| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ENGLISH 8 | AMERICAN LITERATURE | ETTER, W. | |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC & TRAGIC VISION | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 102A | RACE AND GENDER IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE | SANCHEZ, M.E. | This course has a dual purpose: we will examine some primary texts that use race and gender as means of talking about issues of sovereignty, nationalism, governance, religion, and ethics in early modern England, and we will also consider the ways in which race and gender are appropriated in contemporary literary criticism. Both concerns ultimately address the relationship between the two categories as they are directed towards political and ethical rhetoric. In early modern texts, these highly porous categories provide elastic frames that comment as much on changing perceptions of what race and gender meant to a newly emerging world power as on the political allegiances of their authors. The poetry and prose of the early modern period proper will offer many opportunities to trace the uses of racial and gendered discourse to explain, justify, or question the changes in British political, religious, and cultural organizations from the reign of Elizabeth I to the restoration of Charles II. As we consider both the job performed by race and gender in early modern British literature, we will also address the place of religion and nationality in forming early modern identities. |
| ENGLISH 102B | RESTORATION LITERATURE | DENMAN, J.R. | This course will cover six major restoration plays, slanted heavily toward comedies. We\'ll read plays by Dryden, Behn, Wycherley, Etherege, and Congreve. Lectures will incorporate the historical and political background necessary to understand these challenging texts. The main emphasis will be on the question of how Restoration literature constitutes a response to the upheaval of the English civil war, how it self-consciously represents the fragility and artificiality of governmental stability, largely through the metaphor of erotic conduct.One 5-6 page paper, Mid-term, Final. |
| ENGLISH 102C | THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTION | ROBERTS, H.J. | This course provides an introduction to the literature of a complex and fascinating period in British social and literary history. Most of the works we will read were written while Britain was waging a counterrevolutionary war with France in the wake of the French Revolution (which began in 1789). During this period of intense political struggle and debate, a new and profoundly influential literary movement--Romanticism--began to emerge throughout Europe. By reading the works of lesser known poets of the period alongside such familiar figures as Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth we will be able to explore both the continuities and the differences between the late Eighteenth Century literature of \"sensibility\" and the emergent literature of Romanticism. At the same time, we will read a number of contemporary political and aesthetic prose documents which will allow us to relate the changing aims and concerns of the poetry we are reading to the turbulent political events of the period. |
| ENGLISH 102D | ANGLO-AMERICAN MODERNISM | NORRIS, M. | This course is designed to explore the major canonical works of Modernism by British, Irish, and American writers whose works encompass the period from just before the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War II. The lectures will attempt to focus on the historical conditions of each writer, and the formal experiments and innovations that were the poetic response to those conditions. We\'ll read Joseph Conrad\'s The Heart of Darkness, several of James Joyces stories in Dubliners, T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf\'s Mrs. Dalloway Gertrude Stein\'s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, D. H. Lawrence\'s Lady Chatterley\'s Lover, Nella Larsens Quicksand, as well as some poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. There will be two examinations--a mid-term and a final. The examinations will be half objective, half essay. |
| ENGLISH 103 | THE ROMANTIC NOVEL | CHRISTENSEN, J.C. | In this course we will read fiction and non-fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, predominantly from England but with examples from Germany. At its broadest sweep this is a course in the problem of the representation of feeling. We shall investigate writers\' strategies for rendering the fluxes and refluxes of feeling in narrative; attend to the ways in which kinds of feelings and manners of feeling involved political positions and social dispositions; and examine how the representation of feeling was imagined to produce by gentle influence or rough violence responsive emotional states in characters or readers. At the end of quarter we will address how, in the works of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, the problem of representing feeling provoked reflection on the historically specific conditions that determine the kinds of feelings that persons are able to have. Authors will include Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Edmund Burke, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, William Godwin, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott. Students can expect to write two 3-5 page papers and to complete a take-home final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | GILDED AGE IMMIGRATION | OSTER, S. | Mark Twain and his co-author named the period after the Civil War the “Gilded Age,” indicating the rise of corporate capitalism, the extreme division between the wealthy and the poor, the constant taint of criminal conspiracies between businessmen and politicians, and a general air of social mistrust. These issues were only complicated by massive waves of immigration to the United States, particularly after 1880. We will look at a number of immigrant and international narratives from roughly 1880 to 1925 to see how both immigrant and “native” writers responded to these changes. We will focus on literary explorations of the vicissitudes of race, ethnicity, and American identity, as well as questions of economics, cosmopolitanism, and national citizenship. Authors include Mark Twain, Henry James, Abraham Cahan, Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, and Willa Cather. There will be two papers, a mid-term, and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 103 | NEW JOURNALISM | SIEGEL, B. | \"New Journalism\" is