Fall 2004
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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.
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.
A study of the poetry, autobiographical prose, 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. 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 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.
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 first-year students only.
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 first-year students only.
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. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
Weaving together various depictions of the "City of Angels," and drawing from an array of sources, this course will explore how differing images of Los Angeles reveal critical and unresolved questions about America's ever-evolving demographic and ever-shifting cultural and social geography. Reading may include James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, Joan Didion's Where I Was From, as well as the films Chinatown, Twilight: L.A., and Better Luck Tomorrow. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
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.
This course will ask how some of the most heated social, political, and artistic issues of our time affect our readings of Shakespeare’s plays. Topics may include gender (Taming of the Shrew), violence (Titus Andronicus), race (Othello), anti-Semitism (The Merchant of Venice), class (Henry V), and tyranny (The Tempest). For each topic, we will find out what artists and critics from our own time have to say, as well as reading commentaries and historical documents from Shakespeare’s era. British, Pre-1700. D, 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 reinterpretation and appropriation of Shakespeare; we'll read plays, study films, and work on the theoretical and cultural relationships between them. British, Pre-1700. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course is cancelled.
An introduction to the reading of British and American lyric poetry, with emphasis on works from the first half of the twentieth century. We will consider the complex relation between innovation and tradition, music and discord, pattern and disruption, as well as that between public discourse and intimate awareness. A central goal will be to explore the particular challenges and opportunities that lyric poems present to writers of critical prose. Readings may be taken from the poems of Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Stevens, Loy, Williams, Pound, H.D., Owen, Crane, Hughes, Neidecker, Warren, and Auden. Post-1900. P. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course addresses two borders: the boundaries of Asian American representation, and the shifting parameters of the Asian American canon. Readings will include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Joy Kogawa, David Wong Louie, David Henry Hwang, Karen Yamashita, Jessica Hagedorn, as well as canonical Asian American criticism and theory addressing how stereotypes, history, and cultural and personal memories collide in the contentious relationships between gender, sexuality, and national/diasporic identity. American, Post-1900, Diversity. AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course surveys the decade of artistic production known as the "Harlem Reniassance" or the "New Negro Renaissance"--roughly 1919-1929. We will explore the controversies of racial representation in this important period of modern American politics and culture. We will address key interactions on the subject between and among black and white artists of the period, treating their fiction, poetry and essays. Our exploration will focus on literary conversations about identity and art through the issues of race, racism, racialism, and cultural nationalism. Visual art, music, and film will accompany the introduction of texts. American, Diversity. 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 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. Identical to CINE 272. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
An investigation of the nature and scope of comparative literary studies, focusing on the theoretical assumptions of major approaches to the discipline. Topics to be covered include translation, the role of theory and criticism, the opportunities and limitations of influence studies, methods of historicizing across boundaries of time, space, language, and culture, and comparisons between literature and the other arts. Texts from several literary traditions will be analyzed from a variety of perspectives. Identical to CMPL 200. Diversity. WL. Prerequisites: An introductory literature course in any language. Note: For Comparative Literature majors this course must be taken by the junior year. Enrollment limit: 25.
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.
Although we cannot really speak of a "female literary tradition" in the Middle Ages, the period is not quite the "long silence" for women's writing that scholars once thought. We will study those women who, remarkably, managed to make themselves heard, including Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Marie de France, Heloise, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pisan, the Paston women, and Anonymous. British, Diversity, Pre-1700. F, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Almost five hundred years ago, Thomas More coined the term “Utopia”
to describe an island society that had supposedly been discovered by one of
Amerigo Vespucci’s traveling companions. This course will examine the
relationship between literary utopias like More’s and various early modern
endeavors to explore, describe, and colonize the “new world.” Did
fictional utopias primarily suggest ways to reform injustices in England, or
were they blueprints for colonial settlement and exploitation abroad? Was utopia
imagined as a lost, natural state -- like Eden, or the “golden age”?
Or was the idea of utopia fundamentally futuristic, embracing new technologies
and innovative models of political organization? In addition to More’s
Utopia, readings may include Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
Montaigne’s “Of cannibals,” Bacon’s New Atlantis,
D’Urfey’s Commonwealth of Women, and selections from the
poetry of Spenser, Donne, Milton, and Marvell.
