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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.
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.
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, Amy Bloom's A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine, 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.
Cancelled for Spring 2004. Next offered Spring 2005.
During the ante-bellum period diverse American writers vied for methods of representing the American scene. In this course students will read a range of sketches, stories, narratives, and essays by humorists (Thorpe, Harris, and Hooper), abolitionists (Stowe, Brown, Jacobs, Douglass, Harper and Whitfield), transcendentalists (Thoreau and Emerson), and "classical" writers (Whitman and Melville). We will examine both overlaps and divergences in the figures, practices, and values considered by the authors in order to explore how literature can enrich and complicate our sense of perceptions of the nation's cultural past and present. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
This course will focus on adventure narratives of the medieval period and the more recent past. The verb in the course title, "to shape," comes from the Old English words scieppan (to make, fashion, or create) and scop, a poet or singer of stories. In the course, we will explore the ways in which writers, in crafting their texts and characters, make or shape heroism through storytelling. Questions we pursue may include: to what extent do these stories of heroism depend on idealized visions of the past? How do these narratives negotiate questions of chivalric or heroic identity, gender ambiguity, and racial difference? How do modern writers use heroisms of the past to address concerns and problems within their own cultures and communities, such as the restraint of violence, new technologies of warfare, expansionism, totalitarianism, and imperialism? How does contemporary popular culture rework traditional notions of heroism?
Readings for the course may include Beowulf (in translation), Heldris de Cornualle's Roman de Silence (in translation), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other Arthurian romances, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Enrollment limit: 50
A lecture course primarily for non-English majors interested in poems, which Marianne Moore wonderfully described as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." We will concentrate on learning to read, appreciate and understand a variety of poems, both for themselves and in their historical and literary contexts. No papers as such, but various regular assignments and exams. Enrollment Limit: 50.
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.
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.
Students will study five plays through a variety of critical methods and theories, including new historicism and cultural materialism, gender and feminist studies, performance and performativity, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies. British, Pre-1700. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Non-dramatic poetry from the period 1580-1660, with special attention to Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Marvell. The course will consider how these poems participate in discourses of love in the Early Modern period. British, Pre-1700. P, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course introduces students to the complexity of a period in British literary history that has sometimes been caricatured as beginning in dullness and ending in sentimentality. In fact, literature of the eighteenth century is both dynamic and highly expressive, engaging fundamental questions of humans' moral and social nature in both private and public life. As we read representative works of poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fictional prose, we will survey the disruptive currents that troubled the apparently placid surface of eighteenth-century culture (e.g. violent political factionalism; declarations of the primacy of the passions over reason; swellings of religious enthusiasm; and expressions of dissent by disenfranchised groups). Attention to such phenomena shows just how contested eighteenth-century "stability" was, but also reveals the extraordinary intellectual effort behind eighteenth-century assertions of order in the face of potential chaos. Principal authors may include Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. As a Gateway course, this class stresses methods in literary studies. We will read a variety of critical texts with an emphasis on interrogating intersections between questions of literary form and questions of cultural history. British, 1700-1900. EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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. British, 1700-1900. P, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course examines the difficulties and advantages of characterizing contemporary poets through references to racial, sexual, gender, and national identity. Focusing on the work of Audre Lorde, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott, we’ll work through complex and ambivalent expressions of cultural identifications that often seem "divided to the vein." With the help of a range of critical essays, we’ll take care to emphasize the differences between lived and poetic identities, asking ourselves whether the pleasures, difficulties, and disruptions of poetic language begin to suggest their own strategies for imagining the self in relation to the social world. American, Diversity, Post-1900. P, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Debates about the character of literature in "America" took shape around questions of slavery, social and political commitments mandated by faith, constructions of gender and of race, national expansion, increasing immigration, the stratification of literature into highbrow and lowbrow, the author, and the nature of "art." Writers to be studied include Poe, Emerson, Stowe, Melville, Hawthorne, Douglass, James, Chesnutt, Harper. We'll approach the reading in the contexts of its emergence while recognizing our positions as 21st-century readers. Emphasis will be given to reading historically and interpretively. American, 1700-1900. 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," and "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. Identical to CMPL 265. British, Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. 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 changes in 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, 1939-1942 and 1966-73. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Identical to CINE 272. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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. Diversity. D, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
200-level electives differ from Gateway courses (see above) in taking a less focused approach to introducing the study of the discipline of English.
