| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH E291 | GUIDED READING | STAFF | English 291 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [HERE] by the end of the second week of classes (April 9, 2010). Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |
| ENGLISH E299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STEINTRAGER, J | Course Code 24580 |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 28C | REALISM & ROMANCE | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which this mode formulates experience. Students write several short analytic papers. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement |
| ENGLISH 28E | CRAFT OF FICTION | STAFF | E28E, The Craft of Fiction, should be taken before embarking on the Creative Writing Emphasis. The concentration of the course is the study of writing by writers about the process of writing. How have writers viewed their craft; how have they developed their processes; what have their influences been, and at what point did they shed them? Contrary to popular notions of muses, of inspiration, most writers are very hard working. This course studies the thoughtfulness most writers have about the work of writing. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 100 | HIST THEORY & CRIT | CLARK, M. | This course introduces students to some of the most important concepts and texts that inform the ways we read, write, and discuss literature today. We will approach the readings chronologically, starting with Plato and Aristotle and ending with some contemporary theorists, but the course is not intended to be a comprehensive survey. Instead, we will identify a few key ideas about literature and study their emergence and evolution under the pressure of intellectual debate and historical change. Requirements will include mid-term and final examinations, a short paper, and a journal. The text for the course is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (W.W. Norton, 2001). |
| ENGLISH 101W | LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | E 101W fulfills the upper division-writing requirement for English majors and introduces them to a particular critical or theoretical approach to literature with practical application. In this section we will explore the intersections between law and literature. There will be four units: (1) The law's impact on literature; for our course questions of censorship. We will read selections from Plato's REPUBLIC, Milton's "Areopagitica," Mill's ON LIBERTY, and a few relevant Supreme Court cases. (2) Literary representations of the law. We will read BILLY BUDD and, for background to it, the Burke/Paine debate about the French Revolution.(3) Literary/rhetorical analysis of legal documents. We will read closely selected writings of Lincoln related to the law. (4) A literary response to a legal controversy. We will read "The Man Without a Country," which was written in response to Lincoln's most famous crackdown on civil liberties during the Civil War. Students will write three essays. Because this is a writing course, we will spend considerable time on writing both in and out of class. This section counts as a course for the Humanities and Law Minor.
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| ENGLISH 101W | CLARISSA & CRITICS | VAN SANT, A. | Like other E101W courses, “Clarissa and her Critics” satisfies the upper-division writing requirement. Unlike most courses, this one requires that you read only one literary work. The catch is this: Clarissa, written by Samuel Richardson, is almost the longest novel in English. It’s also one of the best, so try to let its length challenge rather than scare you. One of the early novels in English, Clarissa is written in letters, mostly between two young women friends and two young men friends. As you might imagine, there’s a question of seduction involved. And there are questions of parental authority, issues of self-definition and independence, problems about money, and a lot of tension about sex. It’s not an action novel (though it begins with a report about a duel), but it is a novel in which conflict lies just at the surface of every encounter, every sentence. Because the novel is a set of letters, there is no narrator to explain or interpret things; you are reading the letters of characters as they write under pressure.
As you read critical articles for the course, you will make a mental collection of the ones you think would be especially useful to college students reading Clarissa. That will be the starting point for your main writing project. You will also write 3 very short practice papers to get used to reading and writing about literary criticism and theory. Everyone will write a draft as well as a revision of the main paper and will participate in peer reading. Everyone will also write on the message board and sometimes in class.
The edition of Clarissa ordered for the course is the Penguin edition (ed. Angus Ross) available online and in the bookstore. Other materials will be available online and in the library. |
| ENGLISH 101W | MATERIALIST MODELS | GODDEN, R. | Departing from a Marxist assumption that materiality is socially produced, under changeable conditions that its producers neither wholly control nor wholly understand, the course seeks to explore elements of those methodologies which may best allow for the reading of literature as part of that wider materiality. We shall beg the question, aphoristically put, “If nature (the materiality) is always human nature (or human materials), how best might that stuff be understood as it reflects and is modified by literary expression?” The materiality of literature will be explored as produced in relation to a number of interwoven forms of work; that is by and within political economy, language, historical explanation, and even by and within the forgetting of that on-going and diverse production.
