Fall 2006
| Courses for Non-Majors |
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 all participate in dialogues almost every day of our lives, but how often do we stop and think about how this basic form of communication really works? And what happens when it doesn’t work? This seminar will be an interdisciplinary analysis of dialogues in drama, poetry, fiction, films, philosophy, religion, interviews, debates, and conversations -- including our own class discussions. Readings will include scenes by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekov, Beckett, and Pinter; selections from fiction by Austen, Dickens, Lawrence, Hemingway, and Roth; films by Howard Hawks and Woody Allen; philosophical and psychological theories by Bakhtin, Gadamer, Goffman, Tannen and Ricoeur. We'll consider such issues as initiating and concluding a dialogue, how turn-taking works, power relations among the participants, listening, the use of questions and answers, genre-based expectations, and the influence of interruptions, misunderstandings and hidden agendas. 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.
Is seeing believing? Can you always believe your eyes? Why do hoaxes and frauds work? We'll take up questions like these by exploring the literal and metaphoric perspectives we bring to narratives and other creative work and how such work projects or plays with perspective and "truth." Our inquiry will be pursued through writing and the give-and-take of discussion as we examine prose narratives by O’Connor, Morrison, Kay, Fitzgerald and others, essays on identity and hoax, the graphic narrative Maus, The Wizard of Oz in its print and film forms, Orson Well's F for Fake, and selected works of visual art. Enrollment Limit: 14 first-year students only.
We often treat time and place as background, focusing on characters and actions rather than their context. In this course we will read and view works that put time and place in the foreground to explore the relationship between our sense of self to time and place. We will also explore how artists characterize the relation between time and place. A second concern in this course is the nature of reading and viewing. Enrollment limit: 14 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.
Television shows, movies, newspapers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, websites --
these all profoundly influence the ways we understand and experience the world.
In this course we will explore how such media produce meaning. To do this, we
will examine a variety of different media "texts" and learn to read
them more self-consciously, expanding our sense of what they mean to include
how and why they mean what they do. Enrollment limit: 14 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.
The detective story appeared in the West in the mid-nineteenth century, at the same time that crime-solving became more organized and systematized. The definition of crime/The way that crime has been portrayed has shifted over the years, however, and detective fiction can help us track these changes. The detective story -- built on a deceptively simple formula -- is an ideal genre in which to explore beliefs about relationships between criminality and the social world. Since the late nineteenth century black writers have recognized this, and they have riffed or "signified" on the formula to question sources and the effects of different kinds of crimes, to draw readers into the social and moral worlds of African Americans, and to explore institutional barriers to living crime-free, fulfilling lives. This course begins with some theories about the genre and about signifying as ironic "repetition with a difference" and examines works by authors such as Pauline Hopkins, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and John Ridley. We will ask why so many black writers have turned to a genre considered mere entertainment, what they gain (or lose!) with it, the effects of changes to its conventions, and the notion that the history of a genre is very much a history of its readers or that "signifying" has as much to do with reading as with writing. Enrollment limit: 14 first-year students only.
An introduction to the different meanings of rivers in a variety of texts, genres, and formats. Through careful readings of short pieces (poems, films, songs, stories, essays), longer accounts (novels, history, travel writing, autobiography), and local waterways, we will examine some of the different meanings that Americans have attributed to rivers and attempt to imagine where our attitudes towards places, people, and flowing water might lead us. Student writing will include brief essays and exams. Enrollment Limit: 50.
This course will examine a variety of innovative movements in American poetry, including (but not limited to) the Beats, the Black Mountain School, Black Arts Movement, Third World Liberation Front writing, LANGUAGE poetry, and new forms of performance poetry. We’ll be exploring the question of American poetry through a variety of lenses, with the ultimate goal of understanding how these poetic practices shape and re-shape our understanding of the very category of "American Poetry." 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.
