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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.
Many African American novelists have embedded what W. E. B. Du Bois called "double consciousness" in their forms and themes. But hybrid narratives combining residual black folklore and Western literary genres have shifted over time and been named and studied variously. This course constitutes a survey of major representative novels, or highlights, within the tradition from the 1850s through the 1970s (written by authors from William Wells Brown to Toni Morrison). Enrollment limit: 50.
"On these battlefields," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "my lovely, safe world blew itself up." In this course we will consider an array of aesthetic responses to World War I, with an emphasis on the literature and film of the Western Front. Texts will be drawn from historical accounts, trench novels and poetry, American modernism, psychiatric literature, war memoirs, documentary footage, war and anti-war films, and painting. Classics of war literature (Remarque, Hemingway, Sassoon) and film (Griffith, Renoir, Kubrick) will be studied alongside lesser-known works, including those by women on the front (Wharton, Stein, West). Our aim in this course is to immerse ourselves in what Fitzgerald called the "terrible twilight of an old world, noisy dawn of our times." 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.
Eighteenth-century authors explore what it means to be modern. In this course we will consider how their literary experiments engage with different kinds of newness - from revolutionary models for how the mind works to a radically altered understanding of the globe and the cosmos. We will trace how authors, in a variety of genres, exploit and critique the new forms of materialism that emerge from philosophical and scientific developments, the extension of trade routes, and the expanding book market. Students of this course will learn to navigate their way through texts at first dauntingly allusive and gain the confidence to critically engage with these rich and complex works. Readings will cover a variety of genres including the periodical essay, the novel, slave narratives, poetry, science fiction, and the gothic. British, 1700-1900. F, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
In this course we will read eighteenth-century works alongside the modern fiction and film they inspire. Eighteenth-century authors experiment with literary form to pose open-ended questions about the nature of the self, as a solitary and social being, the cultural and ethical role of artistic representation, the limits of reason, and the function of the imagination. These are just some of the issues to be considered in the cinematic adaptation and modern re-writings of eighteenth-century works, such as: Pope’s poetry in Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Kaufman’s/Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Robinson Crusoe transferred to celluloid in Castaway and revised in Coetze’s Foe; Austen’s Emma set in the Beverly Hills of Clueless. 1700-1900 OR Post-1900 (not both). F, 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. Painters to be considered will include Girtin, Constable, Turner. 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.
Novels and short fiction by such major twentieth-century writers as Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, Mansfield, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, and Greene. British, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30
An introduction to British and American lyric poetry, with attention to the complex relation between innovation and tradition, music and discord, pattern and disruption, as well as public discourse and intimate awareness. Specific emphasis on the challenges and opportunities that lyric poems present to writers of critical prose. Readings from Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Hughes, Moore, Lowell, Plath, Ashbery, Heaney, Graham, Komunyakaa. Post-1900. P, WL. 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, and also explore how representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class inform and shape these contemporary texts. American, Diversity, Post-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30
This course deals with how the art of American cinema is shaped by demands of business and technology. We will also explore how filmmakers used strong genres and stars, focusing on two 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.
What kinds of theoretical models are valid for grounding literary comparisons across history, place, language, nation, culture, genre, and medium? Texts from several literary traditions will be used to answer that question and explore topics in theory, translation, East-West comparison, and literature and the other arts. Identical to CMPL 200. Diversity. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
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 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.
Introduction to the study of folklore through genres: folk speech, myth, legend, folktale, ballad, riddle, jokes, superstition, custom, belief, folk clothing and foodways. Considerable attention to secondary criticism focusing on cultural meaning, race, ethnicity, feminist and gender concerns, collecting, and questions of stereotyping and social inequality. Most examples from certain cultures--especially Anglo-American, Black American, Native American, other ethnic groups in America; some attention to European and African materials as well as Asian and Indonesian. Diversity. 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.
