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English 8, Journalism, 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. WCult: W. This course does not carry English major credit.
English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, Professor Will at the 10 hour
This course introduces the student to the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading and the study of literature. This course is designed as an introductory course to the English literature major and other literature and humanities majors. Students must complete Writing 5 before enrolling. Texts may include theory, history of literature, and will be drawn from at least two genres and historical periods. Dist: LIT. No course group or CA tag assignments.
English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, Professor Boggs 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.
English 23, The English Renaissance, Professor Halasz at the 2A hour
English verse and prose of the sixteenth century: a study of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Nashe, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others in the cultural context of Tudor England. The course will investigate issues of classical and European influence, publication, and courtly patronage, especially under the auspices of a female ruler (Elizabeth I). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 24, Shakespeare I, Professor Boose at the 10 hour
A study of about ten plays spanning Shakespeare’s career, including comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s language; to his dramatic practices and theatrical milieu; and to the social, political, and philosophical issues raised by the action of the plays. Videotapes will supplement the reading. Exercises in close reading and interpretative papers. Prerequisite: English 2/3, English 5 or English 5 exemption status. Dist: LIT; WCult:W. Course Group I. CA tag Genre-drama.
English 28, Milton, Professor Luxon at the 10 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: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 45, Native American Literature, Professor Goeman at the 11 hour
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: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 47, American Drama, Professors Pease and Colbert, 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: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 48, Contemporary American Fiction, Professor Favor at the 10 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 59, Critical Issues in Postcolonial Studies, Professor Giri at the 2A hour
Intended for students who have some familiarity with postcolonial literary texts, this course will combine the reading of postcolonial literature with the study and discussion of the major questions confronting the developing field of postcolonial studies. Issues may include: questions of language and definition; the culture and politics of nationalism and transnationalism, race and representation, ethnicity and identity; the local and the global; tradition and modernity; hybridity and authenticity; colonial history, decolonization and neocolonialism; the role and status of postcolonial studies in the academy. Authors may include: Achebe, Appiah, Bhabha, Chatterjee, Coetzee, Fanon, Gilroy, Gordimer, James, JanMohamed, Minh-ha, Mohanty, Ngugi, Radhakrishnan, Rushdie, Said, Spivak, Sunder Rajan. Prerequisite: English 58, Trinidad FSP, or permission of the instructor. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group IV. CA tags Multicultural/Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 60.3, Profiles of the Dead, Professor Kennedy at the 2A hour
How do we tell a vivid story about a stranger who has crumbled into dust? During this advanced seminar in literary nonfiction, each student will write a stylish, suspenseful narrative about a dead person. We will gear up to this final assignment with exercises, individual meetings and "boot camps" on historical research. Readings will include "The Lives They Lived" profiles from The New York Times Magazine, as well as excerpts from Gay Talese, Sarah Vowell and John Hope Franklin. WCult: W, pending faculty approval. CA tags Creative Writing, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 63.2, National Allegory: Readings in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Professor Giri at the 11 hour (crosslisted with COLT 49)
Since Frederic Jameson published a controversial essay asserting the centrality of the nation in third world literature, the national question has become a focal point of debate in postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Some of the questions that have been raised include: does postcolonial/third world literature represent the nation in ways that render it distinct from other varieties of writing? Is allegory still a viable mode of literary representation? What are the implications of national allegory to the putatively universal category of class and class-based analysis of culture? How does the idea of national allegory relate to those works that seem to privilege mobility, diaspora, and transnationalism? And finally, if third world literature is concerned primarily, if not exclusively, with representing the nation, why is there so much public disenchantment with the actually existing nation-states that came into existence in the wake of decolonization? This course seeks to explore some of these questions in relation to a wide range of texts and authors from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and their Western metropolitan diasporas. In doing so, it also follows a historical trajectory that began with anti-colonial resistance movements leading to the achievement of freedom, and subsequent recognition that the historically realized entity we call nation-state has fallen far short of the nation as an imagined community and a utopian project, a site where he the desire for individual freedom has yet to reconciled with collective well-being. LIT; WCULT: NW. Course Group IV, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.09, Modern Jewish American Women Writers, Professor Zeiger at the 12 hour (crosslisted with JWST 21.1 and WGST 51)
This course offers a survey of women writers of Jewish background and identification. We will first take up the question of who is a "Jewish woman writer," a subset of the larger question of ethnic, national, and religious identity and identification in literary studies. We will then study a variety of writers mostly from the US and Latin America, writing in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, memoir, essay, and drama from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Writers include Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Jo Sinclair, Cynthia Ozick, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Muriel Ruykeser, Irena Klepfisz, Wendy Wasserstein, Allegra Goodman, and Marjorie Angosin. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.10, Black Movements, Professor Colbert at the 12 hour (crosslisted with AAAS)
Accounting for the multiple meanings of "movement," this course will explore representations of migration, immigration, community activism, and embodied performance in black literature and cultural productions. We will examine how black people's ambiguous relationship to space and place in the Circum-Atlantic world informs modes of representation, by focusing on images of home, homelessness, flight, entrapment, embodiment, and metaphysical transcendence. These images permeate the African American literary tradition and the literatures of the black diaspora. The tenuous relationship between black subjects and place, nationally and internationally, also calls for consideration of how social, cultural, and historical conditions work to create overlapping and often contradictory images of movement(s) in black expressive culture. At the same time, we will analyze how movement functions as a mechanism to explore some of the predominate themes of black expression, including: freedom, family, identity, subjectivity, nationally belonging, and history. We will read such works as Jean Toomer's Cane, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Aime Cesaire's A Tempest, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist; watch Josephine Baker's Princess Tam Tam and listen to musicians including Billie Holiday and Kanye West. Dist: LIT, WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 67.11, James Joyce, Professor Cosgrove at the 12 hour
