English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, with Professor Travis at the 12 hour
The course will introduce students to some of the leading texts, concepts, and practices of what has come to be known as theoretical criticism. Topics to be considered may include some of the following: structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, new historicism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Attention will also be given to historical and institutional contexts of this criticism. Intended to provide a basic, historically informed, knowledge of theoretical terms and practices, this course should enable students to read contemporary criticism with understanding and attempt theoretically informed criticism themselves. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 20, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, with Professor Travis at the 11 hour
An introduction to Chaucer, concentrating on ten of The Canterbury Tales, and studying him as a social critic and literary artist. Special attention will be paid to Chaucer’s language, the sounds of Middle English, and the implications of verse written for the ear. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 31, Reason and Revolution, with Professor Cummings at the 10A hour
Was there a British Enlightenment? In the age of the American and French Revolutions Britain seemed to hold steady. But in the literature of the period there are many social and literary struggles which took their tolls in the madness and suicide of writers such as Smart and Chatterton, the difficulties of attaining creative freedom, and the emergence of new literary forms such as the Gothic. This course will trace the fortunes of writers such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke as they grapple with the anxieties of their time. We will also consider how women thinkers and novelists such as Charlotte Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft forged new roles for themselves and we may include studies of the novel of political paranoia as exemplified by Caleb Williams, and by Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 38, The 19th Century English Novel, with Professor McKee at the 12 hour
A study of the nineteenth-century novel focusing on the Victorian novel’s representation of public and private categories of experience. Readings may include Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 40, American Poetry, with Professor Schweitzer at the 10A hour
A survey of American poetry from the colonial period to the early decades of the twentieth century. Readings may include works by Bradstreet, Taylor, Wheatley, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Dunbar. We may also study Native American poetry and schools like the Fireside Poets, 19th-century women poets, and precursors of early Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. We will look at lyric, meditative, religious, comic and political poetry, the long poem and the epic. Some themes we might trace include the transatlantic character of American poetry, its "newness," its engagement with religion and self-definition, with nature, and with gender and race. Emphasizing close readings as well as historical and cultural contexts, this course examines the complexities of an American poetic vision and serves as an introduction to reading poetry and to American literature. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 43, Early Black American Literature, with Professor Favor at the 10 hour (cross-listed with AAAS 34)
A study of the foundations of Black American literature and thought, from the colonial period through the era of Booker T. Washington. The course will concentrate on the way in which developing Afro-American literature met the challenges posed successively by slavery, abolition, emancipation, and the struggle to determine directions for the twentieth century. Selections will include: Wheatley, Life and Works; Brown, Clotel; Douglass, Narrative; Washington, Up from Slavery; DuBois, Souls of Black Folk; Dunbar, Sport of the Gods; Chestnut, House Behind the Cedars; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; and poems by F. W. Harper, Paul L. Dunbar and Ann Spencer. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 48, Contemporary American Fiction, with Professor Bahng at the 3B hour
Contemporary American fiction introduces the reader to the unexpected. Instead of conventionally structured stories, stereotypical heroes, traditional value systems, and familiar uses of language, the reader finds new and diverse narrative forms. Such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Ralph Ellison, among others, have produced a body of important, innovative fiction expressive of a modern American literary sensibility. The course requires intensive class reading of this fiction and varied critical writing on postmodernism. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 58, Introduction to Postcolonial Liteature, at the 11 hour with Professor Giri (crosslisted with AAAS 65)
An introduction to the themes and foundational texts of postcolonial literature in English. We will read and discuss novels by writers from former British colonies in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, with attention to the particularities of their diverse cultures and colonial histories. Our study of the literary texts will incorporate critical and theoretical essays, oral presentations, and brief background lectures. Authors may include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, V.S. Naipaul, Merle Hodge, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Paule Marshall, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie, Earl Lovelace, Arundhati Roy. Serves as prerequisite for FSP in Trinidad. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 60.6, Advanced Literary Nonfiction, with Professor Kennedy at the 10A hour
This course continues the study of nonfiction writing. Students pursue independent projects in order to hone their research and story-telling skills. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of the classic works of literary nonfiction. Prerequisites: English 80, English 83 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the form in the English office entitled " How to Apply for Eng. 81,82, 83" and answer all questions. Students should submit a five-to-eight-page sample of their nonfiction writing, along with the application, to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last class day of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART, pending faculty approval. CA tag, Creative Writing. No Course Group designation. An application is required; download instructions here.
