| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH 8 | AMER LIT: CONSTRUCTING "AMERICA" | ZIMMERMAN, R.B. | In this course, "Constructing 'America,'" we will read a number of narratives by major 19th and 20th century U.S. authors and examine how--in different historical and cultural contexts--they conceptualize "America" and "Americans." We will explore how national, ethnic, racial, class, and gender identities are dramatized in these texts and the diverse notions of "America" and "American" identity these narratives construct and/or resist. We will study texts by Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Pynchon, and Bharati Mukherjee. Grades will be based on two 4-6 page essays and one 5-7 page essay, as well as on homework study questions and in-class quizzes. |
| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division requirement. E28A and E28D may not both be taken for credit. |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | STAFF | Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. Prerequisite: satisfaction of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| ENGLISH 102A | CHAUCER/GAWAIN POET | ALLEN, E.G. | E 102A Chaucer and Gawain-Poet
In a time of tremendous social and political upheaval, medieval writers imagined worlds through romances and dreams—visions of alternate realities, experiments with social reform, wishes for heavenly ideals, fears of hellish punishments. These visions reach a particular height in the early poems of Chaucer (before the Canterbury Tales) and in the poems of the so-called Gawain-poet or Pearl-poet, an anonymous northern writer whose works appear in a single manuscript. In this course we will explore the poems of both writers, which are both typical of the period and exceptional in their condensation of medieval English religious and social anxieties. Although neither poet appears to have know the other, both were working at about the same time and in different places. We will explore in depth the interconnected literary environment that these poets create, and the hopes and dreams to which they give voice. You will be doing some reading in Middle English, but no previous experience is expected or required. There will be a midterm, a final, a paper, and assorted smaller assignments.
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| ENGLISH 102B | LITERATURE OF (THE) ENLIGHTENMENT | LEWIS, J. | The period covered in this course, 1660-1820, knew itself--and has long been known as--"the Enlightenment" and among other things prided itself on the shining of the new "light" of reason, scientific knowledge, and toleration on the old darkness of superstition and political oppression. But was "the Enlightenment" all it claimed to be? What were its limitations and unique possibilities? Most important for our purposes, how did English literature of the Enlightenment both reflect and challenge its values? How can that literature help us to understand our own, present-day quest for deeper understanding of our identity and future as human beings? In this course, we will be exploring a range of literary texts, some quite challenging, which worked through the problem of enlightenment and helped to bring our modern world and understanding of the human into being. Authors explored include: Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Please note that the course spans the Restoration, Augustan and romantic periods, and that it uses a historical and philosophical framework to make sense of a diverse array of genres and authors. Requirements include: midterm, final, 6- to 8-page paper, and at least two informal, fun assignments. |
| ENGLISH 102C | ROMANTICISM AND FAILURE: THE YOUNG ROMANTICS | ROBERTS, H.J. | In this course we will explore the writings of the "second generation" of English Romantic poets. We will look at the ways in which the redemptive promise of High Romanticism is increasingly called into question by the writers who emerge after the great achievements of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the tense political context of the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and the repressive European order which followed in its wake, writers as diverse as Byron, Thomas de Quincey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Felicia Hemans explored extremes of feeling, of aestheticism, of political protest, and of ironic detachment which have in common a fascination with incompletion or "failure". |
| ENGLISH 102D | ANGLO-AMERICAN MODERNSM | O'CONNOR, L.B. | We'll read a range of poetry and fiction--by T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison--with special attention to questions of persona.
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| ENGLISH 103 | MILITARY CULTURE | BURKE, C.M. | Members of the military share an identity fashioned by a distinctive military culture. Through film, literature, and folklore this course explores not only the official tradition of military life (the formal dress parades, heroes’ welcome, and the displays of deference to rank) but also its unofficial, ostensibly transgressive counterpart: parodies, pranks, fake commendations, and the hazing of new recruits. |
| ENGLISH 103 | PUBLIC WRITING | JARRATT, S.C. | (Same as LJ 103) Remember the muckrakers? those spirited, civic-minded investigative journalists from early in the 20th-century who went after corrupt industrialists with such wit and enthusiasm? In the divided opinion of their era, they were either "bold defenders of the people" or scandal-mongers who wrote only "sad substitutes for intelligent policy" (Webster's 3rd International). You be the judge of their 21st-century successors in this section of LJ 103, featuring readings in contemporary advocacy journalism. We will read English-language writers from distant sites taking up daunting problems of globalization and political change: Indian novelist-turned-activist Arundhati Roy's essays on the post-9/11 world conflict (Power Politics), South African radio journalist Antjie Krog's meditation on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (Country of My Skull), and Canadian Naomi Klein's No Logo, a razor-sharp attack on branding first published as a Village Voice series. On the home front, we will analyze the interplay of narrative and argument in Jon Krakauer's controversial account of Mormon violence (Under the Banner of Heaven) and Joan Didion's exile reflections on California (Where I Was From). Writings will include analyses of the readings from a writer's perspective and at least one extended public argument.
