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The Department offers courses in English Composition in close cooperation with the Expository Writing Program. These courses do not count towards an English major.
Possible readings include: Genesis, Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, Dharma Gaia, selections by Annie Dillard, Thoreau, Emerson, Gary Snyder, Carolyn Merchant, Thomas Sherman, and Lewis Thomas, and the magazine Nature.
Colloquia will focus on critical writing and analysis through the study of texts. These colloquia are for first-year students only, and do not count for the English major, which begins with foundation courses at the 200 level. All colloquia are Writing Intensive courses. Students in their second year or beyond should begin work in the English Department at the 200 level.
We typically describe a story as an account of action, of people doing something; time and place are usually understood as a "background." For many storytellers, though, the sense of a particular time and place is equally important, if not more so. In the course we'll discuss a group of such works, focusing on 1) how are stories of this kind made, and what different kinds of reading experiences do these techniques offer us? and 2) what are the different conceptions of time and place in these stories, and what value do they have in helping us understanding the meaning of time and place in our lives?
We'll also pay close attention to how we are reading and interpreting these works to answer the questions: How do we discuss and write about narratives? how do we use the give and take of discussion to help us understand works and our own reactions to them? what does it mean to look at a group of texts through a particular critical or thematic lens? what is the relation of our individual experiences of works of art to the kind of knowledge and understanding we can create through critical inquiry and discussion?
We'll look at both movies and novels in this course, including American Graffiti, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Year of Living Dangerously, Days of Heaven, A Thousand Acres, Sula, Lone Star, and Blade Runner.
There will be frequent writing assignments with an emphasis on drafts as a process of learning and intellectual discovery as well as a rhetorical act expressed in a product, as well as oral presentations to help students develop skills in communication with each other in groups. Enrollment Limit: 16.
Studying drama through performance choices, this course will center on plays (from a variety of periods and styles) being performed locally, with possible field trips elsewhere. We can expect to attend five to seven plays (students will purchase their own tickets) and will read at least one other script written by each of those authors or by a related writer. Methods of interpretation, criticism, and theory will address relationship between written scripts and performed plays. Enrollment Limit: 16.
Focusing on interactions of gender, genre, and culture, this course looks at the way various 19th and 20th century women novelists have represented female development from girlhood to adulthood. Authors are likely to include Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Paule Marshall, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Enrollment Limit: 16.
While poetry is often characterized as the most private and personal of literary forms, this course will explore the possibility of reading both individual poems, and poetry as a genre, as social artifacts. We'll examine how a number of poets both reflect and enunciate attitudes toward their social worlds in their work, and we'll investigate how various critical stances toward poetry themselves carry social implications. The reading list consists of the late medieval romance "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (in modern translation), and selections from John Donne, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and a number of contemporary West Indian poets. We'll also look at critical texts by Plato, Sir Phillip Sidney, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Susan Howe. Course requirements include attendance and participation in class discussion, a number of short prep papers, and three formal essays. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
This course has been cancelled.
This course will analyze the pedagogies through which (British) Colonialism (re)made colonial subject and subjectivities. It will focus especially on the scenes of instruction in a variety of Anglophone texts from the so-called Third World. Some of these texts include: Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here, Salman Rushdie's Shame, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Earl Lovelace's Wine of Astonishment, Tsi Tsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Tayeb Salib's Season of Migration to the North. Enrollment Limit: 16.
This course will address a number of questions about gender: what is the relationship between gender and sex (or sexuality)? where does gender "come from"? can one change genders? and are gender roles the same as gender identities? These are complicated questions, and by the end of the semester we will probably have more questions and fewer answers.
We will explore these topics by reading a variety of literary and non-literary texts and by analyzing movies and popular culture. Because this class will involve viewing a number of movies, we will have to set up evening showings several times during the semester (about every 2 or 3 weeks). Of course we will try to accommodate everyone's schedule, but be forewarned that you will be expected to see the required movies outside of class--either at the class showings or on your own--before our discussions. Enrollment Limit: 16.
