Fall 2002
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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.
The English Department offers a number of seminars designed especially for first-year students. First-year seminars do not count toward the English major, which begins with classes at the 200 level. Students in their second year or beyond should begin work in the English Department at the 200 level.
Intensive study of poetic language, focusing primarily on shorter lyric poetry. Through careful attention to language at its most concentrated and deliberate, we will seek to become more critically aware of language in general and how it shapes our relation to the world. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
I've always been fascinated by metaphors -- how they're used by writers and how they're interpreted by readers. So I've devised a colloquium that begins with poetry, and then explores metaphors in fiction, films, religion, education, science, politics, and art.
I want students to gain new insights into the significance of metaphorical thinking in modern society generally. Among the questions we'll explore are: How do metaphors inform and direct our thoughts and imaginations. How have metaphors changed over the centuries? Is metaphor an appealing ornament to plain speech, or is it inherent in language itself?
If our thinking is heavily influenced by metaphors -- buried and overt -- becoming conscious of their sway would help to sharpen our social and political as well as artistic thinking. Metaphors are at work in the sciences as well as in the arts and humanities. Exploring this relationship would reveal links between different branches of the liberal arts. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
Writing in 1931, William Butler Yeats described the poets of his generation:
We were the last romantics --chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme.
Yeats here summarizes the implicit agenda of much Romantic and Modernist poetry: it is rooted in a newly conceived sense of tradition; its aim is beauty and pleasure; it draws its language and thematic concerns from ordinary working men and women, and its intention is no less than to transform human consciousness. The great contemporaries he was thinking of undoubtedly included Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and it is to the poetry and prose writings of these two American poets and the Anglo-Irish Yeats that the seminar will be devoted. We will discuss both the ways that Modernist poetry grew out of the central concerns of English Romanticism and the ways in which modern poets defined themselves as reacting against what they perceived as Romantic imprecision of language and extravagance of emotion. We will also consider the political sympathies of the three writers. All wrote great and influential poetry, yet all were sympathetic to the rise of extreme right-wing ideologies in England, Germany and Italy. The uneasy relationship between poets and politicians, between art and power, is one of the more disturbing aspects of their work. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
Beyond offering different sorts of content and engagement for their audiences, various artistic forms and techniques can be understood to provide alternative models for individuals and groups to filter and process experience in general. This course will look at multiple artistic forms (e.g., painting, photography, film, literature), in light of their own technical developments and contrasts with each other across time, in order to develop a greater sense of the many ways medium matters. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only. Identical to CINE 128.
In Western cultures, identity often tends to be defined in binary terms: an individual is either black or white, male or female, straight or gay, and so on. This seminar will seek to explore the nature of identity by focusing on texts in which categories of identity -- specifically those of race, gender, and sexuality -- are represented as fluid and ambiguous rather than as fixed and polarized. Examples might include Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Jackie Kay's Trumpet, Nella Larsen's Passing, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Louise Erdric's Love Medicine, James McBride's The Color of Water, and such films as Boys Don't Cry, The Crying Game, and Kissing Jessica Stein. We will explore the significance of such categories as "biracial," "bisexual," and "transgendered" for the ways in which we understand broader notions of sexuality, race, and gender, and also for the implicit challenges they may pose to notions of identity as inborn and unchanging. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
The perspectives and standpoints which narratives and other works of the imagination seem to project or play with, and those we bring as readers, shape the way works appeal and what their apparent "content" or "meaning" is. With this in mind, we'll look at prose narratives by Borges, James, Chesnutt, O'Connor, Morrison, Silko and others, at least one graphic narrative (Maus), The Wizard of Oz in its print and film forms, and some visual art. We may devote some time to ways in which the Internet expands, but also limits, how we see and know our world, present and past. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
Magical Realist fiction both pre-dates and post-dates "realistic" fiction, the mode with which most of us are most familiar. It reaches back to earlier narrative traditions -- the folktale, the romance, the epic -- and it constitutes a challenge of some of the norms, especially materialist and positivist assumptions, that underlie both literary realism and "mainstream" culture. This challenge became especially vigorous in the second half of the twentieth century, and it came most notably from cultures that had a sense of being marginal: South America and Eastern Europe, in particular.
