English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, at the 2 hour with Professor Edmondson
Designed for prospective majors in English and for students interested in a general literature course, English 12 offers an introduction to the critical historical and creative study of literature. Each of the sections provides a survey of literature from different historical periods and an overview of the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading, critical analysis and creative practice. The course counts for credit in the major. Dist: LIT. No course group or CA tag designation.
Introduction to Literary Study--Drama. This section focuses on drama’s double existence as a record of collective, collaborative performance before a live audience and as a text available for reading apart from performance. Potential areas of inquiry include changing forms of dramatic imitation and representation, performance and publication history, staging and reading conventions, and the broad question of how drama complicates the very category of the literary. Writing for the class will include both critical and creative practices.
English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, at the 12 hour with Professor Travis
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 16, Old and New Media, a the 10A hour with Professor Halasz
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 20, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, at the 11 hour with Professor Edmondson
An introduction to Chaucer, concentrating on ten of the Canterbury Tales, and studying him as a social critic and literary artist. Special attention will be paid to Chaucer’s language, the sounds of Middle English, and the implications of verse written for the ear. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 24, Shakespeare I, at the 10 hour with Professor Gamboa
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: Writing 2/3, Writing 5 or Writing 5 exemption status. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tag Genre-drama.
English 32, The Rise of the Novel, at the 10 hour with Professor McCann
A study of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English novel, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen. The course will look at the major sub-genres of the period, including criminal biography, scandalous memoirs, epistolary fiction and the Gothic novel. It will also explore the relationship between narrative fiction and the changing cultural landscape of a period defined by commercial uncertainty, imperial expansion, and the threat of revolution. Finally, and most importantly, the course will ask why the novel became so central to modern conceptions of subjectivity, sexuality, social cohesion and transgression. Readings may include work by Daniel Defoe, John Cleland, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Dist: LIT, WCult. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 39, Early American Literature: Conquest, Captivity, Cannibalism, at the 12 hour with Professor Chaney
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 43, Early Black American Literature, at the 12 hour with Professor Favor (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. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Genre-narrative.
English 67.1, Contemporary American Poetry, at the 10A hour with Professor Finch
This course explores the most exciting developments in American poetry from 1960 until the present. We will consider a wide array of poetic movements--the Beats, the New York School, the Confessionals, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain group, the New Formalists, and the Language poets--in order to understand the aesthetic tendencies that inform American poetries being written today. In particular, we will examine key individual poets through close readings of their most exemplary work. Paying special attention to the crafting of the poem’s language, we will discuss key aspects of both open and closed forms in poets including Lowell, Bishop, Brooks, Rich, Plath, Hayden, Oppen, Kunitz, Guest, Ashbery, Snyder, Levertov, Duncan, Olson, Creeley. The last several weeks of the course will be devoted to reading a selected handful of individual volumes of poetry published just in the last few years. By reading some truly contemporary work, we will get a taste of the unprecedented range and diversity of what’s happening in American poetry just now. Majors concentrating in Creative Writing are encouraged to take this course. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag Genre-poetry.