Since literary materiality is made from words, and since words are social instruments, we shall depart from materialist accounts of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address historiography as it seeks to apprehend the real (Benjamin, Greenblatt). Since written stories are made as much from what is forgotten as from what is remembered, we will consider “forgetting”, or the unconscious, as made from that which we have learned to find unthinkable (Abraham and Torok, Freud).
These three areas, language, narrative and the structural unconscious, since they are to be read as part of a wider pattern of material making (or an economy), needs must be linked to a specific accumulative regime (Marx, Jameson, Pfeil).
The purpose of the course is at all times to explore and enable the processes of reading: methodologies are more limited than the complex literary and historical objects which they address, and should neither be complete nor glass machines. Each week the seminar will consider extracts from theoretical writings in relation to a particular short story. The stories chosen will be drawn primarily from a single historical period ( U.S., post 1973, variously referred to as “postmodern”, “post industrial”, “flexible Fordist” or “post Fordist”): they and the theoretical readings will be made available via pdf .
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| ENGLISH 101W | DISCOURSES OF LOVE | FARBMAN, H. | “What’s love got to do with it?” So goes the ironic refrain of a well-known love song. This rhetorical question says that love is all rhetoric, mere talk. Whatever “it” may be, love is not the word for it. Love is merely a “second-hand emotion,” a “sweet old-fashioned notion.” No talk is more formulaic, more second-hand than talk of love. But cliché ridden as it may be, talk of love still seems to capture something vital to us. How can stock phrases mean this much? How, after having heard the theme song to The Love Boat one thousand times, can we continue to experience love as exciting and new? This course will examine the paradoxical hold that talk of love exerts upon us from three different perspectives. First, we will look at the strange position that we are put into as readers of love poems and love songs not personally addressed to us. What are the lovers to us? We to them? Why does the experience of love, which seems so private, lend itself so promiscuously to the publicity of song? We will read lyric poetry of the troubadours and trobairitz, Dante, Shakespeare, and several major modern poets, and we will listen closely to some pop songs. Then we will look at the plots of some gripping love stories and look into what grips us in them. Here we will read a Shakespeare play, view a film by Terence Malick, and consider theories of Freud and Marx. Finally, we will bring what we have learned about the rhetoric of love lyrics and the logic of love stories to bear upon case studies from contemporary popular culture. The cases, to be determined by the class, may include reality TV shows, tabloid images, and sites of romance on the internet. Our cultural analyses will be framed by further readings in the theory of love (Girard, Sedgwick, and Barthes). |
| ENGLISH 102A | THE EPIC TRADITION | KIENE, J. | This course will survey examples of ancient, medieval, and early modern epic and heroic poetry of Europe, focusing on the creative adaptation of epic conventions established in the ancient Greek oral-poetic tradition associated with Homer, to the vastly different cultural contexts of Augustan Rome, medieval Italy, and early modern England. Over the course of the term, we’ll chart a remarkable development in the defining features of the heroic ideal in literary epic, and we’ll note the ways epic poets frame their grand visions as both definitive celebrations of all that is best about a given society, and as penetrating critiques of societies that will fall. We’ll move from the petulant warrior Achilles, whose wrath makes him as deadly to his Greek comrades as he is to his Trojan enemies, to the stoic Aeneas, who must endure national catastrophe and unthinkable personal loss in order to found Rome, to Dante’s pilgrim, who does his fighting with words alone but who, like Aeneas, is divinely elected to make a descent into a frightening underworld. We’ll then read one or two English critical responses to the classical epic, Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which rearticulates the heroic ideal in Christian terms of “patience and heroic martyrdom” by attempting nothing less than to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Requirements will include three short (2-3 p.) papers, weekly informal responses, a mid-term, and a final exam.
