Fall 2003
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First-Year Seminars |
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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.
A study of the poetry and several of the plays of William Butler Yeats in the context of his late Victorian and Modernist contemporaries. The influence of writers such as Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot and Pound on Yeats' poetic practice and theory will be assessed. Among his Irish contemporaries we will look at John Synge and Lady Gregory. In Yeats' work we will focus on the poetry collections Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole, The Tower, The Winding Stair and other Poems, and Last Poems and plays such as Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Words Upon the Window-Pane, The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. Enrollment limit: 14.
This course focuses on African writing, examining a non-western body of work from a non-western perspective. One important theme is the challenges facing youth in colonial and postcolonial Africa: the struggle to balance tradition and change; the quest for education; the development of political awareness. Several books offer an African approach to what in the west is called a "Bildungsroman," or novel of youth's coming of age. Texts include Laye's L'Enfant Noir, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Achebe's No Longer at Ease. Enrollment limit: 14
We often treat time and place as background, focusing on characters and actions rather than their context. In this course we will read and view works that put time and place in the foreground to explore the relationship between our sense of self to time and place. We will also explore how artists characterize the relation between time and place. A second concern in this course is the nature of reading and viewing. Enrollment limit: 14.
This seminar invites students to view literature and history not as mutually opposed, but as mutually informing disciplines. To this end, it will examine novels (like Salman Rushdie's Shame and Toni Morrison's Beloved) and historical analyses (like those by Hayden White and David Cohen) that deliberately cross boundaries presumed to define literature and history. Enrollment limit: 14.
Television shows, movies, newspapers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, websites--these all profoundly influence the ways we understand and experience the world. In this course we will explore how such media produce meaning. To do this, we will examine a variety of different media "texts" and learn to read them more self-consciously, expanding our sense of what they mean to include how and why they mean what they do. Enrollment limit: 14.
This course will consider how writing practices, old and new, affect the ways we write, read, think, and will look at how writing is influenced by historical events, cultural values, and technological advances. We will examine transformations in reading and writing, from oral culture to hypertext, and analyze the impact of these changes on our practices. Students will think critically about the changing nature of writing and write in many forms, including academic papers, experimental essays and websites. Enrollment limit: 14
This course employs theories and methods for studying drama through examining relationships between verbal scripts and staged productions. By attending five to seven plays performed locally and in Cleveland, and by viewing video productions of related works, students will study nine to ten significant plays representing a variety of periods and styles, with attention to intersections of history, gender, race, and sexuality. Assignments will stress performing scenes, writing critical essays, and critiquing productions. Enrollment limit: 14.
Several of Shakespeare's plays present material from English and classical history, extending between truth and poetry, reality and the fictive world of the stage. We will explore several of these plays in relation to historical reality inferred from other historiographical forms, and we will consider the plays themselves as embedded in history, participating in the politics of their own times. We will also explore the problems of representation, interpretation, and imaginative reconstruction in our own writing. Enrollment limit: 14.
According to Hamlet, if death is not upon us now, then it will come later,
and if not later, then now. What really counts is our "readiness."
But what is "readiness," and how does one "ready" oneself
for death? Should our understanding of death shape the way we choose to live?
Is there an ars moriendi, an art to dying well? To address these questions,
we will examine ideas and expressions of death from a variety of perspectives,
cultures, and historical periods. Among other things, we will study the reasons
that some deaths have been considered noble, beautiful, purposeful, or meaningful,
while others have been perceived as shameful, ugly, purposeless, or senseless.
Works of fiction, poetry, philosophy, music, and visual art will provide models
for comparative and critical reflections as we pursue our overarching goal:
to see how death's different representations can lead us to reimagine our own
life and death. Readings may include works by Osamu Dazai, J. W. von Goethe,
Horacio Quiroga, Gustave Flaubert, Martin Heidegger, Lu Hsun, Jorge Luis Borges,
James Joyce, Maurice Blanchot, and Emily Dickinson; artworks by Kollwitz, Courbet,
David, El Greco, Picasso, and others; music by Richard Strauss, Wagner, J.S.
Bach, and others.
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-scène)
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. Identical to CINE 101. Enrollment
Limit: 60. Mr. Pingree
Courses at the 200 level are designed to introduce students to the discipline of literary study in English through attention to fundamental issues and methods of interpretation in critical reading and writing, substantial coverage of texts, and instruction in the conventions of genre, period, and region as appropriate.
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.
