Catalogue 2014-2015 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
English Department
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Chair: Mark Amodio;
Professors: Mark Amodio, Robert DeMariaa, Don Foster, Wendy Graham, Michael Joyce, Paul Kane, Amitava Kumar, Paul Russellb, Ronald Sharp, Patricia Wallaceab, Susan Zlotnick;
Associate Professors: Peter Antelyes, Heesok Chang, Eve Dunbar (and Associate Dean of the Faculty), Leslie C. Dunn, Hua Hsu, Jean M. Kane, Kiese Laymon, Zoltán Márkus, Molly S. McGlennen, Tyrone Simpson, II;
Assistant Professors: Dorothy Kimab, Julie Park, Hiram Pereza;
Senior Lecturer: Karen Robertson;
Visiting Associate Professor: David Means;
Visiting Assistant Professor: Joanna Gil;
Adjunct Associate Professors: Dean Crawford, M. Mark, Judith Nichols, Ralph Sassone.
a On leave 2014/15, first semester
b On leave 2014/15, second semester
ab On leave 2014/15
Major
Correlate Sequences in English
The department offers seven correlates in English. Race and Ethnicity; Theory, Criticism and Transnational Studies; Poetry and Poetics; Literary Forms; British Literary History; American Literary History and Creative Writing. A minimum of six units is required for the correlate sequence. Further information is in the Alphabet Book as well. English: I. Introductory
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ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing. The content of each section varies; see the Freshman Handbook for descriptions. The department.
Open only to freshmen; satisfies the college requirement for a Freshman Writing Seminar.Although the content of each section varies, this course may not be repeated for credit; see the Freshman Handbook for descriptions.
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ENGL 170 - Approaches to Literary Studies Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)
Each section explores a central issue, such as “the idea of a literary period,” “canons and the study of literature,” “nationalism and literary form,” or “gender and genre” (contact the department office for 2013/14 descriptions). Assignments focus on the development of skills for research and writing in English, including the use of secondary sources and the critical vocabulary of literary study. The department.
Open to freshmen and sophomores, and to others by permission; does not satisfy college requirement for a Freshman Writing Seminar.
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ENGL 174 - Poetry and Philosophy: The Ancient Quarrel Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1/2 unit(s)
Topic for 2014/15a&b: Poetry and Philosophy: The Ancient Quarrel. When Plato famously banished poets from his ideal Republic, he spoke of an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. That argument has continued, in various forms, down to the present, culminating in Heidegger’s notorious question, “What are poets for?” This six-week course looks at a number of key texts in this contentious history, along with exemplary poems that illustrate the issues. Writers include Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shelley, Wordsworth, Wilde, Eliot, Blanchot, Derrida, and others. Mr. Kane.
No specialized knowledge of poetry or philosophy required. The class is ungraded.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 177 - Special Topics Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1/2 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 177 and URBS 177 ) Topic for 2014/15a&b: Imagining the City. This six-week course will survey various approaches to thinking and writing about the city. How do our surroundings change us? What power does an individual have to reshape or reimagine the vast urban landscape? We will consider a diverse array of depictions: the ethnic underground of Chang-rae Lee’s Queens; the forlorn Baltimore depicted in the television show The Wire; the midnight wanderings of Teju Cole and Junot Diaz; the global bustle of Jessica Hagedorn’s Manila; present-day graffiti artists and urban farmers reclaiming their “right to the city.” Mr. Hsu.
English: II. Intermediate
Prerequisite: open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101 may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen. -
ENGL 203 - Introductory Creative Writing: Journalisms Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the diverse complexity of contemporary American lives. In a plain sense, this course is an investigation into American society. But the main emphasis of the course is on acquiring a sense of the different models of writing, especially in longform writing, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. Students are encouraged to practice the basics of journalistic craft and to interrogate the role of journalists as intellectuals (or vice versa). Mr. Kumar.
Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
Not open to first-year students.
Applicants to the course must submit samples of original nonfiction writing (two to five pages long) and a statement about why they want to take the course. Deadline for submission of writing samples one week after October break.
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ENGL 205 - Introductory Creative Writing Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry. Reading and writing assignments may include prose fiction, journals, poetry, drama, and essays. The a-term course is open by special permission to sophomores regardless of major, in order of draw numbers, and to juniors and seniors, in order of draw numbers, with priority given to English majors. The b-term course is open by special permission to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, in order of draw numbers, with priority given to English majors. To gain special permission, students must fill out a form in the English department office during pre-registration.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 206 - Introductory Creative Writing Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 207 .
Special permission is not required.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Continued study and practice of various forms of prose and/or poetry. Ms. Mark.
Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 .
Special permission is not required.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 208 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a reader and writer of literary nonfiction, with emphasis on longer forms. Assignments may include informal, personal, and lyric essays, travel and nature writing, memoirs. Mr. Hsu.
