Catalog 2010 - 2011

Prerequisites: FYS-101

Specific topics are listed below.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course will trace the development of Shakespearean comedy through representative plays from all stages of the dramatist's career. In the process, the class will explore the literary, theatrical, religious, political, and cultural significance of comedy, both in general and in its Shakespearean form.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

World War I, the most literary war in British history, may well have permanently altered the landscape of British literature through its poetry and prose. This course will examine the war poets' verse; soldiers' and nurses' autobiographies; Virginia Woolf's modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway; T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land"; and Pat Barker's recent novel Regeneration, the fictional account of the relationship between military psychiatrist William Rivers and shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

Through careful scrutiny of representative plays in several genres and from different periods in Shakespeare's career, this course will test popular perceptions of English literature's most overexposed figure by situating him in his literary, theatrical, historical, and cultural contexts.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course focuses on literature as a medium of empathy and explores such relationships as those between doctor and patient, mind and medicine, the scalpel and the act of poetry. Authors may include William Carlos Williams, Robert Coles, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, and Toni Morrison.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course will critically examine various constructions of motherhood through close readings of literature written by both mothers and non-mothers. Authors may include Pattiann Rogers, Jane Smiley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Kingsolver.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

Students will analyze contemporary Asian cultures through movies from Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, mainland China and the Indian subcontinent. Genres will include wu-xia, anime, sci-fi, musicals, yakuza narratives and "art house" movies. Course readings will include cultural studies theory, short stories, and the directors' and artists' essays and commentaries.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

One of the most extraordinary achievements of 20th- century American culture is the literature that has come out of the nation's prisons. While there have also been many eminent prison writers from other countries, such as John Donne, Maxim Gorky, and Dostoyevsky, modern American prison writings constitute what might be considered a coherent body of literature with a unique historical significance and cultural influence. Through careful examination of selected works of primarily American prison literature, this course investigates a vision of America from the bottom, an anatomy of the American prison, and an exploration of the meanings of imprisonment. Authors may include Malcom X, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ken Lamberton, Agnes Smedley, and Nawal El Saadawi.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

What is the American West as imagined and depicted by 20th-century writers? Which mythologies and ideologies about the West (such as rugged individualism and the idea of the frontier) dating from the 19th-century are still present and perpetuated by contemporary authors? How do contemporary writers reject or revise such mythologies? How do individualism, counter-culturalism, racial difference, aridity, competition over natural resources, and environmentalism shape the way Americans imagine the West? How does the West in its conflicts, diversity, and complexity epitomize in a dramatic way what we imagine as deeply American? These are just some of the questions that we will attempt to answer through our reading of novels, short stories, poems and essays by 20th-century American westerners such as Wallace Stegner, Gretel Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Leslie Marmon Silko, Edward Abbey, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Gary Snyder.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

In this course we study the evolution and variety of comedy in literature, from classical Greece to contemporary United States. Along the way, we examine different comedic categories, such as the picaresque, absurdism, parody, satire, and black comedy in the work of authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse, and Flannery O'Connor. In each case, we examine the rhetoric of comedy: What makes a particular work funny? Why do we laugh? What are the motivations for comedy; when is it meant as "comic relief" from reality, and when is it meant as subversive critique of society?

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course will critically examine contemporary Asian pop culture narratives defined by and representing the Rising Asia phenomenon of the past thirty years. Students will study Asian movies, manga (graphic novels), anime and television shows (drama and talk shows), all with special emphases on transnationalism, the cosmopolitan, and hyphenated identities in contemporary Asian cultures.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

Henry James famously called nineteenth-century novels "loose baggy monsters." But the Russian novels that inspired this comment - by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy - are not only long, but also rich with insight into life and human nature. This course will focus on the most famous of the nineteenth-century Russian prose writers as well as writers who inspired them or joined the Russian conversation about history and society. Assignments will focus on close reading of text and interpretation of historical context.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