The purpose of this course is twofold: to develop a working knowledge of Middle English, and to study the social work performed by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the most famous English literary text before Shakespeare. In particular, we will approach the Tales through the following questions: what is the function of violence in Chaucer's world, both within and outside his text? How does violence function differently in the various literary genres of the Canterbury Tales, which include romance, fabliau, the saint's life, the fable, the treatise, and the sermon? How might Chaucer's text help us to consider the intersection between violence and religious practices, such as martyrdom, the pilgrimage, and the Crusade? Finally, to what extent does the deployment of violence in the Canterbury Tales intersect with issues of gender, class difference, racial difference, and sexuality? All primary course readings will be taken from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Reading assignments will occasionally include brief selections from A Companion to Chaucer, a collection of recent scholarship on Chaucer's writings. Course requirements will include thorough preparation and participation in class; periodic reading quizzes on the language and content of Chaucer's text; two papers, one of 3-4 pages and one of 5-6 pages; a midterm exam; and a final exam. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
"Sir," said Samuel Johnson to James Boswell in 1777, "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." London was the first great modern metropolis: a place of infinite variety and possibility, but also a place of temptation, danger, and loneliness. This course examines representations of London life in poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfictional prose of the "long" eighteenth century (roughly 1660-1805) in an effort to understand the city’s place both in a changing England and, increasingly, on a global stage. In addition to careful reading and discussion of the texts, students will work in groups to develop an understanding of key eighteenth-century cultural contexts such as crime, chocolate, nightlife, prostitution, coffee, and gin. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course aims to develop skills in practical criticism of literature, mostly fiction, in the context of attention to the interplay of aesthetic and social concerns in the writing and reading of literature. Likely texts: Bambara's Gorilla, My Love, Joyce's Dubliners, Austen's Emma, Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Shakespeare's Othello, and Silko's Ceremony. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
A comparative study of poetry and fiction by two major twentieth-century writers who both grew up in Ireland but were separated by their religions, social classes, politics, and world-views. Major issues will be the tensions between literature and politics, modernist innovation and the tradition, elite arts and popular culture, and nationalism and internationalism. Working on both poems and stories, students will develop fundamental techniques of close reading informed by the intellectual, artistic, and political contexts of revolutionary Ireland. 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. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course centers around a concentrated group of works by African American humorists and explores various methods for interpreting their humor, satire, and comedy. We will read Hurston, Brown, Hughes, Childress, and Reed and sample functional, structural, and cultural theories that might be applied to their fiction, poetry, and drama. As an introduction to the English major, the course foregrounds critical attention to methodologies--some of which enter literary study from other disciplines--at the same time it examines the literary "play" of these writers' works on their own terms. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 30.
Through literature and films, this course will explore what it considers exemplary 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. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Between 1880 and 1930, Europe was convulsed by wars, technological advances, and societal transformations of all kinds. Writers and other artists responded by creating revolutionary new forms, techniques, and movements, e.g. Post-impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. These and other strains of Modernism carried philosophical attitudes, political positions, and aesthetic ideas and practices to authors all over the 20th-century world. We will read works by a variety of non-Western writers to see why and how they received, rejected, and/or recombined central aspects of European Modernism. Authors may include Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Osamu Dazai, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chu T’ien-Wen, and Jean Rhys. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Tirso's trickster-seducer has had a long career in drama and other art forms. This course will explore how the legend has taken different shapes in different ages and cultures. The approach will be comparative and will involve lecturers from different departments and programs analyzing works from their own areas of expertise, along with discussion classes. We will look at such works as Tirso's original Spanish play, Molière's play, Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, Byron's Don Juan, Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, and a number of modern versions of the Don Juan story including two films. The course will explore the various potentialities of a story in different artistic embodiments and different cultural-historical settings. In particular we will consider the story as a site for contested attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Course requirements will include a journal, two papers, and several small-group projects. Identical to CMPL 231. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30. Mr. Pierce
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: Two 200-level courses, including at least one Gateway course; or three 200-level courses.
Medieval English writers considered the Passion and death of Christ to be one of the central events of Christian history, but one which motivated a wide range of responses. These could include new definitions of heroism, particularly through martyrdom and self-sacrifice; emotional identification with the sufferings of Christ and the Virgin; penitential reflection and penance; or vengeance upon the supposed enemies of Christ, including Jews, Muslims, and heretics. In the course, we will investigate this diversity of responses to the death of Christ in medieval texts from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries. We will focus primarily on English literature in a variety of genres, including meditative poetry, apocryphal texts, hagiography, romance, chronicles, and drama. During the first half of the semester, we will assess the ways in which the violence of the Crucifixion was manifested in English culture, with a particular emphasis on martyrdom, chivalry, anti-Semitism, and Crusade. After the midterm, we will focus on interpretations of the Passion in drama and mystical literature. Course readings may include The Dream of the Rood (in translation); Ælfric's Passion of St. Edmund (in translation); Clemence of Barking's Life of St. Catherine (in translation); the Middle English romance Richard Coeur de Lion; The Prioress's Tale, from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; English and Muslim Chronicles of the Third Crusade; Jewish poetry of martyrdom from the Crusade-era (in translation); fifteenth-century dramas of the Crucifixion and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; and selections from Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe. Course requirements will include thorough preparation and participation in class; two papers, one of 3-4 pages and one of 5-6 pages; a midterm exam; and a final exam. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course explores the centrality of ideas about property to British and American literature and political thought at the beginning of the modern era. By focusing on the 18th-century preoccupation with the theory of property, we will seek to understand how a period that could support a lucrative traffic in African slaves could also produce calls for American liberty. By reading texts explicitly concerned with Atlantic crossings, we will work to situate what may look like quaintly "English" phenomena-- such as consumption of tea and sugar, or financial speculation in government debt and corporate stock -- in the context of an increasingly global commercial system. In this course, we will read literary texts (by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Susannah Centlivre, and Alexander Pope) alongside works of political theory and nonfiction prose (by authors such as John Locke, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Olaudah Equiano, and Benjamin Franklin). Students should be prepared to consider both how works of literature participate in cultural debates, and how political or economic texts use quasi-literary language to achieve their ends.
