Spring, 2000
|
|
|
|
|
|
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.
This introduction to college-level reading, writing, and analysis will investigate various genres of the life story. What makes an individual life worth writing about? Are life stories unique or generic? In what ways are life stories conveyed in verse different from those conveyed in prose? What distinguishes biography from autobiography, and why does it matter? Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
This course will analyze the pedagogies through which (British) Colonialism (re)made colonial subjects 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 Astonishments, Tsi Tsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Tayeb Salib's Season of Migration to the North. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
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, poetry, visual art and film -- and at various times. We will discuss questions of regionalism, the environment, social context, among others, along with the influence our own experience of place has on our interpretation of these issues. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
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 first-year students only.
In the first half of this course we will read short fiction by a variety of authors, using my anthology, edited with Keith Hollaman, called Magical Realist Fiction. In the second half we will read a group of novels. The authors we will cover include Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Yuri Olesha, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Bruno Schulz, Clarice Lispector, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, Eudora Welty and Tony Morrison. Which novels we read will depend upon availability, but I usually include One Hundred Years of Solitude. I am also thinking of The Lost Steps, The Storyteller, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Invisible Cities, The Golden Apples, Shame and The Song of Solomon.
I will ask students to bring brief "position papers" to help focus the class discussion, and I will require two longer papers (8-10 pages), one in each half of the semester. We'll work some in class on these papers, going over the stages of writing, responding to drafts, and studying the process by which effective essays are written. Students who handle this responsibility successfully in the first half will be allowed to try writing a magical realist story, as an option, in the second half. Enrollment limit: 16 first-year students only.
This colloquium is intended to involve us in the culture available in this immediate area - Oberlin and its vicinity, in spring semester 2000. We will attend selected performances of music, theater, opera, dance; we will go to poetry and prose readings; we will read texts associated with Oberlin and its area; we will go to exhibits in local museums and galleries; we will walk in and around local buildings and other sites.
The goal is to engage with aspects of the culture of this locality, with particular attention to how we as a group - of first-year students from various locations, mostly outside of Oberlin; and a professor who lives and works in Oberlin - respond to and interpret what we see, hear, read, etc. We will read some work in interpretive theory to sharpen our attention to how we take in and think about and judge this culture. We'll also study some aspects of the history and interpretation of our subjects to get a better sense of how what we make of them might differ from what other folks in other ages and places have made of them.
The course is based on a similar curriculum that I taught in Oberlin's London program in the fall of 1998, in which the material included the National Gallery, the British Museum, etc. It may seem like a diminution to take the course from London to Oberlin. But there are wonderful things going on here as well as in London, and in some ways they are more accessible than in London. And the goal, again, is not so much to learn about these various cultural artifacts as to learn about the process of interpreting them; and that can (and must) be done anywhere.
The list of what we study will certainly change as we go through the semester. At present, I'm planning on:
There will be lots of writing in this course, and a fair amount of reading. You will have the chance to work with the group as a whole, in smaller groups, and on your own. There will be a chance to work on something that you choose, in a small group and/or on your own.
Obviously, given the nature of this study, there will be some events we'll have to schedule outside of class time (concerts, for example). I'll do my best to be flexible on these but I'll expect you to do the same and to try to work to a schedule that enables us to see as much as we can together. There will be some cost for tickets to these performances which I'll ask you to pick up, but I don't think it will be terribly high. Enrollment Limit: 16 first-year students only.
This course focuses on various uses of one literary genre thought to be especially rule-bound--the detective story--in the hands of white and black male Americans. We will look at select samples of classic, hard-boiled, and African-American short stories and novels, drawing out shifts in values and world view, sensibility, style, setting, the figure of the detective, and entertainment value/social critique, among other things. Readings probably will be Poe's "The Murders in the rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," (possibly, though not American) Doyle's "Silver Blaze," Harte's "the Stolen Cigar Case," Hammett's Red Harvest, Chandler's The Big Sleep (and film, if time), Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies, Himes' Blind Man With a Pistol, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, and (possibly) Moseley's Devil in a Blue Dress (and film, if time). Classes will be structured by discussion of readings and weekly workshops on student writing; students will be responsible for writing three 1000-word essays and keeping a reading journal they are willing to discuss with peers as well as turn in to the instructor. 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.
