ENGLISH Course Descriptions for 2007-2008

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Winter Course Descriptions
CourseTitleInstructorDescription
ENGLISH 7LITERATURE IN ENGLISH FROM 18TH TO 20TH CENTURIESJENKINS, J.The course will focus on romantic poetry, considered in its engagement with religious traditions and with revolutionary political ideas. The two engagements are joined in the theme of redemption of universes, political communities, and single souls. Ideas of time and narrative structure are also involved. Readings of romantics, their forebears, and followers, always in search of ruptures as well as continuities, will include (with many in small doses): Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, the Books of Isaiah and Daniel and the Revelation of John, Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Yeats.
ENGLISH 28APOETIC IMAGINATIONSTAFFReading of selected texts to explore the ways in which this mode formulates experience. Students write several short analytic papers. The required prerequisite for this course is satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.
ENGLISH 28BCOMIC&TRAGIC VISIONSTAFFDiscussion, 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. The required prerequisite for this course is satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.
ENGLISH 100HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISMWARMINSKI, A.Literary theory from Plato on. Focus on the way that the question of "the literary"--once posed correctly--frustrates any and all attempts to theorize it. Texts by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus and their "modern" inheritors. Two exams.
ENGLISH 101WSEX & SCI-FIALEXANDER, J.Science fiction is among the most widely read literary genres in America—and for good reason. Quality SciFi undertakes often rich and complex explorations of pressing technological, social, and even political issues. While some critics and scholars look to SciFi for interesting notions about our relationship to technology, we will look to SciFi for provocative discussions about a major socio-cultural (and political) preoccupation in the West: sex and sexuality. Specifically, we will examine a range of science fiction texts—from stories by H. G. Wells written over a hundred years ago to contemporary texts by Ursula LeGuin and Octavia E. Butler—and ask the following: In what ways do representations of sex and sexuality figure into these works? How are sex and sexuality used to imagine the future and, in the process, reinforce or question contemporary values? Put most simply, how do we imagine the future of sex, and why is this important? To approach these questions, we will read a novel a week (Wells, Zamaytin, Orwell, Delany, Russ, LeGuin, Butler), as well as some critical essays on cultural studies and feminist approaches to SciFi. In addition to periodic short, in-class writing assignments, students will compose an annotated bibliography, a short paper, and a longer paper—all of which will be revised. Brief oral presentations about the longer paper will conclude the course. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100.
ENGLISH 101WTHINKING ABOUT RACETUCKER, I.In this course, we will reflect on the meanings and uses of race by tracing it historically in a variety of scientific and literary texts. We will begin with the classical physician Galen’s reflections on the relations among “human variety,” climate and sickness, trace the transmutations of the category in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural historians like Linnaeus and Buffon, before concluding with nineteenth-century biological and evolutionary and twentieth-century genetic understandings. What does race mean if it can mean so many things? What does it do? Should we understand it as a way of seeing, a way of knowing, a mode of self-organization? Readings include works by Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Wilkie Collins, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Todd Haynes, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Franz Fanon. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100.
ENGLISH 101WPOSTMODERN SUBLIMEAMIRAN, E.Since European antiquity, the concept of the “sublime” in literature and philosophy has designated the experience of the highest and most noble sensations, or else the experience of overpowering energies that confront humanity with its smallness in the universe and, by the same measure (or lack thereof), with the huge raw powers that move the world (together with the sense that humanity can experience these things—isn’t there always a little self-congratulation in self-abnegation?). Sublime art has to transcend ordinary measures, to be extreme by definition, and to transport us from our bounded selves, if only for a moment. In the contemporary postmodern world, on the other hand, the world “after Auschwitz,” as the German philosopher Adorno has put it, the distinctions between base and grand emotions, inspired and pedestrian thought, the transcendent and the transient, the human and the non-human—in short, the distinctions that make the traditional sublime possible—have been questioned, deconstructed, or rejected. Is it then not possible in the postmodern world, the world of the Berlin wall and of Walmart, of Hamburger Helper and of J-Lo, to experience the sublime? What about sex and drugs, formerly seen as debasing experiences that lower rather than raise consciousness? Or is there a new postmodern sublime that survives or perhaps even depends on the loss and rejection of the traditional sublime? Perhaps even a qualified experience can transport contemporary people to a sublime plane of existence. This course will study these questions as a way to understand postmodernism and to read contemporary literature, film, and culture. We’ll round up such post-WWII suspects as Darren Aronofsky, Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, David Lynch, Toni Morrison, Mamoru Oshii, and Andy Warhol, and relate them to modern theoretical work on the sublime to find out. Requirements include three essays and a final exam. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100.
