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English 8, Journalism: Literature and Practice, at the 11 hour
with Professor Jetter
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 12, Introduction to Literary Study, at the 12 hour with
Professor Will
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. This course carries English major credit.
English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, at the 10 hour with
Professor McKee
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 17, Introduction to New Media, at the 2A hour with Professor
Evens
This course introduces the basic ideas, questions, and objects of new
media studies, offering accounts of the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of
new media, the operation of digital technologies, and the cultural
repercussions of new media. A primary emphasis on academic texts will be
supplemented by fiction, films, music, journalism, computer games, and digital
artworks. Class proceeds by group discussion, debate, student presentations,
and peer critique. Typical readings include Alan Turing, Friedrich Kittler, Ray
Kurzweil, and Henry Jenkins, plus films such as Blade Runner and
eXistenZ. Dist: ART. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and
Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 20, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, at the 2A hour with
Professor Warren
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, Genre-narrative.
English 27, the Seventeenth Century, at the 10A hour with Professor
Crewe
English poetry and prose from 1603 to 1660. Primary focus on major
lyric tradition including poems by John Donne, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, George
Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and John Milton.
Secondary focus on significant prose works of intellectual history (Francis
Bacon, Robert Burton) and political controversy (debates about gender and/or
political order). Dist: LIT; WCult: EU for the class of 2007 and earlier.
WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course Group I. CA tag
Genre-poetry.
English 29, English Literature 1660 - 1714, Including Drama, at the
10 hour with Professor Cosgrove
A survey of English literary culture in the reigns of the later Stuart
monarchs. Poetry by Dryden, Marvell, Rochester, Butler, Oldham and Pope;
biographical writing by Aubrey, Halifax, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret
Cavendish; the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn; spiritual autobiography and
religious fiction by Bunyan; prose satires and analytical prose of Swift and
Halifax. Within the survey there will be two areas of special attention: the
theatre and the literary response to public events. We will read three plays by
such authors as Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Lee, Behn, Shadwell, Otway and
Farquahar, and study the writing in response to such events as the Great Plague
and Fire of 1666, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. Dist: LIT; WCult:
EU for the class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later.
Course Group II. CA tag Genre-drams.
English 38, The 19th Century English Novel, at the 12 hour with
Professor McKee
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 for the class
of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course Group II.
CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 45, Native American Literature, at the 11 hour with
Professor Palmer (cross listed with 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 for the class of 2007 and earlier.
WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course Group III. CA tags National
Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial
Studies.
English 47, American Drama, at the 12 hour with Professor
Pease
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 for
the class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course
Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 50, American and British Poetry Since 1914, at the 2A hour
with Professor Vasquez
A survey of modern American and British poetry since the First World
War, with particular emphasis on the aesthetics, philosophy and politics of
modernism. The course covers such canonical and non-canonical poets as Yeats,
Pound, HD, Lawrence, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams, Crane, Moore, Millay,
Auden, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Beats. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU or NA for
the class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course
Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 66.1, Whitman and Dickinson, at the 2 hour with
Professor Boggs
Although virtually unknown in their lifetimes, Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson today attract a wide readership and extensive scholarly interest.
Whitman would have been gratified by this kind of attention, Dickinson
horrified. Whitman aggressively tried to promote his works, and even published
– favorable -- reviews of his own writing. Although Dickinson made an early
attempt to publish her poetry, she hoarded her poems in a dresser-drawer where
they were found after her death. As an urban poet, preoccupied with the rise of
commercial society and scientific progress, Whitman experimented with ways to
represent the national paradox – the e pluribus unum by which the many could
become one and the one contain multitudes. Choosing domestic seclusion,
Dickinson experimented with lyric as a means of extreme individualism.
Straining against the formal conventions of their time, when poets were
expected to write in metered and rhyming verse, Whitman and Dickinson shared a
fierce willingness to experiment with form, and keen critical insights into the
role that gender, race, religion, science, commerce and the arts played in
American society. In this course, we will develop three ways of understanding
Whitman and Dickinson. We will examine their poetry in its historical context,
and ask how they responded to the challenges of representing America in poetry.
Second, we will study the literary devices at their disposal, focusing on the
way form influences the meanings they construct and deconstruct in their
poetry. Third, we will discuss the persona that emerges in the poetic
enterprise of each poet. We will divide our time evenly between the poets, and
study each in their own right as well as in comparison with the other.
