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English 8.2: Journalism: Literature and Practice, Professor Jetter
at the 11 hour
This course will explore the role of print journalism in shaping the modern
American literary, cultural and political landscape--from Nellie Bly’s late
19th century undercover exposure to Seymour Hersh’s coverage of the Iraq War.
Students will also participate in an intensive weekly workshop on reporting and
writing, with a short unit on radio commentary. This course does not carry
English major credit.
English 15: Introduction to Literary Theory, Professor Will at the
2A 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 28: Milton, Professor Luxon at the 9L hour
A study of most of Milton’s poetry and of important selections from his
prose against the background of political and religious crises in
seventeenth-century England. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group I,
CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 34: Romantic Literature: Writing and English Society,
1780-1832, Professor McCann at the 10 hour
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in
Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and
the Napoleonic wars. There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on
the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are
at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of
whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist
idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a
continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria
Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey,
Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare. Dist: LIT; WCult:
EU. Course Group II. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 39: Early American Literature: Conquest, Captivity,
Cannibalism, Professor Schweitzer at the 2A hour
The "invention" of America changed the world forever and precipitated the
beginning of the modern era. This course explores that invention, covering the
period of about 1500 to 1800 and surveying a wide range of cultural attitudes
towards the imagination, exploration, and settlement of the Americas: Native
American, Spanish, French, and English. Our reading, including oral tales,
letters, diaries, captivity narratives, poetry, personal narratives, political
tracts, and secondary criticism, will focus on the themes of conquest,
captivity, cannibalism in the shaping of a particularly "American" identity. We
will use historical sources and early books and manuscripts to illuminate
attitudes towards power, identity, race, gender, and nature prevailing in the
multicultural landscape of the early Americas that shaped the emerging
literature and culture of British North America. We will also look at recent
cinematic representations of this early period in our examination of the
shifting and contentious meaning of "America." Dist: LIT. WCult: NA. Course
Group I, CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National
Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 45: Native American Literature, Professor Goeman at the 11
hour (xlist NAS 35)
Native American Literature (identical to English 45). Published Native
American writing has always incorporated a cross-cultural perspective that
mediates among traditions. The novels, short stories, and essays that
constitute the Native American contribution to the American literary tradition
reveal the literary potential of diverse aesthetic traditions. This course will
study representative authors with particular emphasis on contemporary writers.
Open to all classes. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tags
National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and
Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 47: American Drama, Professor Pease at the 10
hour
A study of major American playwrights of the 19th and 20th centuries
including S. Glaspell, O’Neill, Hellman, Wilder, Hansberry, Guare, Williams,
Wilson, Mamet, Miller, Albee, Shepard, Wasserstein. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA.
Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and
Countertraditions.
English 48: Contemporary American Fiction, Professor Favor at the 2
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: NA. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions
and Countertraditions.
English 49: Modern Black American Literature, Professor Vasquez at
the 2A hour (xlist AAAS 35)
A study of African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the
present, this course will focus on emerging and diverging traditions of writing
by African Americans. We shall also investigate the changing forms and contexts
of ‘racial representation’ in the United States. Works may include those by
Hurston, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Morrison, Schuyler, West, Murray, Gates,
Parks. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions
and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Studies.
English 60.2: Asian American Poetry and Performance, Professor
Chin at the 10A hour
How do Asian Americans articulate the world? In this course, we will look at
poets, playwrights and performers who have used the spoken and written word as
ways of exploring and asserting identity. We will examine their prosodies,
political stances and the cultural traditions claimed or rejected in an attempt
to define an Asian American aesthetics and literary tradition. Among the
artists whose work we will study are: Beau Sia, Frank Chin, Li-Young Lee, David
Henry Hwang, Kimiko Hahn, Shishir Kurup and Denise Uehara. Dist: LIT;
WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies
and Popular Culture, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies,
Genre-Poetry.