Questioning how domestic violence is represented as a central element in a variety of plays during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, we study seven plays: Taming of the Shrew, A Women Killed with Kindness, Arden of Feversham, The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi, Othello, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Additional readings will include social and family history, literary criticism, contemporary theory regarding violence and performance. British, Diversity, Pre-1700. D, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Milton's English poetry and selected prose, with special attention to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Considerable time will be devoted to the poetic texts as participants in historical and intellectual discourses and to modern critical writing on Milton. British, Pre-1700. P, EL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course explores the cultural and literary fascination with emptiness across periods, disciplines, genres, and artistic mediums. It investigates how and why "nothing," in its myriad forms, as vacuum, in dialectical relationship with matter, as mental and textual blank, in utopian guise, as an experience of emptiness, serves as a spur to literary and cinematic innovation. We will look at how forms of nothing offer a way to investigate the material world, function as a means of social commentary, and assist in probing the nature of selfhood. Using the long 18th century - the period in which "nothing" enjoyed the greatest scientific, literary, and cultural prominence - as a base, this course pairs 18th-century treatments of the topic with classical sources of vacuity and contemporary artistic experimentation with matter and space, for example the recent film, I Heart Huckabees. Other possible works to be considered include: Tom Jones, White Noise, On the Nature of Things. 1700-1900. F, 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, Diversity, 1700-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Selected short stories and novels by Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Connor, Mary Lavin, William Trevor, John McGahern, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Neil Jordan, Patrick McCabe, Edna O'Brien, and Anne Enright. Major issues will be the tensions between literature and politics, innovation and the tradition, and nationalism and internationalism in the context of a rapidly modernizing Irish society. Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course will study the development of drama from World War II to 1975 from both a literary and a theatrical point of view. Playwrights will include Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Churchill, Pinter, Fornes, and Adrienne Kennedy. Post-1900. D, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The story goes that literature grew up in Chicago - the city that developed so rapidly in the 19th century - striving for "democratic" representation of new urban experiences and (multi-classed, immigrant, and racial) identities, culminating in a renaissance from 1900-1930. Did Chicago continue to encourage a specific strain of American modernism? We will address this question through readings in urban sociology and authors such as Dreiser, Algren, Wright, Attaway, Walker, and Brooks. American, Diversity, Post-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Central themes and conflicts in poetry since World War II, with attention to poetry’s search for new forms and modes of expression in a world altered (often beyond recognition) by war, political unrest, and cultural upheaval. Lowell, Larkin, Roethke, Berryman, Plath, Rich, Ginsberg, Ashbery, O’Hara, Walcott, Heaney, Soyinka, Jay Wright, Charles Wright, Glück, Komunyakaa, Dove, Carson, Murray, Boland. American, Post-1900. P, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. 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.
This course focuses on American culture in the 1930s with particular reference to the relation between the novel and cinema, though other arts and media such as photography, painting, and music will also be addressed. We will consider not only the relation of these arts to each other but to the social crisis of the Great Depression. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Identical to CINE 373. Prerequisite: ENGL 173/CINE 101 and a Cinema Studies Cinematic Traditions course (preferred), or see headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
In this course we will examine psychoanalysis as a literary and artistic medium in its own right. In addition to studying classic texts of Freudian psychoanalysis and those of object-relations theorists (Klein, Winnicott), we will explore the representation of psychoanalysis in the modern imagination. We will look, for example, at how post-war American film portrays the rehabilitation of the hysteric through the patient-doctor relationship (The Seventh Veil, The Three Faces of Eve, Spellbound), and how the "confessional" school of American poets (Lowell, Berryman, Plath) uses the therapeutic session as a basis for poetry. We will also examine contemporary memoirs of madness, analyze the short stories of A.M. Homes, and evaluate the Freudian "family romance" in film and TV (Chinatown, The Sopranos). What we hope to accomplish from this work is an appreciation of psychoanalysis as an influential and intriguing model (and modeler) of human consciousness, as we test its validity across various periods and genres. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
Cinema is perennially concerned with the challenge of representing extraordinary experiences. Filmmakers and critics return repeatedly to the medium's capacity to evoke a profound sense of reality despite reason's doubts regarding the status of the represented world. We'll investigate selected treatments of the extraordinary and the challenges they present to critical theory and practice. American, Post-1900. F, AL. Identical to CINE 376. Prerequisite: ENGL 173/CINE 101 and a Cinema Studies Cinematic Traditions course (preferred), or see headnote above. 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, SEMINARS, AND HONORS PROJECTS
For English majors in either semester of their final year only, involving close work in a small group on an individual project, leading to a substantial paper. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 9.
Our seminar will study texts by the Irish modernists Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett as well as texts by such contemporary Irish writers as Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, and Brian Friel. We will consider them in the historical contexts of the Irish nationalist struggle for independence and the later transformation of Ireland into a modern, secular, European state. Group work will also include reflection on the value of studying literature and doing literary research. Each student will then write a directed research paper on an Irish writer or topic. Diversity, Post-1900. F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 12.
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: Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda; Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Supplementary reading will include one or two essays by each writer and some recent criticism. British, Diversity, 1700-1900 OR Post-1900 (not both). F, WL. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 12.
Intensive year-long work on a topic developed in consultation with a member of the department, culminating in a substantial paper and a defense of that paper. Consent of instructor required.
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