| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 102C | AMERICAN RENAISSANCE | HICKS, J | This course examines the literature of the period sometimes known as the American Renaissance (1830–1865), with a special emphasis on Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe, each of whom had an enormous impact on subsequent(modernist) literary traditions in the U.S. and abroad. Through careful readings of their central works, we will trace the development of new literary techniques and modes of expression that helped establish the still-emerging idea of a distinctly American literary tradition: Whitman’s use of free verse and his efforts to craft an inclusive, democratic poetic discourse; Poe’s development of detective fiction and use of unreliable narrators; and Dickinson’s adaptation of the humble common meter quatrain (usually associated with hymns) and her practice of including variant wordings in her manuscripts. We will also read texts by other major authors of the period, including essays by Emerson and Thoreau, short fiction by Melville, and excerpts from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, as well as a selection of contemporary popular verse. |
| ENGLISH 102D | MODERNISM | HARRIES, M. | ‘Modernism’, as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment, has been retrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of ‘modern’ or even ‘absolute modern’ between, say, 1890 and 1940. We still habitually use ‘modern’ of a world between a century and half-a-century old. Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” (1989) After World War II, critics in the Anglophone world began to call the experimental art of the 1890s and the first part of the century “modernist.” This name stemmed from the sometimes startling formal features of this art – its fragmentation, for instance, or its concentration on the movement of the individual consciousness – and the belief that this art best reflected its epoch. This course will look closely at crucial examples of modernist literature from Britain and the United States, considering drama, poetry, and prose fiction. It will consider the relationship between the details of texts and their historical moment, asking how these “modernist” works reflect, refract, or reject a larger modernity. Texts will include plays by Henrik Ibsen; Joseph Conrad’s novella, “Heart of Darkness”; William Carlos Williams’ volume of poetry and prose, Spring and All; Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway; and plays by Samuel Beckett. |
| ENGLISH 210 | SHAKESPEARE | SILVER, V. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | LITERARY ANIMALS | DAVIS, R. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | DICKENS | ABRAMS, B. | |
| ENGLISH 210 | LIT TECH & MULTILIN | QUEEN, B. |