Please note these listings are tentative and subject to change
English 10: King James Version of the Bible, I, Professor Wykes at the 10 hour
A study of the preeminent English translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanak, or Old Testament), with special emphasis on its relationship to English literature and on the history of its interpretation.
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. Course Group IV.
English 24: Shakespeare I, Professor Luxon at the 9 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. Course Group I, CA tag Genre-drama.
English 42: American Fiction to 1900, Professor Boggs at the 2A 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. Course Group II, CA tags National Traditions and Counter Traditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 53: 20th Century British Fiction: 1900 to World War I, Professor Silver at the 10A hour
A study of major authors, texts, and literary movements, with an emphasis on literary modernism and its cultural contexts. We will read works by Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys, and Beckett, as well as writers such as Kipling, Ford, West, Waugh, Bowen, and Lowry. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Counter traditions
English 62.1: Animals and Women in Western Literature: Nags, Bitches and Shrews, Professor Boggs at the 10A hour
(cross-listed with 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. Course Group n/a, CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 66.1: Restoration Comedy, Professor Wykes at the 12 hour
With the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 came a restoration of the London theatres, closed since 1642 by the ascendant puritans. The comedies of the later Stuart monarchy (1660-1714) are the only large group of plays still viable onstage to come from the period between Shakespeare and Shaw, and their place in the repertory owes a lot to the revived theatre's militantly anti-puritan origins. Sexual frankness could only be reinforced by the presence for the first time of professional actresses on the London stage and Restoration comedy became also a lively forum for discussion of the scandals and crises of a stormy period of English history. The reading will comprise comedies by such authors as: Dryden, Congreve, Wycherley, Shadwell, Aphra Behn, Ethgerege, Vanbrugh and Farquhar. Course Group II, CA tag Genre-drama
English 67.1: Romantics and Moderns, Professor Will at the 10A hour
This course will examine the influence of Romantic poetry and theory on Modernist writers. Readings by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mme. de Stael, Friedrich Schlegel, Thomas Mann, Proust and others in translation; by Byron, Coleridge, Carlyle, Woolf, Lawrence, Cather, Fitzgerald and others in English. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Genders and Sexualities
English 80: Creative Writing, Professor Mathis at the 10A 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. Students will be admitted on a competitive basis. Please pick up the “How To Apply To English 80” 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 poetry and/or 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. It does not carry major or minor credit.
English 81: Advanced Creative Writing-Poetry, Professor Mathis, hour to be arranged
These listings are incomplete. More courses will be added and some changed. This is preliminary information only.
English 15: Introduction to Literary Theory, Professor Boggs at the 10 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. Course Group IV
English 20: Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Professor Otter 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. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 24: Shakespeare I, Professor Saccio at the 9 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. Course Group I, CA tag Genre-drama
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. Course Group II, CA tag Genre-narrative
English 41: American Prose, Professor Renza at the 11 hour
Readings of nonfiction narratives by such American writers as Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac. Course Group II, CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 48: Contemporary American Fiction, Professor Favor at the 11 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. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 67: Native Cultural Production: (Re)Mapping Gender, Race and Nation, Professor Goeman at the 2A hour
(crosslisted with NAS 39)
This class will address various issues of particular importance to indigenous communities as it is reflected in twentieth-century creative works. The relationship between race, gender, and nation will be explicated through an examination of films, visual work, short stories, poems, and novels. We will begin with American Indian literature at the turn of the century, which addresses the trope of the frontier and the push westward, and end with current indigenous work that comments on global restructuring and the indigenous movement in the Americas. By using literary analytical tools in exploring metaphor, poetic structures, and genres, we will engage with the methods American Indian writers employ in their work to map out spaces of their own making. The selected material is presented with a concern for the diversity of American Indian Nations and the variety of their experiences and ideas in order to tackle common misperceptions and put forth the rich complexity of the legal, psychological, and communal contexts of the work. Important to this class is an open and thoughtful discussion about the active struggle for decolonization and healing that takes place in Native communities. Texts will include: Course Reader; National Museum of the American Indian Website, Various Exhibits; Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto FistFight in Heaven;Esther Belin, From the Belly of My Beauty, Fast Runner; Joy Harjo, How We Became Human; Linda Hogan, Solar Storms; Rabbit Proof Fence; Greg Sarris, Grand Avenue; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; Marc Warhus, Another America: Native American Maps and The History of Our Land. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Mulitcultural and Colonial/Post Colonial Studies
English 70: Medieval Animals, Professor Travis at the 2A hour
Description TBA
English 71: Not Your Father's Walt Whitman, Professor Cook at the 10 hour
