Courses
300-level courses are classified into one of three groupings - Group A: Courses in Literature Before the Early to Mid-19th Century, Group B: Courses in Literature After the Early to Mid-19th Century and Group C: Other Advanced Courses in Literature, Language, and Writing. Check major and minor requirements for more information.
The Department of English issues a projected list of course offerings for the next two years to help students plan their schedules; however, course offerings are subject to change based on enrollment. BannerWeb is always the most accurate and up-to-date place for current students to find course offerings for the upcoming semester.
ENGL 100A-100B Interdisciplinary Writing
Unit(s): .25-.25
ENGL 103 Introduction to Expository Writing
General Education Requirement: (COM1)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This is an introduction to college-level critical reading, thinking and writing. Goals include helping writers to move beyond personal writing and opinion to the production of nuanced and well supported work for academic audiences. To that end, 103 focuses primarily on analysis and source-based writing in which students demonstrate strong organizational, grammatical, and analytical skills for textual and visual subjects. Students must complete English 103 with a grade of C (2.0) or better to meet the Communications I, Expository Writing general-education requirement (COM1).
ENGL 140 Academic Writing in English as a Second Language
Prerequisite(s): Department approval.
General Education Requirement: (COM2)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course is designed to help international students advance their proficiency in academic English while they also learn about U.S. culture. Students also gain awareness about culture shock by reading articles, watching videos, and interviewing other students. Intercultural communication, stereotypes, American values, and communication patterns are some of the issues explored through materials such as National Public Radio programs, movies, short stories, popular TV shows, and the internet.
ENGL 198 Teaching English as a Second Language through Literature and Film
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course provides students with a background in methods of teaching ESL by using literature and film. The use of short stories and novels in the ESL classroom creates the opportunity to teach idiomatic use of the English language. Literary texts also enable ESL learners to study and analyze complex sentence structures and provide an excellent source for cultural information. The course also involves hands-on application of ESL theories and includes experience with ESL lesson planning, material development, and instructional technology. Students gain theoretical knowledge through articles and research. This knowledge is put to practice during tutoring practica and class presentations. Students prepare, present, and revise lesson plans based on the information they receive throughout the course. Students are also involved in active research in which they choose a topic related to their teaching.
ENGL 199 Topics in Introductory Literary Studies
Unit(s): .5-1
ENGL 203 Children's Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course offers a selective survey of literature for children and young adults. The focus may shift from semester to semester, but will always include a range of fairy tales and novels for children and young adults, as well as a selection of picture books, early readers, and/or poetry for children. The course emphasizes the literary quality rather than the pedagogical value of literature for children. During the course of the semester we will focus on finding the cultural, historical, and literary contexts for the literature of childhood, exploring the relationship between what we know and what we think we know about children and their literature, and understanding a body of literature that is widely enjoyed but rarely respected.
ENGL 204 Literature and Culture
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course is concerned with writing and reading across cultural boundaries and deals with novels, memoirs, and ethnographies that investigate cross-cultural experience from a variety of cultural sources. Its purpose, in part, is to come to an understanding of some of the ways that writers have tried to make sense of such experience and of some of the issues that confront us as readers of multicultural texts. In recent offerings readings have been drawn from Native American, Asian American, and African literature, as well as from narrative accounts of other cultures written by anthropologists, and have even included a science-fictional account of an encounter between wholly imaginary cultures. More generally, this course is intended to develop skills and techniques of literary analysis, to help students to read and interpret with some clarity a broad range of texts. It also aims to improve students' ability to write an effective analytical essay.
ENGL 205 Latino/a Literature and Film
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
In the last 25 years there has been an efflorescence of literature and film by and about immigrants to the U.S. from Latin America. Latinos and Latinas have produced a rich body of novels, short stories, poems, plays, films, and other forms of narratives about their experiences in the U.S., their culture, the process and challenges of relocating to the U.S., and the questions of identity, culture, and politics that have shaped their lives. This course explores some of the varied representations by and about Latino/as in the U.S. As a general-education course it also uses these texts to think about literary analysis and the strategies employed by writers and filmmakers to tell these stories.
ENGL 206 Selected Readings in American Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Although the specific emphasis for each section of English 206 may change, in general this course is designed to introduce students to one or more major periods, patterns, or themes in American literature. Students read selections from multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. In addition to discussions and studies of form and literary technique, the course also emphasizes how culture, history, and literature influence and shape each other. At the end of the course, students will be able to identify some of the varied characteristics of literature, apply techniques of literary analysis, use these skills in careful reading and clear writing, and demonstrate an understanding of the diverse social and historical contexts in which the texts are written.
ENGL 208 Twentieth-Century American Fiction
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course focuses on the thematic and formal developments of modern American fiction. Novels and short stories of the twentieth century catapulted American writers to the forefront of literary achievement, with figures such as Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein fashioning an entirely new kind of prose. Along with their counterparts in Britain - but often with a focus that was uniquely American - writers like these sought ways to express authentic experience authentically and to convey what was new about modern experience. This modernity was defined in a great variety of ways, including reactions to historical events such as World War I, rapid increases in urbanism and industrialization, the Great Migration of African Americans, women's suffrage and advancing professionalism, and the Depression (among others). These developments in turn prompted textual strategies that departed significantly from the straightforward realism or Victorian sentimentality of their forebears. Above all, authors of this period discovered the enormous wealth of experience and expressive capacity available to writers who focused on interior, subjective experience - the narrative of mental life that characterizes a great deal of modernist literature. Emphases in this course vary, and students may find themselves focusing on writers of a particular region, a certain literary school, or from a particular period of the twentieth century, such as post-World War II writers, the Civil Rights era and its aftermath, or postmodernism. Other writers may include Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Nathanael West, Truman Capote, Chester Himes, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Tim O'Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Bernard Malamud, or Cormac McCarthy.
ENGL 214 Literature of India
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course explores the multiple strains of the Indian novel that have emerged over the past sixty years: those "historical" novels written about the Raj and partition, those addressing the classic confrontation between India and the (usually) English Other, and those more recent works that do not defend or explain Indian-ness but instead explore notions of Indian subjectivity from within, and on, its own terms. Of simultaneous, though secondary, concern, is our consideration of questions of genre: What criteria are necessary for a work to be proclaimed "Indian Literature"? Must the work's author be Indian? How, exactly, is "Indian" defined in this context? Are novels written in English truly "Indian" novels? Do novels written about the English in India earn their place as "Indian" novels? Our discussions and analyses of these works are informed by methodologies of post-colonial theory and the Frankfurt School of critics.
