English

 

Professors:  Bleeth, Boyd, Gezari, Gordon, Rivkin; Associate Professors:  Greven, Ray; Assistant Professors:  Ammirati, Baker, Hay, Wilder; Visiting Assistant Professors:  Ellsworth, Javadizadeh, Reder, Rossi-Reder, Shoemaker; Professor Hartman, chair

 

The Major in English

 

The intention of the department is to provide a range of coverage as well as depth of interpretation through courses emphasizing periods, genres, major authors, and a variety of approaches to literature and language.

                The major consists of 120, 220, and at least eight other courses in the English department.  These eight courses must include at least five at the 300 and 400 level, one in each of the following areas:

 

·         Medieval or Renaissance literature:  303, 323, 324, 326, 330, 331, 333, 334, 493F, 494F, 493W, 494W, 493Y, 494Y;

 

·         Renaissance, eighteenth-century, or Romantic literature:  303, 309, 312, 318, 323, 324, 326, 327, 330, 331, 336, 345, 363, 364, 493F, 494F, 493V, 494V, 493Y, 494Y;

 

·         American literature or culture:  301, 302, 305, 306, 307, 308, 319, 336, 337, 341, 343, 344, 347, 354, 361, 493A, 494A, 493B, 494B, 493G, 494G, 493H, 494H, 493V, 494V;

 

·         Subaltern literature:  302, 316, 319, 325, 332, 337, 339, 347, 354, 357, 358, 360, 361, 493H, 494H, 493K, 494K;

 

·         Literature from 1800-present:  302, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 314, 315, 319, 320, 325, 328, 332, 335, 337, 339, 341, 344, 345, 346, 347, 354, 357, 358, 360, 361, 362, 364, 493A, 494A, 493B, 494B, 493E, 494E, 493G, 494G, 493H, 494H, 493I, 494I, 493K, 494K, 493P, 494P, 493Q, 494Q, 493T, 494T, 493U, 494U, 493V, 494V, 493Z, 494Z.

 

Though some courses satisfy more than one area requirement, each area requirement must be met with a different course.  All English majors are required to enroll in a senior seminar (493 or 494) unless they are writing a critical Honors Thesis.  Apart from 120, only one English course at the 100 level may be counted towards the minimum of ten.

                Only two courses in writing (217, 221, 240, 300, 321, 322, 340, 440) may be counted toward the minimum of ten courses in the major, although all writing courses are counted in determining the maximum of 16 allowed in a given department.

            Only two courses taken outside the college may be counted towards the major.

 

Concentration in Creative Writing

 

Students are expected to concentrate in either fiction or poetry writing.

                For the concentration in fiction writing, students must complete the ten courses for the major, including 217 and either 321 or 322.  Students elect two additional courses in fiction writing:  221, 291, 292, 321, 322, 391, 392, 491, 492, or 497-498.  A course in poetry writing may be substituted for a course in fiction writing.

                For the concentration in poetry writing, students must complete the ten courses for the major, including 240 and 340.  Students elect two additional courses in poetry writing:  440, 291, 292, 391, 392, 491, 492, or 497-498.  A course in fiction writing may be substituted for a course in poetry writing.

 

Advisers:  B. Boyd, C. Hartman

 

The Minor in English

 

The minor consists of Course 120; Course 220; and three courses at the intermediate or advanced levels, two of them at the 300- or 400 level, including one English department course in literature before 1830.  One course in writing at the intermediate level or above may be counted toward the minor.

 

Courses

 

ENGLISH  103  DISSENTING VOICES IN AMERICAN FICTION  A study of major American novels from the late nineteenth and twentieth century that dissent from dominant cultural perspectives and values.  Attention given to issues of gender, race, class, and ethnicity in an exploration of how identity is shaped by and resistant to cultural norms of different eras.  Authors include James, Mark Twain, Sinclair, Faulkner, Petry, Silko, and Morrison.

                Open to freshmen and sophomores.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  104  ALIEN BEINGS, ALIEN WORLDS  Fantasy and science fiction as diametrically opposed genres of popular literature that arise at the same time and in the same place, Britain during the 1880s and 90s.  Fantasy writers range from Dunsany to Shinn; science fiction writers, from Wells to Card.

                Open to freshmen and to others with permission of the instructor.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  P. Ray

 

ENGLISH  114  FROM SELMA TO SAIGON:  A LOOK AT THE '60s  An examination of some of the major political and social movements of the 1960s and their effects on the present.

                Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  T. Ammirati

 

ENGLISH  118  NARRATIVES OF BLACK TRAVEL  Many spaces have been designed to restrict the movement and integration of racially-marked bodies.  This course will examine the narratives of people of African descent that reveal identity to be contingent upon space and place.  We will look at the literature, film, and art of black people "on the move."

                Open to freshmen and sophomores.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  120  SEMINAR IN LITERATURE  An introduction to how literature develops our ethical, psychological, and political imaginations.  Discussions focus on fundamental questions about literature, including how texts have voice, tell stories, and address audiences; how formal elements like syntax, diction, and figurative language shape meaning; and how historical and cultural contexts affect textual production and reception.  Although specific readings will vary from section to section, students in all sections will read poetry, prose fiction, and some literary criticism.  All sections will emphasize close reading and pay close attention to student writing.