This course will work on the special challenges and opportunities offered by a complex and powerful poem, Milton's Paradise Lost (published in two editions in Milton's lifetime, in 1667 and then 1674). We will study the poem as text -- reading, explicating, interpreting, enjoying, critiquing, and entering the worlds created by this vast epic. We will also study the poem as a piece of cultural history, an event in its own time (the turbulent history of the English Civil War, and the swift success and failures of the revolutions that Milton was part of). We will consider the poem's relation to the biblical text, the Book of Genesis, which supplies its story (the creation of humankind, the Garden of Eden, the fall, the destiny of Adam, Eve, and their descendents). We will look at ways in which the poem has taken on different meanings and impacts in the centuries since its publication, in critical interpretations, illustrations, editions, and re-workings such as Mary Shelley's great meditation on creation and fall, Frankenstein.
Crucial in all these approaches will be the concept of gender. This course is a Women's Studies course as it is an English course. We will read some feminist theory and feminist literary criticism; more importantly, we will be using feminist attention to issues of gender -- difference, power, and patriarchy -- in pretty much everything we take on.
Specifically what assignments you'll be doing has not yet been decided, but in general if you join the course, you can expect to read a lot of poetry, to work on it in detail in class; to read a lot of criticism and to work on its relation to the text and to the history of interpretation; to write frequently -- on a listserve as well as in papers. Classes will be part lecture, part discussion, and part group work.
This all probably sounds scary. Because I'm still planning the course, I have a lot of ideas for it. I'll make sure it's not a complete monster before I put the syllabus together. Paradise Lost also probably sounds like a scary text. It is dense and complicated, but after you get used to the particular language it's written in, I think you'll find that reading it is an unforgettable and powerful experience. P, EL. Identical to WOST 211. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
The objectives of this course are (1) to provide the student with knowledge of the Bible as a text, chiefly through an extensive reading of a version in modern English that nevertheless has some affinity with the best known (King James) English version; (2) to introduce some of the complexities of interpretation and interpretive debate that have informed the study, teaching, and use of the Bible; and (3) to examine some significant ways in which Biblical texts and interpretations have been employed by literary artists at various times and under various circumstances. An important assumption underlying the course is the proposition that the Bible has been and remains a text with peculiar and profound authority in western culture--and therefore, of course, for writers who have worked within that tradition. Required texts for the course will be (1) an English translation of the Bible and (2) David Jasper and Stephen Prickett, eds., The Bible and Literature: A Reader (Blackwell, 1999). Classes will entail both lectures and discussion. Evaluation will be based on participation in class discussions; the submission of occasional prep papers; a mid-term exam; and a substantial (15 to 20 page) paper on the relationship between the Bible and one or more literary works. EL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
An interdisciplinary study of "romanticism" in England and Scotland between 1789 and 1832 treating works by poets, prose writers, novelists, painters, and urban architects. Among works to be considered will be poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron, prose writings by Dorothy Wordsworth, Burke, DeQuincey, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, Lewis's The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Matilda. Painters to be considered will include Girton, Constable, Blake, Turner and B. R., Haydon (some of whose letters and journals we will also read). Some attention will be paid to the Prince Regent's attempts, working with John Nash and others, to transform London into an imperial city. Students will prepare weekly presentations and write three papers, one a final research paper of ten to twelve pages. P, WL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
Victorian Britain witnessed an explosion of technological "progress" which writers and politicians aligned with both social evolution and dystopic decline. In this course we will explore how the Machine functioned within the cultural imagination. Using a broad range of fictional and non-fictional texts that feature steam, railways, electricity, telephones and the telegraph, we will analyse how conceptions of mechanization intersected with constructions of British and colonial subjectivity, and ask how languages of machinery, speed and systematization shaped the nation, empire and body. Fiction will include: Charles Dickens' Hard Times, which we will read alongside selections from Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford and Cousin Phyllis, Bram Stoker's Dracula, H.G.Wells' The Time Machine, E.Nesbit's The Railway Children, two tales of exploding clocks: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Oscar Wilde's "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," and a modern novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine.