A close study of Whitman’s texts (poetry and prose), contexts (literary and historical), and significance (cultural and critical). This course will span Whitman’s literary career and pay particular attention to his changing sense of self and nation. We will examine the revisions of Leaves of Grass between the first edition of 1855 and the death-bed edition of 1891-92 to learn how Whitman reconceptualized his project and his own role. We will consider his self-stylization as the American poet in light of the changing definitions that he attached to "America" as he repeatedly reinvented himself from the newspaperman of the 1840’s to the ‘Good Gray Poet" of the 1880’s. In addition, we will carefully examine most of the poetry and prose dropped by Whitman , revised by him and excluded from the canonical Library of America Complete Poems and Collected Poetry of Walt Whitman in order to recover both "the great sexual mystery of Whitman" and a subtler and more complex portrait of the "Good Gray/Gay Poet." Prerequisite: one course in poetry or in nineteenth century American Literature, or permission of the instructor. Requirements: each student will be expected to make two presentations to the class, and to write a term paper on the subject of Whitman’s poetry and/or prose). Course Group II, CA tag Genre-poetry
English 72.1: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Professor Renza at the 3A hour
The course will mostly consist of reading and discussing Stevens' collected poems and some prose. We will also read critical interpretations of his works. Students will give oral class reports and write two essays on approved topics. Course Group III, CA tag Genre-poetry
English 72.2: American Writers Between the World Wars, Professor Will at the 2A 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. Course Group III, CA tags Period Study, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 80: Creative Writing, Professor Dimmick 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. Students will be admitted on a competitive basis. Please pick up the “How To Apply To English 80” 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 poetry and/or 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. It does not carry major or minor credit. Starting with Academic Year 2001-2002, this class will be graded.
English 85.1: Senior Workshop in Poetry and Prose Fiction, Professor Huntington at the 3A hour
English 85.2: Senior Workshop in Poetry and Prose Fiction, Professor Dimmick 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.
These listings are incomplete. More courses will be added and some changed. This is preliminary information only.
English 18: History of the English Language, Professor Pulju at the 2 hour
(crosslisted with LING 18)
The development of English as a spoken and written language as a member of the Indo-European language-family, from Old English (Beowulf), Middle English (Chaucer), and Early Modern English (Shakespeare), to contemporary American English. Emphasis will be given to the linguistic and cultural reasons for ‘language change,’ to the literary possibilities of the language, and to the political significance of class and race. Course Group IV, CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 23: The English Renaissance, Professor Crewe at the 10 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). Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
English 38: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Professor McKee at the 11 hour
A study of the nineteenth-century novel focussing on the Victorian novel’s representation of public and private categories of experience. Readings may include Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’ Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Course Group II, CA tag Genre-narrative
English 42: American Fiction to 1900, Professor Pease at the 10 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. Course Group II, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 49: Modern Black American Literature, Professor Favor at the 12 hour
(crosslisted with 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. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 58: Introduction to Postcolonial Literature, Professor Giri at the 11 hour
(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. Course Group II, CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies
English 60: Native American Oral Tradition, Professor Runnels at the 11 hour
(crosslisted with 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. Course Group n/a, CA tag Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies
English 67: Bob Dylan, Professor Renza at the 2A hour
In this course, we will do close, critical readings of certain Dylan lyrics spanning his entire career, also taking into consideration their social, historical, and biographical circumstances. Oral reports as well as a long final paper will be required. Note: some attention will be given to the performance aspect of Dylan's songs, but we will not listen to them in class. All of the songs assigned and discussed will be available for your listening in the Paddock Music Library beforehand. Course Group III, CA tag Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Genre-poetry
English 67: Millenial Muses: Modernist Poetic Temperaments in English, Professor Sleigh at the 2A hour
What have poets at the end and beginning of the 21st century learned from those at the beginning of the 20th century? How many of our received notions about Modernist poetics still hold true, either for the poets that they supposedly first described, or for poets closer to our end of the millenium? What is the place of form in poetry, now and then? How has the use of abstraction in poetry changed? How do poets regard the integrity of the lyric self, or has the lyric self been superseded by other, more language-based conceptions of personality? By looking at how a poet at the beginning of last century has effected the work of a more contemporary poet, we'll explore the answer to these questions, and try to articulate the aesthetic assumptions that underlie the work of such poets as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens and more contemporary poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, C. K. Williams, Anne Winters, Anne Carson, Adrienne Rich, Thom Gunn and others. This course will focus on the work of individual poets and, in a tentative way, try to make clear the situation of the art now and then. Course Group III, CA tag Genre-poetry
English 70: John Milton, Professor Luxon at the 2A 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. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
English 80: Creative Writing, Professor Mathis at the 2A hour
English 80: Creative Writing, Professor Hebert, 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. Students will be admitted on a competitive basis. Please pick up the “How To Apply To English 80” 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 poetry and/or 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. It does not carry major or minor credit. Starting with Academic Year 2001-2002, this class will be graded.
English 82: Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction, Professor Dimmick at the 3A 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
These listings are incomplete. More courses will be added and some changed. This is preliminary information only.
