Fall, 1999
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Students interested in taking introductory-level courses in writing should also see the Expository Writing 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.
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.
Identical to EXWR 116 and AAST 116. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
A place records the passage of time, the passage of time changes a place. Place and time become invisible because we understand and experience both as the natural background of our existence. American stories particularly often seem to concentrate on the individual above all else, but any story is also about a time and a place. In this course we'll examine how a group of American movies, novels, stories, and poems foreground time and place so we can see them more clearly, and see the individual from a different perspective.
In this process we'll be concerned with becoming self-aware readers and interpreters, conscious of how we are active agents rather than passive perceivers in the creation of meaning. We'll try to understand reading as an dynamic process with its own value rather than just as a source of information or an occasion for projecting what we already think and feel onto a text. We'll also focus on writing as a form of inquiry, a way of learning and knowing. rather than just as the tool that conveys data from our mind to others.
As of now the syllabus includes the movies American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir and Lone Star, directed by John Sayles, the novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, and Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson, the short story "A&P" by John Updike and the poem "The Dredge" by Elizabeth Bishop. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
In this colloquium for first year students we will examine 9-10 scripts that can be seen in the nearby vicinity live, on film, or on video. The goal of the course will be to develop the interpretative and analytic theories and skills required to study scripts meant to be performed as plays rather than to be read as literature. We will proceed using a basic theory that the scripts are not complete works of art in themselves, but require completion in performance involving actors, the scripted words, enactment with costumes and props, a space (if not a set), an audience, movement, and sound. A high priority will be to attend important plays that will be performed in Oberlin or nearby locales during the semester, and students will be expected to attend a live performance, video, or film of each play studied. Wherever possible, we will read two works by the same author.
Two of the plays will likely be by William Shakespeare, and one will be performed at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland. Depending on what else is performed nearby, we may also study plays by Arthur Miller (The Crucible and Death of a Salesman), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), August Wilson (The Piano Lesson and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) and David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna).
Along with performing two scenes from the assigned plays over the course of the semester, students will keep a performance journal detailing the process of preparation and working out questions regarding character and performance choices. Students will also write four short papers and participate in an oral examination. Some critical reading may also be required. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
A fascination with metaphor has always been at the heart of literary study, but in recent years it has become a central issue in many other disciplines as well. In fact, more has been written about metaphor in the past fifteen years than in the previous fifteen centuries going back to Aristotle. As one scholar concludes, metaphor is now seen as "situated in the deepest and most general processes of human interaction with reality."
In this interdisciplinary course we'll explore the theory and practice of metaphorical expression, first in poetry and fiction, and then in religion, politics, medicine, art, and film. We'll begin with a quick survey of metaphors in poetry from Shakespeare to Plath, including Donne, Wordsworth, and Dickinson. Then we'll go on to fiction as represented by The Great Gatsby and stories by surrealists and magical realists (Calvino, and Marquez).
Moving beyond literature, we'll take up Susan Sontag's The Metaphors of Illness and AIDS, New Testament and Zen parables, and Clinton's campaign speeches. In modern art we'll focus on Magritte, and in film on Hitchcock's The Birds. Alongside these examples we will examine theories of metaphor by Nietzche, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others.