English 67.8, Transforming Narrative, at the 2A hour with Professors Huntington and Hernandez (crosslisted with WGST 59.2)
A community-based learning course team taught by Cynthia Huntington and Pati Hernandez. We create our identities and transform ourselves through stories. This community-based learning course offers students the unique opportunity to work directly with a local population in crisis, as well as study the effects of poverty, class structures, drug addiction, incarceration, and the issues facing people after treatment and/or imprisonment. For one class each week, students will study and discuss relevant readings in the traditional classroom. For the second class, students will travel to Valley Vista, a substance abuse rehabilitation center in Bradford, Vermont, to participate in a program for women clients. Its goal is the creation and performance of an original production that will facilitate the clients' voices. The written work for the course combines critical analysis and self-reflection on the effectiveness of service learning and performance in recovery. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-narrative, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture,Genders and Sexualities
English 70.1, Shakespeare's History Plays and the Making of England, at the 2A hour with Professor Boose
As historian Benedict Anderson has pointed out, no nation is a “natural” identity, but an artificial creation that is unified by a carefully constructed fiction. Late sixteenth- century England's fascination with its own history occurs simultaneously with the emerging formation of England, under the Tudor monarchs, as a nation-state. Within the process of national self-definition, the burgeoning vogue for the national history play was fundamental to both the creation and dissemination of the myths of origin crucial to any sense of a shared “Englishness.” In Shakespeare's career, the history play was probably the first type of drama he wrote, and the amount of attention he invested in this new genre plus his role as both its most prolific and influential writer suggest the degree to which his plays are implicated in that nationalizing process. Drawing upon the Chronicles of English history written earlier in the century, the plays literally embody the story of English triumph to a mass audience, making the dead heroes of England's past rise up on stage and, within a space uniquely adapted for such purpose, forge a community out of an audience so diverse as to have included both Queen and peasant. Of the ten English history plays we will read, eight of them can be imagined as a sequential group that spans the approximate 75 years of the Wars of the Roses, running from the deposition of Richard II to the fall of Richard III and the ascendancy of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. We will also read the anomalous King John, and the final history play (perhaps also the final play) that Shakespeare worked on, Henry VIII, the quasi-sequel to the earlier eight, that, some ten years after Queen Elizabeth had died and the Stuart monarchy taken over, gave focus at last to the Tudor monarchy, whose reign had driven the process of national unification to which the patriotic paeans in plays like Henry V pay tribute. Dist: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 71.1, American Naturalism: Machines, Money, and Madness, at the 11 hour with Professor Chaney
Traditionally viewed as a development of realism, novels of American naturalism by such early twentieth-century authors as Theodor Dreiser and Frank Norris are marked by a tragic vision more seedy than heroic. The sensational violence in these works suggests a deterministic universe populated by human actors who are atavistic, avaricious, and always poised for destruction. Whether conceived of as a literary period, a style, or a literary mode, naturalism has received less critical attention than the forms of realism or modernism that both flank and overlap it; nevertheless, naturalism will be the focus of this class as we explore its key texts, themes, contexts, and influences, while briefly surveying some of the major critical claims that it has given rise to. Authors will include Dreiser, Norris, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ellen Glasgow, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright. Dist: LIT; WCult: Wl. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertradtions, Genre-narrative.
English 71.2, Bohemia and the 19th Century Novel, at the 12 hour with Professor McCann
Bohemia - an urban underworld of social outcasts, struggling artists, and political conspirators - is one of the most enduring fantasies to emerge out of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, the figure of the Bohemian had become central to a cosmopolitan literary culture eager to assert its autonomy from the marketplace and a restrictive notion of Englishness. It had also become bound up with a range of late nineteenth-century anxieties fixated on cultural decadence, racial degeneration, transgressive sexuality and the occult. This course will study a series novels that foreground these issues, including Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan, George Gissing's New Grub Street, George Du Maurier's Trilby and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Dist: LIT, WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 80.1 Creative Writing, at the 2A hour with Professor Hebert
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).Procedures for enrolling in English 80: To gain admission to English 80, students must fill out an application, available on-line or in the English Department office, and submit it to the English office no later than the last day of classes of the term preceding the one in which they wish to enroll. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Please answer all questions on the application and make sure your name is legible. Be sure to indicate clearly on your application the sections(s) of 80 for which you are applying. If you do not indicate which sections work with your schedule, we will place you in whatever section is available. Students should then enroll in three other courses. If admitted to English 80, students can then drop one of the other courses. Changing sections after enrollment is highly discouraged and will not be possible except in extenuating circumstances. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 82.1, Creative Writing-Fiction, at the 2A hour with Professor Tudish
Continued work in the writing of fiction, focusing on short stories, although students may experiment with the novel. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of short stories by contemporary writers. Constant revision is required. Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please read the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Dist: ART.
English 85.1, Senior Workshop in Poetry, Prose Fiction and Nonfiction, at the 10A hour with Professor Huntington
This course is offered in the fall of senior year for English majors and minors concentrating in Creative Writing. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, fiction, or literary nonfiction. All students who wish to enroll must submit an 8 to 12 page writ-ing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. Please also read the “How to Apply to English 85” document, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83.
English 85.2, Senior Workshop in Poetry, Prose Fiction and Nonfiction, at the 10A hour with Professor O'Malley
This course is offered in the fall of senior year for English majors and minors concentrating in Creative Writing. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, fiction, or literary nonfiction. All students who wish to enroll must submit an 8 to 12 page writ-ing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. Please also read the “How to Apply to English 85” document, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83.