ENGLISH 101WLIT & IMPERIALISMKRISHNAN, S.This course is an introduction to the study of colonial and postcolonial literatures. Although we will concentrate on close readings of novels and short stories, students will be required to do background reading for each class. These readings will provide a basic contextual framework for the literary texts that we discuss. Moving between text and context, we will study the works of Conrad, Kipling, Maugham, Coetzee, Rushdie, Pramoedya, and Devi. We will also be reading selected excerpts from the writings of Nehru and Fanon. The broader questions we will consider are: the relationship (and difference) between commercial and territorial imperialisms; anti-colonial nationalism; the minority question in the post-nationalist state; the role played by the diaspora in mediating the relation between empires old and new; the relationship between empire and the workings of global capitalism. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100.
ENGLISH 101WMATERIALIST MODELSGODDEN, 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, Williams). Since literary words frequently take narrative forms, we will address historiography as it seeks to apprehend the real (Benjamin, White, 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, Harvey). 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 from a single historical period ( U.S., post 1973, variously referred to as “postmodern”, “post industrial”, “flexible Fordist” or “post Fordist”), and will be found in a readily available anthology (The Scribner’s Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American Stories Since 1970). The theoretical extracts will be held in the library on reserve. Requirements include papers totaling 4000 words, and regular seminar attendance. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100.
ENGLISH 101WSHORT FICTIONO'CONNOR, L.In addition to reading a variety of compelling short stories, this seminar will examine the characteristics of this underrated genre. What qualities (besides relative shortness) distinguishes the genre? How has the art of short-story writing changed over time? Weekly papers, midterm, term paper. The required prerequisite for this course is Criticism 100A or English 100.
ENGLISH 102AEARLY MODERN SELFSILVER, V.The course will address how a shift in conceptions of selfhood (in relation to community and cosmos) alters the possibilities and refashions the forms of literate expression from the 14th through the 16th centuries. The course will probably include a late medieval romance, one of Chaucer's two major works, some sonnets from Wyatt to Donne, a play or two of Shakespeare's, and a reasonably dreadful revenge tragedy. There will be two take- home exams and at least one movie.
ENGLISH 102BRESTORATION & REVOLUTIONVAN SANT, A.This course is in part framed by political events. We begin in 1660--with the restoration of the monarchy after civil war, the beheading of a king (Charles I), and several years of Puritan dominance--and end just after 1700, approximately a decade after what became known as the "Glorious Revolution." We will read drama--both aggressive wit comedy and heroic tragedy-- satiric poetry, fiction, and feminist and political essays. Lectures will also provide material from scientific reports and from contemporary philosophy. Readings (in some cases, selections) include Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies; John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress; Daniel Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and All for Love; poetry by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Mary Lee, Lady Chudleigh; and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. This material invites us to ask questions about literary form, political structures and principles, marriage, property, and the status of women. And it invites us to consider fundamental contrasts in a period marked both by restoration and by revolution. Students will be required to write one paper (5-7 pages), take two exams (midterm and final), and participate in class and noteboard discussion.
ENGLISH 102CVICTORIAN LITKROLL, A.Later Victorian Literature: Underworlds and Otherworlds In this course, we will explore late Victorian social, spiritual, and cultural anxieties as expressed in a number of fin de siècle texts which center on the demi-monde, the supernatural, the magic(k)al, and the mystical. The overlapping of these worlds in many of our course readings will particularly concern us as reflective of an instability of categories indicative of a culture in chaotic transition. Readings might include: Stoker's Dracula; Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray; the ghost stories of M.R. James; Conan Doyle's short stories; Thomson's City of Dreadful Night; papers from the Society for Psychical Research, The Theosophical Society, and The Golden Dawn. Take-home midterm and final, possibly also a short paper.