This colloquium is designed as a workshop to introduce students to critical reading, writing and learning strategies. We will focus these efforts by concentrating on the topic of American cultural representations of place in various media--fiction, essays, poetry, visual art and film. We will discuss questions of regionalism, the environment, social context, the presence of the past, the attractions and limits of place as metaphor, among others, along with the influence our own experience of place has on our interpretation of these issues. One major area of investigation will be contemporary representations of the American West in all the formats described above. Another will be our own context here in Oberlin. We will consider works by Smiley, Momaday, Robinson, Ford and Malick, among others. Enrollment Limit: 16.
This course will look at the relation between poetry as text and as oral performance. We will discuss and write about poetry in traditional classroom ways in order to explore what a poem means, how it means, how it affects us. We will also use workshop techniques as a mode of exploration and interpretation, treating poems as scripts for performance and then using various modes of performance as tools for understanding the poems. The course will draw widely on English-language poetry from Shakespeare through contemporary writing. No acting ability or experience will be presumed. The texts include Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, and an issue of Field, the magazine of poetry and poetics published at Oberlin. Enrollment Limit: 16.
Using the autobiographical moment to engage issues of American personal and national identity, this course will focus on various forms of autobiography and memoir. In addition to developing a sense of the literary techniques available to writers in the autobiographical mode, we will also consider the production of a recognizable self as an important--even if omitted--aspect of this genre. Works from the late 20th century might include The Liar's Club, Girl Interrupted, Hunger of Memory, and Lost in Translation. In addition to these contemporary works, we will read Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Enrollment Limit: 16.
This course has been cancelled for this semester and will be offered next semester (Spring '99).
These courses are designed to introduce students to the discipline of literary study in English through a substantial coverage of texts, instruction in the conventions of genre, period, and region as appropriate, and attention to fundamental issues and approaches in critical reading and writing.
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.
Studies in selected works (including lyric poetry, prose, and poetic narrative) written from the beginnings to 1550. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
This course has been cancelled.
My primary interest, as a teacher, scholar, poet and translator, is in poetry, and my main objective in teaching this course is to introduce students to the tremendous outburst of poetic creativity that occurred as part of the Romantic movement. We will also read one novel from the period, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but students should be aware that I have had to leave lots of other interesting texts aside in order to make room for the major poetic achievements represented in this period by the poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Clare and Keats. Indeed, with more room and time I would be first of all tempted to put in Romantic poets who wrote in other languages, e.g. Leopardi, Nerval, Hölderlin, Pushkin.
This does not mean that we will ignore the historical, philosophical and ideological contexts in which these poets wrote. On the contrary: those contexts will make us much more effective readers of the poetry, and the poems will in turn enlarge and enhance our understanding of the contexts.
It also does not mean that students who bring the perspective of a particular agenda -- feminist, postcolonialist, new historicist, deconstructionist -- will be unwelcome or unable to pursue that agenda, either in class discussions or in written work. It simply means that pursuit of that kind will be founded on close, careful and thoughtful readings of the rich and varied texts we will be studying. The final project in fact encourages the development of a particular perspective and the extensive use of recent commentary upon that perspective, and is partly intended to allow exploration of some of the elements we have necessarily had to bypass in our concentration on the poets.
The class will be taught with a mixture of lecture and discussion. Written work includes weekly response papers plus the final project, a paper of 12-15 pages with a research component and some significant engagement with the critical and theoretical literature related to the topic. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
A survey of British and Irish fiction from the 1890s to the Second World War. The course will examine the responses of various authors to the existential pressures of modernity which characterize this period, as well as to the new currents in politics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics that arise in English intellectual life from the fin-de-siecle onward. Authors to be read include Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys, George Orwell, and Samuel Beckett. Course requirements include attendance and participation in class discussion, a number of short prep papers, and three 6-8 page essays. Prerequisite: any Writing Intensive course, or any Writing Certification course in the Humanities. This course is particularly designed for sophomores. Enrollment Limit: 35
An examination of nature, self, culture, and interpretation in the writings of the American Transcendentalists of the 19th century--Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Hawthorne, Alcott, Very, etc.--with special emphasis on the first two (a.k.a. the Odd Couple of Transcendentalism). This course will also consider more recent critical, literary, and philosophical approaches to Transcendentalism, including the works of such thinkers as Edward Abbey, Stanley Cavell, and Annie Dillard. We will concern ourselves with the versions of Transcendentalism that diverse approaches produce, especially insofar as these versions take up and depart from the Emersonian and Thoreauvian notions of nature. By experimenting with the methods of intellectual inquiry employed by the Transcendentalists--lectures, addresses, letters, journals, conversations, essays--we will investigate the nature of interpretation itself. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Identical to ENVS 253. Enrollment Limit: 35.