The class will be discussion-based and full preparation and participation in discussion will be essential. Regular short written assignments, a presentation, a medium-length and a longer critical paper will be required. F, WL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
A close reading of selected British and Irish fiction from the first half of the twentieth century: among books likely to be included are Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, selected stories by D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Although some attention will be paid to placing these works in their historical and cultural context, the primary focus will be on the nature of their experiments in structure and style. The course will be taught by a combination of informal lectures and discussion. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two short papers (3-4 pages each), one longer paper (10-12 pages), and maybe a final exercise. Students should be aware that some of these novels are quite challenging (if exhilarating), and that those with only one previous English course might find the course heavy going at times. F, WL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
Through a variety of theoretical essays and novels, this course will examine the problems of definition, analysis, and evaluation that attend our interpretation of works from the "Third World." We will consider, for instance, whether or not: 1) "Third World" or "Post colonial" are appropriate designations; 2) notions of "marginality," "difference," "alterity," so often deployed to characterize these works, are useful interpretive tools; 3) the perception that these works are always already enactments of resistance against dominant ideologies and formations is effective. F, WL. 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 pre-occupation, often suffused with romanticism and nostalgia as well as fear and anger. In this course I want to explore how crime and criminals become metaphors for a wide variety of ethical, social, and epistemological 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. We'll also pay attention to the issue what it means to be a critical writer and develop an understanding of the issues and concerns that are central to critical inquiry not only into film but literature.
Movies will probably include Rear Window, Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, The Godfather, The Long Goodbye, House of Games, Body Heat, One False Move, Fargo, Dirty Harry, Silence of the Lambs though this list might change between now and February. (No Tarantino, don't bother to ask.)
Requirements: Two critical essay of about 1500 words, 4 shorter, 750 word assignments. Students will be expected to form a small discussion group outside of class. While there will be weekly showingsof each movie, they will also be on reserve; you should expect to see each movie twice. AL, F. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
This course will study English and Continental drama from the Greeks to the present with the aim of promoting analysis and appreciation of the major forms of drama within the context of the time and place in which a particular play was written and performed, as well as its relevance for us today. Although this course should by no means be confused with a theatre history course, we will be covering the plays in chronological order so that we may explore the influence on the texts of the culture and theatrical conventions of the time and thereby facilitate an understanding of the common elements of all dramatic works, as well as those elements which vary and have changed from one age to another. We will be reading works of Sophocles, the medieval dramatists, Shakespeare, the Restoration, Chekhov, Beckett, Churchill, and others.
Classes will be conducted mainly through discussion supplemented by lectures. Written work will include three papers: two short (4-6 pages) and one long (8-10 pages). In addition, each student will be responsible for a performance in class of a scene from one of the plays we are reading. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
This course will present the lively, diverse, and controversial tradition of Irish drama since 1901 when William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory established the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as an act of cultural nationalism in defiance of the British authorities. We'll read their short plays and then go on to the modern classics they fostered--John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Shaw's comedy John Bull's Other Island satirizes British naivete and Irish fantasies. The famous prison drama by Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow, set a new tone of grim realism, which Samuel Beckett uses inimitably in Krapp's Last Tape and the international classic Waiting for Godot. From the wealth of contemporary Irish drama, we'll read Translations, Brian Friel's widely-performed play on British imperialism in the 1830's. And for views of the conflicts in Irish society today, Thomas Murphy's The Gigli Concert and Marina Carr's The Mai.
The course will be taught by a combination of brief lectures and class discussions. Although no prior theater experience is expected, student groups will give informal presentations of scenes as an aid to understanding the plays we're reading. This will be supplemented by recordings and videos whenever available. Writing assignments will be two short essays, weekly responses to a computerized discussion, and a final creative project. D, WL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
After an introductory study of Shakespeare's sonnets, we will look at the English poetic tradition from Anglo-Saxon times to the mid-eighteenth century, with special focus on the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Pope. The aim of the course is double: to develop skill in reading, responding to, and writing about poetry and to gain a sense of how poetry is part of a historical age. How does it participate in the discourses of its own time, and how do we converse with its otherness from the new millennium? Requirements for the course will include a reading journal, three group reports, participation in class discussion, and three short papers. P, EL. Prerequisites: see headnote above. Enrollment Limit: 35.