We'll be studying this fictional mode, more or less chronologically, through the course of the semester. We'll read six novels and two collections of short stories in the process. Authors to be studied include Borges, Calvino, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Kundera, Morrison, and Rushdie. Enrollment Limit: 14 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.
This course will explore The Canterbury Tales in relation to the turbulent world of late-fourteenth century England, a world where the inadequacy of traditional social, religious, and gender categories was increasingly obvious. Through the competing voices of knight and miller, wife and clerk, "gelding" and "manly man," nun and Jew, realism and allegory, the Tales repeatedly test the limits of narrative and community. We will be particularly interested in the way discourse constructs -- and challenges -- social identity and subjective experience. P, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
What happens when Shakespeare is produced on screen? Given the powerful status of "the Bard" in many cultures of the twentieth century, a Shakespeare film must be studied not merely in itself, but also as a contribution to the ongoing reinterpretion and appropriation of Shakespeare; so we'll read plays, study films, and work on the theoretical and cultural relationships between them. Monday evening film viewings are required. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
The seventeenth century in England was notable for at least two things: a tremendous flowering of lyric poetry and a devastating civil war. The way in which these two facts interpenetrate and inform each other will be the subject of this course. Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Herrick, Vaughan, Milton, and Marvell will be the poets most featured in this survey. P, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course examines questions of signification, subjectivity, and power that are raised in fictional works by representative figures of nineteenth-century North America (e.g., Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville). In order to understand the genre and its implications, we will also compare fiction with works by poets and essayists (Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Fern, William Apess, Whitman, Dickinson), using literature to explore different notions of the self as represented in those texts, the contexts that make such representations possible, and the implications of such representations for contemporary readers. F, AL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 30.
Novels and short fiction by such major twentieth-century writers as Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, Mansfield, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, and Greene. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 30.
This course will study the theme of metamorphosis as it manifests itself in literature and other art forms including the visual arts and music. The approach will be comparative and will involve lecturers from different departments and programs exploring works in their own areas of expertise, along with discussion classes. F. Identical to CMPL 232. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course will focus on American fiction written between 1900 and 1940. In addition to novels, we will study visual arts, essays, and literary criticism produced during this period. Key themes will include mass culture, modernism, and the politics of form and style. Particular attention will be paid to methods of literary study; critical terms or theories will be studied along with each text. Likely authors include Henry James, Willa Cather, Nathaniel West, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston. F, AL. Prerequisite: a Writing Intensive course. Enrollment limit: 30.
Through literature and films, this course will explore a variety of immigrant (Asian, Afro-Caribbean, European) experiences, examining diverse reactions to immigration to the U.S. It will consider the subject formation of immigrants as well as questions of identity--individual, group, national--that arise in the context of emigration and immigration, taking into account the cultural and historical differences shaping different immigrant groups. It will also consider legal and economic issues surrounding immigration to the U.S. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course will focus on how American cinema functions as an entertainment industry and the ways in which the demands of business and technology have shaped it. At the same time, we will explore American movies as works of art produced in a tradition of strong genres and the star system, and efforts of filmmakers to use these for individualized expression. The course will focus particularly on two great eras of American cinema, the late 1930s-early 1940s and the 1970s. F, AL. Identical to CINE 272. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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 by consent of the instructor.
