|
|
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.
We will address the fascinating complexity of metaphorical language -- how metaphors are used by writers and how they're interpreted by readers. We'll begin with poetry and then explore metaphors in fiction, drama, film, religion, science, politics, and art. Among the questions we'll explore are: How do metaphors inform and direct our thoughts and imaginations? How have metaphors changed over the centuries? Is metaphor an appealing ornament to plain speech, or is it inherent in language itself? Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
"Literature" connotes a special kind of writing--sophisticated, meaningful, artistic, remote. This course questions distinctions between the literary and the popular by examining how fiction is shaped by a presumed audience, how it is adapted to its readership. Our exploration of how fiction is consumed will encompass best-sellers (from "Rip Van Winkle" to Tarzan); works treating the cult of the author (Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet"); fiction about the importance of reading fiction (Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple); books written to make certain kinds of political points (Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio"). This course, predominantly about readers, is also for readers; it features relatively little formal writing, relying instead on a series of response papers 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.
In 1888, Strindberg declared that theater, like religion, was dying: disenchanted modern audiences had lost the "primitive capacity for deceiving themselves." This course will investigate questions surrounding the persistent link between theater and "primitive" magic or religion: What is the relationship between theatrical experience and rituals such as ancestor-worship, sacrifices, or sacraments? Can the "magic" of theater promote social and political change? Do the sensory and embodied elements of performance -- such as action, dance, and music -- have special transformative powers? We will focus on the Early Modern theater (Shakespeare's The Tempest and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, for example), but with attention to plays from other periods as well (Tony Kusner's Angels in America, among others), and to short critical writings by playwrights, choreographers, anthropologists, theologians, revolutionaries, and others. British, Pre-1700. D, 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 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 has two goals: to introduce major texts and themes in American literature, and to consider how those texts and themes have been revised, critiqued, and rewritten from different perspectives. We will pair works accorded "traditional" status with works by writers who engage and transform the terms of that tradition; for example, Herman Melville's Moby Dick with Sena Naslund's recent novel Ahab’s Wife; Henry David Thoreau's Walden with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Other pairings may include the poetry of Walt Whitman and that of Allen Ginsburg; James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues; Ernest Hemingway's short stories and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Reading across literary canons and across history, this "gateway" course seeks to model the terms by which literature can be critiqued and adapted, read and re-read from various points of view and various cultural situations. American, 1700-1900. F, AL. 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. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30
What kind of a future is queer? This course asks us to imagine questions of sexuality as, also, questions of temporality. Queerness, after all, is a way for subjects to imagine themselves by terms other than the ones that they have been given, and so queerness engages futures that exceed familiar progress narratives. But identifying as "queer" also might be a way of claiming an identity that is as-yet unknown to the subject who claims it. Is queerness, then, a way of casting into a future or a way of suspending presumptions about what that future might consist? Does queerness consolidate new futures or put the category of "the future" itself under critical scrutiny? In this course, we will read queer fiction and theories that push us to reconceive the relation between sexuality and time. We will also read and think about recent activist work around issues like gay parenting/adoption/immigration, transgender, and AIDS and healthcare. Readings will include fiction and science fiction by "new narrative" experimentalists like Samuel Delany, Laurie Weeks, and Renee Gladman; theoretical work by Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Dean Spade, Judith Halberstam, and Lauren Berlant; poetry by Eileen Myles, Pamela Liu, and John Ashberry, and visual art by the futuristic duo Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. Diversity, Post-1900. F. 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. Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course will explore the question of representation in a variety of works by American authors, each of whom comes with what seems an uncomplicated adjectival 'supplement': Asian, Native, Latino/a, Chicano/a, to name but a few. We'll focus on how these unique supplements influence how we interpret literary work, asking what, exactly, it means to be representative of a particular culture or ethnicity. Possible authors include Sherman Alexie, David Wong Louie, Ana Castillo, and Jessica Hagedorn. American, Post-1900, Diversity. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Intensive study of the various shorter forms of English poetry between the mythical Anglo-Saxon cowherd-singer Caedmon and the witty Parliamentarian Andrew Marvell. We will read alliterative elegies, troubadour and religious lyrics, songs, sonnets, more sonnets, still more sonnets, satires, odes, invitations, epitaphs, ballads, hymns, and other small gems of the medieval and Renaissance periods, attending to both aesthetic-formal and cultural-historical issues. There will be reading and reciting in Middle English, and several exams. British, Pre-1700. P, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
An opportunity to consider major currents and counter-currents in English poetry from 1630 to 1939. In addition to love, death, and the changing of the seasons, topics will include form, disorder, time, war, dream, intimacy, violence, reparation, alienation, reflection, the senses, and human and non-human life. British. P. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
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 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. 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.