The goal of this course is to introduce students to the study of folklore through an examination of genres. the course is organized mainly by a consideration of forms of folklore--myth, legend, folktale, ballad, riddle, verbal dueling, jokes, superstition, custom, belief, and other minor forms. At the same time, we will consider some themes and approaches as well as methodologies as we proceed; these include considerable attention to ethnicity, feminist and gender concerns, collecting, and questions of stereotyping and social inequality. Most examples will come from certain cultures--especially Anglo-American, Black American, Native American, other ethnic groups in America, such as Jewish-Americans; we will also consider European and African materials as well as, occasionally, examples of forms from Asia, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
The semester will open with an inquiry into the problem of what we mean by the term "folklore" and what folkloristics, the study of folklore, aims to do. The ultimate goals will be to examine the relationship of symbolic and performed forms of popular, traditional arts to the production of culture, society, and self.
The course will emphasize major folkloristic theories and methods concerning various genres. Fieldwork techniques will also be studied in connection with the major assignment for the course: an original folklore collection. Students will collect lore and analyze it along a number of lines, including research into other published versions of the same story or other appearances of related motifs. The collection should have some integrating aspect--be of a single genre, or from a certain type of group, or about a certain topic--and can be collected from friends, family, other students, people you have not known but ask to help you. Other written work for the semester will include a midterm and final examination as well as occasional prep papers for class discussions. Related to collections, students will need to provide the instructor with two progress reports and give a brief class presentation of their findings. Identical to ANTH 254 and is a referenced course in Women's Studies. 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.
The objectives of this course will be to enable the student to read (in Middle English) and to interpret with some facility the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote in the late fourteenth century. To that end, class meetings will be devoted chiefly to analysis and discussion of the poetry itself, as well as to occasional lectures on the English language in Chaucer's time, the social and intellectual background of his work, and some critical and interpretive approaches that have tended to characterize readings of the poet's work. The course will focus particularly on the Canterbury Tales. Evaluation will be based on class participation; several short prep papers; an oral presentation that will entail reading, translating, and commenting upon a brief passage from the Tales; one or two brief essays; and a substantial research paper (due at the end of the course) on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor. The text for the course will be The Riverside Chaucer (3rd ed.), ed. Larry Benson (Houghton Mifflin 1987). P, EL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
In this upper level course, students will consider six Shakespearean scripts including one tragedy (Julius Caesar), two history plays (Richard II and Henry V), one problem play (Measure for Measure), and one late romance (the Tempest) from the early, middle, and late periods of Shakespeare's career. The study will consider the texts as scripts for performance, and will question how performance choices can develop, question, or interrupt the ways the plays explore power relations and their disruptions.
In our consideration of these plays, we will examine how the scripts and performance choices can expose how the plays, on the one hand, can be seen as ideological works that support existing institutions and arrangements. We will also question, on the other hand, how the scripts can also be interpreted as resistant and questioning works that dramatize and interrogate authoritative forms, ideas, institutions, and practices. Along with calling attention to subversive elements, we will examine the ways the plays show resistance, rebellion, revolution, disorder, and dissidence. Similarly, we will consider how they show hegemonic or controlling power being reinstated, recuperated, and maintained.
While the title suggests a participation in a New Historical discourse centered on the ways that authoritative discourses permit but also contain subversion and dissidence, we will also question the methods and assumptions of the New Historicist readings that have redefined studies of power in Shakespearean drama. We will be concerned with various kinds of concerns from issues of sexuality to issues of religious controversy, from issues of youth vs. age to matters of class conflict, from questioning the basis of war and violence to questioning marriage arrangements, homosociality, and early capitalist ventures.