This course examines the eighteenth-century British novel both as a product of and a contribution to the rise of modern individualism. The eighteenth century is widely credited with giving rise to a new form of narrative fiction that responded to dramatic social changes underway at the beginning of the modern period. In turn, the novel helped 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. 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 Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney and Jane Austen, as well as selections from eighteenth-century philosophers like John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. We will also engage with relevant modern criticism of the novels. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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. Selections of poetry and prose of thought from the 1830s and 1840s will also be read. Works will include fiction by Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Emily Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë, and poetry by Tennyson and Browning. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course is designed to help students develop a rich and complicated sense of the poets and poetic approaches that helped constitute what we now call modern poetry. Taking symbolism and imagism as two predominant stylistic and historical points of reference, we'll survey U.S., British and European poetry between roughly 1880 and 1920. While we're thinking broadly about the beginnings of modern poetry, we'll also take time to savor the particular textual personalities of Baudelaire, Yeats, Hardy, Frost, Sandburg, Hughes, Pound, Williams, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and H.D. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Modern American and British poetry between the First and Second World Wars, including work by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and E.E. Cummings. Major issues will be the conflicts between: modernism and tradition, internationalism and regionalism, classicism and romanticism, and free verse and closed poetic forms. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course is about developments in literary theory in the context of the last thirty-five years 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 about literature and art. We'll pay particular attention to the impact of post-structuralism on American critics, the relation of literary criticism to cultural criticism, and various elaborations of the idea of post-modernity. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An examination of twentieth-century poetry, through the work of three dazzling and continually influential modernists. Through intensive engagement with poems and essays by T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes, we'll confront some of the most intractable problems of modern poetry -- of belief, value, form, and cultural difference -- and ponder the various and contradictory solutions great poets find for these problems. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The writing of poetry. Intensive discussion of student work, accompanied by assigned reading. Admission based on a completed application form and a writing sample of six to eight poems (due in the Creative Writing Program office by 6/12/03). Identical to CRWR 310. Enrollment limit: 12.
The writing of short fiction. Admission based on a completed application form and a writing sample of at least 12 pages of fiction, made up of at least 2 separate pieces (due in Creative Writing Program office by 6/12/03). Identical to CRWR 320. Enrollment limit: 12.
A course on writing theory and pedagogy that combines knowledge with know-how. We will learn about teaching, tutoring and writing by reading: we will survey scholarship in composition studies (Elbow, Bartholomae, Vitanza), rhetorical theory and writing history (Burke, Freire, Berlin). We will learn how to teach, tutor and write by practicing: all students enrolled in the course must work at either the Writing Center or as course assistants (Writing Center tutors receive $7.00/hour; assistants receive $600/semester). Many readings and discussions will focus on pedagogical strategies. Students will be asked to experiment with their own writing processes and to complete projects that contribute to the Peer Tutoring Program. For more information about the Peer Tutoring Program, see http://www.oberlin.edu/~ptp. Students enrolling in RHET 481 or ENGL 399 should also enroll in RHET 483, Tutoring Lab. Enrollment Limit: 12.
SENIOR
TUTORIALS, HONORS, AND INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS
These courses are designed primarily for seniors and offer opportunities to
do individual work based on focused reading of texts, criticism, literary history,
and 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.
For English majors in either semester of their final year only, involving close work on an individual project, leading to a substantial paper. Required for all students who declare the English major from March 2003 on; recommended for previously-declared majors. Students planning to apply for Honors must take the tutorial in the semester before their final semester. Students are assigned to instructors on the basis of applications; application forms available from the department secretary 2-3 weeks before registration. 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. Note: CR/NE grading.
An exploration of English and European drama from the Renaissance to the present, emphasizing the relation between drama as literature and as a script for theatrical realization. The syllabus will be based on plays being produced in London and Stratford; on average, two plays a week will be read, discussed, and seen in production. The course will be conducted largely by discussion with the instructor and with actors and other guests involved in theater. Students will rehearse and perform scenes for analysis, keep a performance journal, and write several short papers.
A study of the modernist aesthetic as practiced in England during the first half of the twentieth century, emphasizing thematic, cultural, and stylistic developments and focusing as much as possible on works reflecting life in London. The syllabus is likely to include poetry by Pound, Eliot, and Auden; stories by Mansfield and Lawrence; and novels by Conrad, Woolf, Isherwood, Forster, Bowen, and Greene. Literary study will be complemented by attention to the visual art, architecture, music,and dance of the period.
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