Authority and challenges to it create tensions on many levels in Shakespeare's plays. Whether authority derives from institutions such as the Church or monarchy, from patriarchal family structures or social norms, from gender expectations or sexual roles, or from literary genres and conventions -- disobedience, subversion, or critique motivate character, action, language, form, and stage interpretations in Shakespearean drama. We will study six to seven plays within histories of order and disorder in early modern England. British, Pre-1700. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
When we think of sentimentality, we tend to think of feelings that are ascribed to women: weakness, weeping, and irrationality. Indeed, most studies of the sentimental novel associate it with the development of a private, domestic, women’s sphere of feeling. But a closer study of the genre in the 18th century reveals that sentimentality has its roots in racialized narratives of heroic, masculine suffering. In this course, we will begin with travel narratives that showcase the aristocratic ideal of noble African princes suffering heroically at the hands of the Europeans. We will follow the course of these narratives of masculine pain through the sentimental novel and the gothic towards the end of the 18th century. Our goal is to consider the transformation of the problem of cultural difference (in the figure of the native prince) into the “solution” of identification (in the suffering hero of the gothic genre). How is it, we will ask, that the “exotic” native becomes an exemplar of masculine, white, English sensibility? Texts will include Aphra Behn’s Ooronoko, Dryden’s Indian Queen, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, and theories of the sublime from Longinus and Burke. British, 1700-1900, Diversity. F, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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 required. Click here to request application; it will be emailed to you.
This course explores the different ways in which "reality" was staged by playwrights including Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shaw, and Pirandello. We will consider how modern theatrical movements such as realism, naturalism, expressionism, and metadrama sought to represent "reality," focusing on evolving stagecraft. Emphasis will also be placed on the historical and cultural contexts surrounding the early stages of modern drama. Post-1900. D, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Poetry in English during the period of the World Wars: chiefly Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Crane, Hughes, Auden. We will contemplate the inner working of the poems, keeping in mind the conceptual and historical contexts from which they arise. General concepts and (and specific phenomena) to be discussed: Destruction (War), Improvisation (Jazz), Plot and Disjunction (Cinema), Description (Photography), Abstraction (Nonrepresentational Art), Disclosure (Pornography), and Concealment (The Body’s Unknowable Interior). Post-1900. P. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Innovation in technology is often seen as either a starry dream or a dystopian nightmare. This course seeks to move beyond such polarized judgments by looking closely at representations of technology in film, literature, visual art, and electronic resources as well as critical and theoretical works on technology and aesthetic and social experience. Identical to CINE 340. American, Post-1900. F, AL. 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.
Melville's phrase captures a major concern of American writers during the antebellum period: the creation of a distinctly American literature. Directly or indirectly, many writers of the era engaged with "writing like an American"--Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Douglass, Jacobs among them--while a few, notably Poe, repudiated the very idea. We'll read work by the writers I've listed and by others as we consider what "writing like an American" entailed during the formative era in American culture and history. American, 1700-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
A comparative study of America's two most important 19th-century poets: Whitman the exuberant poet-wanderer and Dickinson the thoughtful soul who selected her own society. We will examine some of the key contexts in and against which they wrote, including Puritanism, Transcendentalism, and the Civil War. Texts to include 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.
