Catalog 2011 - 2012

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

A survey of landmark poetry and prose from the Anglo-Saxon Era to the Enlightenment, with special emphasis on how the assumptions, concerns, and techniques of these texts came to be seen as the kernel of a coherent national literary tradition.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

In order to see the picture, one must step out of the frame. In this course, students will step out of their own cultural frames by studying how and why genres, politics, trade/war, religion (and also how we ourselves) construct global culture and identity. The texts will provide not only vicarious experiences of lands and cultures but will also reflect the dialogic nature of specific cultural and cross-cultural literary traditions. Possible traditions covered may include those of the Ancient Near East, the Ottoman Empire, the Subcontinent, Mogul and Persian poetry, Greco-Roman culture, North Africa, Native America, and the Caribbean-African-Asian heritage.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course explores the making of "America" (focusing primarily on the United States) through literature, from the age of discovery through the post-Revolutionary period. Our primary purposes is to explore the means by which settlement and national identity were invented through language. Our texts feature a range of "literature," including transcribed Native American oral stories, colonial promotional tracts, sermons, speeches, captivity narratives, political pamphlets, personal letters, and slave narratives. The class will explore personal and cultural issues that concerned early Americans and discuss how texts both define and complicate some of the terms associated with the literature of this period, including "colonist," "Puritan," "Enlightenment," "liberty," and even "America" itself.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

By examining the specters that have haunted the last two hundred years of British fiction, this course will explore the applicability of the supernatural as a vehicle for expressing transgressions against cultural and literary conventions. Canonical and non-canonical authors have imaginatively and effectively summoned the supernatural to animate tensions embedded in class structure, gender and family dynamics, imperial possessions, science and religion, realism and fantasy, and the permeability of language. Authors studied may include Walter Scott, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Riddell, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, A. S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel.

Prerequisites: Permission

This is a writing-intensive course, intended primarily for students who have already taken a 200-level writing workshop. Students are expected to produce a portfolio of original poetry and to engage critically and thoughtfully with their own and other writers' poems.

Prerequisites: Permission

This is a writing-intensive course, intended primarily for students who have already taken a 200-level writing workshop. Students are expected to produce a portfolio of original work and to thoughtfully and critically engage with their own and other writers' fiction.

Prerequisites: Permission

This is a writing-intensive course, intended primarily for students who have already taken a 200-level writing workshop. Students are expected to produce a portfolio of original work and to thoughtfully and critically engage with their own and other writers' fiction.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course is a survey of the periods and movements of African American literature: early slave narratives, the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th-century, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and contemporary literature. We study prose, poetry, and drama by authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Marilyn Nelson. Along the way, we seek to understand how African Americans have responded through literature to the oppressions of white America - slavery, segregation, violent and institutional racism - as well as how authors forge identity and create community through writing. We examine how these authors respond to their own literary tradition, how they shape form, style and genre in response to their historical context, and how they use writing as resistance, subversion, self-realization and celebration.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

Vita Sackville-West once said, "The more one gardens, the more one learns." If this is the case, then a number of American authors must have been very wise individuals, since they were avid gardeners. In this course, we will consider the relationship between gardening, expression, and American literature. We will read a range of texts, including herbaria, records of natural phenomena, and "traditional" literature such as poetry and prose. We will also read scholarship devoted to literature and gardening. Authors may include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Celia Thaxter, and Alice Walker.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

An intensive study of the works of two major authors in postcolonial studies. Originally from the former British colonies and celebrated as Britain's finest contemporary authors, Naipaul and Rushdie are paradoxically housed and unhoused men. Speaking as decentered men, these authors explore and critique the legacies of colonialism and the birth pangs of postcolonial nationhood with force, humor, play, and melancholia, and along the way celebrate cultural confusion, fragmentation, hybridity, the cosmopolitan, and the reclaiming of self.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

An intensive study of representative poetry and plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, focusing both on the features of Shakespeare's artistry and on the cultural conditions to which that artistry responded.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

An intensive study of the works of one of the major American poets of the last half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first. The course will chart the progression of Rich's poetry as well as examine some of her works of nonfiction and critical theory, interrogating along the way some of Rich's key conceptualizations of nation, power, and women's sexuality.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T (any version)