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the continually shifting history of the English language from Old English to the present day. We will discuss both the internal aspects of English, such as changes in its sound system, syntax, grammar, and lexicon, and its external history, including the linguistic consequences of invasions, migrations, trading, colonialism, and other political and cultural changes. The first part of the course will focus on Old and Middle English, from the Germanic invasions of Britain in the fifth century to the earliest stages of the Protestant Reformation. In the second half of the semester, we will discuss changes in Early Modern and Present-Day English, focusing on the worldwide spread of English and its diversity, with special attention to pidgins, creoles, and ethnic, regional, and class-based dialects. British, Pre-1700. EL. 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: Two 200-level courses, including at least one Gateway
course; or three 200-level courses.
Including about eight Shakespeare plays, the course will examine two kinds of issues. First, we will look at ways in which the plays make use of philosophical concerns, in particular drawing on classical traditions of skepticism, cynicism, and stoicism. Second, we will consider ethical and epistemological issues in interpreting the plays. British, Pre-1700. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Studying five plays representing history, tragedy, comedy, and late romance, and featuring any plays performed locally, the course examines how current feminist criticism considers the intersections of gender with histories of race and empire. British, Diversity, Pre-1700. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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. British, 1700-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
A survey of U.S. poetry since 1945, considering poets as participants in larger movements and examining new forms in relation to terms such as multiculturalism, the New Criticism, open form, confessional poetry, and language poetry. Featured poets include Lowell, Brooks, Bishop, Berryman, Ashbery, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Rich, Levertov, Bernstein, Graham, Li-Young Lee, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. American, Post-1900. P, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course will study the developments mainly in British and American drama during the last ten to fifteen years. Plays will be discussed from both a literary and theatrical point of view, with attention to their historical, cultural, and political context. Among the playwrights we will be reading, a tentative list might include Tony Kushner, David Henry Huang, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Maria Irene Fornes, Elaine Jackson, Emily Mann, Caryl Churchill, and Brian Friel. Classes will be conducted primarily through discussion supplemented by lectures. Written work will include two papers: one short (4-6 pages) and one long (8-10 pages). In addition, each student will be responsible for a performance in class of a scene from one of the plays we are reading. Diversity, Post-1900. D, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course is a comparative study of America’s two most important 19th-century poets: Walt Whitman--the public, physical, exuberant, self-celebrating being who wandered across America--and Emily Dickinson, the private, ethereal, thoughtful soul who selected her own society.
Using a variety of critical approaches, we will examine some of the key textual contexts in and against which each poet wrote--the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Puritanism--and consider their poems on love, sex, nature, death, poetry, and the powers of human bodies and minds. We will also consider both poets' reactions to the Civil War and other major American socio-historical trends: democracy, slavery and abolition, commerce, the influx of immigrants and other demographic changes, the ascendancy of science, the decline of Calvinism, and others.
Texts will include correspondence, prose works, and major poetic cycles such as Dickinson's "bridal," "riddle," "definition," "nature," "prisoner," and "beyond-the-grave" groups and Whitman's "Children of Adam," "Calamus," "Leaves of Grass," and "Songs of Insurrection." American, 1700-1900. P, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
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. British, Post-1900. F, WL.Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An examination of the writings of the American Transcendentalists of the 19th century with special attention to Emerson, Thoreau, and the concept of nature. We will study some of the early contributors to this school of thought, as well as more recent expositors. Students should be prepared to tackle difficult texts that pose challenging philosophical, political, and interpretive questions. American, 1700-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
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 to develop a significant independent project. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Identical to CINE 436. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 18.Consent of instructor required.
