Fall 2000
|
|
|
|
|
|
Students interested in taking introductory-level courses in writing should also see the Rhetoric and Composition section of the catalog. Descriptions of writing-oriented courses and procedures to be followed in order to meet the college-wide writing requirements may be found there. These courses do not count towards an English major.
Colloquia will focus on critical writing and analysis through the study of texts. These colloquia are for first-year students only, and do not count for the English major, which begins with foundation courses at the 200 level. All colloquia are Writing Intensive courses. Students in their second year or beyond should begin work in the English Department at the 200 level.
Identical to EXWR 116 and AAST 116. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
We typically think of a story as an account of people doing something; time and place are usually understood as the "background" against which character and action are played out. For many storytellers, though, the sense of a particular time and place is as important, if not more so. We'll discuss a group of such works, focusing on how stories of this kind of told and on their various conceptions of time and place. We'll also address the value these stories in helping us understanding the meaning of time and place in our lives.
We'll also pay close attention to how we are reading and interpreting these works to answer the questions: How do we make sense of stories? What goes into this apparently natural process? What does it mean to look at a group of texts through a particular critical or thematic lens? What is the relation of our individual experiences of works of art to the kind of knowledge and understanding we can create through critical inquiry and discussion?
We'll look at both movies: American Graffiti, The Year of Living Dangerously, Days of Heaven, and Lone Star, novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Thousand Acres, Housekeeping, and poems: "To Autumn," "The Bight," and "These Lacustrine Cities."
There will be frequent writing assignments with an emphasis on drafts as a process of learning and intellectual discovery and as a communication to a reader. There will also be oral presentations to help students develop skills in communication with each other in groups. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
In this colloquium for first year students we will examine 9-10 scripts that can be seen in the nearby vicinity live, on film, or on video. The goal of the course will be to develop the interpretative and analytic theories and skills required to study scripts meant to be performed as plays rather than to be read as literature. We will proceed using a basic theory that the scripts are not complete works of art in themselves, but require completion in performance involving actors, the scripted words, enactment with costumes and props, a space (if not a set), an audience, movement, and sound. A high priority will be to attend important plays that will be performed in Oberlin or nearby locales during the semester, and students will be expected to attend a live performance, video, or film for each play studied.
William Shakespeare's Macbeth will be performed at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland and we will certainly see it in October, right after Fall Break. Depending on what else is performed nearby, we may also study plays by Sam Shepard (True West), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine), Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), and Henrik Ibsen (Hedda Gabler).
Along with performing two scenes from the assigned plays over the course of the semester, students will keep a performance journal detailing their process of preparation and working out questions regarding character and performance choices. Students will also write three medium length papers and participate in an oral examination. Some critical reading may also be required and short position papers, 1-2 pages, will be required for each play studied. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
An interdisciplinary analysis of dialogue in drama, poetry, fiction, films, philosophy, religion, interviews, debates, therapy, and conversation. Also, readings in theories of dialogue from Plato to Heidegger. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
This course will analyze the pedagogies through which (British) Colonialism (re)made colonial subjects and subjectivities. It will focus especially on the scenes of instruction in a variety of anglophone texts from the so-called Third World. Some of these texts include: Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here, Salman Rushdie's Shame, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Earl Lovelace's Wine of Astonishments, Tsi Tsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Tayeb Salib's Season of Migration to the North. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
An intensive study of the works of William Butler Yeats in their biographical, cultural and historical context. We will read a majority of Yeats' work during the semester, including his Collected Poems, several of his plays, autobiographical writings and essays, and several works by his contemporaries. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
An exploration of U.S. literature alongside U.S. legal developments and recent theoretical work on the textual foundations of law and justice. Special attention will be paid to literary and legal battles over "frontier justice" and "frontiers," whether they are geographic, domestic, rural or urban, policed by slave-catchers, spouses, Texas Rangers or the Chicago Police Department. Fiction and film may include Joaquin Murieta, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Riders of the Purple Sage, Native Son, "A Jury of Her Peers," George Washington Gomez, The Death of Jim Loney, Witness for the Prosecution, Shaft, and Boys Don't Cry. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