Reading one full-length novel and several essays every two weeks, our primary objective will be to explore various critical vocabularies and approaches to interpreting African-American modern fiction. While this tradition is now thought of as an area of study unto itself, this has not always been the case. Beginning with the mid-1920s, a great deal of debate has been waged about the socio-political and literary functions of black fiction and its relationship to mainstream American literature as well as to what is often called the "black experience" in America. We will read from this ongoing discussion (possibly Du Bois, Hughes, Brown, Baldwin, Neal, Gayle, Christian, Bell, Hogue, Gates, among others) alongside close reading of about seven canonical works (probably Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wright's Native Son, Ellison's Invisible Man, Morrison's Sula and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo). Using various definitions (for example, from Sollors and Baker), one of the abiding questions we will ask is how to speak of these novels as both "black" and "modern" as opposed, say, to pre-modern and/or not-black, and we will finally consider how introduction of the term "postmodern" (in the case of Reed) may or may not impact our discussion.
Students will alternate introducing class discussion with short response papers to critical essays in the context of our novel reading. Several of these short papers will be revised and turned in over the course of the semester, and a longer paper treating one critical approach to a novel (chosen either on the student's own or from a supplementary bibliography) will be required. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
This course is an introduction to, not a survey of, Asian-American literature. The material selected for the course does not "represent" the full range of the field (no single course could); rather, it has been assembled in order to examine specific contexts and to focus on particular theoretical issues that surround the study of Asian-American literature. "Asian American" is an identity born of racism and nationalism, filtered through history. It is an identity inflected by regionalisms, challenged from within by individual and cultural differences, and revised by each succeeding generation. We will be exploring this diversity in our readings and discussions over the course of the semester. Our topics will include the race/gender "authenticity" debate; Asian-Americans and Hollywood representations; Asian-American identities and World War II; the past's claims on the present; cultural memory, cultural continuity, and nostalgia; and the contentious relation between identity politics and academic disciplines -- "special interests" and "universal truth."
Text read are likely to include: Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die, Okada's No-No Boy, Kogawa's Obasan, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Mukherjee's Jasmine, Hwang's M. Butterfly, and a selection of shorter literary and theoretical works. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
It would be an exaggeration to say that contemporary American film would disappear without crime as a subject, but not much of one. Throughout the history of American movies, crime has played a central role as subject, theme, and metaphor. The criminal is one of the common archetypes of American stories and the meaning of crime an American preoccupation, often suffused with romanticism and nostalgia as well as fear and anger. In this course I want to explore a variety of uses of crime and criminals. I'm equally interested in how crime and criminals become metaphors for a wide variety of ethical, social, and epistomological issues as well as subjects on their own. The number of movies we could look at is vast; I've chosen ones that I think are particularly interesting and important, and tried to keep the list relatively contemporary. If your favorite crime drama isn't on the list, you can still write one of the longer essays on a movie we don't discuss in class.
Movies will probably include the classics Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver, and such recent movies as House of Games, Grosse Point Blank, To Die For, The Grifters, One False Move, Fargo, Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Natural Born Killers, though this list might change between now and September. (No Tarantino, don't bother to ask.)
We'll pay attention to the movies as works of art and as part of contemporary American culture as an opportunities to discuss what it means to study film, what it means to approach any work of art critically, and what kinds of uses different theories and approaches have in our attempts to make sense and value of works of art.
Requirements: Two critical essays of about 1500 words, plus shorter assignments. Students will be expected to form a small discussion group outside of class. Showing of the movies will be on Sundays between 4-6 pm (exact start & finish time depends on how long the movie is); while movies will be available at other times, students should try to keep that time free if at all possible. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
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: These courses are open to students who have completed at least 3 courses at the new 200-level, or (for students who have taken courses prior to 1998) at least 3 courses in English at the 150 level or above, or by consent of the instructor.