Prerequisite: open to students who have taken ENGL 207 or by permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 209 - Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of narrative, with particular emphasis on the short story. Mr. Means.
Deadline for submission of writing samples is before spring break.
Yearlong course 209-ENGL 210 .
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 210 - Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of narrative, with particular emphasis on the short story. Mr. Means.
Deadline for submission of writing samples is before spring break.
Yearlong course ENGL 209 -210.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 211 - Advanced Creative Writing: Verse
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of poetry. In addition to written poetry, other forms of poetic expressions may be explored, such as performance and spoken word.
Deadline for submission of writing samples is before spring break.
Yearlong course 211-ENGL 212 .
Not offered in 2014/15.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 212 - Advanced Creative Writing: Verse
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of poetry. In addition to written poetry, other forms of poetic expressions may be explored, such as performance and spoken word.
Deadline for submission of writing samples is before spring break.
Yearlong course ENGL 211 -212.
Not offered in 2014/15.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. -
ENGL 213 - The English Language Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of the history of English from the fifth century to the present, with special attention to the role of literature in effecting as well as reflecting linguistic change. Treatment of peculiarly literary matters, such as poetic diction, and attention to broader linguistic matters, such as phonology, comparative philology, semantics, and the relationship between language and experience. Mr. DeMaria.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as CLCS 214 ) This course introduces the theoretical and practical underpinnings of writing and teaching writing. Students interrogate writing’s place in the academy, discuss writing process from inception to revision, and share their own writing and writing practices. The course offers an occasion to reflect on and strengthen the students’ own analytical and imaginative writing and heighten the ability to talk with others about theirs. Students are asked to offer sustained critical attention to issues of where knowledge resides and how it is shared, to interrogate the sources of students’ and teachers’ authority, to explore their own education as writers, to consider the possibilities of peer-to-peer and collaborative learning, and to give and receive constructive criticism. Texts may include Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Stephen King’s On Writing, as well as handbooks on peer consulting.
Students who successfully complete this class are eligible to interview for employment as consultants in the Writing Center. Mr. Schultz. (English; Director, Writing Center)
Prerequisite: Freshman Writing Seminar.
By special permission.
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ENGL 215 - Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 1800 Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of selected dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.
Not offered in 2014/15.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800 Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of modern dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year. Mr. Márkus.
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ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
A study of various critical theories and practices ranging from antiquity to the present day. Ms. Kane.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 218 - Literature, Gender, and Sexuality Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
This course considers matters of gender and sexuality in literary texts, criticism, and theory. The focus varies from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre; constructions of masculinity and femininity; sexual identities; or representations of gender in relation to race and class.
Topic for 2014/15a: Gay Male Narratives in America after 1945. An exploration of various narrative modes and genres through which modern gay male identity has both expressed and created itself. The first half of the course will focus on the evolution of the gay male literary novel, and may include works by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Andrew Holleran and Mark Merlis. For the second half of the course we will organize the class into affinity groups of four or five students who will investigate and present an aspect of gay narrative of their own choosing. Possibilities include: gay pulp fiction, gay porn narratives, the literature of AIDS, gay blogs, genre writing (science fiction, detective, slash, etc.), children’s and young adult literature, film adaptation and gay comics. Mr. Russell.
Topic for 2014/15b: Gender, Sexuality, Disability. (Same as WMST 218 ) This course is an introduction to disability studies, with a focus on the difference(s) that gender can make, both in social constructions of disability and in the lives of men and women with disabilities. Topics include: the languages of disability; cultural ideals of beauty and the acceptable/desirable body; disability and representation; the impact of disability on sexuality and gender identity; and intersections of disability studies with feminist and queer theory. A particular focus of the course will be the self-representation of disabled subjects–how they use writing, art, and performance to overcome stigma and shame, to challenge stereotypes, to re-imagine identities, and to engage in disability activism. Ms. Dunn.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 222 - Founding of English Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
These courses, English 222 and ENGL 223 , offer an introduction to British literary history through an exploration of texts from the eighth through the seventeenth centuries in their literary and cultural contexts. English 222 begins with Old English literature and continues through the death of Queen Elizabeth I (1603). ENGL 223 begins with the establishment of Great Britain and continues through the British Civil War and Puritan Interregnum to the Restoration. Critical issues may include discourses of difference (race, religion, gender, social class); tribal, ethnic, and national identities; exploration and colonization; textual transmission and the rise of print culture; authorship and authority. Both courses address the formation and evolution of the British literary canon, and its significance for contemporary English studies. Mr. Foster.
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ENGL 223 - The Founding of English Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
These courses, ENGL 222 and 223, offer an introduction to British literary history through an exploration of texts from the eighth through the seventeenth centuries in their literary and cultural contexts. ENGL 222 begins with Old English literature and continues through the death of Queen Elizabeth I (1603). English 223 begins with the establishment of Great Britain and continues through the British Civil War and Puritan Interregnum to the Restoration. Critical issues may include discourses of difference (race, religion, gender, social class); tribal, ethnic, and national identities; exploration and colonization; textual transmission and the rise of print culture; authorship and authority. Both courses address the formation and evolution of the British literary canon, and its significance for contemporary English studies.