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| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL VISIONS | DAVIS, R. | “Some say there is nothing in dreams but lies and fables; however, one may have dreams which are not in the least deceitful, but which later become clear.” -The Romance of the Rose
This course explores the medieval tradition of visionary literature, traces the developing relationship between text and image in medieval manuscripts and other visual arts, and delves into the controversy over the use of images in religious literature. Readings encompass visions both sacred and profane including Chaucer’s dream visions, Pearl, Langland's Piers Plowman, excerpts from the Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Divine Comedy, holy visions by female mystics, a medieval play, and The Cloud of Unknowing.
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| ENGLISH 102B | ANATOMIES OF POWER | LEWIS, J. | “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” These words, from Thomas Hobbes’s philosophical treatise, Leviathan (1651), haunted English literature from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. In this period, dramatic social and political change forced a re-examination of traditional assumptions about what power is, where it is located (in inherited and communal forms or in individual desire?), and how it is most effectively exerted (through coercion or seduction?). And imaginative literature–poems, novels, and plays alike–played a crucial role in ‘anatomizing’ these assumptions: in breaking them down, analyzing their dynamics, and exploring their implications for real human bodies. We’ll start with a look at Hobbes’s theory of human nature as a quest for power and go on to examine works as various as Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Rochester’s libertine poetry, and Behn’s romance of the slave trade, Oroonoko. These late seventeenth-century texts were all written against a background of radical anxiety about the nature and extent of authority itself; in the second half of the course, we’ll turn to eighteenth- entury attempts to regulate power through social analysis (the satires of Pope and Swift) and through the attempted legislation of the English language (Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language). Our survey will end with a quick look at the emergence of new conceptions of power in the wake of the French Revolution, comparing Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake as radical respondents to the legacies of the preceding 130 years. Required work: midterm, final, one paper, one recitation or creative option for extra credit. |
| ENGLISH 102C | PTRY/PRSE 1789-1815 | CHRISTENSEN, J. | We will study the poetry and non-fiction prose of the major Romantic writers, including William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. You can expect a mid-term, a final exam, and one or two critical papers during the quarter. |
| ENGLISH 102D | FITZGERALD&FAULKNER | GODDEN, R. | The course will undertake close readings of key works by Fitzgerald and Faulkner, contemporaries who wrote out of entirely divergent economic conditions and systems. Fitzgerald’s writing took place in, and explored, a culture which, in his own words, “followed money.” Faulkner’s fiction, preoccupied with racialized work, reflected and refracted an impoverished region, within which ‘bound labor’ or ‘human capital’, rather than monetary capital, was central.
The nineteenth century American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, “It must relate to property; because nothing else survives in this world. Love grows cold and dies; hatred is pacified by annihilation” (The American Claimant). In the spirit of Hawthorne’s insight, the course will address how different forms of property and its production yield different narrative forms; where differences involve not simply differences of subject (the flapper rather than the sharecropper), but different structures, perceptions and poetics. Each week, the two sessions will consist of one lecture and one group discussion; during the latter, based on designated passages, we will seek to particularize and extend the central ideas of the course through detailed textual work. Novels covered will include, The Great Gatsby(1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941) (Fitzgerald), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses(1942) (Faulkner).
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| ENGLISH 102D | 20TH CENT AMER LIT | SZALAY, M. | "Greatest Hits of 20th-Century American Writing"
This course will read novels, poems, short stories and essays by some of the most talented American writers of the last 60 years. |
| ENGLISH 103 | OUTSIDER LITERATURE | AMIRAN, E. | Outsider artists and writers by definition do not have significant exposure to mainstream art and writing, or operate so far outside the norms of other literature as to seem that way. Generally they work alone and for themselves. Many have been lifelong inmates of hospitals for the insane, or have lived in isolation or solitude. The work we will read is sought out and collected, often after the authors' death. Does it show a pre-social innocence? Does it embody social obsessions, reflecting ourselves back to us in a raw form? Or does it show inclinations of the human mind toward the paranoid fantasies that often structure this work? This course will ask such questions by focusing on religious vision, paranoia, and ideas of space in the mostly 20C American work. Authors studied will include the amazing writer and artist Henry Darger, paranoid racist Frances E. Dec, visionary preacher Howard Finster, pacifist topiary artist Pearl Fryer, cartoonist hero George Herriman, worst writer ever Amanda McKittrick Ros, and hallucinatory spiritualist Hannah Weiner, along with theoretical work by Artaud, Freud, Schreber, and Lefebvre.