                Open to freshmen and sophomores, unless otherwise stated in the course schedule.  Enrollment limited to 16 students in each section.  Offered both semesters.  Each course satisfies General Education Area 4.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  120B  CONNECTIONS:  SEEKING COMMON PATTERNS IN POETRY AND FICTION  A search for intersections of sound and sense in English, American, and Irish poetry and fiction ranging across four hundred years.  Poets to be considered include Donne, Plath, Keats, Yeats, and Corso, among others.  The novels studied will be Shelley's Frankenstein, Dickens' Great Expectations, and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  120C  THE BODY AS METAPHOR  A study of the ways in which poetry and prose have conceptualized and constructed the body, which has symbolized Western selfhood in terms ranging from patriarchal power to misogyny to homophobia to racial identity to simple human vulnerability.  Treating the body as both form and content, we will integrate both aesthetic concerns and critical theory as we study literature and develop our own idiosyncratic critical voices.  Literary texts include Genesis (King James version); Ovid, Metamorphoses; Shakespeare, Richard III; Milton, Paradise Lost; Shelley, Frankenstein; Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Dickinson, Selected Poems.  D. Greven

 

ENGLISH  120E  THE EXPERIENCE OF LITERATURE  This seminar examines the relations between the experiences writers choose for subjects and our experiences as readers.  How do life experiences become artworks?  How do we clearly describe these texts and craft effective arguments about them?  Readings include British and American short fiction, poetry, novels, and selected critical essays.  M. Ellsworth; K. Bleeth

 

ENGLISH  120G  READING, WRITING, AND IDENTITY  We will explore issues of identity, including self-expression, race, gender, and power, in a selection of poems spanning several hundred years and in contemporary novels by Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Sandra Cisneros.  M. Reder

 

ENGLISH  120I  Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Company  A historical survey of English literature's most enduring writings up to the early nineteenth century, ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Other writers to be considered include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Spenser, Milton, and Pope.  Students may not receive credit for both this course and the Freshman Seminar “Golden Oldies.”  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  120K  WICKED THOUGHTS  Literature has enabled writers and readers to explore taboo thoughts and behaviors which often reflect upon social mores.  Artists have used these explorations to interrogate repressive or hypocritical ethics.  This class will study poems, novels, and films, asking how such works reflect upon the author, the reader, and society.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  120L  LITERATURE AS TESTIMONY  In bearing witness to historical events such as slavery, the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, and the civil rights movement, writers have turned to varied genres, including poetry, fiction, memoir, and graphic narratives.  This course addresses the transformation of traumatic memories into art by analyzing the politics and poetics of literary testimony.  L. Harrison-Kahan

 

ENGLISH  120M  REMEMBERING LITERATURE  This course examines the vexed relationship between writing and thought through the literary memories (personal or cultural) of writers such as Shakespeare, Virgil, Keats, Isabel Allende, and Art Spiegelman.  Focus will be on student writing and identifying what needs to be explained in a literary text.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  120N  IMAGINING THE NATION  Nationhood is one of the most resilient of political constructs, albeit riddled with contradictions and fraught with anxieties.  What happens to the idea of nationhood once it enters the realm of the literary and imaginative?  Close analysis of drama, poetry (including anthems, street ballads, and rock music), and contemporary film.  Students may not receive credit for both this course and the Freshman Seminar “Writing the Nation.”  Staff

 

ENGLISH  120P  THE ART OF CLOSE READING  An introduction to the practice of criticism as rooted in the art of close reading.  Emphasis on lyric poetry (problems of voice, genre, conception, and execution) and novels by Hardy and Pynchon.  Assignments include regular writing, critical essays, and exercises in memorizing and composing imitative poems in a given genre.  J. Isenhart

 

English  120q  What is Literature?  What is poetry?  What is a novel?  How does the form – as opposed to the content – of what we say matter?  This course poses these fundamental questions through paying close attention to particular texts in a wide range of forms and to our negotiation of them as readers.  Students may not receive credit for both this course and the Freshman Seminar “Why Literature.”  S. Hay

 

English  120R  Inventing Childhood  A study of the depiction of childhood in works written both for and about children.  How does literature imagine the child as an aesthetic, historical, and cultural construct?  Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Joyce, Sexton, and Donoghue.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  120S  IMAGINARY GARDENS, REAL TOADS:  THE WORK AND PLAY OF THE LITERARY IMAGINATION  An introduction to the pleasures and challenges of literary language through a consideration of the methods and motivations of a broad range of poets and novelists.  Emphasis on formal analysis, the role of the reader in the creation of meaning, and the writing of criticism as an act of self-expression.  Students may not receive credit for both this course and the Freshman Seminar “Literature and Language in a State of Crisis.”  J. Isenhart

 

ENGLISH 120T  THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION  This course raises questions about how and why we read, interpret, and criticize literature.  Our time will be evenly divided between poetry and the novel, with emphasis on poetic and narrative technique and on how formal choices express changing ideas of individuality, gender, sexuality, class, and much else.  J. Gezari

 

English  120U  Making Nothing Happen  "Poetry," W.H. Auden suggested, "makes nothing happen."  In the first half of this course, we will test that idea against a wide swath of British and American poems, ranging from the 16th century to the present.  In the course's second half, we will turn to two novels -- Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Don DeLillo's White Noise -- and consider what happens when fictive plots and characters enter our non-fictional world.  K. Javadizadeh

 

ENGLISH  120V  BOHEMIANS AND EXILES  Why does art often occupy an outsider position?  This seminar considers authors who wrote from the fringe and works that thematize this position.  As we pursue outsider art through poems and fiction by authors including Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, Joyce, Stein, Bishop, and Hemon, we will also work on our own craft:  sharpening skills of interpretation and writing.  E. Setina

 

ENGLISH  207  INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE:  THE 19TH CENTURY  A survey of 19th century American literature, considering such issues as the rise of professionalization of authorship in America, abolition and race, women’s rights, self-reliance, and the transition from romance to realism.  Authors may include Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Dickinson, and James.  This is the same course as American Studies 207.

Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  D. Greven

 

ENGLISH  208  INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE:  THE 20TH CENTURY AND THE PRESENT  A survey of American literature from modernism to postmodernism.  Particular attention to revolts against tradition, challenges to stable concepts of literary value, and intersections with the other arts.  Authors may include Hurston, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Eliot, Stevens, Bishop, Morrison, and DeLillo.  This is the same course as American Studies 208.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  S. Shoemaker

 

ENGLISH  209  SHAKESPEARE In the 1590s  Disturbing elements (such as misogyny, racism, and violence) in Shakespeare’s plays are often explained away.  His macabre and beautiful plays of this decade, however, resist such treatment.  The course confronts these issues in such plays as Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  210  SHAKESPEARE After 1600  Part owner of a successful theater company and proud owner of a new coat of arms, Shakespeare begins the century with money and Hamlet.  In this play and others (Twelfth Night, Othello, The Tempest), we will examine Shakespeare’s self-conscious skill and his treatment of identity, ethnicity, violence, and sex.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  212  PASSING IN LITERATURE AND FILM  How is identity categorized, performed, concealed, and exposed in literature and film?  A study of various instances of passing–black as white, gay as straight, Jew as gentile, woman as man–in a range of texts and contexts.  Readings may include The Scarlet Letter, House Behind the Cedars, and Passing; films may include Philadelphia, Boys Don't Cry, and The Crying Game.  This course is taught in the SATA Rome program only.

                Prerequisite:  Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  J. Rivkin

 

ENGLISH  213  INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON LITERATURE

 

ENGLISH  213A  MUSIC AND POETRY  An investigation of the relations of poetry with music.  Special attention to analogies between postwar American poetry and jazz, the integration of words with music in songs, poetic and musical ideas of rhythm, and the problem of establishing an interdisciplinary critical discourse.  Materials may include works by Antin, Berryman, Cage, Coleman, Creeley, Dylan, Harper, Mac Low, Parker, Waits, and Zukofsky.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  C. Hartman

 

ENGLISH  213B  BOB DYLAN  This course explores Dylan's work as a verbal artist from Bob Dylan (1962) through Modern Times (2006), with attention to musical accompaniment and its interaction with lyrics; cultural and artistic background; revisions and covers; transcription, performance, and the reception and distribution of song.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  J. Gezari and C. Hartman

 

ENGLISH  214  SPECIAL GENRE TOPICS

 

ENGLISH  214B  FROM TREASURE ISLAND TO HOGWARTS:  AMERICAN AND BRITISH FANTASY 1883-1997  A study of the development of fantasy in Britain and America from Robert Louis Stevenson to J. K. Rowling.  Emphasis on the sub-genres of fantasy such as Christian fantasy (Lewis, Tolkien) and dark fantasy (Bradbury).

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  A statement of interest must be submitted to the instructor two weeks prior to pre-registration and will constitute the basis for selection of 40 students.  Admission by permission of the instructor.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  P. Ray

 

ENGLISH  216  WOMEN AND LITERATURE  These courses focus on concerns central to feminist criticism:  the role of women as writers, readers, and literary characters; the relations between gender and genre; feminist revisions of the literary canon.

 

ENGLISH  216B  CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS, 1970-PRESENT  Works by contemporary women writers with an emphasis on fiction.  The use of a woman's literary tradition; connections between gender and genre; experimentation with language and form; the impact of ethnicity, race, and class; and feminist revisions of traditional images of gender.  Readings may include works by Morrison, Kingston, Atwood, Kincaid, Munro, Robinson, and Rich.  Secondary readings in feminist criticism and theory.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  J. Gezari, J. Rivkin, A. Rossi-Reder

 

ENGLISH  217  WRITING THE SHORT STORY  Students will study and write short fiction.

                Prerequisite:  Writing samples must be submitted to the instructor one week prior to preregistration and will constitute the basis for selection of 12 students.  Admission by permission of the instructor.  Enrollment limited to 12 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 5.  B. Boyd

 

ENGLISH  219  INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN STUDIES  This is the same course as American Studies 201A.  Refer to the American Studies listing for a course description.

 

ENGLISH  220  THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LITERARY STUDY  An introduction to practical and theoretical questions about the discipline of English and the study of literatures in English.  What is distinctive about English as a discipline and how does it intersect with other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields?  While continuing to refine the techniques of close reading developed in 120, we will consider how some theories of language, text, value, narrative, author, audience, history, culture, psyche, identity, and politics may shape literary study.

                Prerequisite:  Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Offered both semesters.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  221  NARRATIVE NON-FICTION  Intensive writing course emphasizing use of narrative techniques in nonfiction writing.  Relationship of fiction and nonfiction, integration of storytelling with essay-writing and reporting.  Focus on the development of individual style.  Readings may include Didion, Mailer, Thompson, and James Baldwin.