For most nineteenth-century American women writers, the word (especially the written word) reflected the world and could affect it. This course is organized around four key terms: domesticity, regionalism, reform, and sentimentality. Via contemporary feminist criticism, we’ll also consider the word-world relationship and the status of our key terms in U.S. culture today. Writers to be read include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson, Sarah Orne Jewett and Sui Sin Far. Critics include Lora Romero, June Howard, Amy Kaplan, P. Gabrielle Foreman. American, 1700-1900 or Post-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An exploration of law and legal themes in American literature, especially around the issue of race. In context of key legal issues and rulings -- from the Fugitive Slave Law to Brown v. Board of Education -- the course considers how 19th- and 20th-century American narratives create and shape systems of justice and authority. Authors may include: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Fuller, William Styron, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth. American, post-1900, Diversity. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Through readings of works that de-stabilize, de-center, and de-naturalize our assumptions about what literature ought to be, this course will explore what it might mean to be an “ethnic experimentalist” writing in America today. We’ll examine what “experiment” provides for ethnic American authors, and question how their works seek to reframe contemporary discussions of race, ethnicity and language. Possible authors include Nathaniel Mackey, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Myung Mi Kim, Sesshu Foster, Tan Lin, and Harryette Mullen. American, post-1900, Diversity. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course will scrutinize the issues of gender, sexuality, race, and nation/nationality in a variety of "Third" world narratives by women. Our discussion will focus on the following issues: narrative -- especially the novel -- as the preferred "genre" for describing and interrogating the birth and development of nations; women's role(s) in the narratives of nation-forming; the narrative strategies and structures -- i.e., who speaks what and for whom? how is the narrative organized, around whose perspective, and what materials are selected for consideration? Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
How to represent the unspeakable? How to convey trauma without merely producing pleasurable spectacle? This course compares contemporary fiction, graphic novels, film, documentary, and performance art that represent historical events triggered by perceived racial difference -- the Holocaust, American slavery, the Japanese American internment. We will discuss how affect is represented and racial differences (re)staged, and explore the psychic and social implications of narrative/visual pleasure and pain. American, Post 1900, Diversity. AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Selected works of major American playwrights. Emphasis will be placed on close reading, as well as on the significance of each play in regard to political and social movements of the time and the evolution of the American theater. Among the playwrights to be considered: Odets, O'Neill, Williams, Hellman, Albee, Shepard, Baraka, Bullins, Fornes, Kushner. American, Post-1900. D, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The body may seem natural, but bodylore treats it as a cultural artifact inflected by ethnicity, class, gender, so on. Folklore of the body treats the body -- dead and alive -- as a site where we inscribe notions about identity and society. We will study many forms of bodylore concerning reproduction, initiation, health, beauty, gesture, etiquette, hair, body parts, beliefs, and dress by utilizing various disciplinary approaches and examples from different cultures and periods. Diversity. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Between 1880 and 1930, European artists and writers responded to crises of war, technology, and empire by creating an array of Modernist forms (e.g. Expressionist, Cubist, and Surrealist). We will read works by a variety of non-Western authors to see why and how they received, rejected, and/or recombined European Modernism. [Note: not available to students who have taken ENGL 266.] Diversity, Post-1900. WL. Identical to CMPL 381. Enrollment Limit: 25.
A reading of Toni Morrison's oeuvre undertaken in light of a survey of some contemporary critical practices, including Black feminism, new historicism and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. The course explores how Morrison's novels and critical essays address the relation of history and literature through problems of identity, focusing on the thematic issues of African American women, individual and communal memory, migration and belonging. American, post-1900, Diversity. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An intensive study of major works by William Faulkner (1897-1962). Readings include Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, The Unvanquished 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.
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.
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.
|
|
|
|
|
| ||