ENGL 215 Reading Science Fiction
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course introduces the student to work spanning the range of science fiction produced during the past century, including the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, as well as other writers less often identified with the genre. But it is also concerned with ways of reading science fiction, through the application of formalism, psychology, myth, feminism, sociology, cultural studies, and other theories of interpretation to science-fiction short stories, films, and novels.
ENGL 216 Literature, Technology and Society
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
In general, this course looks at literary and nonliterary texts that react, in given societies and periods of history, to technological change and the social effects of technology. The course content will change from semester to semester, but a recently repeated topic has been "The Road," a survey of films and literary texts that concern themselves with cars, the experience of automotive travel, and the way writers, filmmakers, and urban-planners depict a "car culture."
ENGL 217 The Bible and Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The Bible is without a doubt the single most influential text in Western culture. Its language, stories, characters, and mythic patterns have provided the cultural grammar upon which much of our art and literature are based. Subsequent works have rewritten, borrowed, parodied, critiqued, or otherwise shown the influence of this Biblical foundation. In this course, no familiarity with the Bible is required; students read a generous sampling of biblical texts from the Old and New Testament before proceeding to measure their influence on a range of works from erotic poetry of the mystics to Renaissance epic to Romantic tragedies to the fantasy of C. S. Lewis.
ENGL 218 African Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Many students have read Chinua Achebe's classic Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart, but beyond that most people in this country are unaware of the rich, diverse body of writing that has arisen over the past six decades in Africa, a continent that has already produced four Nobel laureates in literature. This course is designed as an introductory survey and is intended, in part, to provide a more broadly based familiarity with the literature of Africa. It focuses attention both on thematic concerns characteristic of many modern African works (colonialism and revolution, uncertain cultural identity, etc.) and on special problems of expression faced by contemporary African writers (use of a second language, the interaction of African and European forms, etc.). It includes works by writers from various regions of the African continent - texts originally composed in English as well as works translated from French and from various African languages. It also examines ways in which one's own culture shapes one's reading of the products of other cultures. More generally, this course aims to extend students' powers of literary interpretation and to help them rethink literary analysis as an activity that is open to a variety of different approaches, some of which entail quite different kinds of results
ENGL 219 Introduction to Drama and Theater
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course introduces students to basic concepts of drama and theater. They read plays and theoretical essays with a view to analyzing how drama works both as a text on the page as well as a spectacle on the stage, examining all the elements that together constitute the dramatic experience. The course also focuses on significant theatrical traditions that have influenced modern drama, particularly with regard to the changing relationship between stage and audience. A fundamental question underlies all these readings and discussions: Why drama at all? What can the theater accomplish that other art forms cannot?
ENGL 220 Introduction to Film Studies
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course introduces students to the practice of film studies; the theoretical, historical, and aesthetic analysis of the cinema as an art form and as a socio-cultural phenomenon. The course begins by considering film in its earliest history, looking at the invention of the cinematic apparatus and the development of the earliest forms of film narrative as well as the audience for these spectacles. The course then considers film in other national and historical contexts: possible areas of examination include the Italian neorealist movement, the French New Wave, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage, among others. Further units include an in-depth investigation of the work of a significant director such as Alfred Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman, and an analysis of the history and development of film genres such as the Western, the screwball comedy, or film noir. Students who take the course learn to engage with film interpretively and imaginatively. These interactions encourage a more active, critical engagement with the medium and add to one's recognition of the complex ways in which film operates as a symbolic and cultural-historical system.
ENGL 221 Introduction to Poetry
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The purpose of this class is to introduce students to lyric poetry as it has been written and read in Modern English since the early 16th century. The course is arranged thematically, rather than historically, however, and is designed to allow students to explore how poems have served their readers and authors in the face of some of the basic difficulties of being human and in the course of changing historical conditions. We explore the ways in which certain aspects of the art have made it particularly well-suited to the contemplation of loss and human isolation. We also explore poems that describe or invite us to contemplate extreme states of consciousness, that invite us to return to or imagine origins, that reveal connections to the past, to other human beings, or to a God or truth that has been hidden or obscured by history or by pain. The final sessions explore the role that poems play in the construction, promulgation, and possible reform of political ideals and ideologies. We conclude with an extended examination of a single volume of poems by one author. Considerable attention is also paid to meter and other aspects of line-construction as well as to various lyric forms and genres.
ENGL 222 Short Fiction
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course is a reading workout with the emphasis on quality rather than quantity. That means using a small number of important concepts in conjunction with a close examination of examples of classic and contemporary short fiction to develop reading and
interpretive skills. Starting with the sound of words and moving to ideas of Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Poe we spend time examining the building blocks of short fiction: plot, character, setting, narrative point-of-view. By mid-semester we are ready to move beyond formalism to touch on several critical approaches: socio-political, Freudian, gender, and reader response. The objective is always for students to get to know each work well enough to be able to write a short essay that makes clear their understanding of its meaning, that explains the maximum number of its details without stretching or forcing, and that makes clear why it does or does not engage their interest. Because the stories are good and the discussion lively, this is an enjoyable course.
ENGL 223 The Modern Novel
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course provides an understanding of the concepts, techniques, and artistic goals associated with literary modernism, and it examines classic examples of modernist fiction by writers such as E.M Forster, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, as well as work by recent inheritors of modernism's legacy, such as Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, and Penelope Fitzgerald. The larger goals of the course are to give the student experience in identifying and writing about the concerns, values, and world views of novelists and the strategies by which novelists convey these elements. Students emerge from this course, in other words, with a much more detailed and sophisticated understanding both of "the modern" and of "the novel."
ENGL 224 Great Novels
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The major questions posed in this course are 1) what makes a novel "great," significantly superior to most others, and 2) how we reach such value judgments and, indeed, of what use it may or may not be to do so. The course pursues these questions by close study of some of the most celebrated works in the genre, by writers such as Austen, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, James, and Kafka. Together they offer a stunning variety in character, vision, and style. They also offer significant challenges to the reader: how to identify and evaluate the concerns, values, and world view of the author, and the literary strategies by which the author conveys those concerns and values.
ENGL 226 Love and War in Medieval Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The literature of the Middle Ages is too often regarded as inaccessible because of its distance and difference from modern works. Reading texts written long ago does involve a sophisticated set of reading strategies, yet there can also be a good deal of pleasure in reading such texts. In this course, we consider how customary modern practices of reading measure up to the challenges of medieval texts; texts that were, after all, produced in a manuscript culture in which literacy and literary authority were conceived of differently than they are in much of the modern world. Our discussions are informed by methodologies of the new historicism, emphasizing some of the mediations through which modern readers are able to apprehend texts from the past as objects of study, as well as by more traditional approaches to historical and cultural context. Literary representations of "love" and "war" provide a focus for the course, and the theories that guide our discussions of these particular representations help us to consider (among other things) how gender and class are constructed in these texts.