A study of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry, to be read in Middle English, with particular attention to The Canterbury Tales; and with emphasis on the medieval setting in which the poet wrote. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
The eighteenth century is often credited with inventing the genre we now know as the novel. This course surveys the early English novel, focusing on issues of individualism and characterization, "realism" and "historicism," representation and authority, and the forms and meanings of fiction. It will ask you to think critically about the relation between originality, genre, and representational accuracy, and to speculate thoughtfully upon the significance of the novel's current cultural dominance, its status as truthful depiction of other people's experience, and its role in creating social realities.
Texts read are likely to include: Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Pamela, Fielding's Tom Jones, Lennox's The Female Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Lewis's The Monk. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
A close study of poetry written in the crucial period between the two world wars. While the course will focus on the poetry and poetics of five American poets (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and the later Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams), we will also read the work of several poets in translation (probably Robert Desnos, Anna Akhmatova, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda) in order to examine some aspects of international modernism. The course will be taught by a combination of informal lectures and discussion. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two shorter papers (3-4 pages), and a longer paper (around 10 pages). Note that while the normal prerequisites for 300-level work apply, students should ideally have taken at least one previous course focusing on poetry. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
By considering early American literature in various genres-- poetry; spiritual & secular autobiographies; narratives of captivity; religious, political, & philosophical tracts; nature writing; fiction; travel writing--this course will examine the different ways in which writers imagined this country & their place in it throughout the period before, during, & after the establishment of a new nation. Two striking novels will play a central role in our study: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation (1798), which deals with a case worthy of "The X-Files," and Tabitha Gilman Tenney's Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions & Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801), "a boisterous, rollicking anti-romance & literary satire." In addition to our exploration of the subject matter, methods of research into literary history will be an important component of the course. Student work will include brief, experimental response papers, a midterm, & a final research project. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
We'll read representative literature of the antebellum era, focusing centrally on the question of what literature was in antebellum America and, as well, on the cultural work of the printed word, which included forming a sense of "American" identity and mobilizing readers against slavery. Throughout, our focus will include ways in which race, region, genre and gender were activated in and by the written word. We'll cover a lot of literary ground, reading long-canonized works such as Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Emerson's "Self-Reliance," and Whitman's Song of Myself, recently canonized works such as Douglass's The Narrative of Frederick Douglass and Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and work which still lingers in canonical limbo like Stoddard's The Morgesons. We'll also look at a few pieces that have only recently been taken into critical account at all--David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, William Apes's "An Indian's Looking-Glass for White Men," Lydia Huntley Sigourney's "The Father." Our understanding of the contexts within which antebellum Americans read this writing will be enriched by our use of Mudd Library's outstanding collection of antebellum magazines (such as Putnams, Harper's, the Atlantic, Godey's Ladies' Book) and newspapers (including The Liberator).
There will be twice-weekly lectures and weekly student-led discussions.
Reading will include, in addition to the works mentioned above, short stories by Poe and Irving, additional essays by Emerson, Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills," prose by Thoreau, poetry by Dickinson, fiction by Melville, and other writings. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
Toni Morrison is widely known as a great American novelist, but in critical circles her little book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, has come to mark a new direction in study of the national literature. In some ways, however, her book echoes a much earlier study of the American imagination by D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. We will begin this course with consideration of the two studies in tandem and proceed to cover a wide span of literary chronology, testing their theses by reading from among the following: Melville's "Benito Cereno," Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (if available), Thurman's The Blacker the Berry, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Wright's Eight Men, Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Kelley's A Different Drummer, Kerouac's On the Road or The Subterraneans. With the aid of some supplementary race and culture theorists (possibly Fanon, Ellison, Fiedler, Fishkin, Sunquist, Spillers, Gates, Nielson, hooks), we will explore such questions as these: whether moral ambiguities like pleasure, freedom, and social responsibility require specialized definition in a democracy; how race functions as a ready category in which to work out and/or displace anxiety about national, ethnic, and individual identity; ways in which ethnic stereotypes may be exploited or revised and representations of whiteness and blackness are shaped into working literary symbols over time; and whether these abstractions may operate unconsciously in "common sense" understandings of everyday experience and thus fictional credibility.