For the course, students will carefully read and review the six works. They will study three to five critical or theoretical readings for each work; perform in one short scene over the semester; keep a scene journal and write a 6- 8 page report; write a 8-page midterm essay; and conduct a final project that can be either a 10-page paper, a group of scenes, or another type of presentation to be arranged. D, EL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
The emergence of prose fiction in the eighteenth-century, focusing on novelistic form, with attention to cultural and historical contexts. Authors may include Behn, Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Lewis, Austen. F, EL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
A comparative study of the Bildungsroman, or novel of education, and the confessional novel in European narrative from Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a novel we will concentrate on for the last four weeks of the course. Other works to be read are narrative poems by Byron, including Don Juan, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and Conrad's Lord Jim. Students will keep weekly journals of their reading and will take part in small group presentations. Identical to CMPL 318. F, WL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
In this course, we will explore the emergence of sexual discourse in nineteenth-century Britain, considering the degree to which current concepts of "identity" and "desire" influence or grow out of readings of nineteenth-century sexual expression/repression. To this end we will study Victorian literature and non-fictional materials alongside recent critical work on sex and sexuality. This course will be in constant dialogue with the notion that sex is historically constructed and will be structured around questions of identity and ideology; we will trace the "invention" of the homosexual, the emergence of sexual science, the links between race, colonialism and sexuality, chart legal and literary legislation of prostitution and trace the languages of Sapphism and Decadence. Literature studied will include Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," the short pornographic novel The Autobiography of a Flea, prose by sexologist Havelock Ellis, J. A.Symonds and Walter Pater, poetry by Alfred Tennyson, "lovers and poets" Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper who wrote under the name Michael Field, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Algernon Swinburne. To explore the question of children and sexuality we will read J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan fiction, Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, and R. M.Ballantyne's adventure story, The Coral Island.
Classes will be discussion- and lecture-based. Responses to critical reading, a presentation, a medium-length and a longer critical paper will be required. F, WL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
Modernism was born out of the Symbolist movement, a late nineteenth century revival of romanticism. In part it carried forward certain aspects of Symbolist theory and practice, and in part it reacted strongly against the movement. Seeing how this worked, both in European poetry and in American poetry, is the aim of this course. The first half is more or less situated in Paris, where Mallarmé and other French poets, along with many visual artists, developed the ideals of Symbolism. The two major figures we study in this part of the course are the Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the German-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Both poets developed from Symbolists into modernists, so that the arc of their careers helps us see how modernism established itself. In addition to the poets we will be reading in this part of the course, we will also be looking at slides of the work of a good many visual artists, studying the same transition in terms of the change from Symbolism to Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and dada.
In the second half of the course we move to America, where we study the impact of the Armory show of 1913 and the advent of European modernism (through the advocacy of entrepreneurs like Stieglitz and Duchamp) on American poets of the time, with particular attention to Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Again, we will look at the work of visual artists involved in movements like Precisionism and photography in connection with our study of the transformations of literary practice and style.
I require weekly position papers, to facilitate class discussion, and two longer (10-12 page) papers, one in each half of the semester. The class meets in the Art Building. P, WL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
This course will study the developments in European and American drama from the late nineteenth century through the first world war. We will discuss the major theatrical movements, such as realism, naturalism, and expressionism; the outstanding figures, such as Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shaw, Pirandello, and Eugene O'Neill; and the historical and cultural contexts in which the plays we will be reading were created. Special emphasis will also be placed on the relevance of these plays to their original audiences and to ourselves as audience in the world we inhabit today.
Classes will be conducted mainly through discussion supplemented by lectures. Written work will include two papers: one short (4-6 pages) and one long (8-10 pages). In addition, each student will be responsible for a performance in class of a scene from one of the plays we are reading. D, WL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
Primarily a survey of the literary works of representative figures of nineteenth-century North America through the Civil War, this course also examines questions of signification, subjectivity, and power that are raised in those works. We will thus frame our readings of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Stoddard, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and others with a look toward the different notions of the self represented in those texts, the contexts that make such representations possible, and the implications of such representations for contemporary readers. Written work will include informal protocols, 1 or 2 short essays, and a final paper. F, AL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
So many American women wrote so much between 1820 to 1930, from such an array of standpoints, with so many commitments and objectives, covering such an enormous range of subjects and with such extraordinary skill and energy, that an entire curriculum could be composed of their work alone. In an intriguing parallel, feminist literary critics with a variety of concerns, asking a variety of questions and using a variety of methods, have produced a vast body of criticism and theory in the past twenty-five years. This course will not pretend to be comprehensive about either of these subjects, but it will approach some of the fiction which American women wrote during the century-plus in question from the perspective of some of the key issues with which feminist literary critics and historians are grappling. Among these are: the character and racial-political resonances of the discourses of domesticity which flourished until well after the Civil War, including the relationship between domesticity and sentimentalism and domesticity and the emergent consumer market-place; convergences and conflicts between what was cast as proper "women's writing" and activist writing; constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, and taste in writing from 1870 to 1930; possible relationships between and among the local, regional, national and international in narratives at the turn into the twentieth century; the representation/repression of sex, sexuality and desire in all of this writing.