ENGL 227 Life-Writing as Literature: Studies in Biography and Autobiography
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This is a readings course that focuses upon life-writing as an art. It explores the ways meaning is constructed within biography and autobiography and considers the means by which life-writers collect, evaluate, and shape data from their own lives or the lives of others. It also attends to the similarities and differences in the processes of generating, interpreting, and presenting material used by life-writers and writers of fiction. In addition to assigned texts, students have the opportunity to read and write about a biography and autobiography of their own choosing.
ENGL 229 The Black Vernacular
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Primarily, this course entails the study of and growing familiarity with the black vernacular tradition. We study novels, autobiography, music, film, dance, and, occasionally, selected popular culture texts (basketball games, church services, barbershop visits, etc.) that encompass a range of black social classes, sexual orientations, and genders, peering into each text in order to “read” it from a distinctly black vernacular perspective. Once we become proficient at recognizing and identifying the vernacular, we talk about what the use of the vernacular by black folk means in the larger American culture. At the same time, we also examine black vernacular-inspired texts from non-black artists and writers, and talk about what it means—not just to (white) America but to black America. The last portion of the course is devoted to black commentary on white participation in the black vernacular, sometimes while artists are executing their vernacular-based art itself. What is the range of responses available to blacks when confronted with non-black black vernacular practitioners? What do those responses tell us about African American culture? about American culture? This course uses the black vernacular as a broad, in-depth cultural lens through which to view American culture, and in so doing, seeks to locate the black vernacular in the American cultural imagination.
ENGL 230 Women in Modern Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course examines literary representations of the modern woman's search for identity and struggle for self realization. It begins with two major questions: Do women write differently than men? Do women read differently than men? Because the novel is central to women's literary history, the course focuses on fiction and the changing nature of narratives by women. As literary critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis has pointed out, "Once upon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social - successful courtship and marriage - or judgmental of sexual and social failure; death." As an example of such conventions, the course begins with a novel by either Jane Austen or Emily Brontë, then moves to early modernists such as Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston, who critique the romance tradition, and finally to writers such as Virginia Woolf, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Danzy Senna, Penelope Lively, and Josephine Humphreys, who experiment with new literary forms, new endings, and new definitions as they examine women in untraditional roles.
ENGL 231 African-American Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course introduces students to a selected body of writings by African Americans from the colonial period to the present. The class looks at varied forms, including the traditional genres (novels, poems, plays, short stories, essays), slave narratives, and oral forms (narratives and performance pieces, such as political speeches, sermons, songs, etc.). Some attention is given to distinctive and persistent elements of style in the Black tradition (oral and written), such as double vision, masking, signifying, wit, irony, verbal play, and all the complex area of language (voice/silence, metaphors, rhythms, idioms, dialect, etc., etc.).
ENGL 232 Southern Fiction
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The South of myth and the South of history have combined to produce a literature fascinating in both its range and conflicting images. Issues of familial and communal heritage, conceptions of place and region, and relations among various racial and ethnic groups are among the most prominent and pressing themes in Southern fiction, but since such might be said of any regional American fiction, this course asks, what makes this fiction "Southern"? We can begin to understand some of the oppositions constructed in the Old South and represented in its fiction "between blacks and whites, the landed gentry and the yeoman farmer, the strict gender roles of ladies and gentlemen" by examining particularly Southern attitudes toward honor and the land in works by Thomas Nelson Page, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin. To chart the evolution of Southern fiction from the romantic rhetorical mode to the modern dialectical mode, the course investigates the effects of changing social conditions and new fictional forms on representations of the South by writers such as William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Peter Taylor, Jean Toomer, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. The final weeks of the semester focus on the following questions: Is today's South more a matter of social perception than social distinction? Is there anything still "Southern"? We may find answers in contemporary fiction by such writers as Ernest Gaines, Ellen Gilchrist, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, and Jill McCorkle.
ENGL 233 Contemporary Native American Literatures
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information: This course is an introduction to the most recent fiction by Native American writers in the United States. It focuses on texts written in the last two decades by authors representing a variety of historical and contemporary indigenous nations and working in many different genres: short stories, historical novels, postmodern fiction, mystery, crime and detective novels, science fiction. We will consider this writing in the context of the United States colonial history, indigenous nations’ contemporary attempts to reassert or regain their political sovereignty, and the long legacy of the hypervisibility of stereotyped Indians in American popular culture. Authors studied include Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, James Welch, Diane Glancy, Greg Sarris, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Treuer, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Daniel Heath Justice.
ENGL 234 Shakespeare
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course investigates a selection from Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Special emphasis is placed on close reading and on genre analysis. Both comedy and tragedy are complex literary modes that have been invested with a variety of meanings and functions in the Western tradition. We explore what these roles have been, and in particular how Shakespeare adopted and manipulated generic conventions to serve his own purposes. This course also engages a variety of recurring issues that emerge in these works, including questions about the nature of the individual subject, gender roles, communities, history, political institutions, art, and questions about the relations among all of these. We also explore what theater is and how it works, making use of film clips of various performances of the plays as one way of approaching this issue. The most important goal of this course is for students to reach a good level of familiarity with and understanding of Shakespeare's language and imagery. Students also examine how interpretations of these plays may be affected or influenced by our own involvement in the Shakespeare "myth," and we will consider ways in which the playwright himself seems to offer his readers hints for approaching his own texts.
ENGL 235 Narratives of Personal Development
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course examines novels and short fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present and from a variety of national traditions - works by writers as diverse as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jamaica Kincaid, Milan Kundera, and Joyce Carol Oates - all of which recount stories of personal growth and development. The German word Bildung: the formation, education, cultivation of a person, has come to be used in English to identify such narratives. The course explores the formal and thematic elements of the Bildung narrative, some of its classic representatives in which characters develop through incorporation into larger social frameworks, more recent examples in which characters learn about themselves through resistance to larger social forces, and still others in which elements of the Bildung narrative are combined with more experimental methods of storytelling.
ENGL 238 Selected Readings in Caribbean Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course is designed to introduce students to a body of literature from the Caribbean. Using a variety of interpretive frameworks, we do close, critical readings of selected writings representing varied periods, areas, and groups. Specific emphasis may change from term to term; the focus is generally on the English-speaking Caribbean, but works in translation from the Spanish-, Dutch-, and French-speaking islands may be included from time to time. We consider the process by which Caribbean texts have been created and received, the historical and cultural contexts in which they have developed, and their relationship to each other and to other bodies of American, European, and world literature.
