and the Ethics of Reading
Full course for one semester. Much of the intellectual energy and
emotional reception of contemporary literary theory derives from
its ethical implications. Recent assertions about the politics of
canon construction, the rhetorical configuration of self and world,
and the instability of textual meaning have provoked intense debate
among scholars of literature and have greatly distressed some
observers outside the circle of professional literary study. After
a brief review of such polemics and of the tradition of ethical
criticism, this course will examine two different ethical
approaches to reading: the "philosophical criticism" of literature,
as exemplified by Stanley Cavell, and the deconstructive criticism
of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. In order better to assess the
force and consequence of these approaches, we will consider them in
relation to pertinent literary works. Prerequisite: two English
courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Not offered 2005-06.
English 400
- Introduction to Literary Theory
Literature 400 Description
Other Classes
English 329
- Film and Fiction
English 331
- History of the English Language
English 357
- Biblical Narrative: Genesis and After
English 386
- Literature and the Sister Arts: Theory and Practice
English 389
- The Scene of Imprisonment in Western Culture
English 397
- Technologies of Literary Scholarship
English 470
- Thesis