English 62.2, War and Gender, with Professor Boose at the 10A hour (crosslisted with WGST 42)
Of all the cultural enterprises and big ticket myths in western history, probably none has been as strictly gendered as war. Traditionally, war has been constructed as powerfully gendered binary in which battle is posed as a nearly sacred and exclusively male domain through which young men are initiated into the masculine gender and the male bond. From the west’s great classical war narrative of The Iliad onward, the feminine has, by contrast, been defined as that which instigates male-male conflict and that which wars are fought either to save or protect, be it a war to rescue Helen of Troy, to avenge the raped women of Kuwait whose plight was invoked as a cause for the 1991 Gulf War, one to protect the faithful (or faithless and betraying) wife at home, or a war to defend the ultimate national repository of the feminine ideal to be protected from the rapacious invasions of the enemy: America the Beautiful, mother land and virgin land. As a counterpart to the protection of the feminine imagined as belonging to one’s own males, the narrative either tacitly or overtly allows a soldier to view the all “enemy” women as objects to be raped; and in the most recent wars of ethnic genocide of the 1990s onward, women in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan have become no longer just incidental victims or “collateral damage,” but the primary objects of enemy destruction.
Starting with the Gulf War, however, the strict spatialization of the American war myth was at least challenged by the new presence of women on the war front, women as POWs, and in the present war in Iraq, women coming home maimed and in body bags; and women have now been integrated—whether successfully or not-- into all of the U. S. military accredited academies. With a special although not exclusive concentration on U.S. culture of the past century, this course will take a look at film, fiction, nonfiction and biography, news media and online material, in tracing the strongly gendered myths and narratives that are wrapped up in the cultural understanding of War. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III, CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 62.3, Immigrant Women Writing in America, with Professor Zeiger at the 11 hour (crosslisted with WGST 47.1)
In responding to the obstacles facing America's immigrants -- problems of dislocation, split identity, family disunity and claustrophobia, culture shock, language barriers, xenophobia, economic marginality, and racial and national oppression -- women often assume special burdens and find themselves having to invent new roles. They often bring powerful bicultural perspectives to their tasks of survival and opportunity seeking, however, and are increasingly active in struggles for cultural expression and social and economic justice. We will examine the different conditions for women in a variety of immigrant groups in America, reading in several histories, anthologies of feminist criticism, interdisciplinary surveys, and relevant texts in critical theory, but ultimately focusing on the words, in autobiography and fiction, of women writers. We will read such works as Akemi Kikimura's Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior; Bharati Mukerjee's Darkness; Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street; Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy; and Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualities.
English 65.1, Shakespeare as an Acting Script, with Professor Boose at the 2A hour (cross-listed with Theater 10)
This course on Shakespeare begins by recognizing that the plays, written specifically to be performed, conceptually exist as scripts for the actors. Patrick Stewart once said that performing even the smallest part in Shakespeare is so hugely rewarding for an actor because, in Shakespeare, even the lowliest messenger has been given an individuated character, a 'personality,' that lies right there in the language, just waiting for the actor to give it life. Using just two plays for the term, the course will place an intense focus on studying each play as an actor's script. Students will be responsible for particular roles in each play; and, working from the myriad cues that exist within the language, they will learn to build a character based on those cues. They will, in addition, learn how to research the acting history that lies behind a play's major roles, and how to understand the editing history that determines the words within a particular text of each play. This course should be attractive both to students who just enjoy drama and to those specifically interested in performing, directing, or writing plays. Dist: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-drama.