a label that Tom Wolfe and others applied to a form of literary journalism that began appearing in magazines and books in the 1960s. It wasn\'t truly new, but it did introduce a new generation of writers who were consciously crafting nonfiction prose that read like novels, that adopted the aims and techniques of the finest fiction. These \"new journalists,\" looking out at a country then undergoing seemingly apocalyptic change, saw a phantasmagoria richer than anything they could make up. So they plunged in, combining rigorous reporting with writing styles that paid close attention to voice, character, motivation, structure, points of view, scenes, dialogue and interior monologue. The masters students will study in this class include John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, John McPhee, Michael Herr and Hunter Thompson. Through a critical reading of their work, students will see how New Journalism planted the seeds for the decades of literary journalism that have followed. Same as Lit/Jrn 103, Lec A. |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS LIFE STORIES | YAMADA, M. | In \"Writing Lifestories\" we will do more than recover personal memories and retell family stories. Most of us carry fragments of images, memories, dreams and stories, a mixture of Asian and American cultures, collected through our own lifetime and through the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. In \"Writing Lifestories\" these fragments of our Asian ancestral ties may be melded together into an artistic whole. This melding process will be done through putting those personal fragments in context by researching the historical and cultural backgrounds of our ancestors. Through collecting visual images of periods long past as well as myths and tales, we may see and hear the world as our ancestors saw and heard it. Through exploring the sign of the times when they first stepped foot on the new land that would become their home, we may come to understand their hopes, dreams and fears and capture the interior life of a transformed culture. Toni Morrison called it \"a kind of literary archeology.\" \"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning,\" she tells us, \"it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.\" We will examine creative works that combine family stories and historical data. Course requirements: 1. Informal response papers on the works assigned. 2. In lieu of a final exam, a final project of your findings including writings and documentation. 3. An annotated bibliography of your sources. 4. An oral report. Same as AsianAm 110 and LJ 103, Lec B. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFRICAN-AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVES | BARRETT, L.W. | This course will examine primarily the \"classic\" U.S. Slave Narrative (1836 - 1965) and consider issues of authorial control of the narrative, as well as the strategies by which the texts challenge the regulatory mechanisms of race, gender, and sexuality. Texts which include: \"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass\", \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\", \" The Fugitive Blacksmith\" and others. Course work will include a mid-term, final and one paper. Same as AfAm 130, Lec B. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CONTEMPORARY IRISH POETRY | O\'CONNOR, L. | We\'ll read a range of contemporary Irish poets, and develop several
thematic frameworks for discussion, with a view to stimulating
participants to write strong research-papers on elective topics.
weekly writing assignments, midterm, final, research-paper. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RHETORIC OF RELIGION | MAILLOUX, S.J. | This course will study the rhetorical effects of various religious texts and examine the cultural conversations in which those texts are read for different purposes. We will begin with an introduction to classical rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome and examine the relation of rhetoric as persuasion to the Christian notion of faith. We will study the text and context of St. Paul\'s Epistles and then look at some literary, philosophical, and political receptions of Pauline Christianity and its variants. Readings will include Augustine\'s Confessions, Equiano\'s Interesting Narrative, Nietzsche\'s The Anti-Christ, Faulkner\'s A Fable, Kesey\'s One Flew Over the Cuckoo\'s Nest, Ngugi\'s The River Between, and Badiou\'s St. Paul. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LAW & LITERATURE | THOMAS, B. | Law and Literature is an advanced seminar for English majors. It also fulfills requirements for the Law and Humanities Minor. We will read works of both literature and law. The first unit will be on one way in which the law can affect literature: censorship. In this unit we will read some famous arguments for and against censorship. We will also read some Supreme Court cases on freedom of speech and hate speech. The second unit will look at Melville\'s Billy Budd in relation to legal and political issues raised by the French Revolution and its aftermath. The third unit will look at literary and legal documents from the US Civil War. We will look at Abraham Lincoln as a \"wordsmith\"--some have argued that his command of rhetoric won the Civil War
for the North--and at civil liberties disputes growing out of the war. The later should shed light on present debates about the Patriot Act and civil liberties. |
| ENGLISH 106 | MILTON | SILVER, V.A. | The course will cover selections of Milton\'s poetry and prose, towards reading Paradise Lost. But those readings will be framed by both The Malleus Maleficarum (\'The Witches\' Hammer\'), a handbook for members of the Holy Inquisition, and some altogether surprising remarks of Martin Luther, the better to understand how one can be a religious iconoclast and a poet simultaneously--as Milton is. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RISE OF ROMANCE | GEORGIANNA, L.M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | VICTORIAN SUBJECTS | NEWSOM, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | ENG AS WORLD LANG | O'CONNOR, L. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | 20TH C AMRCN LIT | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | 18TH C NOVEL | FOLKENFLIK, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMERCN ENLIGHTMNT | TAMARKIN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 225 | BEING A WRITER | RYAN, M.R. | |
| ENGLISH 230 | TBA | STAFF | |
| ENGLISH 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | STAFF | |