A comparative study of about ten plays, half by Shakespeare and half by other dramatists of the period, probably Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster. The aim is to portray the Early Modern theater as an ongoing conversation, in which plays acquire their meaning partly in relation to one another. British, Pre-1700. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Scholars have suggested that the eighteenth century marked a crucial shift in our understandings of both "sexuality" and "literature" -- yet the relationship between these spheres remains an open question. With the literature of the long eighteenth century as our particular focus, we will investigate the mutually shaping relationship between the sexual and the literary. Authors and theorists to be considered include Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, Richardson, Wordsworth, Freud, Foucault, and Sedgwick. British, Diversity, 1700-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
This course introduces the nineteenth-century novel, with an emphasis on how emotions generate and organize these narratives. Authors may include Austen, Dickens, Brontë, Shelley, Eliot, Hardy, and James. In addition, the screening of a few film adaptations will allow us to contrast two kinds of storytelling (visual and non-visual). Through detailed critical readings of these texts, and their affective structures, we will attempt to discern a poetics of feeling underlying the Victorian novel. British, 1700-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 30.
A comparative study of poetry, fiction, and drama by three major twentieth-century writers who all grew up in Ireland but were separated by their religions, social classes, and world-views. Major issues will be the tensions between literature and politics, innovation and tradition, elite arts and popular culture, and nationalism and internationalism. Working on poems, stories and plays, students will develop fundamental techniques of close reading informed by the historical context of revolutionary Ireland. Diversity, Post-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 30.
African American humor has historically received little academic study. But the many anthologies of oral humor and the visibility of stand-up comedy invite us to examine the presence and role of humor and irony in African American literature. This course thus centers on a concentrated group of black literary humorists and explores various theories and methods (functional, structural, and cultural) for interpreting their works. Authors we will read include Chesnutt, Hurston, Hughes, Ellison, and Reed. American, Diversity, Post-1900. 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 may 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, Diversity, Post-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 30.
Through literature and films, this course will explore what it considers exemplary immigrant (Asian, Afro-Caribbean, European) experiences, examining diverse reactions to immigration to the U.S. It will consider the subject formation of immigrants as well as questions of identity -- individual, group, national -- that arise in the context of emigration and immigration, taking into account the cultural and historical differences shaping different immigrant groups. It will also consider legal and economic issues surrounding immigration to the U.S. Diversity, Post-1900. 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. 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.
We will study the lyric tradition in English from the later Middle Ages to the Restoration: from popular songs to elaborate formal sonnets, from irreverent seduction poems to holy hymns and meditations. We will explore how the intimate world of the lyric is shaped by public events (e.g. Reformation, Civil War) and cultural histories of gender, sexuality, education, belief, and aesthetics. Authors may include Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, and Anonymous. British, Pre-1700. 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, 1700-1900. 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.
Our focus will be on The Canterbury Tales in its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. Requirements include memorization, exams, and essays. British, Pre-1700. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
An intensive survey of the eighteenth-century British novel. We will take our critical bearings from Locke's famous description of the mind as "white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas." Experience thus makes us who we are -- a notion that bequeathed to the eighteenth century both an unprecedented freedom and danger. Accordingly, we will study the pleasures and perils of human experience in novels by, among others, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Austen. British, 1700-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The development of poetry from 1880 to 1918. Consideration of poetry’s contribution to shifting accounts of history, identity, religion, and love. Inquiry into poetry’s nature not only as an art form, but as a form of thought (intended to change our beliefs about the world) and a form of work (intended to change the world itself). Readings from Walt Whitman through Marianne Moore. American OR British (not both), Post-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course explores how technologies of the image have been imagined in relation to the human subject. We will examine a wide range of visual and written texts in order to think about how various technologies have altered our relationship to the world at specific historical moments: the invention of photography (1830), the beginnings of cinema (1900), the rise of television (the 1950s), and the proliferation of digital media (1990s). Identical to CINE 340. American, Post-1900. Prerequisite: CINE 101 and a Cinematic Traditions course (preferred), or see headnote above, or consent of the instructor. Enrollment limit: 25.