Sampling several centuries, countries, and literary genres, this course traces the love-hate relationship between literary art and financial calculation, a relationship which raises questions regarding what has value and what doesn't, what is real and what isn't, what humans in society owe to one another, and what purpose artistic endeavor is supposed to serve in a world where such endeavor rarely pays.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

Classes on literature often cover the "setting"of a work, but what is the larger role that landscape plays for the meaning and structure of some novels? By reading works in which landscape plays a significant part in the author's writing, students in this course will interrogate what "place"and interaction with landscape means for human activity, emotion, and memory. Readings will include works by Ivo Andric, Vladimir Nabokov, Abd al-Rahman Munif, and V.S. Naipaul. Assignments will emphasize close reading of text and will include an independent reading project.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course will explore the last forty years of Native American and First Nations fiction. We will begin by examining the social climate of the late 1960s that surrounded the publication of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer-prize winning House Made of Dawn , the novel which signaled the beginning of the literary period known as the Native American Renaissance. Our survey will then take us forward to the present as we explore the adaptation of indigenous story traditions and conventions into contemporary novel forms in fiction which is funny, tragic, and suspenseful.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course focuses on the literary history of chattel slavery, particularly as it pertains to the United States, and on how slavery and its legacy have shaped--and functioned within--literary and cultural traditions. We will concentrate on the period of 1700-1861 in American literary history, and readings will include letters, poetry, fiction, and autobiographical narratives about the slavery experience, as well as various writings that both denounce and support the institution of slavery. As we will see, the literature of slavery and the issues it raises are both political and personal, both historical and contemporary.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaiming "the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear"as "the highest aspiration of the common people[,]" that "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts" and "that every individual and every organ of society... shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms."Using the Declaration as a basis, this course explores post-World War II theories, fiction, poetry, and movies by formerly colonized and/or enslaved and historically oppressed indigenous peoples. This course will feature authors who violate literary forms and genres as a method of resistance and empowerment. Topics may include Arab nationalism, the Intifada, the Bangla Language Movement, the Cultural Revolution, and apartheid.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course examines non-Western immigrant experiences in North America and Europe through fiction, poetry, personal memoir, and letters. Topics may include generational conflicts, hyphenated identity, racial discrimination, and immigrant rights. Along the way, we will explore the emergence of immigrant activism and the impacts of 20th-century wars, foreign policies, and immigration laws on domestic civil rights movements. Authors may include Michael Ondaatje, Jhumpa Lahri, Chang-Rae Lee, V. S. Naipaul, and Hari Kunzru.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

The nineteenth century was immersed in the cultural project of defining criminality and, through the gradual professionalization of the police, constructing the criminal's nemesis, the detective. Through popular crime fiction, newspaper accounts of an actual criminal case, and articles from nineteenth-century periodicals, we will explore how the nineteenth-century fascination with crime and detectives was shaped by preoccupations with the construction of gender, class dynamics, and the tension between the didactic and entertainment functions of popular fiction. We will also turn the spotlight on ourselves, considering why we might sustain that fascination today and why mystery stories remain one of the most widely read genres. As we address these questions, we'll be making forays into interpretative strategies based on Marxist, cultural studies, psychoanalytic, and narrative literary theories. Texts include Charles Dickens' Newgate novel, Oliver Twist Wilkie Collins' sensation novel, Woman in White; selected short stories featuring the exploits of Sherlock Holmes; and at least one late twentieth-century text adopting and adapting the figure of Sherlock Holmes.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course is not about quiet remembrances of days past! Instead, postmodern literature, with disruption of time and space; utterly irreverent concepts of authority and self; and complete disbelief in the veracity of any memory, creates new methods of representing the non-representational (i.e. memories of past, present, and the future). The course will intersect with several movies. Possible authors include Onadaatje, Ishiguro, Calvino, and Cortazar. Possible movies include Memento, Prime Suspect, and Daughters of the Dust.

Prerequisites: FYS-101

This course focuses on writers who have shaped thinking about the environment in the United States. The course first examines the historical and philosophical bases for American conceptions of nature, and then analyzes literary treatments of concepts such as bioregionalism, wilderness, sense of place, and environmentalism. Authors include Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and others.