Spring 2003
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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. Descriptions of these classes will be posted here soon. 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.
This course explores narrative technique, sociohistoric context, and artistic purpose in a diverse group of coming of age novels. In the process, the course seeks also to investigate questions concerning the nature of literary criticism and critical debate. Likely readings include Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Toni Morrison's Sula, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
Through a variety of fictional and non-fictional works in English by writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and India, this course examines the theories and practices of (British) colonial education through which the colonized peoples were molded into appropriate subjects. Although about an ostensible past, these works demonstrate powerfully and precisely how all forms of education participate in molding students' mind. For entering college students, surely it is both empowering and necessary to become critically aware of this significant aspect of education, including a liberal arts education. Among works (and writers) we will study are: Our Sister Killjoy (Ama Ata Aidoo), Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon), Nervous Conditions (Tsi Tsi Dangarembga), Season of Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih). We will also read Thomas Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education" and Gauri Viswananthan on the beginnings of English literary education in India. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
Poetry is a major vehicle for our understanding of ourselves, though it can be as puzzling as the life it interprets. This course will look at the relation between poetry as text and as oral performance. We will discuss and write about poetry in traditional ways but will also use workshop techniques as a mode of exploration and interpretation. No acting ability or experience will be presumed. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
This course examines a range of British writings about nature from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. While we often use the word "landscape" to mean something like "the natural features of a place," the first sense of the word is actually "A picture representing natural inland scenery." "Landscape," then, designates not so much nature itself as a way of thinking about nature. By examining the ways our authors think about nature, and by questioning the literary and philosophical uses they make of their subject, we will trace the process by which human needs and desires transform "nature" into "landscape." In addition to reading a range of poetry and fiction, we will address philosophical writings and aesthetic theories (of, for example, "the picturesque"), and a number of related phenomena, including landscape gardening and "scenic" tourism. We will read texts from throughout this era, but with a particular emphasis on the eighteenth century and Romantic period, which mark a pivotal epoch in Britain's transformation from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial one. 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.
Focused study of five plays from the second half of Shakespeare's career: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest. Emphasizing how performance choices inflect interpretation, the course will feature student scene performance (no experience or expertise required) and video showings of films or stage productions. Particular critical methods and theories will be studied in connection with each play, including feminist, folkloristic/anthropological, new historicist, performance, and race criticism. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Milton's English poetry and selected prose, with special attention to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Considerable time will be devoted to the poetic texts as participants in historical and intellectual discourses and to modern critical writing on Milton. P, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
As Britain became an international power, the great passions, satires, and tragedies of eighteenth-century British literature often took place in distant lands (both real and fantastic) and envisioned complex human migrations. This course explores how British literature dealt with some of its grand topics, particularly desire, sexuality, and power, while also imagining imperial and commercial expansion. We will pay close attention to the representation of the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia and the role of the transatlantic slave trade. P, EL. Prerequisite: Any Writing Intensive course. Enrollment limit: 30.
An interdisciplinary study of "romanticism" in England and Scotland between 1789 and 1832, treating works by poets, essay writers, novelists, painters and urban architects. Among works to be considered will be poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, essays by Burke, De Quincey, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, and fiction by Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Painters to be considered will include Girtin, Constable, Turner, and B. R. Haydon (some of whose letters and journals we will also read). We will investigate the Prince Regent's attempts, working with John Nash and others, to transform London into an imperial city. P, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course examines and compares various traditions in documentary cinema by considering how each has framed its pursuit of the "real."Using documentary films from diverse times and places, the class introduces students to basic questions and issues -- structure, mimesis, politics, authorship, ethics, history -- central to the notion and enterprise of documentary cinema. F, AL. Identical to CINE 221. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30
This course will focus on recently published American novels. We will attend to questions of style, authorship and interpretation against the backdrop of contemporary cultural and political history. Likely authors to include Dorothy Allison, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, Charles Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Powers, Sherman Alexie, Michael Chabon. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
The development of English from its Anglo-Saxon beginnings to the present, focusing on lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological change, with emphasis on the intersections between language, literature, and culture. EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
An exploration of the concept of Nature in early American literature, this course also offers students a thorough introduction to research skills and information technology. By connecting today's "information landscape" with the physical landscape as it is theorized, encountered, and represented in early American literature, students will investigate the ways in which representations of America then might inform our contemporary understandings of nature and nation. Texts will include sermons, promotional tracts, descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, captivity narratives, American Indian responses to European encounters, poetry, autobiography, philosophical and political treatises, and fiction. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Tension and change marked the nation's racial and ethnic composition, class formations, gender arrangements, laws, and international status. The literature of the era not only reflected this ferment, but participated in debates about what "America" and "Americans" were. At the same time, the nature of "literature" and the circumstances of its production, distribution and reception were also in flux. These issues will frame the course. Reading will include narratives and essays by Howells, James, Jewett, Freeman, Chesnutt, Hopkins, Twain, Garland, Dunbar Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala Sa and others. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