A comparative study of about ten plays, half by Shakespeare and half by other dramatists of the period, probably Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster. The aim is to portray the Early Modern theater as an ongoing conversation, in which plays acquire their meaning partly in relation to one another. D, EL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
From Gulliver's Travels to Frankenstein, eighteenth-century literature often took great pleasure in the disgusting, the depraved, or the horrifying. We will first ask, how is the allure of the dreadful created? We will then explore how, by paradoxically combining the pleasurable and the terrible, our writers grappled with some of the central concerns of the Enlightenment: embodiment, subjectivity, and reason. This course will also attend to the ethical dimensions of "the gothic" in its historical context, including the construction of misogyny and race, and the feminist and abolitionist uses of horror. F, EL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level ENGL courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
A survey of British fiction written in the first half of the nineteenth century, with special attention paid to historical and cultural context, serial publication and changing readerships, the emergence of a sophisticated aesthetic of fiction in critical periodicals, and the interplay between text and visual image in illustrated fiction. Works will include fiction by Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, and Trollope. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
An exploration of the most significant Irish poets since 1945--Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, John Montague, Paul Durcan, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Paula Meehan, and Michael Longley. We'll consider their relationship to the earlier generation of Yeats and Kavanagh as well as the personal and thematic impact of their various cultural and political contexts, North and South. P, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
Contemporary innovations in technology are often seen as promising either a starry futuristic dream (of interactivity and globalization) or a dystopian nightmare (of regulation and homogenization). This course seeks to move beyond such polarized judgments by looking closely at formal and thematic representations of technology in various cultural objects--film, literature, visual art, electronic resources. Along with these texts, we will read critical and theoretical works on technology and its relation to aesthetic and social experience. F, AL. Identical to CINE 340. Prerequisite: A previous film studies course, or three 200-level courses in ENGL. Enrollment limit: 25.
Is there such a thing as a black feminist tradition in American writing? This course is a survey of literary-cultural trends revised by twentieth-century African American women's literature: the remapping of African American cultural history; the exploration of African American vernacular culture; the presence of women as authors of and subjects in African American literature; and the acknowledgment and exploration of multiple African American identities. The course will concentrate on Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. F, AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level ENGL courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course focuses on major playwrights of England and Ireland from post-World War II to the present. Authors may include Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Edward Bond, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Mark Ravenhill, and Sarah Kane. Students will be expected to attend productions and participate in scene performances. D, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level ENGL courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
Major themes and debates in classical and contemporary film theory and historiography. Topics to be explored include realism, montage, semiotics, apparatus theory, theories of the Avant-Garde, Third Cinema, and spectatorship. Authors: Bazin, Eisenstein, Kracauer, Mulvey, Metz, Doane, Williams, and Wollen. Directors: Griffith, Ford, Micheaux, Godard, Marker, Hitchcock, Ackerman, Varda, Haynes, Sembene, Trihn. F, WL. Identical to CINE 358. Prerequisite: Either CINE 101, a 200-level Cinematic Traditions course, or three 200-level ENGL classes. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course is about developments in literary theory in the last thirty years not as abstract systems but in the larger context of American intellectual and artistic culture. Our concern will be understanding literary theories in their historical and institutional contexts as well as considering their value as ways of thinking. We'll pay particular attention to the impact of post-structuralism on American critics, the relation of literary criticism to culture criticism, and the elaboration of the idea of post-modernity. F, AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
The substantive focus of this course is to read -- closely, carefully, assiduously -- novels and essays/critical exegeses by arguably one of the most important contemporary "postcolonial" writers, J. M. Coetzee. This focus will include sustained attention to contexts -- of historical moment, location (geographical and epistemological), ideological investments -- through which his work becomes, or is made, meaningful. The timing of this course is tied to Coetzee's visit to Oberlin in Fall 2002. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment limit: 25.
Identical to CRWR 310.
Identical to CRWR 340.
Identical to CRWR 320.
Identical to RHET 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.
What is an author in the cinema? Drawing from relevant theoretical work, the class will fashion critical methods for exploring questions of cinematic authorship and then apply those methods to the work of Woody Allen and Spike Lee. For their own seminar projects, students may consider actors, directors, styles, or movements of their choice. F, AL. Identical to CINE 413. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
The public theater of Early Modern London (roughly 1590-1620) created a series of remarkable plays. How did the playwrights, acting companies, and physical theaters create the imaginary worlds of those plays? How do the versions created by modern techniques of acting, staging, and filming relate to what we can infer of the plays' early performances? D, EL. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 15.