Course writing: two 5-6 page analyses, and one 10-12 page research project on a topic of your choice. Your contribution to our class discussions will also count toward your final grade. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
The hero is a figure whose deeds and moral qualities reflect what is presumed to be admirable (or admirably problematic) within a given society. The focus of this course will be on representations of such heroic figures within English and American story-telling (and therefore within English and American society). Several assigned texts (e.g., Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Doctor Faustus, Wuthering Heights, and Beloved) will be read and discussed at the outset of the course; several films (to be selected by members of the class) will be viewed and discussed at the conclusion of the course. (Other texts may be studied at the behest of the class.) Fundamental matters to be addressed in these discussions will be transformations in the idea of the hero and the heroic; the connection between social values (as implied by heroic behavior) and narrative structures; and the relationship between historical experience and literary figures of the hero. Each student will maintain a journal, will write at least three essays to be read and commented on by other students in the class, and will submit a term paper at the end of the course. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
Fictions of Authority introduces students to the interpretation of literature by examining the relations of knowledge, power, culture, stories, and the construction of readers and writers by those relations. We will be reading provocative works of fiction that both investigate the problems involved in the acts of reading/ writing and experiment with different ways of representing those problems. Accordingly, participants in this course can expect to encounter such questions as: What is a writer, or author? What is authority? What is fiction, or a story? What isn't? What is reading? What is a reader? Are you one? The reading list includes works by, among others, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ishmael Reed, and Italo Calvino. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
Mountains. Mysticism. Monks. Westerners have often imagined Tibet as an idyllic place, as Shangri-La. This course explores Western constructions of Tibet in light of recent discussions about the problems of representing other cultures and within the context of European colonialism. Using a variety of texts to orient our research -- from travel writing to novels to film -- we will engage in a critical analysis of the continuities and disjunctions in Western representations of Tibet, representations which inevitably inform contemporary understandings of Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora. Texts considered may include Edward Said's Orientalism, the travel narratives of George Bogle, Peter Matthiessen, and Pico Iyer, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, James Hilton's Lost Horizon, Martin Scorsese's Kundun, and Donald S. Lopez's Prisoners of Shangri-La. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
An intensive study of the works of William Butler Yeats in their biographical, cultural, and historical context. We will read a good deal of Yeats' work during the semester, including his Collected Poems, several of his plays, his autobiographical writings and essays, and several works by his contemporaries. While there will be several lectures on historical context, the class will be conducted largely by discussion. Participants are expected to take an active part in preparing and delivering small group reports, write weekly papers, and undertake a final paper of eight to ten pages. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
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.
The study of Shakespeare, which is still central to a major in English and American literature, involves a number of responsibilities: understanding that the playtexts are performance scripts; seeing the ways in which we have made a cultural icon out of Shakespeare; and evaluating interpretations, in the theater and in literary criticism, to understand their values, assumptions and agendas. We often speak of the importance of historicizing Shakespeare's texts, but few of us are sure exactly what we mean by that. Historicizing has many possibilities, and insofar as it is inevitably selective, it too can become a form of ideology or special pleading.
This course will examine six Shakespeare plays -- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Part One, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest -- with special attention to the variety of historical issues they raise, in the classroom, in critical analysis, and in the theater. Is it important, for example, to any modern production of Macbeth that this play especially addresses the king for whom it was written and a number of his most distinctive preoccupations (e.g. genealogy, the magic of monarchy, witchcraft and violence)? If it's not relevant to performance, is the historical information now no longer useful at all, or can it serve, as historical information often does, to illuminate the present through an understanding of the past? I don't have settled answers to these questions, but I think it will be interesting to explore the relation between Shakespeare's place in the past and his distinctive place as "our contemporary," and I look forward to considering the six plays with you. D, EL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
A study of major authors of the Restoration and the long eighteenth century: Behn, Congreve, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Austen, and others. Some fiction, but mainly drama, poetry, and non-fiction prose. Organized by genre and theme as well as author. P, EL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
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, Denis Johnson, Sandra Cisneros. Expect occasional critical readings, frequent short writing assignments, a presentation, and three critical essays of varying length. F, AL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. 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. F, AL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
This course will focus on two interrelated developments of the American late nineteenth century: the rise of realism in literature and the other arts and the emergence of a visually-based mass culture. Through an interdisciplinary cultural study of various forms of expression produced between the 1880s and 1910--novels, stories, paintings, architecture, photography, journalism and consumer culture--we will discuss what makes a work realist, why the "real" became such an important concept during this period, and how realism is related to mass culture's emphasis on visuality and the sense of sight. As the course will be taking place at the cusp of the turn into the next century, we will question as well the legacy of the last century's turn on mass culture and notions of the real today. Trips to the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and downtown Cleveland will supplement course readings and viewings. Texts include works by Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Mary Freeman, Sarah Jewett, and Mark Twain. F, AL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
As an introduction to both literary study within the English major at Oberlin and critical reading of twentieth-century African American long fiction, this course will focus on seven or eight major novels in tandem with select essays seeking to describe the tradition and advocating various approaches to reading within it. Some of the questions that have repeatedly been brought to bear on individual works and the tradition as a whole are (1) ideological and formal constraints of producing social protest or experimental works, (2) methods of achieving authentic and/or fair race-based representation, (3) complexities of negotiating the American publishing industry and audience, and (3) changing attitudes toward cultural nationalism, integration, and the Black Experience in America. And by reading and discussing works produced at different moments and from different schools of thought during the modern era--from the Harlem Renaissance through the protest era and thereafter--students will become familiar with the styles and modes various authors have selected and customized and be able to recognize their thematic and formal relationships as well as their contributions and limitations as part of the general effort to produce and African American novelistic tradition.