This seminar will be devoted to the study of Joyce's Ulysses. After some discussion of Joyce's Portrait and Dubliners -- both of which students are urged to read before the course begins--we will focus on the text of Joyce's Ulysses, with an emphasis on close reading and an examination of Joyce's experiments in prose and his place in modern literature. Each student will be asked to write two papers. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.12, Jewish American Literature, Professor Milich at the 10A hour (xlist JWST 21)
The history of Jewish American literature is a history of many literatures. It reflects the broad variety of historical, political, social and cultural experiences that Jews from very different places and backgrounds brought to the United States. The course introduces students to the central topics, motives and literary strategies from the beginnings of a tangible Jewish American literature in the late nineteenth century to the present. The course is divided into four parts: The Great Tide (1880-1920) discerns the literary repercussions of Jewish immigration such as language (Yiddish, Hebrew, English), religion (Judaism, secularism), and politics (Zionism, democracy) in the writings of authors such as Antin, Cahan, Kallen, Lazarus, Leeser, Mayer Wise, and Yezierska. From Margin to Mainstream (1920-1945), covers the cataclysmic interwar years, which evoked an intensive production of the literary and literal children of immigrants coming of age and becoming an aesthetic and political force in debates about American modernism, among them Gertrude Stein and Henry Roth. In the Years of Achievement and Ambivalence (1945-1970), the defining line of Jewish American writing altered dramatically. Jewish American literature’s “ethnic stamp” marks and complicates the characters and perspectives created by Bellow, Ginsberg, Mailer, Malamud, Olsen, Paley, Singer and others with respect to debates about the Holocaust, the counterculture, or the civil rights, women’s, and student movement. Wandering and Return (1970 to the Present) will focus on the broad variety of modern and postmodern Jewish American writing. Questions of contemporary ethnic identity in a multicultural society as well as attempts to reconfigure historical perspectives on the Holocaust, the Rosenberg Case, or McCarthyism inform the writings of Doctorow, Lelchuk, Ozick, Philip Roth and others. Dist: LIT. WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.13, Contemporary Native American Poetry, Professor Palmer at the 10 hour (xlist NAS 47)
As Muscogee poet, Joy Harjo, expresses in the introduction of the anthology, REINVENTING THE ENEMY'S LANGUAGE, a collection that she co-edited, Native peoples are "...still dealing with a holocaust of outrageous proportion in these lands...Many of us at the end of the century are using the 'enemy language' with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves during these troubled times." This course in Native American poetry examines the ways contemporary American Indian poets employ literary gestures of resistance to the ongoing effects of colonization, and how their poetry contributes to the survival of tribal memory and the regeneration of tribal traditions and communities. We examine the influence of oral tradition and ritual life upon contemporary poets, as well as the position Native American poetic "voice" occupies in contemporary postcolonial discourse. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 70.2, Love, Gender and Marriage in Shakespeare, Professor Boose at the 12 hour
In Shakespeare, issues so seemingly "domestic" as love, sexuality and family are problems of such colossal significance that they could be said to constitute the focal center of the canon itself. Hamlet and King Lear, for instance, are plays more truly "about" the politics of family than they are about the politics of kingdom. Focusing on seven plays, this course will interrogate the knotty issues of love, sexuality, and family. As part of the course, students will be required to participate in at least one scene production. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities.
English 71.3, The Brontës, Professor Gerzina at the 2A hour
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë are perhaps the most mythologized and analyzed family of writers in Britain. Their childhood in Haworth, the intensity of their novels, the relationship with their father and brother—all have been fodder for literary and biographical analysis, and spawned an entire industry of memorabilia, imitation and criticism. In the seminar we will do close readings of four Brontë novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), and critical articles, look at some of their juvenilia, and read Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth. We’ll end with Maryse Conde's Windward Heights and Jasper Fforde’s imaginative novel, The Eyre Affair. We will also view 2-3 film adaptations of their novels. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 72.4, The Harlem Renaissance, Professor Favor at the 12 hour (crosslisted with AAAS 91)
This class will examine the literature and social contexts of a period widely knows as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Part of our mission in the class will be to deconstruct some of the widely held presuppositions about that era, especially by interrogating questions of class, race, gender and sexuality as social constructs. Although this class will focus mainly on fiction writing, we will also consider some poetry and non-fiction prose as well. Dist: LIT, WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 75, Form and Theory of Fiction, hour to be arranged with Professor Tudish at the 2A hour
How do fiction writers think about fiction? What aesthetics, goals, tools, strategies, and theories have been explored and employed by fiction writers as they write their own works, read the works of other fiction writers, and postulate on the role of fiction in literature and among a general readership? Topics will include the ways that writers consider and work with point of view, dramaturgy, narrative sequence, character, voice, psychic distance, and authorial presence. In addition to examples of the novel, novella, and short story, readings will include theory and craft texts by such fiction writers as James, Poe, Forster, Calvino, Atwood, Gordimer, Ecco, Macauley, Lanning, Cixous, and others. Dist: LIT, CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, Professor Huntington at the 2A hour
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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.2, Creative Writing, Professor O'Malley, hour to be arranged
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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.3, Creative Writing, Professor Mathis, hour to be arranged
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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 81.1, Advanced Creative Writing-Poetry, Professor Mathis, hour to be arranged
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. DIST: ART.
English 82, Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction, Professor O'Malley, hour to be arranged
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. Dist: ART.
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