It is not the intent of this course to locate definitive answers or villains in the perhaps still-unfinished cultural history of "race" in American fiction. One of our goals will be to obviate potentially circular or reductive discussion, and with this in mind, the class will collaborate on the weekly production of reading questions, handing in several responses to these as exploratory "working papers." The final project will consist of a longer paper, possibly a treatment of the narrative strategies (e.g., character, plot, or symbolic development) within an American novel or short story of choice or another student-selected project having some relationship to issues raised in class. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
Using a cultural studies approach to materials as varied as advertisements and popular mass print media as well as works of "literature," we will examine innovations in the publishing industry, effects of the marketplace and the emergence of the cult of authorship as a way to get to know U.S. literary history and how it was/is made. Readings from canonical writers such as Hawthorne, Stowe, Twain, Howells, James and Wharton. By the end of the course students will complete their own projects in literary history, drawing from material in Mudd archives and special collections. Projects will be displayed in Mudd Library. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
The word "theory" is as fetishized, reviled, and misunderstood as any in academia today. Some people think of Theory as more or less synonymous with the "New Gospel," the only exciting thing to think about, or study, or do, while others regard it as the very Devil himself, come to destroy literature and steal our souls. I hold neither view. The diverse group of writers and writings that travel under the name "Theory" are part of historically and institutionally defined debates about literature, meaning, and value in which positions are constantly changing and alliances always shifting. These debates are part of our cultural situation and social institutions, especially American academia, a dwelling in which literature, criticism, and theory cohabit in various perverse ways. This isn't a "how to do it" course in criticism, though we'll pay some attention to how theory turns into method and gets"applied," and why this happens. The goal of this course is to understand particular strains of "Theory" as ways of writing and thinking, as parts of a larger discourse which is both about and part of what, for lack of a better phrase, we'll call "the symbolic world."
We'll approach this material by examining the institutions of Literature and Criticism in the academic and artistic world of the U.S. We'll begin with the rise of New Criticism, with its particular mixtures of modernist aesthetics and formalist method, and its relation to romantic/enlightenment humanism. After examining structuralism, we'll take up the French post-structuralist writers as they were received in the U.S. and how they affected American critics and writers in the academy and outside it. We'll be exploring the questions 1) what was/is post-structuralism and why did it have such an impact on the American academy? 2) what are the relations between post-structuralism and the critical theories and methods that appear in its wake, particularly those that "politicize" literary and cultural studies? and 3) how do we understand the relations among theory, literature, and criticism at this moment?
The course will work by a combination of lecture and discussion. Four short essays and one long essay to be done in drafts. We'll read works by Derrida (the blond vampire of French philosophy), Barthes, Butler, Belsy, Baudrillard, Cixous, Fish, Harraway, Jameson, Lacan, Silliman, the ubiquitous Foucault, and others notable and notorious. We'll also look at five narratives, not as objects for theory to be applied to, but as part of the theoretical/literary/critical conversation of the last three decades. These are Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, Salem's Lot by Stephen King, and the Sandra Bernhart/John Boskovic movie Without You, I'm Nothing. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 25.
This course will examine and enact feminist retellings of myths, other sacred stories, folktales, legends, and other folk genres (such as rituals). The texts will be literary works as well as folklore works (in transcription, or in some other form).
Theoretical and methodological approaches will stress how to study these materials in indigenous ways as well as through historically situated cultural perspectives. We will see how feminist writers, critics, readers, and students have transformed canonical texts, allusions, and values. We will question the liabilities and gains in such revisions.
Cultures we will draw from include classical (Greek) materials, European, Anglo-American, African-American, Jewish-American, native American, African, and Biblical texts. Feminist theories will examine how traditional interpretations can be explained or located historically while also exploring how feminist re-tellings might refigure uses of "difference," and so re-define conventional uses of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexualities. Retellings will be analyzed as they offer resistance to and reclaiming, parodies , transgressions, and subversions of what could be called canonical texts. We will begin with Biblical narratives feminist writers have been attracted to retelling, then Greek myth, European folktales, African folklore, African-American folklore, Native American myth and tale, and other ethnic groups' (Jewish American, Asian American) folklore and literature in the US.