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| ENGLISH 103 | SPORTS LITERATURE | HOLLOWELL, J.W. | (same as LJ 103) The Sports Literature course will be cross listed for Literary Journalism and English majors. Major sports to be represented are basketball, football, baseball, tennis, boxing, bullfighting, etc. The double goal will be to select excellent examples of literary nonfiction by writers such as Mailer, Hemingway, Roger Angell, John McPhee, and Gary Smith. We will pay special attention to techniques of reporting and narrative recosntruction. The larger question will be how our sports connect to us as people and communities. Differences will noted for example between short intense sports (basketball, say) and longer, more bucolic sports (baseball). I imagine there will be 2 short papers to write and a final exam. |
| ENGLISH 105 | HARLM REN SOPHIATWN | MASILELA, N. | Same as AfAm 130. Description listed under African American Studies. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AFR AM SLAVE NARR | BARRETT, L.W. | Same as AfAm 130. Description listed under African American Studies. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CHAUCER CANTERBURY TALES | ALLEN, E.G. | Late fourteenth-century England saw great social turmoil: the Plague wiped out a third of the population; peasants and artisans rose against the aristocracy; the King struggled to retain authority and was eventually deposed; the Church was divided against itself. Out of this social unrest comes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales--a work full of chivalrous knights, valiant heroes, and beautiful ladies, but also full of corrupt preachers, bawdy women, and lecherous old men. The work creates a lively microcosm of the turbulent late medieval world, complete with a cook so drunk he falls off his horse and a parson so virtuous he won't tell a story. The Canterbury Tales show us a world deeply different from our own. Chaucer's strangeness to our modern sensibilities can make us puzzled and curious, but as we will see, can also give us tools for interpretation. You will be reading in Middle English, but no prior experience is expected or required. Three short papers, final exam. |
| ENGLISH 106 | VERNACULAR ENG&LIT | O'CONNOR, L.B. | We'll explore concepts of "standard" English, "English-only" ideology, and what it means for literary texts to employ varieties of English that are regarded as non-standard by the mainstream. |
| ENGLISH 106 | IDEAS OF TRAGEDY | TERADA, R. | (Same as CL 106) This course is a small, discussion-based seminar that uses 19th and 20th c. film, philosophy, fiction, and possibly current events to explore ideas of the tragic other than the traditional notion of heroic individual fault: for example, physical and linguistic limit, deliberate injustice, mechanical repetition, and utter randomness. Authors and directors to be studied include Arendt, Egoyan, Freud, Hitchcock, Kleist, Lispector, Soares, and Winterbottom. |
| ENGLISH 106 | RENAISSANCE PROSE | PFEIFFER, D. | This seminar will examine major humanist innovations in traditional kinds of writing and thinking (historiography, political treatise, essay, familiar letter, narrative fiction, conduct manual) during the European Renaissance, with special attention to the period’s sense of a heightened contest between the “disciplines.” We will focus on the common formal, philosophical, and artistic continuities among these different discourses, including their shared indebtedness to the resources of the classical rhetorical tradition. Authors include Petrarch, Valla, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, and Montaigne. |
| ENGLISH 106 | EARLY MODERN SONNETS | HELFER, R. | Love is a ‘many splendored thing’ in Renaissance sonnet sequences, and this course will pursue both how and why. Beginning with the premise that, as Shakespeare writes, “love is not love” – or not just love, at any rate – this class will explore how the sonnet’s language of love is used to describe a great range of artistic and cultural issues: gender and sexuality, authorship and authority, identity and memory, power and nationhood, and so on. Sonnet sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare will be our primary focus, but we will begin with Petrarch’s influential poetry and end with its influence on Mary Wroth’s anti-Petrarchan sonnets. As well as studying the sonnet’s literary and historical development, we will also consider how sonnet sequences imagine the relationship between the self and world, the secular and divine, the past and present. |
| ENGLISH 210 | VICTORIAN SUBJECTS | NEWSOM, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | AMERCN ENLIGHTMNT | TAMARKIN, E. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | MID-CEN US POL THRY | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | NY INTELLECTUALS | SZALAY, M. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | 18TH C NOVEL | FOLKENFLIK, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | RISE OF ROMANCE | GEORGIANNA, L.M. | |
| ENGLISH 230 | EMILY DICKINSON | RYAN, M.R. | |