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| ENGLISH 103 | POETIC RHYTHM | ROBERTS, H. | This course will provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the study of prosody--the critical analysis of poetic meter and poetic rhythm. The course will be taught principally via web-based modules that students will work through each week at their own pace. There will be weekly class meetings at which students can raise questions and be tested on their progress. The final grade will be based upon a final examination and a variety of shorter written assignments.
Texts: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction and Margaret Ferguson et al. (eds.) The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Fifth Edition).
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| ENGLISH 103 | GOD:LITERARY INTRO | MILES, J. | The Bible, the foundational classic of Western literature, exists in two main editions: the Jewish and the Christian. This course provides a concise historical introduction to the history of the Bible in both its editions and a more extended literary introduction to the story (rather than the history) that is told in the Jewish edition of the Bible, the Tanakh, more usually called the Old Testament. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RENAISS ENG POETRY | HELFER, R. | This course will explore the remarkable poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Reading a wide variety of early modern writers, as well as some contemporary literary criticism, we will reflect upon the relationship between poetry and politics, self and society, renewal and reformation. The requirements for this course will include short response papers and either two essays of approximately 10 pages each or one essay of approximately 20 pages. The text for this course is The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1B: The Early Modern Period. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LIT OF CALIFORNIA | THOMAS, B. | E 106 is designed as a seminar for senior English majors. Our section will focus on the literature of California. Larger than most countries, California has developed its own literary tradition. We will read a representative selection of that tradition, including selections from Royce's THE HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, Muir's THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA, a story or two by Twain, a poem by Bret Harte, Ruiz de Burton's THE SQUATTER AND THE DON, Norris's McTEAGUE, West's THE DAY OF THE LOCUSTS, poetry by Jeffers and Winters, Bulason's AMERICA IS IN THE HEART, Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, and Kingston's CHINAMEN. Students will write either a series of short essays or a research paper.
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| ENGLISH 106 | WORDSWORTH | WARMINSKI, A. | Close reading of Wordsworth's major works with an emphasis on his autobiographical "Prelude." Focus on the self-reflexivity peculiar to Wordsworth (and romantic lyric) and the problematic notion of history that it engenders. Two papers.
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| ENGLISH 106 | REN COURTSHIP LIT | KIENE, J. | This seminar will study 16th- and 17th-century English rhetorical culture through the literature of courtship, defined in this course as literature that seeks to entice, persuade, or win the favor of a lover, a ruler, or God. We’ll begin by examining the conventions of love lyric, reading a selection of poems in which speakers address beloved ladies. We’ll then look at ways in which poets of the Elizabethan age and after adapted the conventions of love lyric to curry favor at royal courts or to gain the financial support and protection of wealthy patrons and even Queen Elizabeth herself. We’ll conclude by tracing these conventions into devotional poetry written to court divine favor. As part of our investigation of “courtship,” we’ll also read works that examine the complex dynamics of life “at court” during the Renaissance.
Reading may include works by Castiglione, Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Lanyer, Donne, and Herbert. Requirements will include regular participation in class discussion, a formal presentation, short response papers, and a research essay.
