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.