ENGLISH 102CUS LIT:SLAVERYTAMARKIN, E.This course traces the literary and cultural response to the institution of slavery in the U.S. in the years before Emancipation. We will consider a series of texts and images depicting the dramas of displacement and subjection that mark the experience of the "middle passage," the slave trade, and life on the plantations. We will also look at the articulations and strategies of the antislavery movement and its efforts to variously appeal on political, religious and social grounds. In the process, this class will ask questions about the difficult relationship of race to national identity and of politics to both ethics and aesthetic forms. Readings will include works by Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, David Walker, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and others.
ENGLISH 102DAMERICAN LIT:1920'SGODDEN, R.The Twenties will be understood as a long decade in order to approach it through such extended and insistent patterns of determination as shifts in the prevalent forms of production (associated with Taylorism and Fordism); the Great War; the Great Migration; the intensification of advertising attendant upon an enlargement of the consumer network, and the continuing marginalization of the South as a region committed to labor bound by debt rather than to free wage labor. Such economic elements and their cultural consequences (alienation/reification, commodity aesthetics/capitalist realism, the Jazz Age, Harlem, Modernism…) will be addressed through a range of literary texts, and under a general rubric of modernization, where the processes associated with “making it new” may themselves be glossed, in a phrasing from Marx, as “all that is solid melts into air”. The course will attempt historically to situate and closely to read texts including The Jungle (Upton Sinclair [1907]), In Our Time (Hemingway [1925]), The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot [1922]), The Great Gatsby and “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz”(F. Scott Fitzgerald [1925],[1922]), The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner [1929]), Cane (Jean Toomer [1923]), Passing (Nella Larsen [1929]), and Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos [1915]). Requirements include an essay, a midterm, a final and regular class attendance.
ENGLISH 102DUS VERNACULAR LITO'CONNOR, L.We’ll read works written in a vernacular other than “standard” American English,­ primarily literature of the Harlem Renaissance and of the 1990s­ in order to explore the relationship between language and the formation of US, class, and ethnic identities. Midterm, paper, final.
ENGLISH 103FREE SPEECHJENKINS, J.This course is centered on U.S. Supreme Court cases of the 1960s and 1970s that tailored many of today’s notions of constitutionally protected free speech. Study of the language of those cases (along with law-school case-book explications)is paired with readings of contemporary novels and journalism that deal with similar issues in varying idioms. The course begins with a history book, written in 1960 by Leonard Levy, that challenged received wisdom on the "Founding Fathers" views on freedom of speech. The instructor, who is both a California attorney and a doctor of comparative literature, will provide students with all background necessary to understand the Supreme Court cases assigned. The course is of general interest and especially recommended for students considering a career in law.
ENGLISH 103GOD:LITERARY INTROMILES, J.The Bible, the foundational classic of Western literature, exists in two main editions: the Jewish and the Christian. This course—one of a pair, the other being Christ: A Literary Introduction—includes: 1) a concise historical introduction to the Bible in both its editions; 2) a more extended literary introduction to the Jewish edition of the Bible, the Tanakh, more usually called the Old Testament, centered on God as its protagonist; 3) a sampling of other-than-literary kinds of contemporary Tanakh interpretation: archaeological, political, theological, feminist, etc., and 4) a sampling of the visual, literary, and musical art that has been inspired by the Tanakh. This course will not entail reading the Tanakh (Old Testament) in its entirety. However, the assigned passages will cover the entire length of the classic anthology in the traditional Jewish order, so that students should conclude the course with a sense of what is found where within it. Note that the assigned Bible text for the course is the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh, which does not include the New Testament. Though the New Testament will figure in the historical portion of this course, it will not be read or discussed, the intent being to engage the Jewish classic as a literary achievement in its own right. The required texts are: 1) Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, Student Edition. Jewish Publication Society; 2) John Barton, How the Bible Came to Be. Westminster John Knox Press; and 3) Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? Viking Penguin.