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| ENGLISH 210 | WORDSWORTH&THEORY | WARMINSKI, A. | [Course Code: 24500] Mondays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
Close reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude and some other major romantic poems. The course will focus on the self-consciousness and self-reflexivity proper to the romantics and the vision of history that this self-reflection engenders. One hypothesis of the course is that (both older and more recent) attempts to “historicize” the romantics need to overlook the “negativity” peculiar to the language of romantic poetry in its truly historical and material specificity. Another hypothesis is that, once read, the texts of the romantics, rather than legitimating the aesthetic, historicist, or other (“Romantic” or “German”) ideologies that dominate contemporary theory, can instead serve as the most powerful resource for their critical dismantling. Testing these hypotheses will require some attention to Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Paul de Man’s (abandoned?) attempt at a “historical definition” of Romanticism. Texts: Wordsworth, short lyrics and The Prelude; Keats, selected poems; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism and The Rhetoric of Romanticism; essays by Abrams, Hartman, Bloom, Lacoue-Labarthe/Nancy, and others. Seminar or pro-seminar. |
| ENGLISH 210 | HIST/MEMRY&AFAM LIT | KEIZER, A. | [Course Code: 24502] Tuesdays 11:00-1:50pm HIB 341
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
History, especially the history of slavery, haunts contemporary African American literature. As the experience of American slavery recedes further into the past, it seems to loom larger in the black literary imagination. This course will examine novels (and some visual artworks) published from the 1970s through the 1990s and the ways in which they address memory (especially the memory of trauma), oral and written history, and the formation of black subjectivity. If, as novelist Charles Johnson argues, “each plot. . . is also an argument,” then a major function of this course is to analyze the arguments—about memory, history, and identity—embedded in contemporary African American fiction, as well as the idea of literature as a form of theory. Our critical readings will include trauma theory, theories of “racial melancholia,” and contemporary analyses of the ontology of the enslaved (e.g., “social death”).
There are three major requirements for this seminar: 1) an in-class presentation of one week’s reading, including a set of questions to help guide the discussion, 2) a 20-25-page research paper, and 3) a short prospectus (about 5-6 pages) for the research paper. Students taking the class as a proseminar will write a shorter paper.
Books:
“The Education of Mingo,” Charles Johnson (short story)
Corregidora, Gayl Jones
A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan
Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Kindred, Octavia Butler
The Known World, Edward P. Jones
Pictures from Another Time: The Art of Kara Walker
“The Attendant,” Isaac Julien (film to be shown in class)
Critical essays to accompany the literary works will be distributed as PDF documents.
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| ENGLISH 210 | LIT&PHILOS OF LANG | BARTLETT, J. | [Course Code: 24506] Fridays 2:00-4:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This course will provide an introduction to some connections between the narrative conventions of the novel and the field of analytic philosophy. When we ask how a sentence in use expresses the thought that attaches to it, or how descriptions of relations conjure the fictional world that in turn depends upon them, what we are really revealing is the conditions that must obtain if the sentence or relations are to count as meaningful. Each referring term in a novel carries its truth conditions with it—-a speaker’s propositional attitudes or background, her intention, the conventions within which she and the novel operates, the criteria under which readers can verify, use, translate, or name the object of her sentence—-and as these conditions shift, characters and plots emerge and develop. Recently, these conditions have emerged as available for literary study. New philosophically inflected criticism on reference and literary objects by Elaine Scarry, Barbara Johnson, Myra Jehlen and others has appeared alongside issues of philosophical journals devoted to intersections between analytic philosophy and narrative. Literary critical panels on ordinary language philosophy, reference and sensation, and the philosophy of actants and objects are proliferating. And analytic philosophy is furthering its application to the questions of metaphysics, hermeneutics, and motor-intentional embodiment that have engaged literary critics for decades. This course reflects this critical turn, arguing that intersections between analytic philosophy and the novel prove vital to our understanding of how language and narratives work. Some of our subjects may include (but are not limited to) theories of reference, speech acts, intentionality, metaphor, translation, demonstratives, fictionality, propositional attitudes, pragmatics, meaning and use.