We will read these texts alongside drawings, maps, travel writings, and records
of colonial efforts such as the Jamestown settlement. In our last unit, we will
ask how earlier representations of the new world as a potential utopia may have
played out in the later history of colonialism in America and elsewhere. Students
will have an opportunity to do research on a utopia or dystopia from any time
period; they will also have the option to pursue a creative project in the medium
and genre of their choosing. British, Pre-1700. EL. Prerequisite:
See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An advanced course in selected British writers of the eighteenth-century, dealing with issues of the rise of the genre of the novel and its relationship to national identity and culture. Possible authors to be studied include Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. British, 1700-1900. F, EL. 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. British, 1700-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
When Ralph Waldo Emerson called for an "original relation" with nature in 1836, he was not thinking of city zoos or taxidermy specimens in Museums of Natural History. But it was through such examples that many later nineteenth-century Americans would encounter and imagine the original, the natural, the authentic. This course raises the question of the real thing in an era when distinctions between the genuine and the fake were not easy or always obvious. In authors including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Abraham Cahan, Nella Larsen, and William Carlos Williams, we will consider how problems of authenticity inform thinking about literature and writing, about nature and technology, about race, gender, ethnicity -- and about the very category of the "American" in an age both enamored and skeptical of that label. American. AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An inquiry into some central themes and conflicts in British, American, and Anglophone Poetry since World War II. Theodore Adorno famously claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. This course will pay close attention to poetry's efforts to find new forms and modes of expression in a world overshadowed by unthinkable acts and unspeakable experience. How have lyric poets undertaken to employ their art to give voice to what appears to be, by definition, unutterable? Authors considered may include Lowell, Larkin, Roethke, Berryman, Plath, Rich, Ginsberg, Ashbery, O'Hara, Walcott, Heaney, Soyinka, Jay Wright, Charles Wright, Glück, Komunyakaa, Dove, Carson, Murray, Boland. Post-1900. P. 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. American, Post-1900. AL. Prerequisite: 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. Post-1900. F, WL Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course will explore cinematic authorship by focusing on directors who have defined a distinctive style despite emerging from vastly different cultural contexts. While their films reward examination in relation to these contexts and to the body of work of each director, their films also share a common domain, the contemporary international cinema of quality. In all these registers, we will examine the value and limitation of a concept of cinematic authorship. Post-1900. F, WL. Identical to CINE 392. Prerequisite: Two 200-level English courses, including at least one Gateway course or three 200-level English courses or CINE 101 and a Cinematic Traditions course or consent of the instructor. 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 Friday, 6/11/04). P. Identical to CRWR 310. Prerequisite: CRWR 201. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
The writing of personal narratives which employ the techniques of both the traditional essay and fiction, with an emphasis on nonfiction as a literary art form. Students will read work by modern and contemporary authors with an eye toward understanding the variety of modes which come under the current heading "creative nonfiction" (memoir, meditation, travel, cultural critique, etc.), and will be asked to employ a number of these methods and approaches in their own work. Admission based on a completed application form and writing sample (due in the Creative Writing Program office by Friday, 6/11/04). Identical to CRWR 340. Recommended preparation: CRWR 201. Consent of instructor required. 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 the Creative Writing Program office by Friday, 6/11/04). F. Identical to CRWR 320. Prerequisite: CRWR 201. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 12.
A course in which students will tutor at the Writing Center or assist one of the writing-intensive courses offered in various disciplines while studying composition theory and pedagogy. In the process of helping to educate others, students work toward a fuller understanding of their own educational experiences, particularly in writing. Juniors or seniors who write well, regardless of major, are encouraged to apply. Identical to RHET 481. Note: Students enrolling in ENGL 399 or RHET 481 should also enroll in RHET 483, Tutoring Lab. Consent of instructor required. 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.
About Senior Tutorial Fall 2004.
Application for Senior Tutorial Fall 2004.
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, whether in December or May, must complete the Senior Tutorial in the previous semester. 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.
This course interweaves reading assignments and use of London cultural resources to study a sequence of phases, controversies, and key figures in the emergence of British feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft's ground-breaking feminist manifesto to Virginia Woolf's pioneering feminist literary and critical works. Within this "long nineteenth century," the course will explore, in a sequence of generational groupings, such topics and figures as: 1) female education, vocation, and domesticity during the 1830s and '40s (including attention to Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Florence Nightingale); 2) the emergence of feminist societies and women's professions in the 1850s and '60s (the Langham Place feminists, the founding of the British woman suffrage movement, the development of health professions for women, and the emergence of women in social reforms including opposition to the Contagious Diseases Act); 3) 1870s and '80s responses to double sexual and social standards in an era of expanding empire abroad and expanding democratization at home (W.T. Stead's "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," "Jack the Ripper" murders, and the gendered implications of imperialism); 4) late and post-Victorian suffrage reform and challenges to sexual taboos (the Pankhursts, Tracy Chevalier's historical novel Falling Angels). Work requirements will consist of several short papers, a longer final paper, and individual or small-group projects involving reporting on a relevant London site and a relevant biography. 3 hours for the English major: British, 1700-1900. F, WL. Consent of instructor required.
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, one to 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. 6 hours for the English major: British; 3 hours for the English major: Pre-1700; 3 hours for the English major: Post-1900. D, 3WL, 3EL. Consent of instructor required.
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