How did these very different places and their cultures take shape as "regions" in the heyday of U.S. regionalism? Focusing on their histories, demographies, literature, artistic and musical cultures, we'll consider what has been distinctive about each and how each has been enmeshed in the national l ife. Readings will cover regional/national history and cultural landscapes, regional/national geographies of race and class, literature by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Pauline Hopkins, others. American, Diversity, 1700-1900. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The course will focus on questions of experiment and its worth: What is "experimental poetry," exactly, and why would anyone want to write it? Along with readings that will roughly describe a historical arc of experimental American poetry in the 20th century, we'll also be engaging these poets on a more creative level, as well, responding to their work both in critical terms and creative projects. American, Diversity, Post-1900. 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, Diversity, Post-1900. 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. Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
This course focuses on major playwrights of England and Ireland from post-World War II to the present. Authors may include Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Edward Bond, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Mark Ravenhill, and Sarah Kane. Students will be expected to attend productions and participate in scene performances. British, Post-1900. 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 OR Post-1900 (not both). Prerequisite: See headnote above. Enrollment limit: 25.
The writing of poetry. Intensive discussion of student work, accompanied by assigned reading. Admission based on a completed application form and a writing sample of six to eight poems (due in the Creative Writing Program office by Friday, June 9, 2006). Identical to CRWR 310. Prerequisite: 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 two separate pieces (due in the Creative Writing Program office by Friday, June 9, 2006). 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, SEMINARS, AND HONORS PROJECTS
Senior Tutorials and Senior Seminars are designed primarily for English
majors, and fulfill the 400-level requirement for the English major. Rising
senior English majors should apply for tutorials and seminars through a common
application available at the department office, not through individual instructors.
Some places in seminars may be available for other qualified students after
all English majors have been accommodated, by application to the department.
Honors in English also fulfills the 400-level requirement for the English major; it is only open to students who have been admitted through the application process.
Prerequisite: Admission based on a completed application form (available at the department office).
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.
About
2006-07 400-Level
Courses.
Application for
2006-07 Senior
Tutorials/Seminars.
This course will explore the ways history and our relation to it is defined
and represented in film, in short, how history is imagined. The emphasis will
be primarily, but not exclusively, on American cinema. We will be equally concerned
with what films do with history and what focusing on the subject of history
reveals about film as art. Identical to CINE 433. American, Post-1900.
Prerequisite: See headnote above. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment
limit: 12.
About
2006-07 400-Level
Courses.
Application for
2006-07 Senior
Tutorials/Seminars.
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. Prerequisite: Senior major standing and invitation of the Department.
Consent of instructor required.
About
2006-07 400-Level
Courses.
Application
for English Department 2006-07 Honors Program.
London
Semester
Frequently an English Department faculty member serves as co-director
of the Danenberg Oberlin-in-London Program, thereby facilitating applications
for English majors interested in that semester's program. For further information,
see the section of the catalog entitled "London Program."
A social and cultural history of London from 1789 to 1851. We will read texts by Blake, Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, P. D. Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, D. G. Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti, and examine paintings and engravings by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, John Martin, Henry Fuseli, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and D. G. Rossetti. Among museums to be visited: National Gallery, Royal Academy, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wallace Collection, Museum of London and Sir John Soane's Museum. In the city we will explore John Nash's transformation of Regency London and the Barry and Pugin Houses of Parliament. British, 1700-1900. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 20.
A survey of the poetry and prose writings of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound and of fiction by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster, emphasizing those works in which the writers represent and respond to the history of London. The influence of contemporary painting will also be examined, focusing on the works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel DuChamp, Wyndham Lewis, Mark Gertler, John Northcote Nash, F. T. Martinetti, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. British, Post-1900. Consent of instructor required. Enrollment limit: 20.
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