This course will study drama as a distinctive form of human artistic production, using examples of Western drama from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary stage. The presumption of the course is that working with the text as a script for performance is the central way of understanding drama, though more traditional approaches through textual analysis and historical study have much to contribute. Class will be mostly discussion and workshop explorations of the plays, and emphasis will be on plays as performances rather than as literary texts. Students need have no acting experience or training, and our aim will not be to attain polished performances but to see what we can learn through our own bodies and voices and through available productions, either live or on film or videotape. The exact plays studied may vary to match available productions on campus or in Cleveland, but we will study about ten plays including Euripides, Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, Brecht, Williams , Fugard, Mamet, Norman, and Wilson. The text will be Stages of Drama, ed. Klaus, Gilbert, and Fields, 4th ed. Requirements will include participation in stagings of several scenes from plays we study, two papers (5-7 pages), several one-page comments, and involvement in class. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
Reading texts ranging from Nella Larsen's Passing to the John Wayne film The Searchers to the "new abolitionist" journal Race Traitor, we will examine our society's fictions of racial difference--and the complex ways they are supported, and subverted, in imaginative fiction. We will pay special attention to the significance of "whiteness" as an often invisible, but nonetheless crucial, racial category. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
Readings of select detective fiction by writers from Poe to Mosely, with attention to the rules of the genre as well as rule-breaking and -changing. Exposure to classic, hard-boiled, and modern and contemporary African-American uses of this popular form will position us to discuss shifts in its formal and thematic emphasis (e.g., style, setting, sensibility, the figure of the detective and viewpoint of the reader) as well as its role as escape literature/social critique. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
This course will examine the monstrous "other" in Victorian literature with attention paid to the order and disorders of empire, sexuality and class as they were channeled through the figure of the monster, the savage, the cannibal, the homosexual and the lunatic. Texts may include: Shelley's Frankenstein, Taylor's Confessions of a Thug, Stoker's Dracula, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
These courses are designed to introduce students to the discipline of literary study in English through a substantial coverage of texts, instruction in the conventions of genre, period, and region as appropriate, and attention to fundamental issues and approaches in critical reading and writing.
Prerequisites: These courses are open to students who have completed any Writing Intensive course, or have gained Writing Certification in any course in the Humanities. They are also open to those who have achieved a 5 on the AP exam in English Language/Composition or English Literature/Composition, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Other students may be admitted by consent of the instructor, with the understanding that students should be able to demonstrate the ability to handle writing, discussion, and analysis in ways typically taught in Writing Intensive classes.
A study of some major Shakespeare plays in relation to selected film interpretations. The course will involve students in analysis of the texts, of the films, and of critical and theoretical issues raised by creating film versions of Shakespearean scripts. We will probably study Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Richard III, and Henry V, in film versions by directors such as Olivier, Branagh, Polanski, Luhrmann, Kosintsev, and Jarman. D, EL. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or a score of 5 on the AP exam in English Language or Literature, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Enrollment limit: 30.
What do we mean by contemporary, by American, by fiction? What are the common ingredients in this period's large body of works--a dose of postmodernism, a dash of modernism, something borrowed, something blue? Because what we read is always marked by various and sundry considerations regarding how and why we read, this survey will set out to answer two questions. First, what are some works and authors which "could" stand in as representatives of the many fictions available in this period, in this country? We'll read certain texts closely, trying to tease out what it is that makes them great, or (post)modern, or American (or what-have-you). Second, what methods and models "should" we use to define and support the selection of these or other representative texts? Works will include Capote, Morrison, DeLillo, Heller, Silko, Vonnegut, Powers, assorted critical essays, and a few films. The semester will conclude with the selection, by each student working in a small group, of a representative author/text which will serve as their case study for class presentation and a final paper. F, AL. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or a score of 5 on the AP exam in English Language or Literature, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Enrollment limit: 30.
An examination of nature, self, culture, and interpretation in the writings of the American transcendentalists of the 19th century: Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Hawthorne, Alcott, Very, etc. This course will also consider more recent versions of the diverse literary/philosophical movement, especially insofar as these versions take up and depart from the transcendentalist notion of nature. F, AL. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or a score of 5 on the AP exam in English Language or Literature, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Enrollment limit: 30.
Tension and change marked the nation's racial and ethnic composition, class formations, gender arrangements, international status and cultural character. The nature of "literature" and the circumstances of its production, distribution and reception were also in ferment. These and other circumstances formed not only literature's contexts, but often its subject matter. We'll look closely at selected texts in the contexts of their creation, thinking about how they reflected and in many cases sought to affect the nation in which they emerged. Reading will include narratives and essays by Howells, James, Jewett, Chesnutt, Hopkins, Twain, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala Sa and others. F, AL. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or a score of 5 on the AP exam in English Language or Literature, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Enrollment limit: 30.