A survey of the decade of artistic production and debate in early twentieth-century American letters known as the "Harlem Renaissance" or the "New Negro Renaissance," or alternatively as the "Jazz Age"-- roughly 1919-1929--that explores the controversies of racial representation in this period of self-conscious artistic production. We will address key interactions on the subject of racial representation in the arts between and among black and white artists of the period, treating their essays and fiction. Authors may include Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Nella Larsen. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course considers the cinema as a particular media form and explores issues and methods in cinema studies. The class focuses on questions of film form and style (narrative, editing, sound, framing, mise-en-scene) and introduces students to concepts in film history and theory (industry, auteurism, spectatorship, the star system, ideology, genre). Students develop a basic critical vocabulary for examining the cinema as an art form, an industry, and a system of culturally meaningful representation. F, WL. Identical to CINE 101. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course surveys the American silent cinema and its spectators. It asks how the cinema, as one of many technologies invented at the turn of the last century, changed everyday life by changing our relationship to it. We will study how the new media of the cinema, once considered a source of danger, contamination, and vice, became a legitimate cultural institution in its own right. We discover how cinema promoted itself not simply as a national cultural pastime but as an integral feature of American everyday life. Our weekly screenings of silent films will be organized around the representations of race, sexual difference, and poverty that preoccupied the early cinema. Readings in classic and contemporary film theory will help us establish the particular character of early and silent-era cinematic form and narrative. Theoretical perspectives on the question of what it means to be modern will come from such social theorists and cultural critics as Benjamin, Freud, Simmel and Kracauer. Course Requirements: Active class participation and mandatory attendance at weekly film screenings; twelve one-page papers; final paper (12-15 pages). F, AL. Identical to CINE 273. 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: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
An exploration of the most significant twentieth-century Irish short story writers--James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Mary Lavin, Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Sean O'Faolain, John McGahern, William Trevor, Mary Dorcey, and Anne Enright. We'll examine the tensions between tradition and innovation, and the impact of religion and nationalism on the writers in the North and South. F, WL. 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 survey of English literature from the eighth century through the fifteenth -- from "Caedmon's Hymn," one of the first English poems in writing, to Malory's Morte d'Arthur, one of the first books to come off the English printing press. Texts will include lyrics, plays, epics, riddles, romances, prose narratives, comic tales, complaints, allegories, and visions. Old English and Anglo-Norman texts in translation; most Middle English texts in the original. P, EL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
The eighteenth century is widely credited with giving rise to a substantially new form of narrative fiction that responded to dramatic social changes underway at what we have come to see as the beginning of the modern period. In turn, the novel came to shape the ways that readers understood their experiences in a changing society; novels taught readers to imagine new possibilities for social mobility, for example, and even offered readers ways to think about falling in love. This course examines the eighteenth-century British novel both as a product of and a contribution to the rise of modern individualism. On the one hand, we will examine the ways that novels represent characters' experience of contemporary society; at the same time, we will consider how these novels seek to guide their readers in their own development into modern subjects. Readings will include texts by authors such as John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne, as well as selections from eighteenth-century philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith. We will also engage with relevant modern criticism of the novels. F, EL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
Late Victorian novels such as George Eliot's Middlemarch, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, George Gissing's The Odd Women and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure are considered in this course alongside selected poems and prose of the period, as a basis for exploring the novel's responsiveness to late Victorian debate over such topics as feminism, aestheticism, and democratization. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course explores documentary form in both critical and creative ways. The class introduces students to various ways to think about and understand documentaries (in terms of structure, purpose, audience, etc.) and then gives them the opportunity to practice basic documentary production (camera, lighting, sound, non-linear editing). After engaging in various individual and small group exercises, students spend the balance of the semester working together to produce a short documentary video. F. Identical to CINE 320. Consent by instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12. Application Form
This course will study the development of drama from World War II to 1975 from both a literary and a theatrical point of view. Playwrights will include Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Churchill, Pinter, Fornes, and Adrienne Kennedy. D, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
The development of modern poetry from 1880 to the end of World War I. The first half of the course covers the transition from the Symbolist movement to various forms of modernism. The poets studied include Mallarme, Rilke, and Yeats, and their accomplishments are compared with the work of various painters of the period. The second half moves to New York and the Armory Show of 1913 as a background for study of the American modernism of Stevens, Moore, and Williams. P, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
Contemporary American poetry, selected from such major postwar poets as Lowell, Bishop, and Jarrell; more recent poets such as Plath, Ashbery, Merwin, James Wright, and Rich; and such current figures as Simic, Harper, Charles Wright, C. D. Wright, McPherson, Tate, Komunyakaa, and Upton. P, AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course will study the representation of gay and lesbian experience in selected British and American fiction, both modern and contemporary. We will begin with early 20th-century figures (Cather, James, Forster, Woolf, Larsen, Isherwood), and proceed to short fiction and novels written after 1960 by such writers as James Baldwin, Andrew Holleran, Dorothy Allison, Michael Chabon, Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, and Neil Bartlett. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
What is the difference between going to see a movie at a multiplex theater and watching a movie on a flat screen during a trans-Atlantic flight? Between watching a movie in 1903 and watching a film in 2003? How do patterns of distribution and exhibition formats affect our experience of movies? This course is a wide-ranging investigation of what it means to go to the movies. It will provide both historical and technological frameworks for examining transformations in viewing habits and viewing experiences, from the silent cinema to the current moment. Topics covered will include storefront kinetoscopes, segregated nickelodeon audiences, film censorship, movie theater architecture, exhibitors' trade publications, early fan culture, widescreen cinema, journalistic and narrative accounts of moviegoing, and the shift from analog to digital images. Readings from film and cultural theory on mass spectacle, the observer, the spectator, and the mass audience will shape our discussion and guide our individual research. Course requirements: Mandatory attendance at weekly screenings; each student will develop, propose, research and write a long (15-20 page) paper over the course of the semester. F, AL. Identical to CINE 345. Enrollment Limit: 25.