Distributives: LIT.Class of 2007 and earlier: WCult: NA. Class of 2008 and
later: WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and
Countertraditions, Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 67.4, Jewish American Literature, hour TBA, with Professor
Milich (cross listed with 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: NA for class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: CI for class of 2008 and
later. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions,
Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.5, Celtic Myths and Mudbloods, at the 12 hour with
Professor Cosgrove
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. Dist:
LIT. WCult: EU for class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for class of 2008 and
later. Course Group III. CA tag National Traditions and Countertradtions.
English 67.6, August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, at the 3A hour
with Professor Colbert (crosslisted with AAAS 82 and
Theater 21, pending faculty approval)
This course examines Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights August Wilson
and Suzan-Lori Parks‘s written works. In the late 20th century Wilson and Parks
emerged as two African American playwrights who garnered significant critical
and commercial attention. This course investigates the distinctive elements of
African American drama in the late 20th century through the particular
aesthetics of two of American drama’s most notable playwrights. This course
considers how social, political, and artistic histories inform Wilson and
Parks’s drama. Therefore, we will locate the distinctive qualities of their
drama; how should we categorize their style, form, and content? Texts may
include: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson,
Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, The America Play, Topdog/Underdog, The Red
Letter Plays, and Getting Mother’s Body. In addition to Wilson and Parks’s
plays and Parks’s novel, we will read critical and theoretical works on drama
and contemporary African American cultural expression written by the
playwrights and by cultural critics. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA
tags Genre-drama, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and
Countertraditions.
English 67.7, Bob Dylan, at the 2A hour with Professor Renza
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. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA for the class
of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course
Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 70.2, Love, Gender and Marriage in Shakespeare, at the 10A
hour with Professor Boose
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: EU for the class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W
for the class of 2008 and later. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders
and Sexualities.
English 70.3, Race in Early Modern England, at the 2 hour with
Professor Campos
The word "race" as it is used to denote a phenotypic determinant of
identity did not exist in Shakespeare's England. Indeed, the notion of race
(and racism) as we know it today was only slowly emerging from the large-scale
historical shifts that we associate with the Renaissance. The rise of far-flung
exploration, global trade, transatlantic slavery, colonization, and imperial
expansion (at home and overseas) brought the English into contact with an array
of cultural others. This confrontation with Turk, Jew, African, and Indian
precipitated a need for the English to elaborate categories for understanding
the other, and, also, a need for the English to define themselves in the face
of such alterity. The primary focus of this course will be the Renaissance
stage where the fantasies of otherness were performed for the English public in
plays dealing with exotic peoples and fantastic locations. Plays include
Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Behn's Oroonoko, Fletcher's
The Island Princess, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice,
Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. To what extent are these plays
representing England’s cultural others and to what extent do they represent
England to itself? Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. Course Group I.
CA tags Genre-drama, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 75.1, Form and Theory of Poetry, at the 3A hour with
Professor Huntington
How do poets think about poetry? What goals, tools, strategies, and
forms have been employed by modern and contemporary poets in their own writing
and criticism? Topics will include questions of form, revision, inspiration,
voice, and the role of the author as both maker and speaker in much
contemporary poetry. Readings will include theory and craft texts by poets,
along with examples of their own and others' poetry. Readings will be
supplemented by visits and interviews with local and visiting poets. Dist: LIT.
Course Group IV. CA tag Genre-poetry.
English 75.2, High Theory, at the 10A hour with Professor
Evens
This seminar for advanced students undertakes a close reading of
difficult texts in philosophy and in literary and cultural theory. We will
include secondary literature to help contextualize the primary texts under
study, but the emphasis is on close reading to develop original and critical
approaches to these challenging works. Class will be based largely around group
discussion, with lectures and prepared student presentations to help stimulate
conversation. Students can help to shape the syllabus by proposing texts they
wish to work on together. Representative authors we might read in this class
include Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Agamben, Heidegger, Virilio, Zizek, Lyotard,
and others. Course Group IV.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, at the 2A hour with
Professor Mathis
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 or can be downloaded from
the English Department website. Dist: ART.
English 80.2, Creative Writing, at the 10A hour with Professor
O'Malley
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 or can be downloaded from the English
Department website. Dist: ART.
English 80.3, Creative Writing, at the 11 hour with Professor
Lenhart
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 82.1, Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction, at the 10A 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.
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