ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels

ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Novels

ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945

ENGL 260 - Modern British Literature, 1901-1945

ENGL 261 - Literatures of Ireland

ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures

ENGL 265 - Selected Author

ENGL 275 - Critical Ethnic Studies: Caribbean Discourse

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Caribbean Discourse. (Same as AFRS 275  and LALS 275 ) Study of the work of artists and intellectuals from the Caribbean. Analysis of fiction, non-fiction, and popular cultural forms such as calypso and reggae within their historical contexts. Attention to cultural strategies of resistance to colonial domination and to questions of community formation in the post-colonial era. May include some discussion of post-colonial literary theory and cultural studies. Ms. Paravisini.

Open to sophomores, junior, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair.

Two 75-minute periods.

ENGL 277 - Crossings: Literature without Borders

ENGL 281 - The Comics Course

ENGL 290 - Field Work

ENGL 298 - Independent Study

ENGL 300 - Senior Tutorial

ENGL 302 - Adaptations

ENGL 305 - Creative Writing Seminar

ENGL 306 - Creative Writing Seminar

ENGL 307 - Senior Creative Writing

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Writing samples are due after the October break.  Please check with the department for exact dates.

One 3-hour period with individual conferences with the instructor.

ENGL 315 - Studies in Performance

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: Writing for Performance. This seminar examines a range of culturally significant entertainments from Homer to Homer Simpson; Euripides to YouTube; Beowulf to Snoop Dogg; and Shakespeare to Shakira—but it is designed chiefly as a workshop for theatrical writers who already know, and value, the Western dramatic tradition. Coursework includes theater visits and the rehearsal of one another’s original writing (monologues, forms of dialogue, scenes, a one-act play). Our emphasis is insistently dramaturgical, though not without a dose of criticism, and performance theory. Focus: writing for the stage, not for TV or film. Mr. Foster.

Prerequisites: an original writing sample; evidence of successfully completed coursework in dramatic literature; and permission of the instructor.

Limited enrollment.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 317 - Studies in Literary Theory

ENGL 318 - Literary Studies in Gender and Sexuality

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Feminist Approaches to the Representation of Rape The representation of rape has been central in the Western literary tradition providing a pretext for aggression and revenge since the Iliad. These stories, foundational to narratives of the making of political entities, are repeated and recycled in the literary tradition. Yet the subjectivity of the raped woman continues to confound. Her silence seems necessary. This course considers the classical figures of Lucrece, Lavinia, and Philomel and their translation into the English literary tradition in the work of Chaucer and Shakespeare. We then turn to recent feminist work on the representation of rape. Authors may include Alcoff, Higgins and Silver, Walker, and films such as Thelma & Louise and The Accused. Ms. Robertson.

Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English or by permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 319 - Race and Its Metaphors

ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Visions and Revisions of the Fall. In this class we consider the ways in which the Fall is treated as a literary, religious, and philosophical construct by John Milton in Paradise Lost and by Philip Pullman in his Dark Materials trilogy. While the course focuses on Milton’s poem and Pullman’s novels, we consider other versions of the Fall (including the Biblical one) and we also examine the lot/state/situation of the fallen (angels and others) by reading a variety of medieval and modern texts, which may include The Consolation of Philosophy, Pearl, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Butcher Boy, and Postcards. In addition, we will screen a number of films, which may include The Devil’s Advocate, The Rapture, Dogma, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Bedazzled. Mr. Amodio.

ENGL 325 - Studies in Genre

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Comedy - Then and Now. What made the Ancient Greeks laugh? What did Shakespeare’s contemporaries laugh at? What do we find funny? Do we laugh at what the Ancient Greeks or Shakespeare’s contemporaries found funny? This course examines the genre of comedy from the Ancient Greeks to the present. While we read a representative selection of comedies that may include plays by Aristophanes, the Wakefield Master, Shakespeare, Jonson, Behn, Wilde, Coward, Orton, Ionesco, Stoppard, and Churchill, we also study theoretical texts by Aristotle, Sidney, Dryden, Meredith, Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin, Esslin, Sypher, Critchley, and Weitz. In addition, we view and discuss comedies on film and television as well as theater productions staged at Vassar or in New York City. Mr. Markus.