                Admission by permission of instructor.  Enrollment limited to 15 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 5.  B. Boyd

 

ENGLISH  222  RECENT ENGLISH FICTION AND CULTURE:  1980-1999  How are contemporary English authors defining their cultural identity after the collapse of Empire and the end of "British" domination?  What does it mean to be "English" at the end of the 20th century?  In addition to readings and films from contemporary English writers (Angela Carter, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson), the works will be put in the context of contemporary English culture using art, music, essays, and critical readings.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  M. Reder

 

ENGLISH  223  INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE  This course focuses on major movements in African-American literary history, from the antebellum era to the present.  Students will be introduced to the practice of literary analysis through a study of early and recent criticism.  Discussions will focus on the tricky question of how to identify a uniquely African-American text.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  226  SPECIAL TOPICS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE  An exploration of concerns central to African-American literature through focus on a single genre.  The course examines the relationships between texts and culture, literary form and racial identity, and African-American texts to the literary canon. 

This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  227  THE FILMS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK  An exploration of the British and American career of Alfred Hitchcock, focusing on themes such as sexuality, suspense, violence, and obsession.  Films include The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Suspicion, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and Frenzy.  This is the same course as Film Studies 227.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  D. Greven

 

English  228  ADVANCED ESSAY WRITING  An intensive course in exposition designed to help the competent writer become an accomplished one.  Emphasis on style and the development of the writer’s characteristic voice.

                Admission by permission of the instructor.  Samples of student writing must be submitted prior to registration.  Enrollment limited to 16 students.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  231  MODERN LITERATURE  Readings in post-war writers such as Beckett, Nabokov, Mailer, Bellow, Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Heller, Albee, and Fowles, with particular attention to their criticism of Western culture and to their use of various modes of antirealism.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  232  HOLLYWOOD AFTER THE SIXTIES  An examination of the work of innovative 1970s directors—Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Cohen, Romero, Carpenter, Cimino—through a series of critical lenses.  Given that New Hollywood film emerges from the revolutionary cultural shifts produced collectively by the civil rights movement, feminism, and Stonewall (gay rights), critical apparati such as race theory, feminism, and queer theory provide salient insights into the complex negotiations of race, gender, and sexuality in the films of this era and movement.  Possible films include The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Hi, Mom!, Black Caesar, Dawn of the Dead, and The Deer Hunter.  Readings include critical essays by Robin Wood, Amy Taubin, Laura Mulvey, Tony Williams, and Carol J. Glover.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  D. Greven

 

English  237  LITERATURE AND EMPIRE  An analysis of texts from three broad categories:  imperial narratives, narratives of decolonization, and postcolonial narratives.  The class will focus on a historical understanding of the development of postcolonial forms of literature.  Readings from authors such as Kipling, Haggard, Conrad, Cesaire, Achebe, Devi, Friel, Roy, and Walcott.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Formerly English 236; cannot receive credit for both courses.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  S. Hay

 

ENGLISH  238  A THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION TO POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE:  GENDER, RACE, EMPIRE  An analysis of literature and film.  The class will focus on an understanding of the concepts developed in postcolonial theory as they pertain to textual analysis.  Readings from African, Caribbean, Indian, Pacific, Asian, South American, and Irish authors.  This is the same course as Gender and Women’s Studies 238.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  Formerly English 236; cannot receive credit for both courses.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  S. Hay

 

ENGLISH  239  POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES IN IRISH LITERATURE  While some insist on examining Ireland's status with respect to England in postcolonial terms, others question the validity of such an approach.  We will consider the applicability of postcolonial approaches to the “anomalous” case of Ireland.  Readings from authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Brian Friel.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  240  READING AND WRITING POEMS  Introduction to the writing of poetry through reading, analysis, imitation, and composition.

Enrollment limited to 18 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 5.  C. Hartman

 

ENGLISH  241  CONTEMPORARY FICTION WITHOUT BORDERS  How does literature in the U.S. and outside it confront the animating social and political anxieties of our time?  We will read the work of celebrated living writers such as Philip Roth, Jonathan Lethem, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Akhil Sharma, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Amitav Ghosh, Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk, and Zadie Smith.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  242  LITERATURE AND RACE CRITICISM  This course examines the particular role that race plays in constructing literary subjects.  Emphasis is placed upon examining the techniques of narrative in representing race, how racial identification shapes character interaction and plot, and the way that race inflects other identifications (gender, sexuality, nationality, class).

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  243  RACE AND AMERICAN CINEMA  Beginning with the silent film era and ending with contemporary cinema, we will investigate the cinematic representation of diverse racial identities.  Attention to whiteness as an ideal, historically taboo topics such as miscegenation, and gender and sexuality in relation to racial and ethnic stereotypes.  This is the same course as Film Studies 243.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  L. Harrison-Kahan

 

ENGLISH  244  RACE AND THE CITY  The Lower East Side.  Harlem.  Chinatown.  El Barrio.  These locations are associated with the racial and ethnic minorities who made them home.  In this course, we will read literature by Jewish American, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic writers in order to examine the relationship between race and urban space.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  L. Harrison-Kahan

 

ENGLISH  249  INDIAN FICTION IN ENGLISH  This course explores a wide range of reading contexts for understanding recent Indian fiction:  the Western novel, postcolonial history and politics, Indian philosophical and narrative traditions, modernism, postmodernism, and fiction in other Indian vernaculars.  Authors studied include Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Akhil Sharma, and Jhumpa Lahiri.  This course is taught in the SATA India program only.

Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  250, 251A  SURVEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURES  Major authors in historical, cultural, and critical context.  Course 250:  Medieval to 18th Century British Literature.  Course 251A:  Late 18th Century to Modern British Literature.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 40 students.  This course satisfies General Education Area 4.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  300  SEMINAR IN THE TEACHING OF WRITING  This course will explore theories of writing, current research on writing as a process, and the theory and ethics of peer tutoring and evaluation.  Extensive reading of texts on the composition process and rhetorical theory.  The course is specifically designed to provide training for Writing Center tutors, but will be useful to any student interested in exploring the teaching of writing.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with permission of the instructor.  Students must submit two writing samples for evaluation.  This course does not count toward the English minor.  Enrollment limited to 17 students.  S. Shoemaker

 

ENGLISH  301  MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS

 

ENGLISH  301C  AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS  A study of major works by four or five American women writers.  Authors may include Bradstreet, Dickinson, Wharton, Cather, Petry, Bishop, O'Connor, Morrison, and Danticat.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Rivkin, D. Greven

 

ENGLISH  302  LITERATURE OF THE JAZZ AGE  An examination of various forms of American modernism in the post-World War I period, with an emphasis on writers of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance.  Authors may include Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, Stein, Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Faulkner, and Hurston.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Harrison-Kahan

 

ENGLISH  303  History and Text in Renaissance Drama  A historicist, materialist perspective on Renaissance drama.  Readings in these courses include the plays by Shakespeare and others, historical documents on Early English Books Online, and literary criticism and theory.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  303A  Pain and Violence in Renaissance Drama  Violence and physical pain receive special emphasis on the Renaissance stage.  Readings may include Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Titus Andronicus, Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and contemporary accounts of theatrical performance.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  303B  Jews and Moors in Renaissance Drama  Vexed issues raised by the treatment of ethnicity and “otherness” on the English Renaissance stage often disturb modern audiences.  We will engage our own moral disapproval of The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, The Masque of Blackness, and Othello in the context of contemporary theories of race.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  304  LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICAL PRACTICE  An introduction to contemporary literary theory with an emphasis on how theory translates into critical practice.  The course covers the following:  formalism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, feminism, gender studies/queer theory, and ethnic and postcolonial theory.  It also draws on theoretical texts to interpret and re-interpret King Lear, The Aspern Papers, selected poems by Elizabeth Bishop, and The Bluest Eye.  This is the same course as Gender and Women’s Studies 304.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Rivkin

 

ENGLISH  305  MODERN POETRY  The development of a modern idiom in poetry.  A study of poets including Yeats, Eliot, Pound, W.C. Williams, Auden, and Wallace Stevens.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  306  CONTEMPORARY POETRY  A close study of poetry written between 1940 and the present.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  306A  POETRY OF THE POST-MODERN ERA  A chronological review of the major English-language poets since World War II.  Poets studied will include Thomas, Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Heany, Rich, Bishop, and Ashbery.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  306B  RECENT AMERICAN POETS  An exploration of the careers of five or six of our contemporaries and near-contemporaries.  This may begin with work like that of Roethke (d. 1963), Bishop (d. 1979), Hayden (d. 1983), or Matthews (d. 1997), but will also include poets still active among us, such as Kinnell, Glück, Levine, Dove, Ashbery, Doty, etc.  C. Hartman

 

English  307  Literature and Film of the 1930s  An examination of prose, poetry, and film from a period marked by dramatic modernization, severe economic depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe.  Authors include Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, West, Chandler, Larsen, Hurston, Williams, and Rukeyser.  Films include King Kong, Modern Times, Scarface, White Zombie, Triumph of the Will, and The Big Sleep.

                Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors; and to freshmen who have taken Course 120.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  S. Shoemaker

 

ENGLISH  308  EMILY DICKINSON  An intensive examination of the full range of Emily Dickinson’s poetic achievement, with some attention to her letters.  Topics include lyric voice and formal constraint; solitude and the imperial self; exultation and despair; poetry and belief; love and death.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Isenhart

 

ENGLISH  312  MILTON  Ambitious poet, revolutionary propagandist, free-press advocate, and would-be divorcé, Milton spent his later years blind and crying out to be “milked” by his secretaries of his great poem, Paradise Lost.  Readings will include Comus, Lycidas, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, excerpts from Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  314  THE NOVEL AND GLOBALIZATION  A course exploring how some contemporary novels try to cognitively map the increasingly global world, in ways that seemed to become impossible after the nineteenth century.  Authors we will read include Zadie Smith, China Miéville, William Gibson, Robert Newman, and Alan Moore.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  S. Hay

 

ENGLISH  315  HENRY JAMES IN ITALY  A study of Henry James's fiction and travel-writing set in Italy, with attention to what Italy means to a late 19th century American writer.  Readings include Roderick Hudson, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Aspern Papers, The Wings of the Dove, and Italian Hours.  This course is taught in the SATA Rome program only.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Rivkin

 

ENGLISH  316  CONSTRUCTING THE HUMAN  This course will broach the philosophical question:  What distinguishes the condition known as being human?  We will approach this question through a study of texts that contemplate mortality and consciousness.  We will also consider the ethics of humanity through readings investigating torture and terrorism.  Authors include Derrida, Scarry, and Fanon.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  317  NATURE IN HEAVEN AND HELL:  REPRESENTATION OF NATURE IN UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN WRITINGS  This is the same course as Environmental Studies 317.  Refer to the Environmental Studies listing for a course description.