English 62.3: Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women
and Animals Western Literature, Professor Boggs at the 2 hour (xlist WGST
60)
What do stories about animals tell us about the treatment of women in
Western society? What do stories about women tell us about the treatment of
animals in Western society? And why are the two so often linked in the first
place? In this course, we will examine the philosophical traditions that
associate women with animals, and will interrogate women’s complex response to
those associations. We will ask why women and animals are jointly bracketed
from subjectivity and from ethical consideration. Given the advances in areas
such as women’s rights, we will ask whether there have been corresponding
advances in the treatment of animals, and why women feel particularly called
upon to work for those advances. Statistics suggest, for example, that the
overwhelming majority of vegetarians and humane society members are women. Is
the ethical treatment of animals an important feminist cause? We will read
literary (Ursula Le Guin, Aesop, Anna Sewell, Virginia Woolf) alongside
religious (the Bible) and philosophical (Aristotle, Wollstonecraft, Bentham)
texts, and draw on current schools of critical thought such as ecofeminism
(Carol Adams) to develop an understanding of these issues. Dist: LIT. Class
of 2008 and later: WCult: CI. No Course Group assignment. CA tags Genders and
Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 63.1: The Emotions and Identity in American Literature and
Film, Professor Santa Ana at the 10A hour
What do our feelings of shame, anger, grief, and compassion tell us about
ourselves and the culture in which we live? By watching films and reading
novels, essays, and personal narratives, we will examine the ways in which
human feelings express and construct identities of race, class, gender, and
sexuality. Texts may include The Bluest Eye; Bastard Out of Carolina; My Year
of Meats; Fixer Chao; Nickel and Dimed; and the films Flower Drum Song and
Crash. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and
Criticism.
English 63.2: National Allegory: Readings in Postcolonial Literature
and Culture, Professor Giri at the 11 hour (xlist COLT 49)
This course explores current theories of nationalism and postnationalism and
how these theories could be productively utilized in making sense of a select
number of literary texts and authors from the postcolonial world. The authors
include Lu Xun from China; Raja Rao from India; Sembene Ousmane from Senegal;
Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya; and Chinua Achebe from Nigeria. Cultural
theorists whose work will be discussed include Benedict Anderson, Anthony
Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Eric Hobsbawm, Franz Fanon, Frederic
Jameson, and Ernest Renan, among others. The readings follow a trajectory that
began with anti-colonial resistance movements leading to the achievement of
freedom, and subsequent recognition that the postcolonial nation-state as a
historically realized entity has fallen far short of the idea of the nation as
an imagined community and a utopian project, still unfinished and full of
promise for some, while a matter of historical anachronism for others. Yet
others see it as a site where an individual’s desire for freedom co-exists
uneasily with the pursuit of collective wellbeing. Dist: LIT. WCult: NW.
Course Group IV. CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism, Multicultural and
Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and
Countertraditions.
English 65.2: The Merchant of Venice: Jews and the Protestant
Imagination, Professor McKee at the 10A hour (xlist JWST 70 and REL
81)
This course will offer a close examination of Shakespeare's construction of
"Jewishness," in the context of a larger review of Jewish history in medieval
and early modern Europe. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group I, CA tags
Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 67.7: Mixed-Race Experience in Asian American Literature and
Culture, Professor Santa Ana at the 2A hour
Growing numbers of interracial relationships and the multiracial children of
these relations have contributed to America’s increasing diversity. Asian
Americans, in particular, are ever more claiming biracial parentage and
identifying themselves as mixed race. In this course, we will explore the
multiracial experience in Asian American novels memoirs, films, and criticism.
Text may include My Year of Meats, Fixer Chaos, Paper Bullets, The Unwanted,
and the films Danang and First Person Rural. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course
Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and
Countertraditions.
English 71.1: Charles Dickens: Allegory, Capitalism and the
Grotesque, Professor McCann at the 12 hour
The novels of Charles Dickens embody a complex formal response to the
pressures of industrial capitalism and their apparently corrosive effects on
Victorian social life. By foregrounding the concepts of allegory and the
grotesque, this course will explore Dickens’s development of a critical idiom
that tried to reveal the distortions of both laissez-faire economics and state
bureaucracy, while also preserving Victorian society from the revolutionary
potential of popular political mobilization. We will discuss Dickens in
relationship to his radical imitators and rivals (such as George Reynolds), to
a developing literature of labor (embodied in the work of Carlyle and Marx),
and to anxieties about colonial expansion and dislocation. We will also draw on
the work of critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to
develop a sense of how Dickens’s work embodies the tense relationship between
print-culture, populism and a developing culture industry increasingly oriented
to visual technologies. Reading will include The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby
Rudge, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend. Dist: Lit. Class of 2007 and
earlier: WCult: EU. Class of 2008 and later: WCult: W, pending faculty
approval. Course Group II, CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and
Countertraditions.