The class format will be a combination of lecture and discussion; students will alternate opening class discussion with response papers to scheduled critical readings and will write two longer, formal essays. F, AL. 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 survey of fiction written in nineteenth-century Britain, with special attention being paid to historical and cultural context, serial publication and changing readerships, the emergence of a sophisticated aesthetic of fiction in critical periodicals, and the interplay between text and visual image in illustrated fiction. Works will include Austen's Northanger Abbey, Dickens' David Copperfield, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Gaskell's Cranford, Trollope's Barchester Towers, and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Participants in the class, which will have both lectures and discussions, will keep a weekly reading journal treating the new work assigned and reflecting on previous readings and discussions. In this way the work load will be spread evenly over the semester. F, WL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
In the late 60's and early 70's American poets were more vocal than before or since in articulating the passions and anxieties of their society. These were the traumatic years of Vietnam with protest marches and political upheavals. These years also extended the cultural range of the American imagination by such dramatic events as Woodstock and the moonwalks as well as by new social movements ranging from feminism to ecology and Eastern spirituality.
To focus on the poetry of this period we'll first read poems by Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Allen Ginsberg--poets who in different ways brought a new personal frankness to poetry. Then we'll read three major books that were published in 1971: James Wright's Collected Poems, Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, and Adrienne Rich's The Will to Change.
Then we'll move ahead to later poems by Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Charles Simic, John Ashbery and the collection Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove. Our poetry reading will be accompanied by essays by the poets themselves from Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall. Finally, to bring us right up to date I'll invite three Oberlin faculty poets to share their recent work with us.
Course Writing: two 5-6 page analyses and a creative project. (Your contribution to class discussion will be evaluated as part of your final grade. ) P, AL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
This course will study the representation of gay and lesbian experience in selected British and American fiction, divided between material from the early part of the twentieth century and works written in the past twenty years. Our reading will necessarily touch on questions of history, politics, psychology, and theories of sexuality, but our primary attention will be literary; students should have an active interest in close reading and in investigating the ways in which character and experience are represented in fiction. The syllabus is not yet set, but might well include material such as the following: short fiction by Willa Cather and Henry James, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, E. M. Forster's Maurice, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Nella Larsen's Passing, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and recent fiction by Andrew Holleran, Dorothy Allison, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Chabon, Dale Peck, Neil Bartlett, A. N. Homes, Christopher Bram, Michael Cunningham, Paul Russell, and Elizabeth Searle. The course will be taught primarily by discussion, and students will be expected to participate actively. You'll also be asked to write two papers and devote considerable time to keeping a reading journal. F, WL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
The object of study in this coure will be the English language itself. English is part of what is commonly called the Indo-European family of languages; more precisely, it is a member of the Germanic branch of that family. Although language is basically the organization of sounds produced in the mouth for the purpose of communication, historical evidence for those sounds is largely limited to written records. Such records for English exist over a period of the past ten or twelve centuries--and those records reflect an interesting process of change and adaptation as well as continuity. The earliest records, for example, represent "Anglo-Saxon" or "Old English," and a substantial amount of attention in the course will be devoted to that phase of linguistic history.
The course requires no prior knowledge of linguistic methodology, and therefore some initial work in the course will involve the study of basic principles that are entailed in the study of language and linguistic history--including, for example, phonological assumptions that will include some rudimentary training in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Students enrolled in the course will be expected to participate regularly in meetings of the class; to submit entries for a "dictionary of local English usage" to be compiled by members of the class; to write two brief essays--one on a topic in English grammar and another on the history of an English word; and to submit a term paper (12-15 pages) on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
Contemporary innovations in the nature, capacity and distribution of technology have presented opportunities and challenges to our culture. Often, these changes are seen as promising either a starry futuristic dream (of interactivity, globalization and progress) or a dystopian nightmare (of regulation, surveillance and privatization). This course seeks to move beyond such polarized judgments by looking closely at selected works by writers, theorists and other artists who exploit, exemplify or examine important dimensions of technology. In order to begin to address the question of technology's impact on individual and social experience, we will look at formal and thematic representations of technology in various cultural objects--film, literature, visual art, electronic resources. Along with these readings, we will read critical and theoretical works on technology and its relation to aesthetic and social experience. Frequent short writing assignments, a presentation, a medium-length and longer critical essay will be required. AL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
This four-credit course is designed with a rigorous reading schedule which presumes students have had some experience in the close reading of critical and literary works alongside one another (though students are welcome who are willing to learn). Some background lecture on individual authors and context will be offered as appropriate, but we will focus primarily on ways in which select American authors have used and developed the racial symbolism of "blackness" and "whiteness" and invited particular reader responses through literary technique or form. The class will consider a combination of several related texts each week--one (usually short) novel and two critical essays, and students will alternate opening class discussion with short response papers drawing out the arguments and implications of the scheduled readings. Although, until recently, such terms as "race" and "the race problem" have often served to introduce discussion of African Americans and other minorities, critical theorists have demonstrated that "whiteness" may likewise be examined as a discurseively produced identity construction with its own limitations. With this in mind, we will not focus our interpretive efforts on testing the historical accuracy of the works we read in terms of, say, lived racial experience as much as we will strive to read American representations of this experience as closely as possible; thus we will use insights from critical race theory to identify the two racial constructions in their shifting and sometimes incredible forms through the literature. F, AL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
Identical to CRWR 310.