ENGL 297 Literature in Context: Genre and Mode
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course focuses on the way particular genres and modes arise and are adapted to new purposes over time. The course is divided into two modules (taught be different professors). Each part concentrates on a single genre or mode in its longer historical contexts. For fall of 2007, the titles of the modules are "Metrical Form as a Mode" and on "Science Fiction as an Interdisciplinary Genre." Future modules may include "Form and Intention in the English Love Lyric," "The Pastoral as a Mode," "The English Novel in Pre- and Post-Colonial Contexts," etc.
ENGL 298 Literature in Context: Texts in History
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course focuses on how a particular literary tradition arises in particular historical circumstances. The course is divided into two modules (taught be different professors), one of which deals with a pre-mid-nineteenth century tradition, and one with a post-mid-nineteenth century tradition. For fall of 2007, the titles of the modules are "The Emergence of the Gothic" and on "Power, History, and the Rise of Theater in Elizabethan and Jacobean England." Future modules may include "The Rise of the Novel" (dealing with Defoe, Richardson, Smollet, Scott, and the like); "Naturalism" (works of Balzac and Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser); "Noir in Fiction and Film" (The Maltese Falcon, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, etc), or "The Fin de Siecle" (Oscar Wilde, William James, von Hoffmanstal, and so forth).
ENGL 299 Special Topics in Literary Analysis
Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption.
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course focuses on the essentials of close textual analysis, with special attention to the theoretical and critical vocabulary and methodology of literary interpretation. It pursues these goals by way of different topics each semester. Recent topics include “Multiethnic American Literature,” “What Is Modernism?,” and “The Art of Story-Telling.”
Group A Courses in Literature Before the Early to Mid-19th Century
ENGL 301 Literature of the Middle Ages
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The Middle Ages is a period of vast diversity, spanning some ten centuries and presenting an almost dizzying array of literary styles and genres. This course explores the literature and culture of both the early and later Middle Ages, from Beowulf to Chaucer. The purpose of the course is to sample the broad variety of medieval literature while attending to its linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts.
ENGL 302 Literature of the English Renaissance
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course is designed to introduce students to sixteenth and early seventeenth century English literature. Students read a variety of texts in roughly chronological order, focusing primarily on lyric poems, narrative verse, and plays, paying close attention to the cultural assumptions that governed the way literary texts were written, read, and performed in the period. The course also helps students develop the special analytical skills needed to read this literature carefully and to write about it effectively. Students learn to identify genres and make sense of archaic language, while developing a familiarity with historical contexts and the relationship between these contexts and the major stylistic and thematic concerns that not only characterized the age, but set up the template for much later literary production in the English language.
ENGL 303 Chaucer
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course explores the range of Chaucer's work. We pay particular attention to the social, economic, and political currents that inform Chaucer's poetry and analyze his aesthetic response to them. Our discussions are informed by methodologies of the new historicism, emphasizing some of the mediations through which modern readers are able to apprehend texts from the past as objects of study. We also pay particular attention to the performance of Middle English.
ENGL 304 Shakespeare
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
In this course we read a selection from Shakespeare's plays, organized according to their genre. The primary goal is to achieve an in-depth knowledge of these works through close reading and structural analysis. While investigating the specific concerns articulated in each of these plays, we pay particular attention to Shakespeare's use of generic conventions to create his meanings. This requires us to investigate various approaches to the nature and function of comedy and of tragedy. What are some of the recurring characteristics of these genres, and how have they been approached from the perspectives of literary history, of anthropology, of philosophy, of cultural materialism, and of gender studies? As we become familiar with some of the major concerns linked to particular genres, and with some of the principal characteristics of generic conventions, it becomes easier to understand how Shakespeare appropriates and manipulates those conventions for his own purposes. In particular, we trace his tendency to combine genres within his works, particularly in the histories and romances. By focusing on questions of genre, we are also able to trace some of the principal thematic connections among the plays. In what ways, for example, is The Merchant of Venice tragic, or Othello comedic? How does Shakespeare's presentation and/or understanding of love, theatricality, virtue, or history - to name just a few concepts - seem to develop as he moves from the comedies to the tragedies to the romances? Throughout, we are concerned with the plays' cultural and historical contexts. How do Shakespeare's texts implicitly and explicitly respond to or comment upon contemporary social structures, political and religious ideologies, and cultural values and traditions? Perhaps the highest achievement of the English Renaissance, and certainly the most popular at the time, is its rich dramatic tradition. In this class, therefore, we also seek for clues in Shakespeare's plays that may explain why this form of representation struck such a responsive chord in Renaissance society. We see that drama perhaps most compellingly engaged a society in which the self's relation to others and to reality was increasingly understood as dynamically flexible and uncertain rather than fixed and predictable. Drama vividly displayed the problematic relationships between fact and fiction, skepticism and idealism, politics and ideology, magic and science, which were of central concern to thinkers in the Renaissance. Finally, we also consider the question of Shakespeare's hallowed status in the literary tradition. What factors contributed to his literary "canonization"? Indeed, how are judgments about aesthetic value made, and what purposes might they serve?
ENGL 305 Critical Approaches to Shakespeare
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course incorporates much the same content and concerns as English 304 Shakespeare (see description above). It differs in its emphasis on examination of a variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare's work, which essentially span the history of critical theory of the past fifty years or so. It should be easier to understand some of the basic moments and concepts in this history by tracing its development in relationship to a single author.
ENGL 306 Milton
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This is a course on the life and work of John Milton. Students read a selection of the "minor" poems, a few Latin ones in translation, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, as well as selections from some of the major prose works, including Areopagitica. In this course we pay close attention to the ways in which Milton conceived of and then reconceived of himself as an author (as a scholar, a polemicist, and a poet) in response to the sometimes rapidly changing personal and historical circumstances that he confronted in his life. We pay particular attention to the literary and intellectual backgrounds of his work as we examine the ways in which he absorbed and rethought, resisted and rewrote what he understood to be his cultural inheritance, and how he did so in accordance with a set of often highly idiosyncratic religious and political views. Because his achievement ultimately rests on his technical mastery of the craft of writing, we also pay a good deal of attention to the structure of his verse and of his pamphlets. Above all, our task is to establish a flexible, open-ended (and open-minded) relationship with this writer, whose work invites us to do so despite the "vast interrupt" that separates us from the time and place in which he wrote.
ENGL 307 Epic Tradition
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The epic is one of the oldest forms in literature, and it has proved remarkably durable over time. Originally, the form was a long narrative poem in elevated style, involving a protagonist or protagonists of heroic stature, who figured in a number of independent episodes loosely grouped together. It has proved a potent form, appropriated through history to a number of political, religious, and ideological projects. It has also proved highly adaptable to changing literary tastes and radical reformulations of what constitutes "the heroic." This course surveys the beginnings of English epic in Beowulf, and samples a range of texts, in whole or in part, from the following list among others: Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen, John Milton's Paradise Lost, William Wordsworth's Excursion, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Alternative versions, like the mock epic, are represented as well, by works like Pope's Rape of the Lock, Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, and Lord Byron's Don Juan.