ENGLISH 103JOYCE'S SHORT FICTNMCMICHAEL, J.The course will involve a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of James Joyce's DUBLINERS and A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. There will be a mid-term and a take-home final.
ENGLISH 103SHAKESPEAREHENDERSON, A.In this course, Approaches to Shakespeare, students will learn a variety of techniques for reading, watching, and discussing Shakespeare's plays. We will study three major plays--Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest--from a wide range of perspectives. We will explore, among other things, Shakespeare's use of rhetoric, the influence of editors on Shakespeare's plays, the ways performance functions as interpretation, and the relevance of Renaissance social issues to modern readers and audiences. Coursework will include three papers and weekly exercises.
ENGLISH 105HARLEM RENAISSANCE SOPHIATOWNMASILELA, N.Same as AfAm 118 and HumArts 101. One of the extraordinary events of the twentieth century has been the emergence of black modernities across the oceanic divide. These modernities took on particular historical forms as well as singular cultural configurations. Invariably, in their formation, realization, and actualization, whether on African or in the African Diaspora, they constituted themselves as historical discourse, usually across the Atlantic, about cultural identities, historical survivals, invention of traditions and the formation of new nationalities. At the center of these reciprocal exchanges and interactions in the black world has been the New Negro modernity in the United States. It was largely the New Negro modernity that orchestrated the deeper strains of cultural splay of black historical avant-gardes globally. The course will investigate and analyze some of these seminal United States cultural and literary influences on South Africa. On the cultural plane, of essential importance will be an understanding of how the concepts of the New Negro and New African were formulated and came into being, as well as the 'construction' of the literary periods of the Harlem Renaissance and the Sophiatown Renaissance. Within each literary period, the complexly different intersection and combination of literary modernity and literary modernism will be theorized. Each literary period had a peculiarly differential structure of generic forms. Despite this, several parallels between writers will be discussed: say, between Zora Neale Hurston and Bessie Head, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.I.E. Dhlomo, Langston Hughes and Rive Rive and Ezekiel Mphahlele, Rudolph Fisher and Arthur Maimane, George Schuyler and Casey Motsisi, and etc. Of the six assigned books, five are anthologies. Fredric Jameson has recently observed: "The eclipse of avant-gardes (including political ones) has often been taken to be more than accidental characteristic of the postmodern turn; less often remarked is the concomitant substitution---for the great avant-garde manifestos and indeed for the very conception of the great individual master text or statement---of the anthology, the collective symposium, as the generic expression of the emergence of new concerns and new fields or objects of study." Clearly, the relation between United States and South African concerning modernity and modernism is an emergent new concern of intellectual endeavor.
ENGLISH 105ASIAN AM LITERATURE/FILM ADAPTATIONSSHROFF, B.Same as AsianAm 110 and ComLit 108. This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American texts have been adapted into films. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas and short stories, for example Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's drama, The Wash. Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes retitle and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience such as Heaven and Earth directed by Oliver Stone, and others such as Hot Summer Winds directed by Emiko Omori based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short tories, Seventeen Syllables and Yoneko's Earthquake. We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen--for instance, how dramas lend themselves to screen adaptation more easily than do novels. We interrogate the strengths of each medium such as the scope of the fictional framework, and the spatio-temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium.
ENGLISH 105LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORASHROFF, B.Same as AsianAm 114 and ComLit 143. In this class we analyze the work of writers who are of South Asian ancestry living in North America and Britain. A central concern is how through literary and cinematic representations, spaces of “home” and “belonging” are negotiated through narratives of disjunctures and displacements. How do the literary and cinematic texts represent multiple and contradictorily organized spaces where new identities must be negotiated? How do writers and filmmakers construct and negotiate their identities in their own specific cultural context and also in the larger diasporic context? We analyze texts such as Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories The Interpreter of Maladies, Hanif Kureishi's screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette, and Agha Shahid Ali's poems The Half Inch Himalayas, among others.
ENGLISH 106WORDSWORTHWARMINSKI, 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.