None of these questions can be pursued as though writing and literature were only words on a page. Accordingly, we will be considering the contexts of production, distribution, and reception of what we read. Since magazines were a major medium for all writers, female and male, during much of the time when the fiction we'll be reading was written, some reading around in Oberlin's collection of antebellum magazines, including the popular Godey's Ladies' Book, and late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century magazines, including Harper's Bazar (sic), will help us get at this matter. And two underlying questions will circulate through the course: 1) what generalizations, if any, can be made about American women's writing between 1820 and 1930? 2) what are the primary positions of the major feminist literary criticism about this writing, and what is at stake in these positions?
Among the narratives and authors we'll read will be: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Jacobs' Our Nig, Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons; short narratives by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sui Sin Far, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zitkala-sa, Kate Chopin; Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy, Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth. Included among recent feminist critical work engaging the questions identified above will be writing by Joanne Dobson, Laura Wexler, Frances S. Foster, P. Gabrielle Foreman, June Howard, Lauren Berlant, Claudia Tate, Elizabeth Higginbotham. F, AL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Identical to WOST 355. Enrollment Limit: 25.
This course will study the theme of metamorphosis as it manifests itself in literature and other art forms including film and music. The approach will be comparative and will involve lecturers from different departments and programs exploring works from their own areas of expertise, along with discussion classes. Texts will probably include Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apuleius, Marie de France, Shakespeare, Wagner, Kafka, Cortázar, and others. Students will be expected to participate in class including group reports, keep a journal, and write two papers of 5-7 pages. F. Identical to CMPL 363. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above) or Comparative Literature 200 or equivalent work in another literature.. 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 culture 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 "our 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? 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.
Requirements: an essay of 2500-3000 words to be written in draft, 5 shorter 500 word essays due about every other week, and an out of class discussion group. AL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
This course explores major critical responses to film in their historical context. Thus, we'll be surveying film history and theory simultaneously. An assumption of the course is that cinema is the definitive twentieth-century medium, so that exploring how we think about film can lead to important considerations of issues of subjectivity, collectivity, representation and power. F. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
When slave narratives emerged during the struggle to abolish the slave trade in the British eighteenth century, they drew on, and challenged, representations of slavery in the novel. The interrelationship of the two genres only became more complex in the Antebellum U.S. This course will examine representations of race and slavery in both genres, placing them in a transatlantic historical and cultural context. While we will emphasize texts from the 18th and early 19th centuries, we will also draw on works written up to the present. Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriett Jacobs alongside Aphra Behn, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Caryl Phillips. F, EL. Prerequisites: 3 200-level courses (see headnote above). Enrollment Limit: 25.
Identical to CRWR 310.
Identical to CRWR 340.
Identical to CRWR 320.
This practicum/seminar combines work teaching and tutoring writing with an introduction to composition theory and pedagogy. All students enrolled in the course will work as tutors at the writing desk in Mudd or as writing tutors for a writing intensive course. While "learning by doing", students will also learn by reading about and discussing current issues in composition studies, such as process theories of writing, discourse communities, diversity and ideology in the writing classroom, postmodernism and writing, ESL and grammar. A particular focus will be the role of computers in writing and electronic literacies, and the class will be held in the new laptop seminar room in King. Undoubtedly, practicing and theorizing writing pedagogy will lead us to reflect upon our own writing habits and processes, and students will have the opportunity to explore these issues in their own writing for the course. Texts include Villanueva, Cross Talk in Comp Theory, Podis and Podis, Working with Student Writers: Essays on Tutoring and Teaching, and Rose, Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educational Underclass.
This course is open to any junior or senior who writes well and receives consent from the instructor. Non-English majors are encouraged to apply. To apply, please submit an application form and a writing sample to Ms. Trubek's office. Application forms are available in King 139. Writing samples should be any piece of academic writing you feel reflects your abilities. Admitted students will be notified by e-mail. Identical to EXWR 481. Enrollment limit: 12.