Writers will include Margaret Atwood, Kim Chernin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Angela Carter, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Hamilton, and Toni Morrison. Theorists and critics will include Jack Zipes, Bruno Bettelheim, Phyllis Trible, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Shirley Williams, and Renita Weems.
Pedagogical methods will include short lectures, class discussions, and panel presentations at the close of various units. Assignments will include short response papers, a midterm essay, a final paper, and a reading journal. Response papers and the final paper may involve students themselves doing retellings (in writing or in other forms of expression) of traditional texts. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Identical to WOST 377. Enrollment Limit: 25.
Tirso's trickster-seducer has had a long career in drama and other art forms. This course will explore how the legend has taken different shapes in different ages and cultures. The approach will be comparative and will involve lecturers from different departments and programs analyzing works from their own areas of expertise, along with discussion classes. We will look at such works as Tirso's original Spanish play, Molière's play, Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, Byron's Don Juan, Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, and a number of modern versions of the Don Juan story. The course will explore the various potentialities of a story in different artistic embodiments and different cultural-historical settings. In particular we will consider the story as a site for contested attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Course requirements will include a journal, two papers, and several small-group projects. Prerequisite: Any introductory literature class. Identical to CMPL 382. Prerequisites: 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 6-8 poems (due in the Program Office by Friday, August 21, 1998). Prerequisites: CRWR 201 (formerly 101). Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 12. Identical to CRWR 310.
The writing of fiction. Admission based on a completed application form and a writing sample at least 12 pages of fiction, made up of at least 2 separate pieces (due in Program office by Friday, August 21, 1998). Prerequisites: CRWR 201 (formerly 101). Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 12. Identical to CRWR 320.
This course is a workshop focused on discussion of student work, supplemented by study of selected contemporary plays. The first part of the course involves exercises and assignments. In the second part, students concentrate on developing material toward a finished one-act play. You will be expected to recruit a small group of actors who will be available to try out work in progress and participate in staged readings at the end of the semester. No previous work in playwriting is expected, but students should have a solid working knowledge of drama, either through coursework or through substantial reading over the summer. Admission based on a completed application form and writing sample (due in Program office by Friday, August 21, 1998). Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 12. Identical to CRWR 330.
A course for peer tutors who will be working for the Expository Writing Program. Students will tutor at the writing desk in the library or will be assistants for one of the writing-intensive courses offered in various disciplines. Juniors and seniors who write well are encouraged to apply (King 139), regardless of major. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 12. Identical to EXWR 481.
These courses are designed primarily for seniors and offer opportunities to do individual work based on focused reading of texts, criticism, literary history, or 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 2 courses at the 300 level.
In this seminar we will read essays by a variety of post-colonial critics from and/or writing about the Third World. We will focus not only on the subjects of their analysis, but also on the rhetoric of their arguments -- how they say what they say, to what ends, etc. -- as too we will consider how they locate themselves (explicitly or implicitly) vis-a-vis their subjects and what are the bases for their authority. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 15.
Through a series of case studies, combined with theoretical readings, this course will examine the methodological assumptions and implications of a variety of contemporary critical approaches which are gathered together under the loose rubric of Cultural Studies.
The definition of Cultural Studies is itself a matter of dispute. To some, it connotes sociologically inflected examinations of discrete groups and behaviors. To others, Cultural Studies refers to a tradition of abstract criticism of the institutions of the human sciences. Finally, some understand it to be what happens when skills learned in traditional humanistic education are turned on the world of popular discourses, objects and entertainments. In this course, we will seek to understand the possible relations between these positions. In the process, students will be encouraged to reflect, critically and at some length, on the assumptions and implications of their own critical practices.
Our objects of study will likely include contemporary photography (Sherman, Wall), comic books (Spiegelman's Maus), fiction (Doctorow's Ragtime), film (Jordan's The Crying Game), and television. Critical readings will probably include Fiske, Hall, Fraser, Jameson, Appadurai and Stewart, among others. Requirements: one ten- to fifteen-minute presentation of course readings to frame a particular week's discussion, accompanied by a written version of the presentation; one five- to ten-minute response to a weekly presentation, accompanied by a written version of the response; a final project, completed in stages of proposal, draft and final, of fifteen to twenty pages; a brief oral presentation on the final project.