English 8: Readings in American and British Literature
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 Edmondson at the 2 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. Course Group IV
English 16: Old and New Media, Professor Halasz, hour to be arranged
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. Course Group IV, CA tag Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 39: Early American Literature, Professor Schweitzer at the 2A hour
This course surveys the literature of the first settlers in the New World up to the American Revolution, focusing on writers in English and highlighting the major controversies that erupted during this period. We will focus on European attitudes towards and fantasies about the New World, how the settlers imagined masculinity and femininity, and represented indigenous and enslaved peoples. We will examine the frontier as a zone of inter-cultural contact, and look at the idea of “nationhood” that emerges from it. Some of the writers we will study are John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Mercy Otis Warren, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Judith Sargent Murray. This provides a foundation for English 40, 41, 42, 43. There are no prerequisites, but courses in early US history, or English 15 are highly recommended. Course Group I, CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 43: Early Black American Literature, Professor Cook at the 10A hour
(crosslisted 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. Course Group II, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 45: Native American Literature, Professor Goeman at the 12 hour
(crosslisted with NAS 35)
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. Course Group III, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, 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. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
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. Course Group IV, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies
English 62: Immigrant Women Writing in America, Professor Zeiger at the 2A hour
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. Course Group III, CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 62: Gender and Cyberculture, Professor Silver at the 10A hour
This course will explore the intersections between gender and a wide range of print and electronic texts associated with cyberculture. Taking as our starting point the question of how gender is represented within and produced by the new genres and the new media, we will look at such genres as cyberpunk, hyperfiction, and computer games. We will also explore recent multi-media works described as "media art," as well as the phenomenon of web-based MUDs, MOOs, chat groups, listserves, etc., including those produced by "fans." And, we will read a number of essays about cyberspace textuality and cyberculture. The questions we will consider include: the role of the body in cyberspace; the nature and cultural meanings of cyborgs; the role of generic conventions in the new media, including those associated with narrative and "character"; and the different relationships of men and women to technology and the new media. The course will be run as a seminar/workshop. Requirements include oral presentations, papers, and a final exam. Course Group III, CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 65: Inescapable Romance: From Late Antiquity to Early Modernity, Professor Crewe at the 10 hour
(crosslisted with COLT 23)
In reading long narrative works (or excerpts) by Heliodrorus, Longus, Ariosto, Tasso, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, we will pose the question “what is romance?” We will consider the history and some incarnations of the genre from late antiquity through the early modern period. Critical topics to be covered will include those of cultural function, readership, narrative pleasure, desire and subjectivity: they will also include the central tension in romance between “endlessness” and the plotting of closure. Course Group I, CA tag Genre-narrative
English 67: National Allegory, Professor Giri at the 11 hour
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. Course Group III, CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 67: Celtic Myths and Mudbloods, Professor Cosgrove at the 10 hour
Irish literature in the twentieth century set out to redefine its identity during a period of political upheaval and civil war. Intense struggles arose over the roles of the urban community as in Joyce's Dubliners and mythic and rural values as in Synge and Yeats. Simultaneously women writers like Edna O'Brien and Eavan Boland questioned the place of women in the myth of national heroism. We will delve into this cultural ferment using the works of these writers as well as contemporary novelists and poets such as Roddy Doyle and Seamus Heaney. The course will have a visual dimension with the movies, Michael Collins, The Crying Game, and Bloody Sunday. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions
English 67: Jews in American Culture and Theory: The New York Intellectuals, Professor Milich at the 11 hour
(crosslisted with JWST 30)
No other group of Jewish critics has been so influential in American literary and cultural politics as the New York Intellectuals, who came to prominence with the foundation of the Partisan Review (1937-2003). While some scholars interpret their political transformation from Marxist criticism to “liberal imagination” as a move from the periphery to the center of cultural critique, others consider this reconciliation with America as a depoliticization. Taking the New York Jewish Intellectuals as a paradigmatic segment of American criticism since the 1930s, this course shall focus on their political debates in the 1940s and 1950s (Marxism, the Rosenberg trials, McCarthyism), their alienation from European high culture after Fascism and Stalinism in the 1950s, their literary and cultural debates about the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s (the Beat Generation, Pop art, counterculture, the student movement), and finally their political separation since the 1980s. Starting from the assumption of what Russel Jacoby has identified as a Jewish-gentile split among the NYI, special emphasis will be laid on how the political and cultural debates informed notions of Jewish-American identity, particularly in respect to other minority groups such as African Americans. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 71 Alexander Pope, Professor Cosgrove at the 12 hour
Immerse yourself in the works, biography, and critical responses to Alexander Pope, the eighteenth-century satirist whose waspish couplets run the gamut from scatology to eschatology. Course Group II, CA tag Genre-poetry