ENGL 308 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The purpose of this course is to explore the cultures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from the perspective of a number of different fields of inquiry. These fields include the history of art and architecture, literature, philosophy, religious studies, history, and political philosophy. The basic assumption behind this course is that the various kinds of artifacts, physical or conceptual, that a culture produces constitute together a unique symbolic "universe." In order to interpret this universe of signs and symbols, whose meanings have been blurred by the passage of time, it is often illuminating to explore their rich and complex interrelations. Thus, for example, by studying together Michelangelo's David, Luther's Freedom of a Christian, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, it is possible not only to further one's understanding of each of these works, but also to achieve a more complex and thus more accurate insight into Renaissance conceptions of the human self. Such an interdisciplinary study of a distant era fosters a capacity for intellectual flexibility, as students are asked to learn some of the "languages" of these historical periods and to fit together from them a version of a coherent culture. The point of this course, it should be noted, is not necessarily to trace the influence of one work on another. Depending on the instructor, this course places more emphasis either on the Middle Ages or on the Renaissance. The course usually has a subtitle that describes the particular theme or topic it will focuses on. For example, "Empire, Antiquity, and Myth: The Idea of Rome in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance" explores the various and often compelling ways in which poets, artists, theologians and political theorists in this period incorporated and constructed conceptions about ancient Rome and classical antiquity in their works. Another version of the course is entitled "The Divine, the Will, and the Performative Self." It begins with Augustine's Confessions and goes on to explore the works of Boethius, Spenser, and Chaucer, Gothic Architecture, and Giotto's frescoes, among other texts.
ENGL 309 Desire and Identity in the Renaissance: The Lyric Tradition
General Education Requirement: (FSLT)
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
In this course we trace the development of lyric poetry from the 14th to the 17th centuries, a period of time that spanned the Italian, French, and English Renaissance. The nature of the self and of its relation to the other remains a central concern in all the works examined in this course, though the perspectives articulated differ widely. Some of the more specific questions or issues to be investigated include: 1) the relation between the poetic imagination and reality. To what degree does imagination reveal or occlude truth? To what degree is the self an unstable poetic construct rather than a divinely constituted and fixed “essence”? Does the self create its own fragmented and illusory reality, or does it inhabit a coherent universe structured by God? 2) the relation between self and other, especially as played out in the context of romantic love. Is physical beauty a manifestation of the divine? Can physical desire be sublimated into spiritual passion? Is it possible to have both? Is genuine contact with an “other” possible? To what degree can the beloved survive the process of absorption into a poetic text? 3) the relation between the poet and his predecessors, between imitation and originality. 4) the relation between ethics and aesthetics. What kind of knowledge does lyric poetry provide? Can poetry be transformative or redemptive, or is it inherently about itself? Is poetic creation an act that reflects or parodies/perverts divine creation? What is the proper relation between art and nature? 5) the relation between poet/poem and the social and political context out of which the work emerges.
ENGL 311 English Literature of the Restoration and 18th Century
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
In this course students study works by representative British writers of the late seventeenth century (the so-called Restoration period, 1660-1700) and the eighteenth century (often divided by literary historians into two segments, the Augustan Age from 1700-1745, and The Age of Johnson or the Age of Sensibility from 1745-1789). Though the term "neoclassicism," which points to the concern of many writers during this long period, including the major poets John Dryden and Alexander Pope and the great satirist Jonathan Swift, with the literary models established by ancient Greek and Roman writers, is often applied to the entire period (sometimes called "the long eighteenth century"), and though many important works from the time are comic plays and prose or verse satires (both comedy and satire were traditional or "classical" literary genres or modes), the period is notable for the invention of a number of major new kinds of literature, most notably the novel (the works, principally, of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobais Smollett, Frances Burney, and Laurence Sterne) and modern autobiography and biography (for example, the most literary of all English-language biographies, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson). Most of the writers in this period in British literary history, which is part of the broader, European-wide phenomenon known as the Enlightenment, try through their works to come to terms with rapidly changing cultural trends that we now associate with the term "modernity."
ENGL 312 English Literature of the Romantic Movement
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Along with the Renaissance, the Romantic era represents one of the two great intellectual watersheds of Western culture. The industrial revolution, political upheavals in Europe and America, the founding of democracies and the growth of capitalism, secular assaults on religion, liberal humanism and new conceptions of the individual, all made for a tempestuous era of paradigm shifts across the spectrum. In the realm of aesthetics, literary models underwent their most dramatic transformations since antiquity. We study some of the intellectual and cultural underpinnings behind Romanticism and examine some of the movement's early manifestations in France and Germany, before turning to the study of British Romanticism proper. Figures to be studied include Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley.
ENGL 321 Early American Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The earliest American writings were by definition travel literature. The early explorers and settlers described the land, its inhabitants, and their ventures in the new world. These early travelers began a long tradition of travel writing by and about America. Over the course of the semester we study a number of key texts in American travel literature from 1590 to 1840. We read books by English and African travelers to America, as well as books by Americans traveling across and beyond the continent. Some of the questions we pursue include: how was the notion of America, and more precisely of the United States, shaped by the experience of traveling? In what ways is U.S. American identity built upon this legacy of travelers and traveling? How do ideas about mobility, the landscape, and space, for example, work to construct a distinct American ethos and literature?
ENGL 325 Age of the American Renaissance
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course examines the diverse texts that emerged during the American Renaissance, a period from roughly 1840 to 1865, which saw the first great flowering of a distinctly American literature. In addition to focusing on canonical writers (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman), students also explore how writers from different classes, races, and genders contributed to discussions of national significance, including debates over slavery, women's and Native Americans' rights, industrialization, and national expansion. Ultimately, then, the course examines how writers perceived literature's role in the larger question of what it means to be an American in such a time of excitement, change, and uncertainty.
ENGL 326 From Revolution to Romanticism: American Literature Through 1860
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information: This course begins with a consideration of the American Enlightenment—an intellectual and cultural shift that coincides with the American Revolution and that marks the decline of Anglo-Puritanism and the emergence of secular rationalism. Emphasis is placed on how notions of Enlightenment help to inform American thought during the Revolutionary period and discussions surround some of the following issues: reason (vs. emotion), autonomy, objectivity, self-governance, “the People,” consent, equality, liberty, revolution, public and private sphere, among others. The course then turns to the nineteenth century in order for students to consider how nineteenth-century writers inherit and rethink these concerns. Students explore how nineteenth-century narrative sustains and extends the national culture that was first being imagined during the Revolutionary period, paying particular attention to Romanticism as a literary (and philosophical) mode. The course concludes on the eve of America’s second and most substantial crisis: the Civil War.