Consent of instructor required. Students wishing to apply should fill out an application form available on the instructor's door (Rice 26) by Wednesday, April 22. Names of admitted students will be posted on that door Friday, April 24. Enrollment Limit: 15.
Over the course of the 19th century, Britain witnessed an explosion of literary production. New mechanized printing techniques and an overall rise in national wealth and literacy resulted in more people encountering print in more forms than ever before. The eighteenth-century market for gentlemen's books and polite periodical literature gave way to a highly competitive emporium of popular specialty magazines, daily newspapers, self-help books, ladies' fashion-plate books, advice manuals, triple-decker novels, railway novels, "penny dreadful" pulp fiction, printbased advertising, etc. The impact on individual consciousness, as well as the fabric of social life, bears comparison with the impact of electronic print technology today.
This seminar looks at selected works of Victorian fiction in the context of the material and social realities of the print culture of the period. Our texts are drawn mainly from two decades roughly at either end of Victoria's reign, which extended from 1837 to 1901. From the decade between 1847 and 1857, we read Charles Dickens' Hard Times, George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance," and portions of W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair. From the decade between 1886 and 1896, we read George Gissing's New Grub Street and two novellas by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Beach of Falesa. We'll also consider some poetry by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, in conjunction with an on-campus talk being given in early October by visiting Rossetti scholar Jerome McGann. To get as close as we can to original publication, we'll work with historically-oriented editions and with whatever Victorian periodical or early-edition versions we can gently lay hands on from out of the stacks or Special Collections in Mudd.
Our consideration of the texts will revolve mainly around the following questions: 1) What's the story of how their authors broke into print and subsequently made a living as writers?; 2) How might the physical embeddedness of the text as originally published--hardbound book, paperback part issue, magazine serial alongside advertisements and issues of the day, with illustrations or without, etc.--have contributed to its meaning or effect for its original audience?; 3) What picture can we put together from contemporary reviews and from cues in the texts themselves about who the original audience was, or was expected to be?; 4) How do issues of reading, literary commercialism, and print technology play out thematically in the texts?
As a seminar, this course will be taught primarily by discussion. Individual students will prepare five-minute lead-off presentations for each class, with the aim of developing some "talking points" for the text and issue at hand. There will be an early exercise involving comparison of issues of a given periodical from each of our two targeted decades or else profiling a Victorian best-seller. There will be another exercise about two-thirds of the way through the semester to develop and circulate within the group a brief (4-6 item) annotated bibliography related to final projects. Students will write a short mid-term paper (4-6 pages) and a longer final paper (12-14 pages). As an alternative to the final paper, there might be a possibility of working with Special Collections Director Whitney Pape to mount an exhibit on some aspect of Victorian fiction or print culture.
Enrollment limit: 15; admission by consent of instructor. Interested students should stop by Kathie Linehan's Office in Rice 10 (office hours MW 3:30-4:30; see sign-up sheet on door for extra office hours the week before Registration). Up until April 20, I'll hand out CANs to senior English majors on a first-come, first-serve basis. I'll keep a record of all other people interested and start to let non-seniors or non-majors in for whatever spots remain available as of April 20.
The senior project is an opportunity to engage, on an individual basis under the supervision of a faculty member in the Department of English, in a semester-long research project. This project typically culminates in a 15-20 page essay and an oral presentation of that work at the end of the semester. This project opportunity is available to a limited number of senior English majors, by application only. The senior project differs from the Honors program in being limited to one semester; it does not qualify the student to become a candidate for Honors at graduation. Prerequisites: Admission to the senior project. Consent: Consent of instructor required.
Intensive work on the topic of student's honors project, to be organized on consultation with the instructor. Consent: Consent of instructor required.
A forum for group discussion of honors projects at various stages of design and composition. The colloquium will examine some methods and theories pertinent to the study of literature and address the honors project as an intellectual exploration, an analytic enterprise, and a rhetorical entity. Prerequisites: Admission to the Honors Program. Notes: CR/NE grading. Consent of instructor required.
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