English 67.1, The Literature of Empire, at the 2A hour with Professor Giri
What does the English literature of the last one hundred and fifty years tell us about the ideology, institutions, and practices of the British Empire? What sorts of literary genres and styles did the imperial mission propagate? How do literary works of this period relate to the dominant institutions of commerce and politics? Which literary works tuned into the anti-colonial sentiment and which ones legitimized and consolidated an imperial worldview? This course intends to explore such questions by engaging students in a careful study of about half-dozen literary works that include: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The course also includes additional readings on the history of the British Empire and its relation to literature and culture, broadly understood. Dist: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.2, Transforming Narrative, a community-based learning course team taught by Professors Ivy Schweitzer and Pati Hernandez, at the 2A hour (crosslisted with WGST 59.2, pending faculty approval)
We create our identities and transform ourselves through stories. This community-based learning course offers students the unique opportunity to work directly with a local population in crisis, as well as study the effects of poverty, class structures, drug addiction, incarceration, and the issues facing people after treatment and/or imprisonment. For one class each week, students will study and discuss relevant readings in the traditional classroom. For the second class, students will travel to Valley Vista, a substance abuse rehabilitation center in Bradford, Vermont, to participate in a program for women clients. Its goal is the creation and performance of an original production that will facilitate the clients' voices. The written work for the course combines critical analysis and self-reflection on the effectiveness of service learning and performance in recovery. Dist: LIT; World Cultures: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III, CA tags Genre: Narrative; Cultural Studies and Popular Culture; Genders and Sexualities
English 67.9, Indian Killers: Murder and Mystery in Native Literature and Film, at the 2 hour with Professor Benson (crosslisted with NAS 32)
This course explores the abundance of crime fiction and murder mysteries created by Native American artists in recent decades. For some, the genre provides an imaginative space for avenging the offenses of colonization. For others, it offers a democratized landscape where all are equal, where American law is malleable, and where intelligence and subversion triumph. While most critics applaud these decolonizing efforts, we will examine their darker implications as well: do these narratives do real cultural work, or do they simply cash in on a thrill-seeking, stereotype-infested, pop-cultural industry? Do such works reveal that colonial violence will beget only more-and bloodier-violence? And in the end, who are its true victims? Dist: LIT; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 67.10, Caribbean Women Writers: Prose Fiction, at the 2A hour with Professor Hodge, (crosslisted with WGST 52.2 and AAAS 84)
In this course we will read, discuss and write about a selection of female-authored novels from the Anglophone Caribbean. The texts are: Edgell, Zee. Beka Lamb; Espinet, Ramabai, The Swinging Bridge; Levy, Andrea, Small Island; Mootoo; Shani, Cereus Blooms at Night; Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea. We will relate the texts to the historical, social and cultural realities of the region; identify and analyze the major thematic concerns of individual writers; examine each writer's treatment of issues such as gender, class, ethnicity, family and identity; and evaluate technical aspects of these works of fiction, among them structure, characterization, language use (of particular significance in the Caribbean context), narrative perspective and voice. We will explore commonalities and differences among the texts. Students will be expected to present and develop ideas in academic essays which use a formal register of English, are well organized, and adhere to the required documentation style. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditons.
English 70.1, John Milton, with Professor Luxon at the 10A hour
Members of this seminar should be prepared to settle on a project of research designed to produce new and interesting readings of Milton’s poetry and/or prose within the first week of class meetings. The group readings, both in Milton and in the secondary literature, will then be determined by what topics the members have selected. Though no prerequisite has been specified, those who have completed English 26, 27, 28, or a Special Topics course will be best prepared for this seminar. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, with Professor Hebert, Tu/Th 7 - 9pm
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week plus individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed their seminar. See instructions for applying to English 80. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 82.1, Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction, with Professor O'Malley at the 10A hour
Continued work in the writing of fiction, focusing on short stories, although students may experiment with the novel. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of short stories by contemporary writers. Constant revision is required.
Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART.
English 83.1, Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Nonfiction, with Professor Kennedy at the 2A hour
This course offers students an overview of the conventions, genres and techniques of narrative-nonfiction writing. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of classic works of literary nonfiction. Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the form titled "How To Apply for English 81, 82 or 83" from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-to-eight-page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART. CA tag, Creative Writing. No Course Group designation. See instructions for applying to English 81, 82 and 83.
English 85.1, Senior Workshop in Prose, with Professor O'Malley at the 2A hour
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction. While all Creative Writing majors are guaranteed a spot in English 85, they must nonetheless submit a five-to-eight page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. See instructions for applying for English 85. Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83. Students who are not Creative Writing majors may be admitted by permission of the Creative Writing staff. Dist: ART.
English 85.2, Senior Workshop in Poetry, with Professor Huntington, at the 3A hour.
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction. While all Creative Writing majors are guaranteed a spot in English 85, they must nonetheless submit a five-to-eight page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. See instructions for applying for English 85. Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83. Students who are not Creative Writing majors may be admitted by permission of the Creative Writing staff. Dist: ART.
English 85.3, Senior Workshop in Prose, with Professor Tudish at the 10A hour
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction. While all Creative Writing majors are guaranteed a spot in English 85, they must nonetheless submit a five-to-eight page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. See instructions for applying for English 85. Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83. Students who are not Creative Writing majors may be admitted by permission of the Creative Writing staff. Dist: ART.