ENGL 330 Selected Topics in Literature Before the Early to Mid-19th Century
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course allows the selection of topics arising in other period courses for more in-depth study. Examples may include "Romance, Allegory, and Mysticism in Medieval Literature," "Eros, Magic, and the Divine in the Renaissance Imagination," "The Poetry of John Donne," or "Nationalism and the Novels of Cooper and Scott." Topics vary by semester, and the course may be taken more than once for credit.
Group B Courses in Literature After the Early to Mid-19th Century
ENGL 331 Literatures of Africa
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course examines a wide selection of Anglophone works as well as works translated into English from other languages, drawn from several regions of Africa. It draws attention to themes of colonialism and decolonization, tradition and modernity, cultural hybridity, shifting gender roles and relations, rural-urban exchanges, and a variety of other concerns explored in distinctly different ways in the work of writers like Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Wole Soyinka, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Nadine Gordimer, and others. It also takes up issues particular to this body of literature, like the relationship between written texts and the ongoing oral tradition, the choice for the writer between colonial and indigenous languages, and the theoretical problems posed in studying African literature from the position of American and Northern readers.
ENGL 332 Literatures of the Caribbean
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course offers a survey of some of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, with an emphasis on contemporary works and with some attention to the historical and cultural contexts that influenced the literature. It examines the work of poets as well as fiction writers, including writers like Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Erna Brodber, and Jamaica Kincaid.
ENGL 333 Literatures of South Asia
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course explores what have become the predominant larger questions and concerns of the Anglo-South Asian novel: what does the end of empire mean for Anglo-S.A. fiction? How did/does partition problematize notions of South Asian identity? What is the relationship between globalization and the post-colonial novel? Of simultaneous concern are questions of genre and of defining "the field" itself. What criteria are necessary for a work to be proclaimed "South Asian Literature"? Must the work's author be South Asian? How, exactly, is South Asia defined in this context? Are novels written in English truly "South Asian" novels? Do novels written by and/or about the English in India earn their place as "Indian" novels? Our discussions and analyses of these works are informed by methodologies of post-colonial theory, the Frankfurt School, and cultural materialism. Students are assigned relevant secondary readings in order to prepare them to consider the issues at hand.
ENGL 334 American Indian Literatures
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
At least 300 Native American cultural traditions, including their literary heritages, have been extant for centuries, but only relatively recently have significant numbers of the heirs to those traditions begun adapting Native materials to the conventions and values of the Euro-American literary tradition. Part of the concern of this course is to ask, why now, and why in such astonishing numbers? English is the first or second language of all the writers included in this course - writers such as Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie - and virtually all of them have been thoroughly exposed to the dominant culture's institutions and values, which means that most of the works featured in the course are recognizably works of "American" literature while shaped at the same time by distinctive features of the Native American cultures represented.
ENGL 335 Black Women Writers
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course provides an overview of literature produced by Black women writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Their writings are viewed within the larger context of world literature, while attention is given to the unique problems faced by Black female writers, the concerns upon which they focus in their works, the importance of their individual works, the milieu that produced them and their works, their triple consciousness, the critical reception accorded them, and the affinities that unite them in an unusual sisterhood.
ENGL 336 Literatures of Globalization
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Does the age of cellular internet, global rave culture, and borderless e-commerce have a literature? If so, where does it come from and what does it look like? What is its relationship to the national literary traditions that persist in the present day? How does it relate to such contemporary literary and cultural categories as the postcolonial and the postmodern? To answer such questions, this course considers the most influential scholarship on the culture of global capitalism before shifting attention to literary writing. In past versions of the course, readings have included contemporary historical fiction as well as novels of migration and diaspora. Authors have included Salman Rushdie, Alex Garland, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips, Amitav Ghosh, Michelle Cliff, and Abdulrazak Gurnah.
ENGL 337 Postcolonial Literatures
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course considers twentieth-century literature written in and about the former colonies of Europe's modern empires. It concentrates on writing composed in English. Although the course approaches this literature on its own terms, doing so mandates attention to its complicated relationships with the Euro-American canon. Thus, the course considers how postcolonial literature repudiates and seeks to revise European literary forms as well as how postcolonial literature increasingly defines a new sort of canon from an established position inside its boundaries. This course considers how work that emerges from the former colonies or from the migrant populations engendered by imperialism helps to transform the English canon into a more heterogeneous archive. Writers may include Chinua Achebe, Yvonne Vera, Raja Rao, V.S. Naipaul, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Anita Desai, and others.
ENGL 338 English Literature of the Victorian Period
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The period spanning the years 1832 to 1901 in the British Empire was a period of rapid political, economic, social, and literary change. Industrialization and imperial expansion mark an era also known for the flowering of both the realist novel and children's literature, as well as biography, autobiography, and new experiments in both epic and lyric poetry. This course provides a survey of selected literature of the Victorian period, including some if not all of the listed genres and emphasizing the following goals: to acquaint students with the major literary genres and figures of the Victorian period, and to explore the process of canon formation in and after the period; to provide students with an understanding of some of the sociological factors and intellectual movements of the Victorian period, both as reflected and as constructed by the literature of the time; to develop more effective analytical skills in both discussion and writing, through class discussion, in-class exams, and course papers; to explore some of the variety of on-line resources available for the scholar of Victorian literature, with an eye to developing a more thorough awareness of what the resources and their limitations are, and perhaps to developing our own; to identify some of the research "problems" in Victorian literature, and to begin to find approaches to those problems through research and writing.
ENGL 346 Twentieth-Century British Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information: From the fin de siecle writings of the 1890s to the literature of globalization of the 1990s, this course charts the course of British literature in the twentieth century. Topics may include the relationship between modernism and British imperial culture, the little England movement of the inter-war period, the early years of Black Britain in the 1950s and 60s, and the emergence of multicultural England in the 1980s. Representative writers include Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Flann O'Brien, Sam Selvon, Hanif Kureishi, and Andrea Levy.