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. CRWR 201 is normally a prerequisite. Enrollment limit: 12. Admission by consent only: pick up an application from the Creative Writing Program office, Rice 13, and return it with a writing sample by June 14, 1999. Identical to CRWR 330.
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 two courses at the 300 level.
While American cinema has always had a strong emphasis on the personal and psychological as their central concern, particularly recently history has also been an important subject of American movies. In this course our goal is to understand how movies work and what they mean when the central subject is not a person, but the thing called History. We'll consider the relation between these movies' formal qualities as narratives and the ideas about history which inform them. We'll also try to understand why the historical movies seem to attract so much attention now, and what it means that movies which are also entertainment become a source of general historical knowledge. We'll look at some older American movies and foreign movies that deal with history in order to get perspective on what contemporary American movie makers are and aren't doing.
Films likely to be on the syllabus include: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, JFK, Schindler's List, Forest Gump, Black Robe, Quiz Show, The Way We Were, Avalon, The Wanderers, American Graffiti, Lone Star, Zelig, Cabaret, Mephisto, Hanussen, La Nuits Des Varennes, and others to be named later. Themes will likely include ethnicity and class in American history, the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, and heroic versus conspiratorial reading of American history. Reading from Michel Foucault Jean Baudrillard, Dominic La Capra, Hayden White on theories of history, and essays on film and the particular movies as well.
Requirements: participation in discussion, an oral presentation, six 1-2 page essays, and a final project, typically a 12-15 pages essay. Prerequisite: Consent of the Instructor. Interested students should fill out an application form (available in the English Department office, Rice 130 or from the file holder in front of Mr. Day's office, Rice 114) Applications should be turned in to Mr. Day at his office or the department mailbox by 4:30 p.m. on Thursday April 15th. F, AL. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 18.
This course will consider and critique recent feminist criticism of Shakespearean drama with the goal of understanding how feminists can both appreciate and resist the ways these works construct ideas and values concerning gender, sexuality, class, rank, power, empire and other such historical differences. We will question how studying feminist criticism can support larger feminist goals in society and how feminist criticism can support feminist productions of Shakespeare's work. We will examine trends in feminist criticism, relationships between feminist work and historicism and materialist criticism, and work to understand and question the major assumptions, values, methods and languages of various feminist critics. Further we will subject that material to a critique based on a performance approach to the plays, which few of these critics espouse.
The course will be organized as follows. For the first two weeks students will gain some background in feminist theory and issues of race, gender, class, and empire as they bear on these Shakespearean scripts. We will then spend about three weeks on each play and related criticism. The four plays to be studied will include The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest.
Each long meeting will be devoted first to a discussion of three to five critical essays in relation to the whole work. During the second half of the evening, we will use improvisatory work on scenes to examine these ideas through performance choices. At the last session on a play, a group of students will present a prepared scene (lines memorized, using costumes, props, and a setting) that explores certain ideas and concepts through performance choices.
Each student will participate in a group to perform one scene over the semester and in another group to lead one class discussion of readings. Students will keep a detailed reading journal that examines all the critical readings through a series of prepared questions. A long paper of 15-20 pages will be required. An alternative final project will be to perform a series of scenes and to submit a scene journal explaining the choices made, taking into account the criticism assigned. D, EL. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Identical to WOST 425. Enrollment Limit: 18.
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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