 

ENGLISH  318  EARLY ROMANTIC LITERATURE  This course will conceptualize British Romanticism and explore its origins by examining the period from 1785 until 1815.  We will read major authors, such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen, and will take up significant political issues, such as the French Revolution, slavery, and women’s rights, as they appear in writings by Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Equiano.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  319  TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE  This course considers key texts from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, paying particular attention to how 20th-century writers have worked within and revitalized literary forms and personal and historical narratives.  Authors include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, and August Wilson.

                Prerequisite:  Open to juniors and seniors, and to sophomores who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  E. Setina

 

ENGLISH  320  SPECIAL TOPICS IN 20th CENTURY FICTION

 

ENGLISH  320A  JAMES JOYCE  A study of the works of James Joyce with special emphasis on Ulysses.

Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Offered alternately with Course 320B.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  320B  MODERNISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS  A comparison of representative works of 20th-century "modernist" fiction with more traditional works from the same period.  Authors to be studied may include Joyce, Ford, Woolf, Wodehouse, Waugh, and Nabokov.

Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Offered alternately with Course 320A.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  321, 322  SEMINAR IN FICTION  The study and writing of fiction.  Emphasis will be on the short story, although qualified students may write portions of novels.

                Prerequisite:  Course 217 and permission of the instructor.  Enrollment limited to 12 students.  B. Boyd

 

ENGLISH  323  ELIZABETHAN POETRY  An examination of Tudor and Elizabethan non-dramatic poetry in its social, political and aesthetic contexts.  Poetry, patronage and power; images of love; expressions of the pastoral vision; music and poetry; poetry as self-fashioning.  Authors include Wyatt, Elizabeth I, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Offered alternately with Course 334.  K. Bleeth

 

ENGLISH  324  DONNE, Herbert, Marvell  These poets played vastly different roles in public (Donne and Herbert as clergymen, Marvell as an MP) than in their private verse, and two of them published none of it during their lifetimes.  We will examine this privacy in the context of religious and political upheavals of seventeenth-century England.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Wilder

 

English  326  THe Faerie Queene  In Spenser’s epic romance we encounter, among other things, the female knight Britomart, the Blatant Beast, and a castle that is also a human body.  We wander with Spenser toward a concept of courtliness and virtue contrasting painfully with his role as a repressive colonial governor in Ireland.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Wilder

 

English  327  ENGLISH NOVEL I:  THE RISE OF THE NOVEL  A survey of the British novel from the early 18th century to the mid-19th century.  Attention to how the novel registers the problems raised by urban and print culture, increasing social instability, and the changing status of women.  Authors may include Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Austen, Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  328  ENGLISH NOVEL II  A survey of the British novel from the middle of the 19th century to the late 20th century.  The contexts provided by empire and its aftermath, the development of modern institutional structures, and relations between the sexes.  Authors may include Dickens, Collins, George Eliot, James, Conrad, Woolf, Forster, Beckett, and Rushdie.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Gezari

 

ENglish  331  shakespeare in performance  Through live performances of Shakespeare’s plays and engaging in the discipline of performance studies, we will discuss the overlap between ritual, performance, and various forms of adaptation (operatic, postcolonial, parodic).  Plays will be selected from those being performed in the New London area.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Wilder

 

ENGLISH  332  EXQUISITE CORPSES  A study of how dead bodies affect narrative.  Of particular concern is how race and gender influence the occurrence and reading of death.  The course questions the "expendability" of certain groups and systemic death as narrative premise.  Films and books include Sunset Boulevard, Suddenly Last Summer, Jazz, and In Cold Blood.  This is the same course as Gender and Women's Studies 332.

Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  333  MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE:  CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES  An examination of Chaucer's major concerns as a writer, his language and his place in the medieval period.  Readings will include:  about two-thirds of The Canterbury Tales; selected readings in sources and analogues.  Special attention to contemporary critical approaches to the Tales.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  K. Bleeth

 

ENGLISH  334  MEDIEVAL EPIC AND ROMANCE  A study of two medieval narrative modes in their cultural settings.  Special attention to the development of the hero, the Arthurian tradition, representations of the Other, and courtly love.  Works to be read include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, the lais of Marie de France, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, Mandeville's Travels, and Malory's Morte D'Arthur.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Offered alternately with Course 323.  K. Bleeth

 

ENGLISH  335  TWICE-TOLD TALES  This course pairs classic English novels with contemporary novels or films that re-write them.  Attention to how contemporary works interrogate, appropriate, and revise their precursor texts.  Pairings have included Robinson Crusoe and Foe, Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  336  THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVERY DEBATE:  ABOLITIONIST LITERATURE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY  Throughout this period, questions of human rights were articulated through arguments in favor of slavery and campaigns against it.  This course examines the growth of anti-slavery sentiment in British and American literature.  Authors include Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, Olaudah Equinao, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, and Robert Southey.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  337  THE LITERATURE OF PASSING  Explorations of various forms of "passing"--black as white, Jew as gentile, woman as man, gay as straight--in literature and film.  Issues include the notion of a visible or marked "identity," motives for passing, comparisons between different forms of passing, and meanings of "coming out."  Literary works to be studied may include Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Chestnutt's The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, Larsen's Passing, Cather's My Antonia, Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes, and Gates's "White Like Me."  Films may include The Crying Game, Paris Is Burning, and Europa, Europa.  Secondary readings in feminist, gay and lesbian/queer, and critical race theory.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Rivkin

 

ENGLISH  339  SIGNIFICANT OTHERS:  INDIA AND ENGLAND  This course juxtaposes colonial and postcolonial novels with special attention to the formation of both English and Indian national identities.  Works studied include Confessions of a Thug, The Moonstone, Kim, A Passage to India, Satanic Verses, The Enigma of Arrival, The Glass Palace, and Sacred Games.  This course is taught in the SATA India program only.

