English 16: Old and New Media, Professor Halasz at the 11 hour
A survey of the historical, formal, and theoretical issues that arise from the materiality and technology of communication, representation, and textuality. The course will address topics in and between different media, which may include oral, scribal, print, and digital media. Readings and materials will be drawn from appropriate theorists, historians, and practitioners, and students may be asked not only to analyze old and new media, but also create with them. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 22: Medieval English Literature, Professor Edmondson at the 10A hour
An introduction to the literature of the “Middle English” period (ca. 1100- ca. 1500), concentrating on the emergence of English as a literary language in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and on some of the great masterworks of the late fourteenth century. Readings will include early texts on King Arthur, the lais of Marie de France, the satirical poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the romance Sir Orfeo, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Book of Margery Kempe, and the York Cycle. Most readings in modern English translation, with some explorations into the original language. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group I. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 24: Shakespeare I, Professor Halasz at the 9L 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; Class of 2007 and earlier: WCult: EU. Class of 2008 and later: WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tag Genre-drama.
English 26: English Drama to 1642, Professor Boose at the 10A hour
A study of commercial theater in London from about 1570 until the closing of the theaters in 1642. Anonymous and collaborative plays will be read as well as those by such playwrights as Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Webster, and Ford. The course will focus on the economic, social, political, intellectual, and theatrical conditions in which the plays were originally produced, on their continuing performance, and on their status as literary texts. Research into the performance history of a play or participation in a scene production is required. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities.
English 32: The Rise of the Novel, Professor Cosgrove at the 10 hour
A study of the eighteenth-century English novel, with emphasis on formal variations within the genre as well as on interrelations of formal, political, and psychological elements of the narratives. Reading may include works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as twentieth-century criticism. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 38: The 19th Century English Novel, Professor McKee at the 11 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: EU. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 42: American Fiction to 1900, Professor Pease at the 12 hour
A survey of the first century of U.S. fiction, this course focuses on historical contexts as well as social and material conditions of the production of narrative as cultural myth. The course is designed to provide an overview of the literary history of the United States novel from the National Period to the threshold of the Modern (1845-1900). To do justice to the range of works under discussion, the lectures will call attention to the heterogeneous cultural contexts out of which these works have emerged as well as the formal and structural components of the different works under discussion. (more description elsewhere). Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 46: 20th Century American Fiction: 1900 to World War II, Professor Will at the 10 hour
A study of major American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Dreiser, Stein, Fitzgerald, Cather, Larsen and Faulkner, and a changing list of others. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions
English 58: Introduction to Postcolonial Literature, Professor Giri at the 11 hour (xlist 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 60.1: Native American Oral Traditional Literature, Professor Runnels at the 11 hour (xlist NAS 34)
Native American oral literatures constitute a little-known but rich and complex dimension of the American literary heritage. This course will examine the range of oral genres in several tribes. Since scholars from around the world are studying oral literatures as sources of information about the nature of human creativity, the course will involve examining major theoretical approaches to oral texts. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. No Course Group designation. CA tag Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 62.2: War and Gender, Professor Boose at the 2A hour (xlist WGST 46)
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 l991 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, non fiction 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: TBA. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 66.2: Black Atlantic, Professor Cosgrove at the 12 hour
“Black London” and “Black Atlantic” denote African and Slave presence in Europe and the Caribbean Islands. From Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko about a kidnapped African prince in the 17th century to John Stedman’s account of a slave rebellion in Surinam in the late 18th century, literature is rich with accounts of the British African population and the Caribbean middle passage. This course offers a new intimate view of these events and areas of conflict. Among other readings The Two Princes of Calabar is a history of two African princes who traveled through Europe in the 18th century, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative tells the life of a slave who bought his freedom and became a sailor. The course will also use the films Burn, with Marlon Brando, about a slave rebellion in the Caribbean, and Middle Passage, an unusual French view of the slave trade. Dist: LIT. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 66.3: American Gothic: Theory of the Eerie, Professor Chaney at the 2A hour
Study of nineteenth-century gothic and horror literature as well as the socio-political and psychological "ghosts" that haunt it, such as slavery, Native American removal, women's suffrage, imperialism, and urbanization. In addition to short theoretical selections, students will read works by Irving, Poe, Jacobs, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Gilman, Alcott, and Wharton. Graded work will consist of short responses and two formal essays. Dist: LIT. Course Group II, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Post Colonial Studies.
English 67.6: Harlem in Literature, Professor Gerzina at the 12 hour
Harlem has been used in fiction, poetry and film as a setting for the larger social, cultural and historical issues of race, literary experimentation, urbanization, and music. This course examines the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance into the twenty-first century, through the motifs of social and literary change, sound and the visual. It pays particular attention to literary form, style and language. Books include Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Ann Petry’s The Street, Chester Himes’ Cotton Comes to Harlem, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and Mat Johnson’s Hunting in Harlem, and selected poems and essays.
English 72.2: William Faulkner, Professor McKee at the 10A hour
In this course we will read five of Faulkner's novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August, and The Hamlet. Our focus will be on Faulkner's continuing attention to constructions of identity: especially Southern identities, racialized identities, and individual psyches. We will spend considerable time reading criticism, by such writers as Edouard Glissant and Vera Kutzinski. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA Course Group III. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 75.2: Psychoanalytic Literary and Cultural Criticism, Professor Edmondson at the 2A hour
The dream is a text that both solicits and resists interpretation: With that insight, Freud established the paradigm for all subsequent modes of literary and cultural analysis. Using that paradigm as a starting point, students in this course will immerse themselves in the principles, aims, and methods of psychoanalytic literary and cultural criticism, particularly as they serve as the foundation for other interpretive practices. Our primary texts will be those of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Žižek, and their followers, supplemented by readings of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Poe, and Conrad, among others. Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 80.1, Professor Hebert, M/W 7 - 8:50pm
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, 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 80.3, Professor Huntington 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, Professor Mathis at the 2A 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, Professor Hebert, Tu/Th 7 - 8:50pm
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