Topic for 2014/15a: Ecotexts: Environmental Literature. (Same as ENST 325 ) This course examines the development of environmental literature, from the “nature writing” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the emergence of contemporary ecological writing and ecocriticism. Readings will feature a wide range of writers from various disciplines, including Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Leslie Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben and others. Mr. Kane.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 326 - Challenging Ethnicity

ENGL 328 - Literature of the American Renaissance

ENGL 329 - American Literary Realism

ENGL 330 - American Modernism

ENGL 331 - Postmodern American Literature

ENGL 340 - Studies in Medieval Literature

ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Women and Performance in Early Modern England. Though barred from the professional stage until after the Restoration, early modern Englishwomen had many stages, both public and private, on which to act, from royal courts to urban streets to household rooms. For women playwrights, the act of writing became another kind of performance–the construction of an imaginary stage on which to enact their thoughts. In exploring the spaces and media of women’s performance (including music and dance) this seminar puts particular emphasis on the ways in which they were used to challenge early modern constructions of femininity and to re-imagine women’s social roles. Ms. Dunn.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 342 - Studies in Shakespeare

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: Making Shakespeare’s Plays. This course explores the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays were produced (and reproduced) in his lifetime. Shakespeare wrote his plays for the sole purpose of performance, but these plays survived only because they were published in print as well. We consider the ramifications of this inherent contradiction and seek answers to such questions as the following: what exactly is a Shakespeare play? How was it created? What is the correlation between the manuscripts, performances, and printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays? What is the correlation between the processes of writing, performing, and printing them? How did his contemporaries see Shakespeare as an author of plays? In our investigations, we pay special attention to Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and King Lear. Mr. Markus.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 345 - Milton

ENGL 350 - Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature

ENGL 351 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

ENGL 352 - Romantic Poets: Rebels with a Cause

ENGL 353 - Romantic Poets: Rebels with a Cause

ENGL 355 - Modern Poets

ENGL 356 - Contemporary Poets

ENGL 357 - Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: Virginia Woolf and Queer Modernity. Virginia Woolf seems more like our contemporary than any other British modernist. A scathing and often hilarious critic of patriarchy, her writing is free of the vexing misogyny that dates the work of her male counterparts. She treats women’s quotidian experiences - their travails, but also their pleasures - as subjects of universal artistic concern. Her detailed explorations of the flux of consciousness and the intricate nature of memory continue to resonate in our confessional culture. But so to do her queer attempts to get beyond both the dreary offices of gender and the pondering of one’s own uniqueness. Against the grain of her reputation as a chronicler of the inner life, her writing focuses the mundane object-world in new and unfamiliar ways and probes the elusive nature of our social tie, our being-in-common. Like Freud, she tried in her late work to imagine what a civilized society might look like in an era of unprecedented barbarity, when appeals to collective existence were being marshaled under the banners of jingoism, imperialism, militarism, and fascism. Perhaps her most urgent lesson for us, however, is neither strictly “personal” nor “political”: Woolf made powerful pleas for our right to privacy and anonymity, for the freedom to think about nothing in particular and to do so without interruption in a room of one’s own. On the other hand, no one did more than she to invent her readership and to secure her afterlife as a literary celebrity: no reading of Woolf is quite separable from Woolf. In addition to reading her novels, we will sample her short fiction, essays, memoirs, diaries, and letters. Mr. Chang.

Topic for 2014/15b: Finnegans Wake: Kersse the Tailor through Array! Surrection. Mr. Russell.

ENGL 362 - Text and Image

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: Because Dave Chappelle Said So. (Same as AFRS 362 ) The course will explore the history and movement of black, mostly male, satirical comic narratives and characters. From Hip Hop to Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle to Spike Lee’s Bamboozled to Dave Chappelle to Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character, black masculinity seems to be a contemporary site of massive satire. Using postmodernism as our critical lens, we will explore what black satirical characters and narratives are saying through “tragicomedy” to the mediums of literature, film, television and politics. We will also think about the ways that black archetypes (coon, mammy, sapphire, uncle tom, pickaninny, sambo, tragic mulatto, noble savage, castrating bitch) have evolved into cutting edge comedy on the internet like Awkward Black Girl. We start to see the beginnings of this strategic evolution taking place in the Civil Rights movement when black leaders use television and visual expectations of blackness to their national and global advantage. How did black situation comedies and black comedians of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s speak to and/or disregard that history. Are contemporary comic narratives, narrators and characters, while asserting critical citizenship, actually writing black women’s subjectivities, narratives and experiences out of popular American History? Does satire have essentially masculinist underpinnings? How are these texts and characters communicating with each other and is there a shared language? Is there a difference between a black comic text and a black satirical text? Have comic ideals of morality, democracy, sexuality, femininity and masculinity changed much since the turn of the century? Did blaxploitation cinema revolutionize television for black performers and viewers? How has the internet literally revolutionized raced and gendered comedy? These are some of the questions we will explore in Because Dave Chappelle Said So. Mr. Laymon.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 365 - Selected Author