                Open to juniors and seniors.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  340  WRITING OF POETRY:  INTERMEDIATE  Workshop in the writing of poetry through weekly reading and writing assignments.  Emphasis on class discussion of class poems.

                Prerequisite:  Course 240 or permission of the instructor.  Enrollment limited to 12 students.  C. Hartman

 

ENGLISH  341  AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM  A study of American literary realism as it manifested itself in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to both modern realities such as immigration, urbanization and industrialization, and to the proposition that the environment regulates human behavior.  Authors may include Howells, Chopin, Dreiser, Chestnutt, James, Wharton, Sinclair, and Johnson, among others.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  J. Rivkin

 

ENGLISH  343  GOTHIC ROMANTICISM:  ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE  A study of antebellum American literary output and cultural concerns that focuses on the “gothic” nature of American romanticism.  This course argues that the chief source of the gothic unease that suffuses American romanticism was a terror over race and the Other and an anxious awareness of social injustice.  Readings will include works from major authors such as Crevecouer, Brown, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 30 students.  D. Greven

 

ENGLISH  344  EMPIRES OF SELFHOOD  An analysis of the gender and racial politics of individualism in nineteenth-century America.  Issues considered include Jacksonian manhood, the woman author, the emergence of the slave narrative, and the valences between Northern and Southern theories of selfhood.  Authors studied will include Franklin, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Douglass, Whitman, and Alcott.  This is the same course as American Studies 344.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  D. Greven

 

ENGLISH  345  ROMANTIC POETRY  Poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and their contemporaries.  Relevant prose by these authors and others.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  346  STUDIES IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE  Selected topics, organized by genre or social, intellectual, and cultural issues in the period.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.

 

ENGLISH  346B  THE BODY EXPOSED:  THE PHYSICAL ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE AND DESIRE IN 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE  How certain representative authors see themselves and their characters in terms of physical phenomena operating according to the medical findings of their time.  Possible authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Wilde, William James, and Henry James.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  346C  FROM SCIENCE TO SENSATION  An inquiry into the congruities of literature and science in the second half of the 19th century.  Topics include evolution, the struggle for survival, sexual selection, madness, and managing a potentially chaotic and threatening femininity.  Reading may include Darwin’s The Origin of Species; novels by Collins, George Eliot, and George du Maurier; poetry by Barrett Browning, Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Tennyson.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  347  SAME-SEX LOVE AND THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE  Was same-sex friendship in the nineteenth century also erotic love?  Engaging with current scholarship in gender studies, this course includes readings from Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Jewett, and Wharton.  This is the same course as American Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies 347.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  D. Greven

 

ENGLISH  354  LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE  This course examines twentieth-century narratives of the immigrant experience.  Topics include assimilation and acculturation, bilingualism, education, the urban environment, and trans-nationalism.  Readings will consist of memoirs and fiction by Jewish American, Asian American, Caribbean American, and Latino/a writers as well as secondary critical essays.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  L. Harrison-Kahan

 

ENGLISH  358  POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES AND THEORY

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Formerly English 357; cannot receive credit for both courses.  S. Hay

 

ENGLISH  358A  CARIBBEAN LITERATURE  The study of the key texts of Caribbean literature in English and literary theory, and an analysis of the historical and theoretical contexts for the emergence of this literature and film through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

ENGLISH  358B  WEST AFRICAN LITERATURE AND FILM  The study of the key texts of West African literature in English and West African film, and an analysis of the historical and theoretical contexts for the emergence of this literature and film through the twentieth century.

 

english  360  Race and Documentary film  This course looks at how documentary films representing race function as anthropological, imperialist, propagandist, and popular texts.  Attention will be paid to questions of commodification and (self-)representation and to the responsibilities of filmmakers and spectators of film.  Films may include Chronicle of a Summer, Through Navajo Eyes, and When the Levees Broke.  This is the same course as Film Studies 360.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  361  AMERICA IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE  This course examines how the idea of “America” is invoked in literature authored by and about African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.  Be it a failed utopia or a work-in-progress, “America” haunts these texts and directs their protagonists toward liberation, self-realization, or self-destruction.  Authors include DuBois, Baldwin, P. Marshall, and Morrison.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  362  ALICE MUNRO AND THE SHORT STORY  Canadian writer Alice Munro has been called "our Chekhov" and "the best living short story writer."  A study of Alice Munro, writers who have influenced her, and writers she has influenced.  Works by Cather, Agee, Lorrie Moore, Lara Vapynar, and much of Munro's fiction are included.  This is the same course as Gender and Women’s Studies 362.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  J. Rivkin

 

english  364  the curse of the albatross:  romantic transgression  Monstrosity, incest, fratricide, adultery–transgression fascinated Romantic authors.  What propels individuals to transgress against prescribed codes of behavior?  We will discuss “transgressive” texts from historical, theoretical, and formal perspectives, and will read major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and both Shelleys.

Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  Enrollment limited to 20 students.  Staff

 

ENGLISH  410  MUSLIM POSTCOLONIAL MELANCHOLIA  This is the same course as International Studies 410.  Refer to the International Studies listing under College Courses for a course description.

 

ENGLISH  493, 494  SENIOR SEMINARS

                Unless otherwise stated, open to seniors and open to juniors with the permission of the instructor.  Enrollment in each seminar limited to 16 students.

 

ENGLISH  493A, 494A  POETRY AND SOCIAL NETWORKS  Are poems fundamentally solitary or social texts?  An exploration of this question through a reading of the letters and poems of Keats, Dickinson, Crane, and Bishop.  The course considers competing theoretical definitions of poetry alongside a history of social networks ranging from the postal service to Facebook and Twitter.  K. Javadizadeh

 

ENGLISH  493B, 494B  HENRY JAMES  A study of Henry James's ghost stories, tales of writers and artists, and novels of the major phase.  Readings will include The Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, In the Cage, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove.  J. Rivkin

 

ENGLISH  493E, 494E  THE BRONTËS  A study of Charlotte Brontë’s novels and Emily Jane Brontë’s novel and poems, with particular attention to their eccentric relation to the dominant literary tradition and the social context within which mid-19th-century women writers worked.  This is the same course as Gender and Women's Studies 416.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  493F, 494F  THEMES AND PROBLEMS IN SHAKESPEARE  A few plays which illustrate specific themes, problems or critical issues in the Shakespearean text.  Course content may change from time to time.  A. Bradford

 

ENGLISH  493H, 494H  TONI MORRISON  A close reading of work by one of America's greatest writers.  Novels (Beloved, Paradise, Song of Solomon), selections of Morrison's critical writing (e.g., Playing in the Dark:  Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and other texts (e.g., her libretto for the opera Margaret Garner) are included.  This is the same course as Gender and Women's Studies 418.

                Open to juniors and seniors, and to others who have taken Course 220.  C. Baker

 

ENGLISH  493I, 494I  FINNEGANS WAKE  A study of James Joyce’s most ambitious and demanding work.  Classes will concentrate on close readings of selected passages.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  493K, 494K  LITERATURE OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD  A study of narratives of the Atlantic, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.  Conceptualizing the Atlantic world means thinking about the ways that human bodies, commodities, cultures, and ideas connect Europe, Africa and the Americas through social processes like the rise of the novel, industrial capitalism, and the modern slave trade.  How does this Atlantic world get represented, in literature?  What kinds of histories are shared by the peoples of the Atlantic, and what kinds of identities?  The course will read works by Defoe, Behn, Pychon, Coetzee, D’Aguiar, Walcott, Amis, and Swift; view films by Julien and Jarman; and also include a selection of theoretical and historical readings.

                Open to juniors and seniors.  S. Hay

 

ENGLISH  493P, 494P  George Eliot and Virginia Woolf  A comparative study of the works of the two women writers who dominated the Victorian and Post-Victorian periods.  Topics include gender and sexuality, the woman writer, and the art of the novel.  Some attention to essays, reviews, letters, and memoirs.

                Open to juniors and seniors.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  493Q, 494Q  NABOKOV AND RUSHDIE  A study of two great multilingual novelists writing in exile, with attention to shared elements of their ambition and vision, their experiments with language and narrative, and their ethical and aesthetic projects.  Emphasis on Nabokov’s Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet.  Some attention to their short fiction and essays.

                Open to juniors and seniors.  J. Gezari

 

ENGLISH  493U, 494U  CHARLES DICKENS  A seminar covering the full range of Dickens’s works.  Novels read will include Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend.  J. Gordon

 

ENGLISH  493V, 494V  HAWTHORNE AND POE  A comparative study of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.  Topics include the Gothic, male-male and male-female relations, sexuality and the body, the family, and the construction of race and otherness.  D. Greven

 

English  493Y, 494Y  ShakespearE’s BraIn, ShakespearE’s Body  This seminar examines the staging of the “material mind” and the body in the Renaissance theater.  Readings may include Hamlet, Macbeth, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, and Marston’s The Malcontent, as well as materialist and new-historicist criticism and early modern physiology and anatomy.  L. Wilder

 

English  493z, 494z  The Ghost Story:  Genre, theory, Politics  A close reading of a wide range of ghost stories, old and new, local and foreign, famous and not, together with critical and theoretical readings that situate the ghost story historically and politically against other more well known literary genres.

                Prerequisite:  Course 220.  S. Hay

 

ENGLISH  291, 292  INDIVIDUAL STUDY

 

ENGLISH  391, 392  INDIVIDUAL STUDY

 

ENGLISH  491, 492  INDIVIDUAL STUDY

 

ENGLISH  294  FIELD WORK  Supervised practical work in journalism or communications.  This course may be taken only by application and by permission of the department.  One credit hour, pass/not passed marking.

 

ENGLISH  497-498  HONORS STUDY  Candidates for Honors in English are required to take Course 497-498 in the senior year and expected to take Course 304 in the spring semester of the junior year.