ENGL 349 Late Imperial Fiction
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This is a course about modernism that focuses on a range of novels, some of them fully canonized, all of them centered on what was surely the main item of concern among British intellectuals during the first half of the century, namely, the fate of Empire in a rapidly changing world. We consider how fiction participated in this discussion by reimagining relations between England, the inner colonies of the Celtic Fringe, the Victorian colonies of India and South Asia, emergent colonies in Africa, and the fringes of imperial interest in South America. The special interest of this fiction was establishing rules of engagement between self-identified Englishmen and Englishwomen, immigrants such as the Pole Joseph Conrad and the West Indian C.L.R. James, and colonial populations increasingly well-versed in English language, literature, and culture. By concentrating our attention on the relationship between intellectuals, both colonizer and colonized, we may acquire a clearer sense of how the era of high imperialism transformed into the age of globalization in which we live. We also gain an understanding of what modernism was, what it did in the world, and why it still matters to readers of literature worldwide. Writers may include Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, R.K. Narayan, and Graham Greene.
ENGL 353 American Realism and Regionalism
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Most scholars of American literature have identified realism as the dominant mode in fiction of the late nineteenth century. However, many of the writers who have been lumped together under this rubric, such as Edith Wharton and Mark Twain, would seem to have little in common, either in the formal qualities of their work or in the issues they hoped to address in their writing. Why, then, have critics insisted that the late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a "movement" called realism? This course includes a variety of texts from the general period in order to explore literary realism as a problem. What is at stake in defining literary works as "realist," and what elements of texts must be suppressed, ignored, or neglected in order to make them fit into this category? The course also pays special attention to the relationship between "realism" and "regionalism," asking why some writers are relegated to the status of regionalists while others are given national importance. A closely related concern is the work of literature in the reformation of the national political culture of the United States following the Civil War.
ENGL 354 Literature of the American South
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The South of myth and the South of history have combined to produce a literature fascinating in both its range and conflicting images. Issues of familial and communal heritage, conceptions of place and region, and relations among various racial and ethnic groups are among the most prominent and pressing themes in Southern literature, but since such might be said of any regional American literature, this course asks, what makes this literature particularly "Southern"? We can begin to understand some of the oppositions constructed in the Old South and represented in its literature - between blacks and whites, the landed gentry and the yeoman farmer, the strict gender roles of ladies and gentlemen - by examining particularly Southern attitudes toward honor and the land in works by Thomas Nelson Page, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin. To chart the evolution of Southern literature from the romantic rhetorical mode to the modern dialectical mode and subsequent postmodern permutations, the course investigates the effects of changing social conditions and new fictional forms on representations of the South in works by such writers as Dorothy Allison, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Ellen Glasgow, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Jean Toomer, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. The final weeks of the semester focus on the following questions: Is today's South more a matter of social perception than social distinction? Is there anything still "Southern" about the contemporary South? Does the South now look like the rest of the country, as some, such as John Edgerton in The Americanization of Dixie, claim? Or as others, such as Peter Applebome, have suggested, does the United States now look like the South? What role do writers play in mythologizing, reconstructing, and/or reinventing the South?
ENGL 355 Race and Ethnicity in American Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course explores literature by American writers dealing with issues of racial or ethnic identity studied in relation to historical contexts. It approaches this subject by way of various genres, for example, representations of race and ethnicity in modern and contemporary American drama. Studying dramatic texts, critical material and occasional video productions, we analyze how various ethnic minorities have used the stage as a means of analyzing, questioning, subverting, and modifying dominant power structures as well as of defining, and redefining cultural identities. We study some of the most exciting and compelling plays that have emerged since the Harlem Renaissance and have fundamentally reshaped American theater and American identity.
ENGL 356 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course combines a survey of representative figures from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century with a focus on selected, prominent poets of the period. Attention to prosody and verse scheme figures importantly in the early part of the course, as we learn to recognize the ways in which poets incorporated formal experimentation into their explorations of themes such as secularism, gender, faith, the burgeoning metropolis, and alternatives to a corporate, white-bourgeois culture and ethos. Major figures and schools include Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Imagism, Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the postwar "confessional" poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Alan Ginsberg.
ENGL 357 Twentieth-Century American Fiction
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better or permission of instructor.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course attends to new social, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns in American writing in the mid- to late twentieth century, and to the new forms of fiction that have developed to express them. It examines the work of writers such as John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gass, while developing an understanding of literary postmodernism in relation to the cultural and philosophical movements within which the term first arose and assessing its application and usefulness as a tool for literary analysis.
ENGL 358 African-American Women Writers
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course traces the development of writings by African American women. The class will consider the unique problems faced by these writers, the distinctive features of their literature, the concerns upon which they focus in their works, the milieu that produced them and their works, their triple consciousness, their womanist/feminist perspectives, and the critical reception accorded them.
ENGL 359 Contemporary American Literature
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course examines major trends in American literature of the past fifty years - from the existentialist writing of the immediate postwar period and the development of literary postmodernism to the increasing prominence of ethnic literatures towards the end of the century. The syllabus pairs individual works by prominent late twentieth and early twenty-first century writers such as Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Philip Roth with pertinent theoretical and critical writing. These pairings allow us to consider how these works engaged with some of the central preoccupations of the last half-century: the Cold War, post-American affluence and the problem of conformity, Civil Rights and the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War, the rise of postmodernity, and the omnipresence of technology in American culture.
ENGL 361 Literature and Film
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information: The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the connections and comparisons between literature and narrative film by examining the adaptation of literary works into film texts. Its goals are threefold: first, to explore the historical and generic moment that produced an interest in a particular narrative or filmic genre; second, to isolate the formal properties that define literary and narrative film genres; and third, to consider how historical considerations influence the literary or filmic versions of particular texts. From one semester to the next a different literary or filmic genre is selected for examination. Possible subjects include "Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and Film Noir" and "Shakespearean Adaptations," among others. Among the questions to be considered are: how do literary and filmic texts differ? To what extent are those differences historical, formal, or generic? What happens when literary texts are adapted cross-culturally into different national and formal traditions? What happens when historical genres are updated for new audiences?
ENGL 362 Post-Soul Literature and Culture
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a C or better
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
How are African-American artists who were born or came of age after the civil rights movement responding to this contemporary American culture? Today, as a result of the civil rights movement, black creativity isn't produced or viewed solely within the context of the pursuit of freedom for black people, a reality that is reflected in the literature, film, art, and music of …the “Post-Soul” aesthetic. One reason you likely haven't heard of the Post-Soul, among several, is that, while the Post-Soul aesthetic (PSA) is a legitimate “school” of African-American literature and art, many of its practitioners don’t want to be labeled, even if the label is one that suggests they believe in unfettered artistic freedom. Although she prefers the term “postblack,” art curator Thelma Golden spoke directly to the heart of the PSA artistic dilemma when she wrote: “For me, to approach a conversation about ‘black art,’ ultimately meant embracing and rejecting the notion of such a thing at the very same time. . . . It was a clarifying term that had ideological and chronological dimensions and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” Many Post-Soul writers critique the events or mindset of the civil rights movement in their fictions, and it's important to this sense of African-Americans being “post” that these artists have no lived, adult experience with that movement. Many of the best known younger black artists have a complicated relationship with the PSA, and therefore many of these artists often show up on PSA syllabi: Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Kara Walker, Wynton Marsalis, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Mos-Def, and more.
