English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, at the 2 hour with Professor Boggs
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 tags Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 16, Old and New Media, at the 2A hour with Professors Evens and 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 18, History of the English Language, at the 10 hour with Professor Pulju (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. Topics will include some or all of the following: the linguistic and cultural reasons for 'language change,' the literary possibilities of the language, and the political significance of class and race. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC. Course Group IV. CA tags: Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 19, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Epic and Saga, at the 2A hour with Professor Travis
An introduction both to Old English literature and to Old Norse sagas. In the first half of the course we concentrate on reading, translating and setting into cultural context selected Anglo-Saxon poems, most notably ‘The Wanderer,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and ‘Beowulf.’ In the second half of the course we read a variety of Old Norse sagas, including ‘Egil's Saga,’ ‘The Saga of the People of Laxardal,’ and two shorter sagas recounting contacts with North America. In addition to papers and reports, we’ll discuss the new film ‘Beowulf,’ and each student will write a mini-version of a Norse saga. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative. (Description pending faculty approval.)
English 23, The English Renaissance, at the 10A hour with Professor Halasz
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). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 32, The Rise of the Novel, at the 12 hour with Professor Cosgrove
A study of the eighteenth-century English novel, with emphasis on formal variations within the genre as well as on interrelations of formal, political, and psychological elements of the narratives. Reading may include works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as twentieth-century criticism. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU for the class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 34, Romantic Literature: Writing and English Society, 1780-1832, at the 10 hour with Professor McCann
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare. 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 National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 42, American Fiction to 1900, at the 12 hour with Professor Pease
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. In keeping with this intention, the lecturers include the so-called classic texts in American literature, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but also the newly canonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Life in the Iron Mills, Hope Leslie in the hope that the configuration of these works will result in an understanding of the remarkable complexity of United States literary culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA for the class of 2007 and earlier. WCult: W for the class of 2008 and later. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 46, 20th Century American Fiction: 1900 to World War I, at the 11 hour with Professor Will
A study of major American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Dreiser, Stein, Fitzgerald, Cather, Larsen and Faulkner, and a changing list of others. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA 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, Genre-narrative.
English 60.2, Islam and Judaism: Europe's Orientalist Visions, at the 2A hour with Professors McKee and Heschel (crosslisted with JWST27.3 and CL50)
In this course we will undertake an interdisciplinary study of representations of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the arts, history, theology and racial discourse in nineteenth-century Britain, France, and Germany. Studying the discursive shifts whereby concepts of religious and racial difference were used to produce a variety of gendered, cultured, and national identities, we will address: the role of Orientalism in those shifts; the rise of Jewish and Islamic Studies; the importance of religion to national and imperial identities; and the popularity of Eastern and Orientalist themes in the arts, including poetry, novels, travel writing, and, briefly, music and painting. We will consider how Christian, Islamic, and Jewish identities achieved definition and difference in relation to one another in literature, philosophy, and history, as well as the importance of Orientalism to European gender, character, and culture. Reading will include works by poets, novelists, and historians, including Goethe, Geiger, Graetz, Arnold, Flaubert, Renan, Blunt, Heine, Wagner, and George Eliot, as well as late twentieth-century critics of Orientalism such as Edward Said, Ali Behdad, and Eitan Bar-Yosef. Distribs TBA. Course Group II. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 60.3, Native American Oral Traditional Literature, at the 11 hour with Professor Palmer (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. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. No Course Group designation. CA tag Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 65.1, Renaissance Witchcraft and Magic, at the 2A hour with Professor Campos
Crosslisted with THEA 10 and WGST 48.4, pending faculty approval
Renaissance magic assumed two basic forms: one is witchcraft, a crime associated with women; and the other is occult philosophy, a controversial scientific practice pursued by men. In this course we will investigate both sides of magic as they are spectacularly represented on the Renaissance public stage. Our guiding question: how is Renaissance magic inherently theatrical and how is theater inherently magical? Topics include folklore beliefs, ideologies of gender and power, early modern language theory, theatrical spectacle, and politics. Texts include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Jonson's The Alchemist, and Shakespeare's Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Dist: LIT; WCult W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 67.3, Woolfenstein, at the 2 hour with Professors Silver and Will
(crosslisted with WGST 53)
In her well known passage from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf stated that "we think back through our mothers if we are women"; twenty years later, Gertrude Stein would obliquely refer to herself as "the mother of us all." These two women occupy a central place in European and American modernism, their work having influenced successive generations of writers. Using a series of thematic and theoretical frameworks, we will explore the intersections between the two, asking how they staged their resistances to traditional/patriarchal literary and cultural structures. Possible frameworks are gender and genre; queer texts and contexts; war, nation, and gender; class, ethnicity, and authority; iconization. Texts by Woolf might include Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and Between the Acts; texts by Stein might include Ida, Three Lives, Everybody's Autobiography, and Mrs. Reynolds. We will also be reading a selection of critical and/or feminist theory. Suggested background courses are English 15, Comparative Literature 72, WGST 16. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. Concentration area tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 70.1, John Milton, at the 2A hour with Professor Luxon
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. 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-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 71.1, Thomas Hardy, at the 10A hour with Professor McKee
We will study novels of Thomas Hardy, whose fiction was published through almost three decades of the late Victorian period, considering him both as a Victorian and as a modern writer. We will also read about the culture in which Hardy wrote, looking at the tensions between classes, between genders, and between rural and urban ways of life which were central to his stories. We will give attention to the importance of Darwin's thinking and of the increasing relativism of knowledge late in the nineteenth century to Hardy's narratives. And we will read criticism of the fiction which explores its formal, psychoanalytic, and political dimensions. The novels we read may include Desperate Remedies (1871), Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896). Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 72.3, Transnationalism in Asian American Literature and Cultural Criticism, at the 2A hour with Professor Santa Ana
Drawing on contemporary concerns and debates about transnationalism in Asian American cultural criticism, this course will examine narratives and films by Asian Americans that feature the experience of crossing national borders and living in the global economy of North America. We will analyze postcolonial, postmodernist, diasporic, and globalized views of transnational movement. We will especially take into account globalization and the socio-historical pressures this economic system exerts on the nation-state and subjecthood, gender, displacement, multiple migrations, and constructions of home. Three thematic units comprise the course: (1) the multiple displacements of postcolonial Asian women against the conventional immigrant story of assimilation into U.S. culture; (2) the story of one's journey to Asia as first visit to $E3ancestral$E4 land or as return,and in some cases, as tourist destination; and (3) interconnections-historical, political, personal, and economic-between U.S. lives and Asian lives in the global cities of North America. By analyzing contemporary Asian American writings and films, we will critique current conceptions of transnational mobility and identity in an age of globalization. Texts may include Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Lê Thi Diem Thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala, Peter Bacho's Cebu, Lydia Minatoya's Talking to High Monks in the Snow, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Russell Leong's Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories, and the films A Great Wall, The Wedding Banquet, Fire, First Personal Plural, and Daughter from Danang. Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval. Course Group III, CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 80.1, Creative Writing at the 10A 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 2hour with Professor Huntington
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 2A hour with Professor Tudish
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 81.1, Creative Writing-Poetry, at the 2A hour, with Professor Mathis
Continued work in the writing of poetry, focusing on the development of craft, image, and voice, as well as the process of revision. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of poems by contemporary writers.
English 82.1, Creative Writing-Fiction, at the 3B hour with Professor O'Malley
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.