Through a variety of theoretical essays and novels, this course will examine the problems of definition, analysis, and evaluation that attend our interpretation of works from the "Third World." We will consider, for instance, whether or not: 1) "Third World" or "Post-colonial" are appropriate designations; 2) notions of "marginality," "difference," "alterity," so often deployed to characterize these works, are useful interpretive tools; 3) the perception that these works are always already enactments of resistance against dominant ideologies and formations is effective. F, WL. Identical to CMPL 265 and WOST 265. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or a score of 5 on the AP exam in English Language or Literature, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course will study the development of drama from the ancient Greeks to the present with the aim of promoting understanding and analysis of dramatic texts. By studying the major forms of drama--tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy--within their historical and cultural contexts, we will explore the elements common to all dramatic works, as well as the way in which those elements vary and evolve from one time and place to another. D, WL. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or a score of 5 on the AP exam in English Language or Literature, or a score of 710 or better on the SAT II Writing test. Enrollment limit: 30.
Courses at the 300 level are designed to broaden students' experience of literature in English while also deepening the study of the discipline through focused reading of texts, criticism, literary history and theory.
Prerequisites: These courses are open to students who have completed at least 3 courses at the new 200 level, or (for students who have taken courses prior to 1998) at least 3 courses in English at the 150 level or above, or by consent of the instructor.
Assignments will include weekly short prep papers addressing issues raised in the readings; the performance of a scene from one of the plays; a scene journal of 8-10 pages; a midterm essay of 8 pages; a final paper of 10 pages or a final scene. D, EL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Identical to WOST 307. Enrollment Limit: 25.
In many ways the theater of Early Modern England was a small world, the plays we know and admire coming from a small group of highly skilled professional companies performing in an area of a few square miles of London. The playwrights knew one another's plays, and actors performed in repertory, moving quickly from one play to another from day to day. As a result much of the meaning and power of the plays is generated in conversation with other plays and performances. Modern critical theories of intertextuality have sharpened our perception of how texts including plays generate their meaning in conversation. If, as seems likely, Richard Burbage acted Shakespeare's Richard II, he might well have recently played Marlowe's Edward II; and certainly Shakespeare was responding to Marlowe's historical tragedy in his play. This course will explore those two plays and also the following groups: Macbeth and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; Marlowe's Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice, Jonson's Volpone, Othello, and Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Requirements will include a one-page comment on each play; participation in a scene performed in class with a performance journal; two papers (5-7 pages) and participation in class. Texts will be paperbacks of the different plays. D, EL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
In this course, we will explore the emergence of sexual discourse in nineteenth-century Britain, considering the degree to which current concepts of "identity" and "desire" influence readings of nineteenth-century sexual expression/repression. To this end we will study Victorian literary representations alongside recent critical work on sex and sexuality. Topics covered will include: the emergence of sexual science; the links between race, colonialism and sexuality; prostitution; the invention of the homosexual; Sapphism; Decadence; children and sexuality. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
Selected short stories and novels by Frank O'Connor, Samuel Beckett, Mary Lavin, William Trevor, John McGahern, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe, Edna O'Brien, Colm Tobin, Mary Morissey, and Aidan Higgins will be read in the context of modern Irish society, its history, culture, and politics. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
A close study of poetry written in the crucial period between the two world wars. While the course will focus on the poetry and poetics of five American poets (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and the later Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams), we will also read the work of several poets in translation (probably Anna Akhmatova, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda) in order to examine some aspects of international modernism. The course will be taught by a combination of informal lectures and discussion. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two shorter papers (3-4 pages), and a longer paper (around 10 pages). Note that while the normal prerequisite for 300-level work (three 200-level courses) applies, students should ideally have taken at least one previous course focusing on poetry. P, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
Feminist dramatists writing in Britain and the U.S. from the 1920s to the present have challenged and transformed conventional notions of stage space, character development, dramatic narrative, and "appropriate" theatrical subjects. We'll pay particular attention to the relationships of feminist performances to the politics of race and ethnicity. American playwrights may include Treadwell, Glaspell, Kennedy, Shange, Fornes, Smith, Parks, and Vogel; British playwrights may include Delaney, Churchill, Daniels, Gems, Rudet, Pinnock, Chowdhry, and Kane. D, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
The term "theory" is as fetishized, reviled, and misunderstood as any in academia today. Some people think of Theory as more or less synonymous with the "New Gospel," the only exciting thing to think about, or study, or do, while others regard it as the very Devil himself, come to destroy culture and steal our souls. I hold neither view. The diverse group of writers and writings that travel under the name "Theory" are part of historically and institutionally defined debates about literature, meaning, and value in which positions are constantly changing and alliances always shifting. These debates are part of our cultural situation and social institutions, especially American academia, a dwelling in which literature, criticism, and theory cohabit in various perverse ways. This isn't a "how to do it" course in criticism, though we'll pay some attention to how theory turns into method and gets "applied," and why this happens. The goal of this course is to understand particular strains of "Theory" as ways of writing and thinking, as parts of a larger discourse which is both about and part of what, for lack of a better phrase, we'll call "our symbolic world."