English 72.3: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Professor Zeiger at
the 12 hour
About Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Exchanging Hats," the younger gay poet James
Merrill wrote: "here was a poet addressing herself with open good humor to the
forbidden topic of transsexual impulses, simply by having invented a familiar,
'harmless' situation to dramatize them. I was enthralled." Some of Bishop's
poetic traits are captured by this reminiscence: her humor; her exploration of
twentieth century identities, spaces and boundaries; her willingness on try on
the "headgear" of another gender or culture. Yet Bishop's exploratory
playfulness is connected to her sense of personal displacement and danger. An
orphan, a woman poet, a lesbian, a long-term expatriate in Brazil, Bishop is
nowhere definitively at home. Partly for that reason, her work initially
resisted feminist and other forms of political categorization. More refined
variations on these perspectives have, however, made Bishop's work the focus of
an exciting assortment of queer, feminist, and postcolonial criticism. We will
read widely in this work and study all of Bishop's poems and some of her drafts
and letters in this new critical context. The last part of the course will
focus on Bishop's relationship with her own mentor, Marianne Moore, and on the
male poets who learned from her: Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Frank
Bidart. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry,
Genders and Sexualities
English 72.4: Postmodern Fiction: Boxes, Labyrinths and Webs,
Professor Silver at the 10A hour
This seminar will explore the intersections of postmodern fiction and theory
with contemporary electronic narratives, including hypertext fiction and
digital poetry. We will read print fictions by writers who anticipate the
challenges to traditional narrative made possible by the computer, including
Borges, Calvino, Coetzee, Pynchon, Coover, and Danielewski; a wide variety of
electronic works, such as Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl; and critical and
theoretical essays on the topics covered in the course. Dist: LIT. Course
Group III. CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism, Genre-narrative, Cultural
Studies and Popular Culture.
English 72.5: American Writers between the World Wars, Professor
Will at the 10A hour
This course will examine the work of American authors writing between the
end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. We will consider such
topics as: “post-war” and “pre-war” writing, interwar nativism, black
internationalism, and the afterlife of artistic modernism. The course will
combine a strong historical focus with close readings of texts by Fitzgerald,
Dos Passos, Baldwin, Hemingway, Cather, Stein, and Dorothy West. Dist: LIT.
Class of 2007 and earlier WCult: NA. Class of 2008 and later: WCult: W. Course
Group III. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 75.3: Theory Behind the Digital, Professor Evens at the 10A
hour
This advanced seminar focuses on the theories that underlie critical
accounts of the digital. Though some course texts deal explicitly with the
aesthetics and operation of the digital, this class concentrates on
philosophical readings that may not discuss the digital directly but that have
influenced thinking about the digital. Specific readings and themes will be
determined in part by the interests of the class, and might include texts by
such theorists as Hayles, Lévy, Hansen, Shannon, Deleuze, Baudrillard, ZiZek,
Heidegger, Virilio, Kittler, and Manovich.. Dist: LIT, pending faculty
approval. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 80.1: Creative Writing, Professor Finch at the 10A
hour
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes
meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores,
juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5
(or have exemption status). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their
applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last
day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do
not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is
available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all
other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.2: Creative Writing, Professor Finch at the 2A
hour
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes
meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores,
juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5
(or have exemption status). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their
applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last
day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do
not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is
available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all
other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.3: Creative Writing, Professor Chin at the 2A
hour
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes
meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores,
juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5
(or have exemption status). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their
applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last
day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do
not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is
available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all
other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 81: Advanced Creative Writing-Poetry, Professor Huntington
at the 3A hour
Continued work in the writing of poetry, focusing on the development of
craft, image, and voice, as well as the process of revision. The class proceeds
by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the
instructor, and analysis of poems by contemporary writers.
English 82: Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction, Professor Tudish at
the 2A 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.
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