ENGL 365 Modern Drama
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course analyzes some of the most influential dramatic texts and theories that have shaped Western drama and theater since the late 19th century. We cover a range of theatrical traditions, including Realism/Naturalism, the Art Theater movement, Futurism and Dadaism, Expressionism, Political Theater, the Theater of the Absurd, the Theater of Cruelty, as well as postmodern Performance Art. We look at texts by American, British, Russian, German and French playwrights and theorists.
ENGL 366 Contemporary British and American Drama
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information: This course surveys late twentieth-century and contemporary British and/or American drama and theater, spotlighting selected playwrights who have shaped the contemporary stage and dramatic literature. We examine not only individual plays, but the ways in which these plays contribute historically, theoretically, and philosophically to a narrative history of the theater. The course makes no claim to be a comprehensive survey of all major - not to mention lesser-known - dramatists whose works have found their way to prominence, but by concentrating on a number of key dramatists, we are able to gauge more critically the aesthetic and cultural power of British and American drama.
ENGL 368 History and Aesthetics of Film
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course examines the principles and history of film aesthetics by focusing in depth on the work of one or two individual directors (for example, Alfred Hitchcock or Akira Kurosawa) or on a particular stylistic movement (such as Film Noir, the French New Wave, Hong Kong Action Cinema) that has had a significant impact on filmmaking more generally. The course's emphasis is less on the interaction of individual films with the cultures that produce them, and more on the development of film language and style. Questions to be considered are: what is film style? Can style be defined individually or nationally? How do styles evolve over the course of a career? and with the introduction of new technologies? Ultimately, how are style and meaning related?
ENGL 369 American Culture/American Film
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The purpose of this course is both to teach students to analyze film within a larger cultural matrix - what do films tell us about American culture? what does American culture teach us about film? - and to introduce the methodology of cultural studies by way of visual and narrative analysis. The course is structured around a particular filmic genre (melodrama, film noir, horror, etc.) and/or historical moment (the 1940s, the postwar era, the 1980s etc.) which varies from semester to semester. Recent topics have included "Hollywood Melodrama and Popular Feminism, 1937-1990" and "Conspiracy Film from the Cold War and After, 1945-2000." In each semester, the selected films are read alongside relevant contemporaneous material as part of an ongoing conversation between Hollywood films and the culture that produces them. Questions to be considered include: Are Hollywood films mere reflections of the society that produces them or do they play an active role in the evolution of social institutions? Can popular film be a force for social change? How and what do mainstream movies mean?
ENGL 370 Selected Topics in Literature After the Early to Mid-19th Century
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information: This course allows the selection of topics arising in other period courses for more in-depth study. Examples may include "Films of the Cold War and After", "The British Modernist Novel", "Gender and Class in the Nineteenth-Century Novel", or "Victorian Fantasy." Topics vary by semester, and the course may be taken more than once for credit.
Group C Other Advanced Courses in Literature, Language and Writing
ENGL 371 Versions of Tragedy
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course traces the development of the tragic mode in Western drama. Few other literary modes have been as resilient in the history of Western culture, and this is partly due to the unique adaptability of this genre to changing historical, political, socio-economic and other cultural conditions. In order truly to understand the complex nature and role of tragedy in the West, therefore, it is necessary to study its various manifestations across historical periods and national boundaries. Some of the problems the course explores include the nature of the tragic; how tragedy imagines the individual and his/her relationship to society; how tragedy imagines the relationship between human beings and the divine and between human beings and history. The course pays particular attention to the various ways in which tragedy has functioned as a site of affirmation or contestation of prevalent cultural/political values and ideals. Some of the playwrights investigated in this course may include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Racine, Büchner, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pirandello, Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, and Marsha Norman. Non-dramatic texts, including poems, novels, and films may also be included.
ENGL 372 Theater and Society
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
Theater and Society pursues the study of theater with regard to its social relevance. It examines the various ways in which theater not only reflects but also seeks to intervene in ongoing cultural and political debates relevant to a given society. It draws attention to the politics of form and production as well as to the politics of reception. Topics might include such offerings as “Theater and Politics/Political Theater”, “Theater and War,” or “Postcolonial Theater”.
ENGL 375 Critics Since Plato
Prerequisite(s): One unit of 300-level English with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course considers ways of looking at art and literature in their philosophical context. Theories of such philosophers and writers as Plato, Dante, Pope, Kant, Wordsworth, Shelley, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Jung, Robert Penn Warren, Sartre, Woolf, and Derrida are applied to texts ranging from the Bible to Ulysses.
ENGL 376 Modern Literary Theory
Prerequisite(s): One unit of 300-level English with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
The emergence of literary studies as a discipline with its own methodologies and theoretical underpinnings is a relatively recent development, with beginnings in the early twentieth century. After a brief overview of ancient conceptions of literature, we turn to the study of Russian Formalism and American New Criticism, which set about putting literary studies on an equally rigorous foundation with scientific disciplines of the day. We then survey a range of approaches to the study of literature that followed from mid-century on, most of which had origins in other disciplines. These schools or critical theories include Feminism and Marxism, Structuralism (influenced by linguistics and anthropology), Reader-Response criticism (from German philosophy) Deconstruction (from French philosophy), Psychoanalysis (from Freud and other psychologists), and New Historicism and Postcolonial criticism (both blending Marxism and post-structuralism). This is a course that emphasizes the analysis of theoretical texts (many of which are quite difficult) more than practical, applied criticism, though we spend time both reading and writing criticism of literary texts as well.
ENGL 377 Poetics
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
This course is about the meaning of poetic form. We are concerned with the basic mechanics of traditional formal verse in the English language as it has developed in England and North America since the 14th century and with the values conferred on its forms by various reading communities (by readers and writers who saw themselves as working within and upholding a central tradition and by those who saw themselves as deliberately working against or outside such a tradition). The first part of the course reviews basic methods for perceiving, describing, and interpreting the formal mechanics of verse in English (with particular attention to the rise of modern accentual-syllabic verse). The second part covers various conceptual and historical matters: the development of period styles, the ideological content and context of particular lyric genres and devices, the development of an "English Poetic Tradition" in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and a series of stances in opposition to that tradition among British and American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries.
ENGL 378 The Novel in Theory and Practice
Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better.
Unit(s): 1
Additional Information:
In this course students read a selection of novels that represent th