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.
I have decided to structure this course partly around the recent study by Lee Upton, who will pay us a visit in March. Her book, The Muse of Abandonment, is an extremely interesting account of "origin, identity and mastery" in five American poets: Charles Wright, Russell Edson, Jean Valentine, James Tate and Louise Glück. We'll read four of those poets in the first half of the course (I plan to substitute Elizabeth Bishop for Louise Glück) and we'll talk to Upton about her study of them when she visits. In the second half we'll go looking for a "muse of reparation," considering five poets who might be seen as an alternative group to Upton's: William Stafford, Gary Snyder, Dennis Schmitz, Nancy Willard, and Pattiann Rogers.
My procedure in the seminar is to divide you into teams of two, who rotate the responsibility of directing the class. That means you research the topic, assign the reading, and conduct the discussion. You then write up your presentation in the form of a paper. I also encourage creative writing in this course, in the form of "response poems," which I look at regularly and which the class will workshop occasionally.
Application forms for this seminar are in a folder outside my office door, Rice 30. P, AL. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 15.
This course examines the full range of Joyce's writing in its Irish social and historical contexts. We'll begin with Dubliners, his portrait of a morally paralyzed city of small yet fascinating lives, ending in the great story "The Dead." Then we'll turn our attention to Joyce's bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the semi-autobiographical story of one who tries to escape Dublin's confines. That Stephen Dedalus doesn't get away for long we learn from the monumental literary tour de force Ulysses where the sensitive young artist is soon supplanted by Leopold Bloom, the clumsy but endearing husband of Molly. A careful reading of this lengthy novel will keep us more than occupied for many weeks. And then when we almost feel comfortable with Joyce's increasingly radical imagination, we'll turn to excerpts from Finnegans Wake whose devious verbal wit makes the earlier novel seem like child's play.
Alongside the primary texts we'll get acquainted with Dublin, read critical essays, explore parallels with Joyce's life, and also do some critical writing of our own. I have in mind two shorter essays (6-8 pages), and a longer research project (10-12 pages) on a topic of your choice. Class will be taught by a mixture of short lectures and discussions, supplemented by a computerized bulletin board, and class presentations. (Your contribution to discussion will be evaluated as part of your final grade.) F, WL. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 18.
Both a critical investigation of the different ways that Americans write about nature and a workshop for producing our own nature writing, this seminar divides into three main components: 1. "Reading Nature"--an inquiry into the concept of nature, its different philosophical and historical meanings; 2. "Nature Writing"--a study of diverse methods of writing about nature, organized around one element of the natural landscape (rivers); 3. "Writing Nature"--in which students will practice their own form of nature writing, whether prose or poetry, fiction or philosophy. In the earlier part of the semester, students will form groups and lead discussions, do research and present articles to the class. In the final weeks, participants will be working on their own nature writing and presenting it in seminars for the edification of the class and for critique. Throughout the course, students will keep notebooks, embark on short fieldtrips, and meet up with such texts as Collingwood's The Idea of Nature, Foucault's The Order of Things, Nature Writing and America (Fritzell), Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (Powell), as well as more recent works by Ann Zwinger, Barry Lopez, and Kathleen Dean Moore. Applications are due by 4 November, and should include the student's background, interests in the course, & whether she or he has taken or applied to take other seminars. F, AL. Consent: Consent of instructor required. Enrollment Limit: 15.
This course will be a sustained examination of Richard Wright's pivotal place in black intellectual history and the canon of African-American literature, drawing on the range of available materials (including both print and film). We will read a good deal of Wright's fiction, essays, and autobiographical works as well as biographical and critical sources on his life and work. Some topics for exploration will be the impact of black migration and urbanization on Wright's imagination, theoretical and representational uses of communism and existentialism, and formal and thematic experimentation within inherited literary culture. (Suggested prerequisite: Students should have taken at least one class significantly focused on African-American literature.) F, AL. Consent: Consent of instructor required. 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 of instructor required.
Intensive work on student's honors project, culminating in either an honors paper or creative project. Consent of instructor required.
|
|
|
|
|
| ||