ENGLISH 106SICK IMAGINATIONLEWIS, J.Warning: This class will not be nearly as twisted as its title implies! Our focus will be the relationship between illness and imaginative writing as that relationship has developed historically, mainly in English and American literature. In her essay “On Being Ill” (which we’ll be reading), Virginia Woolf found it “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature". But Woolf may have protested too much: beginning with the ancient Book of Job and working our way up through Woolf to the present, we’ll explore the many literary strategies, both fictional and nonfictional, that writers have used to make sense of their own and others’ physical and sometimes mental suffering. Besides Job, we’ll read Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” for another non-English paradigm of illness writing (also known as “pathography”), look at some 19th-century stories by Poe and Gilman, then focus on an array of more recent works by writers as various as Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Katharine Butler Hathaway (The Little Locksmith), Sherwin Nuland (How We Die), and Miriam Engelberg (Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person), ending with short stories, character sketches, and meditative essays by Helen Simpson, Oliver Sacks and Peggy Phelan. These writers investigate some fundamental questions: Where and how do we draw the line between sickness and health? How can figurative language help us to (re)shape the experience of suffering? What does ‘normal’ really mean? How do social perceptions shape the diseases people ‘have’? Why do we speak of ourselves as ‘having’ and ‘getting’ the illnesses we ‘have’ and ‘get’? How does illness destroy individuality and how can it be used to confirm it? Can the mind or spirit truly be separated from the body? Please note that many of the works we’ll be reading are non- fiction; but they are very imaginative indeed! Along with several short writing exercises, one long paper of 15 to 20 pages is required. A component of it may be an illness narrative of your own.. STUDENTS WHO TOOK E103 (LITERATURE OF AFFLICTION) IN SPRING 2007 MAY NOT ENROLL IN THIS CLASS.
ENGLISH 106SISTER ARTS IN 19CHENDERSON, A.In this course we will discuss the many formal and thematic connections between poetry and the visual arts in nineteenth-century England. Thus, for instance, we will read Wordsworth alongside paintings by Constable, and Byron with Turner and Wright of Derby. In the Victorian period we will study poet/painters like Rossetti as well as writer/photographers like Lewis Carroll. Course requirements will include three papers and some short exercises.
ENGLISH 106KEATSROBERTS, H.This course offers an in-depth study of the poems and letters of John Keats (1795-1821), one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. In addition to detailed study of his major works, we will explore his (all too brief) life, and the social, political, and literary contexts that shaped his writing. Texts: John Keats, Complete Poems (Jack Stillinger, ed.) Harvard UP, 1982; John Keats, Letters of John Keats: A Selection (Robert Gittings, ed. Revised by John Mee) Oxford UP, 2002.
ENGLISH 106MELVILLETAMARKIN, E.Close critical and contextual analysis of major works by Herman Melville, including Moby Dick.
ENGLISH 106WHARTON & JAMESGOBLE, M.This course considers major texts by Henry James and Edith Wharton in light of their shared fascination with marriage, manners, and extravagant wealth. Our readings will survey the shape of each author's career, beginning with some of James' s earlier texts and moving on to later works that demonstrate his stylistic and thematic development. The second half of the course will focus on Wharton. We will read several of her best-known novels, as well as lesser-known works in popular genres, such as the ghost story. We will be especially interested in the ways each author explores a world of propriety, courtship, and sophisticated sociability in order to understand better the violence, sexuality, and brutality this world tries desperately to contain. The course will also provide an overview of the cultural and political contexts asociated with the literary movements with which these authors are most readily identified, i. e., Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism.
ENGLISH 210AGE OF SEGREGATIONTHOMAS, B.
ENGLISH 210WRITERLY READINGRYAN, M.
ENGLISH 210WOOLFLATIOLAIS, P.
ENGLISH 210RACE ENVRNMNT AFFCTTUCKER, I.
ENGLISH 210HENRY JAMESGOBLE, M.
ENGLISH 210COLRIDGE &WORDSWRTHCHRISTENSEN, J.
ENGLISH 210SOCIAL & PSYCHIC FACTTERADA, R.
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF
ENGLISH 290READING&CONFERENCESTAFF