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| ENGLISH 210 | AESTHETIC THEORY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | [Course Code: 24508] Tuesdays 04:00-6:50pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
What is the aesthetic? How are the norms of “the true and the beautiful” determined in Nature, and in Art? How does art/literature speak and to whom? Why do we need a theory for understanding Art and Literature? How do form and content blend in the structure known as the art/literary work? Is there an ideology behind aesthetics? How are politics and aesthetics related to each other: through the individual, society, the nation, the State, class, gender, sexuality, Capital, the commodity form? What is “experience” and how does art/literature frame it? How is the world figured in artistic expression, and how does “worldliness” constrain the freedom of Art? Why are there are fierce controversies about Art and its truth claims about the World? Is it possible to make objective evaluations about such rampantly subjective phenomena as taste, sensibility, pleasure etc? Does literature/art have a purpose, or is it “purposelessly purposive,” as the great philosopher Immanuel Kant would have it? How does aesthetic judgment differ from political or moral evaluation? Can there be a universal aesthetic, or is the aesthetic subject to the vagaries and contingencies of history and circumstance? When and how does the aesthetic function as a critique (utopian or immanent) of reality, and when how does it become complicit with the world as it is? How does the aesthetic experience reconcile matter with spirit, objectivity with subjectivity? What is its mode of appeal: rational or irrational, affective or cognitive, sensuous or intellectual? W.H.Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” whereas the romantic-revolutionary Shelley anointed poets as “the unacknowledged legislators” of the universe, while his contemporary Keats maintained that “Beauty was Truth and Truth Beauty.” ? Who was right? Is there even right and wrong in such matters? These are some of the questions that we will be raising in this seminar as we study a number of literary texts, primarily poems, and theoretical texts that deal with the fraught and contradictory relationship of the aesthetic text to the world at large.
Tentative list of authors to be studied: Adrienne Rich, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre.
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| ENGLISH 210 | POETIC RHYTHM | ROBERTS, H. | [Course Code: 24510] Thursdays 12:30-3:20pm HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
This course is designed to give students an introduction to practical prosodic analysis and an outline of the history of English prosody from the Renaissance to the present day. It assumes, at best, a very rudimentary knowledge of prosody on the student's part. If you consider yourself already adept at scanning lines of English verse and have no difficulty in distinguishing, say, catalectic trochaic tetrameter from acephalic iambic tetrameter, then this course is not for you. If, on the other hand, you're only "pretty sure" that something is in iambic pentameter if most of the lines seem to have ten syllables and you'd draw a blank if someone asked you to describe the difference between Pope's use of the heroic couplet and Shelley's, or Shakespeare's early and late blank verse, then I hope this course will open up whole new dimensions to you even in works that seem very familiar.
Coursework: Students will perform innumerable prosodic exercises; write short essays in prosodic analysis and sit an exam.
(NB: it will be difficult to generate a seminar length paper out of this course because its focus is practical rather than theoretical.)
Required texts:
Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge
Ferguson et al, Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Fifth Edition. Norton.
Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Norton.
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| ENGLISH 210 | RENAISSANCE SONNET | HELFER, R. | [Course Code: 24504] Thursdays 9:00-11:50am HIB 411
Enrollment via [SEMINAR REQUEST FORM]
Although only fourteen lines, the Renaissance sonnet was one of the most pervasive and influential literary forms for approximately three centuries. This course will explore the sonnet as a compact yet powerful vehicle for negotiating boundaries between authorship and authority, imitation and innovation, past and present. Beginning with Continental sonnet cycles by Petrarch and Du Bellay, we will then consider sonnet sequences by authors such as Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Wroth, as well as individual sonnets by a variety of early modern English writers. In secondary readings, we will examine the sonnet form from a range of historical and critical perspectives. The requirements for this course will include a weekly response paper and an essay of either 10-15 pages (pro-seminar) or 20-25 pages (seminar). Please bring Petrarch's Lyric Poems (trans. R. Durling, Harvard U.P., 2001) to the first class. |
| ENGLISH 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | English 290 enrollment requires submission of an approved Independent Study proposal form available [HERE] by the end of the second week of classes (April 9, 2010). Students may add or drop the course by obtaining a code from the administrator. |