When and why did Modernism transmogrify into Postmodernism? This course examines current theories of these two amorphous "isms" and surveys the forking paths between them. We will read works and hybrids of literature and theory comparatively across national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and consider such topics as: the (de)constructions of gender; (inter)textuality and the play of the signifier; surrealism and the hyperreal. Authors may include Djuna Barnes, Marguerite Duras, Luce Irigaray, Jean-François Lyotard, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Georges Bataille, and Jean Baudrillard. Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. Identical to CMPL 370. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
It would be an exaggeration to say that contemporary American film would disappear without crime as a subject, but not much of one. At various times in the history of American movies, crime has played a central role as subject, theme, and metaphor. The criminal is one of the common archetypes of American stories and the meaning of crime an American preoccupation, often suffused with romanticism and nostalgia as well as fear and anger.
In this course I want to explore how crime and criminals become lenses and metaphors for a wide variety of ethical, social, and epistemological themes as well as subjects on their own. In addition to being concerned with what cinema does with crime, I'm interested in what crime does to cinema, particularly the ways in which the crime film affects realism as a cinematic mode and goal. In other words, what challenges, possibilities, and problems does using crime as the center of a story pose for artists working the medium of film?
The number of movies we could look at is vast; I've chosen ones that I think are particularly interesting and important and tried to keep the list relatively contemporary. If your favorite crime drama isn't on the list, you can still write one of the longer essays on a movie we don't discuss in class. We'll also pay attention to the issue what it means to be a critical writer and develop an understanding of the issues and concerns that are central to critical inquiry
Movies will probably include, The Godfather, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, The Grifters, House of Games, One False Move, Hard Choices, Mean Streets, Badlands, Dirty Harry, Silence of the Lambs, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Honeymoon Killers, Across 110th Street, The Big Lebowski, To Die For, Mulholland Drive, though this list might change between now and February. (No Tarantino, don't bother to ask.) Requirements: Two critical essays one 5-7 pages, a second 7-10. Also, 4 3-page assignments. Students will be expected to form a small discussion group outside of class. While there will be weekly showings of each movie, they will also be on reserve. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Identical to CINE 371. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Since its inception, cinema has maintained a perennial concern with problems of representing experiences of the miraculous or transcendental. Despite the customary linkage of film to secular modernization, then, filmmakers and critics have returned repeatedly to the form's profound evocation of a sense of reality to explore the limits and consequences of this tendency. Across historical and national divisions, we will investigate cinematic treatments of spirituality in light of the challenges they present to critical theory and practice. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Identical to CINE 376. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course focuses on one of the first genres African American writers used to represent their perspectives--the slave narrative--and examines how it can serve as a foundation for narrative and authorship into the twentieth century. We will consider the narratives' use of realism, rhetorical methods by which authors position themselves as witnesses to history and claim moral authority, the phenomena of memory and self-reflexivity, and relations among literacy, oral culture, and freedom. And we will examine how modern writers re-visit social and philosophical problems left in tension in the literature of slavery. American, Diversity, 1700-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course offers an analysis of the narratives through which nationalisms
acquire credibility and authority. This
discussion-centered class will examine the nationalisms of Latin America, the
Caribbean, and South Asia with particular reference to those of Argentina, Mexico,
India, and Pakistan. Narrative theories as deployed in and by the disciplines
of History and English literary studies provide the overarching critical methodologies
for interdisciplinary analysis. Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL.
Identical to HIST 367. Enrollment Limit: 25. Consent of instructor
required.
An intensive study of major works by William Faulkner (1897-1962). Readings include Soldier's Pay, Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!, and a selection of poetry, short stories, essays, and speeches. American, Post-1900. F, AL.Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The course will use historical, stylistic, and feminist perspectives to explore the content and development of works by these two eminent British women writers. Texts to be read include: Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (as well as at least one other work by Woolf). British, Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The development of Joyce's fiction from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, emphasizing Ulysses, in the contexts of his biography and post-colonial Irish culture. Major issues will be the tensions between Joyce’s nationalism and internationalism, Catholicism and secularism, modernism and traditionalism, fantasy and social realism. British, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
P. 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.
F. Prerequisite: CRWR 201. Identical to CRWR 320. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
D. 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.
SENIOR TUTORIALS, HONORS, AND INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS
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. Enrollment Limit: 9. Application.
Intensive work on the student’s honors project, culminating in either an honors paper or creative project. Students interested in applying for Honors at graduation this year must take the Senior Tutorial first, in the fall semester . In future years, the Honors Project will be offered in fall and spring semesters. Consent of instructor required.
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