This course pairs two literary giants of early 20th-century American modernism: Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Although they lived in the same period and were both enormously influential for later writers in the U.S. and beyond, Hemingway and Faulkner had strongly contrasting prose styles. Studying them together in this course allows readers to understand their common roots in the innovations of modernism and American culture as well as what made their respective innovations radically distinct.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course will study the three most influential dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, each of whom responded complexly to the example of his predecesssor. In addition to reading some of the plays and poems by each man that respond to, or elicit response from, one of the others, we will also consider the social, theatrical, and literary milieu which made such a convergence of talent possible.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

In the nineteenth century, British fiction experienced a significant florescence.This course will acquaint students with major forms of adult and children's nineteenth-century fiction including domestic realism, adventure-romance, fantasy, the gothic, and naturalism. We will study this literature in the context of nineteenth-century culture, particularly gender relations, perceptions of childhood, the tensions between individual desire and social norms, and the practices of literary production. Assigned texts will include both canonical and non-canonical works. Authors studied will likely include Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, H. Rider Haggard, Charlotte Yonge, George Gissing, and Thomas Hardy.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course will examine British books in recent decades that have figured prominently in major literary competitions, exploring the role these awards play in shaping literary tastes and publishing trends. Readings will include a number of short-listed and prize-winning books, book reviews, and commentaries on these celebrated contests. Throughout the semester, we will consider the place these books may assume in future assessments and studies of the most influential and significant books of our era. (British Literature after 1789)

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course will introduce students to major trends in postmodern fiction, including metafiction, deconstruction, carnival and play, pastiche and intertextuality, post-structuralism, fragmentation, and phenomenology. We will use postmodern philosophies to understand, among other topics, counter-cultural movements such as the cyber and the pop phenomena. Texts assigned may include Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Hana Yori Dango, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. This course, with its emphasis on postmodern movies and fiction, is especially recommended for serious writers of literary fiction.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course considers how the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid modeled supreme literary achievement in Europe for more than two millennia, and how postclassical European writers wrestled with this daunting, but also inspiring, legacy of classical epic. Postclassical works may include Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope's mock-epic The Dunciad, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Derek Walcott's Omeros.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This seminar will ask students to consider poets' experimentation with form in response to their understanding and experience of the natural world. How do poets express ecological ideas in poetry. Poets we consider may include Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Sylvia Plath, Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney, A.R. Ammons, and Mary Oliver.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This survey will concentrate primarily on fiction and poetry from the beginnings of Romanticism to fin de siecle decadence and naturalism. Attention will be given to literary texts' power to reflect and shape British culture in the nineteenth century, a period which many observers, including the American Mark Twain, believed experienced more change than any previous century. We will also explore the impact shifting literary tastes and critical approaches have played in texts' and authors' reception and popularity.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course explores the literary movement that scholars have designated as crucial to the development of a truly "American" literature, focusing roughly on the years 1836 to 1865. In addition to studying canonical authors, students will explore those writers who worked, in the words of one critic, "beneath" the American renaissance, focusing on issues of concern to women, Native Americans, and African Americans. Authors will include Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and Lydia Maria Child.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

Students will examine how authors from around the world use literature to comment upon, protest, or record various forms of oppression, ranging from dictatorial regimes to cultural divisiveness to colonization and occupation. Such literature is written in order to inspire people to know the world in which they live, and to that end, the course will also deal with contemporary politics and world affairs. Authors studied may include Manil Suri (Death of Vishnu, India), Edward Said (Out of Place, Occupied Palestine), Matthew Kneale (The English Passengers, Tasmania/Australia), V.S. Naipaul (A Way in the World, Trinidad and South America). Videos will include Rabbit-Proof Fence (movie), Palestine is Still the Issue (documentary), and The Soul of India (documentary).

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

This course will trace the evolution of Arthurian literature from its first flowering in 12^th-century European court culture to its influential gathering and retelling in Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur and its persistent presence in modern literature and culture. Along the way we'll ask what Arthurian literature tells us about medieval conceptions of heroism, aspiration, hierarchy, and failure, and about why a cultural product so quintessentially "medieval" continues to fascinate modern writers. Authors may include Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, and Walker Percy.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

A survey of prominent texts of the twenty-first century. Authors studied may include Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Beckett, Heaney, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan, and Ali Smith.

Prerequisites: ENG-299T

Intensive study of Salman Rushdie's and V.S. Naipaul's works, and their shaping of postcolonial and third-world cultural studies. For additional context, other postcolonial authors may be examined.