The senior project is an opportunity to engage, on an individual basis under the supervision of a faculty member in the Department of English, in a semester-long research project. This project typically culminates in a 15-20 page essay and an oral presentation of that work at the end of the semester. This opportunity is available to a limited number of senior English majors, by application only. The senior project differs from the Honors program in being limited to one semester; it does not qualify the student to become a candidate for Honors at graduation. Prerequisite: Admission to the senior project. Consent of instructor required.
Intensive work on the topic of the student's honors project, to be organized in consultation with the honors advisor. Consent of instructor required.
A forum for group discussion of honors projects at various stages of design and composition. The class will address the honors project as an intellectual exploration, an analytic enterprise, and a rhetorical entity. Prerequisite: Admission to the Honors Program. CR/NE grading. Consent of instructor required.
One semester each year an English Department faculty member teaches courses in the Danenberg Oberlin-in-London Program. For a fuller description of the London Program in general see the London Program section of the Oberlin College course catalog.
An introduction to the history and culture of Britain, examining the roots of contemporary London and Britain by exploring selected topics in social, political, and cultural history from antiquity to the modern era. The course will be coordinated by both instructors, but taught by a series of visiting experts (who will speak and lead discussions in their fields) and supplemented by field trips to museums and pertinent historical sites. This course is for all students. Notes: CR/NE grading. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 26.
This course will include consideration of seasons, calendars, clocks, sundials, time travel, linear time, cyclical time, the direction of time, time in relativity, and the beginning of time, as described in physics and represented in literature.
Literary study will analyze the ways selected works, in different periods, reflect contemporaneous concepts, theories, technologies, insights into, and experiences of time. Works or authors may include: Gawain and the Green Knight and selected Canterbury Tales in the medieval period; Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton in the early modern period; Defoe and Dickens in the 18th and 19th centuries; and H.G. Wells, Conrad, Woolf, Beckett, Stoppard, and Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) in the 20th century.
Topics from physics will include: methods of measuring time from astronomical observations to atomic clocks, determining the age of the earth, the direction of time defined by the second law of thermodynamics, how Einstein's theory of relativity modified Newtonian concepts of time, and the importance of timekeeping for determining longitude.
Attention to social history and to philosophical issues will further explore the relationships between science, technology, and social change. Throughout the course, we will discuss how different fields -- especially, literary study, folkloristics and physics -- utilize different methodologies, epistemologies, and goals as humans make sense of time in its physical and experiential dimensions.
Papers and individual projects will be required while guest speakers, and field trips to time-related sites in and near London will supplement classroom experience. No mathematics beyond simple algebra will be used. F, WL. Consent of instructors required. Enrollment Limit: 26.
By reading scripts and regularly attending performances in a variety of London venues, students will explore and critique how production values, actors' interpretations, and other performance conditions realize the potential meanings and effects of scripts. Selection of plays will include works by major acting companies as well as fringe productions. Students will write their own reviews, critique published reviews, and stage scenes themselves to gain fluency in the many production elements that contribute to meaning.
Featuring major productions by the subsidized national theatre companies such as the Royal National Theatre performing on the South Bank and the Royal Shakespeare Company, now performing at West End theatres, the course will also emphasize attending significant works at a variety of London venues, including West End establishments, pub theatre, the New Globe theatre, and other alternative sites. Students will explore how theatre locations, histories, audiences, and other political and social features contribute to the ways meanings flow from a wide set of material, social, and artistic conditions. Most attention will, of course, be given to how scripts are interpreted onstage, by acting choices, blocking, lighting, set design, costumes, props, sound, music, and by other theatrical elements such as the program, directors' notes, and lobby displays.
A central goal of the course will be to consider what constitutes theatrical meaning and to examine the ways theatre semiotics embody the possible meanings of a script. To pursue this goal we will also need to theorize problems of interpretation and how to understand the basis and authority for differing interpretations (those of readers, acting companies, reviewers, and audiences) when comparing scripts and performance.
Wherever possible, plays will also be examined in terms of their treatment of time, temporality, and issues relevant to the joint course, "It's About Time: Time in Literature and Physics." D, EL + WL. Consent of Instructor Required. Enrollment Limit: 15.
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