1 unit(s)

 

Not offered in 2014/15.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 370 - Transnational Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Indigenous Transnationalisms. This course focuses on the ways in which transnational studies has become a more helpful tool in unpacking particular critical questions that both American Studies and literary/cultural criticism produce. In many ways, transnational literatures and visual culture continue to serve as a means to subvert dominant narratives of the nation-state as a static and stable territory.  Many contemporary North American Indigenous writers and artists – across colonial and tribal borders alike – utilize their work to more accurately reflect the global flow of Indigenous peoples, ideas, texts, and products etc. and call into question the geo-political boundaries of colonial nation-states.  Indigenous transnationalism as a theoretical position demonstrates how some Native American/First Nation/Indio literatures and visual culture produce a mobilizing force of shared cultural and political alliances across nationalistic lines while remaining steadfast to tribally-specific and inter-tribal identities and citizenships.  In this way, many Indigenous artists are critiquing national identity and imperialism, and radically challenging the histories, geographies, and contemporary social relations that define the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. Ms. McGlennen.

One 2-hour period.

ENGL 378 - Black Paris

ENGL 380 - English Seminar

ENGL 381 - English Seminar

ENGL 382 - English Seminar

ENGL 383 - English Seminar

ENGL 384 - English Seminar

ENGL 385 - English Seminar

ENGL 386 - English Seminar

ENGL 399 - Senior Independent Work

HIST 101 - Martin Luther King Jr.

HIST 103 - Hindus and Muslims in Pre-Colonial India

HIST 108 - International Human Rights

HIST 116 - The Dark Ages

HIST 120 - Japan’s American Revolution, 1945-52

HIST 121 - Readings in Modern European History

HIST 122 - Encounters in Modern East Asia

HIST 123 - Europe at the Crossroads, 1500-1789

HIST 124 - Europe 1945

HIST 125 - Infamy on Trial: Famous Trials in Early Modern Europe

HIST 126 - Terrorism in Russia and Eurasia

HIST 128 - Europe 1945 - Rethinking History

HIST 132 - Globalization in Historical Perspective, 1850 to the Present

HIST 141 - Tradition, History and the African Experience

HIST 151 - British History: James I (1603) to the Great War

HIST 160 - American Moments: Rediscovering U.S. History

HIST 161 - From Gold Rush to Dust Bowl: Writing the American Frontier

HIST 162 - Envisioning Latin America

HIST 174 - The Emergence of the Modern Middle East

HIST 175 - Mandela: Race, Resistance and Renaissance in South Africa

HIST 180 - Ecological Gandhi

HIST 181 - Russia, Ukraine, and the Steppe

HIST 204 - Independent India: 1947-1990s

HIST 208 - Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1945

HIST 214 - The Roots of the Palestine-Israel Conflict

HIST 215 - The High Middle Ages, c. 950-1300

HIST 216 - History of the Ancient Greeks

HIST 217 - History of the Ancient Romans

HIST 218 - The Crusades, 1095-1291

HIST 220 - Medieval and Renaissance Culture

HIST 224 - Wars in 20th Century East Asia

HIST 225 - Renaissance Italy

HIST 226 - Northern Europe in the Renaissance, c. 1300-1550

HIST 230 - From Tyranny to Terror: The Old Regime and the French Revolution

HIST 231 - France and its “Others”

HIST 235 - Ending Deadly Conflict

HIST 236 - Germany, 1740-1918

HIST 237 - Germany, 1918-1990

HIST 242 - Russia and the Steppe to 1800

HIST 243 - Russia and the Soviet Union, 1861-2000

HIST 251 - A History of American Foreign Relations

HIST 252 - Imagining India: Colonial Experience and the Pathways to Independence

HIST 253 - The Jungle in Indian History

HIST 254 - Victorian Britain

HIST 255 - The British Empire

HIST 259 - The History of the Family in Early Modern Europe

HIST 260 - Sex & Reproduction in 19th Century United States: Before Margaret Sanger

HIST 261 - Women in 20th Century America

HIST 262 - Contesting Colonialism: Latin America 1450 - 1750