We'll approach this material by examining the institutions of Literature and Criticism in the academic and artistic world of the U.S. We'll begin with the rise of New Criticism, with its particular mixtures of modernist aesthetics and formalist method, and its relation to romantic/enlightenment humanism. After examining structuralism, we'll take up the French post-structuralist writers as they were received in the U.S. and how they affected American critics and writers in the academy and outside it. We'll be exploring the questions 1) what was/is post-structuralism and why did it have such an impact on the American academy? 2) What are the relations between post-structuralism and the critical theories and methods that appear in its wake, particularly those that "politicize" literary and cultural studies? 3) How do we understand the relations among theory, literature, and criticism at this moment?
The course will work by a combination of lecture and discussion. Four short essays and one long essay to be done in drafts. We'll read works by Derrida, the blond vampire of French philosophy, Barthes, Butler, Belsy, Baudrillard, Cixous, Fish, Harraway, Jameson, Lacan, Silliman, the ubiquitous Foucault, and others notable and notorious. We'll also look at five narratives, not as objects for theory to be applied to but as part of the theoretical/literary/critical conversation of the last three decades. These are Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson, The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King, and the Sandra Bernhart/John Boskovic movie Without You, I'm Nothing.
Requirements: an essay of 2500-3000 words to be written in draft, 5 shorter 500 word essays due about every other week, and an out of class discussion group. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
This course studies changing human attitudes toward the wilderness, as reflected in literary texts from different times and places. We begin with Gilgamesh and progress to the present, shifting from Eurasian and European contexts to American literature and coming on up to the current debate about the meaning and value of wilderness. Among the authors studied: the Gawain poet, Conrad, Thoreau, Muir, Faulkner, Jeffers, Leopold, Beston, Carson, Berry, Abbey and Snyder. AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
Identical to CRWR 310.
Identical to CRWR 340.
Identical to CRWR 320.
This course is a workshop focused on discussion of student work, supplemented by study of selected contemporary plays. The first part of the course involves exercises and assignments. In the second part, students concentrate on developing material toward a finished one-act play. You will be expected to recruit a small group of actors who will be available to try out work in progress and participate in staged readings at the end of the semester. No previous work in playwriting is expected, but students should have a solid working knowledge of drama, either through coursework or through substantial reading over the summer. CrWr 201 is normally a prerequisite. Enrollment limit: 12. Admission by consent only: pick up an application from Rice 13 and return it with a writing sample by June 15, 2000. Identical to CrWr 330.
Identical to EXWR 481.
These courses are designed primarily for seniors and offer opportunities to do individual work based on focused reading of texts, criticism, literary history, or theory, with the goal of engaging in extended research, writing, or performance projects. Courses at the 400 level are open by application only in the semester preceding the course. Students enrolling in 400-level courses should normally have completed at least two courses at the 300 level.
A comparative study of the works of Charles Dickens and Ivan Turgenev in their biographical, cultural and historical contexts. Among works to be studied: Turgenev's A Hunter's Sketches, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, A Month in the Country, and Virgin Soil; Dickens' The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations. F, WL. Consent of instructor required. Identical to CMPL 418. Enrollment Limit: 18.
Intensive work on a topic of the student's honors project, to be organized in consultation with the instructor. Consent of instructor required.
A forum for group discussion of honors projects at various stages of design and composition and for engaging with some critical theory. The first and last weeks will address the honors project as an intellectual exploration, an analytic enterprise, and a rhetorical entity. During the middle half of the semester we will examine methods and theories pertinent to the study of literature and culture. Prerequisite: Admission to the Honors Program. Note: CR/NE grading. Consent of instructor required.
|
|
|
|
|
| ||