This course will center on literary texts by a diverse set of writers as they converge with major concerns of feminist theory and literary criticism. Among likely writers are Stowe, Wilson, Stoddard, Harper, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, Cather, Smedley, Yezierska, and Wharton. Douglas, Wexler, Tompkins, Dobson, Higginbotham, Foreman, and Tate are apt to be among the theorists and critics. F, AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course focuses on American culture in the 1930s with particular reference to the relation between the novel and cinema, though other arts and media such as photography, painting, and music will also be addressed. We will consider not only the relation of these arts to each other but to the social crisis of the Great Depression. F, AL. Identical to CINE 373. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses, or CINE 101, or a Cinematic Traditions course. Enrollment limit: 25.
Through a variety of fictional and theoretical texts, this course will examine how European (primarily English) writers and writers from (formerly) colonized areas describe, analyze, and evaluate, in short, represent the colonized subject. Our discussion will not only address matters of "accuracy," "taste," and "judgment," but also the contemporary critical interest in who can or cannot speak for the (formerly) colonized and/or marginalized subject. F, WL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. 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 history and literature, coming on up to the current debate about the meaning and value of wilderness. Our texts include poems, short novels, a play, essays, and historical and philosophical accounts of how human beings have understood their relation to the nonhuman. P, AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
An intensive study of the major works of William Faulkner (1897-1962). Readings include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and a selection of short stories, essays, and speeches. F, AL. Prerequisite: Three 200-level courses. Enrollment limit: 25.
Prerequisite: CRWR 201. Identical to CRWR 310. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
Recommended preparation: CRWR 201. Identical to CRWR 340. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
Prerequisite: CRWR 201. Identical to CRWR 320. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
Admission based on a completed application form and a writing sample. Identical to CRWR 330. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
Identical to RHET 481. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
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.
This course considers writing as a material, physical object. We will consider how changes in writing technologies -- from handwriting to printing to computers -- affect the ways we write, read and think. Key issues include concepts of the "literary," authorship, originality, intellectual property, and the "end of the book." Readings will be theoretical, historical, and literary; field trips will be taken to Special Collections and computer labs, and projects will ask students to experiment with the material form of their own writing. EL. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 18. Application Form
Almost exactly 200 years ago, two English poets articulated the complex crisis of their nation, which, in the cataclysm of the French Revolution, began to interrogate such established ideas as government, empire, gender, religion, thought, and subjectivity. William Blake and William Wordsworth, founding artists of the English Romantic movement, envisioned this crisis in related but often very different ways. We'll study their wonderful poems in the context of their lives and continuing influence. P, WL. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 18. Application Form
This course will explore the long history, cultural contexts, and critical challenges associated with melodramatic narrative cinema. We will study the origins of melodrama, the rise and fall of its status as a form, its association with women as subjects and audiences, its adaptation to different historical and cultural contexts, and its relationship to contemporary problems of cultural analysis. Expect a demanding viewing and reading schedule, high expectations about participation and presentations, and to develop a significant independent project. F, AL. Identical to CINE 436. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 15. Application Form
In this seminar, we will read African novels of the postcolonial period. We will try to situate the narrative practices of a wide range of authors within the politics of African decolonization and postcolonial literary studies. Authors may include Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, Vassanji, Lessing, Coetzee, and Gordimer. No previous experience with African literature or postcolonial studies is necessary for this course. F, WL. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 15. Application Form
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.
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