Topic for 2014/15b: From the Faerie Queene to The Country Wife: Introduction to Early Modern Literature and Culture. This is a thematically organized “issues and methods” course grafted onto a chronologically structured survey course of early modern literature and culture. Its double goal is to develop skills for understanding early modern texts (both the language and the culture) as well as to familiarize students with a representative selection of works from the mid-1500s through the late 1600s. With this two-pronged approach, we will acquire an informed appreciation of the early modern period that may well serve as the basis for pursuing more specialized courses in this field. We explore a great variety of genres and media, including canonical authors such as Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, but we also attend to less well-known authors, many of them women, through whose writings we can achieve a more nuanced and complex understanding of the times. By paying special attention to correlations between literature and other discourses, as well as to issues of cultural identity and difference based on citizenship, class, ethnicity, gender, geography, nationality, race, and religion, we engage early modern literature and culture in ways that are productive to the understanding of our own culture as well. Mr. Márkus.
Please note that ENGL 222 is not a prerequisite for this course; it is open to all students, including freshmen.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 225 - American Literature, Origins to 1865 Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of the main developments in American literature from its origins through the Civil War: including Native American traditions, exploration accounts, Puritan writings, captivity and slave narratives, as well as major authors from the eighteenth century (such as Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Rowson, and Brown) up to the mid-nineteenth century (Irving, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Fuller, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson). Mr. Antelyes.
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ENGL 226 - American Literature, 1865-1925 Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of the major developments in American literature and culture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Literary movements such as realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism are examined, as well as literatures of ethnicity, race, and gender. Works studied are drawn from such authors as Twain, Howells, James, Jewett, Chestnutt, Chopin, Crane, London, Harte, DuBois, Gilman, Adams, Wharton, Dreiser, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Yezierska, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O’Neill, Frost, H. D., and Toomer. Ms. Graham.
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ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 227 ) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was “The New Negro” new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century? Ms. Dunbar.
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ENGL 228 - African American Literature, “Vicious Modernism” and Beyond Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 228 ) In the famous phrase of Amiri Baraka, “Harlem is vicious/ Modernism.” Beginning with the modernist innovations of African American writers after the Harlem Renaissance, this course ranges from the social protest fiction of the 1940s through the Black Arts Movement to the postmodernist experiments of contemporary African American writers. Mr. Simpson.
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ENGL 229 - Asian-American Literature, 1946-present Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course considers such topics as memory, identity, liminality, community, and cultural and familial inheritance within Asian-American literary traditions. May consider Asian-American literature in relation to other ethnic literatures. Mr. Hsu.
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ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 230 ) This literature engages a history of conflict, resistance, and mestizaje. For some understanding of this embattled context, we examine transnational migration, exile, assimilation, bilingualism, and political and economic oppression as these variously affect the means and modes of the texts under consideration. At the same time, we emphasize the invented and hybrid nature of Latina and Latino literary and cultural traditions, and investigate the place of those inventions in the larger framework of American intellectual and literary traditions, on the one hand, and pan-Latinidad, on the other. Authors studied may include Americo Paredes, Piri Thomas, Cherrie Moraga, Richard Rodriguez, Michelle Serros, Cristina Garcia, Ana Castillo, and Junot Diaz. Mr. Perez.
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ENGL 231 - Native American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Drawing from a wide range of traditions, this course explores the rich heritage of Native American literature. Material for study may comprise oral traditions (myths, legends, place naming and story telling) as well as contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Authors may include Zitkala Sa, Black Elk, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, Sherman Alexie, and Joy Harjo. Ms. McGlennen.
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ENGL 235 - Old English Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Introduction to Old English language and literature. Mr. Amodio.
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ENGL 236 - Beowulf Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of the early English epic in the original language. Mr. Amodio.
Prerequisite: ENGL 235 or demonstrated knowledge of Old English, or permission of the instructor.
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ENGL 237 - Chaucer
1 unit(s)
The major poetry, including The Canterbury Tales.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 238 - Middle English Literature
1 unit(s)
Studies in late medieval literature (1250-1500), drawing on the works of the Gawain-poet, Langland, Chaucer, and others. Genres studied may include lyric, romance, drama, allegory, and vision. Ms. Kim.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 240 - Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies. Ms. Dunn (a); Ms. Robertson (b).
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241 -ENGL 242 .
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ENGL 241 - Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 241 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Mr. Foster.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .
Yearlong course 241-ENGL 242 .
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ENGL 242 - Shakespeare Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 242 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Mr. Foster.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .
Yearlong course ENGL 241 -242.
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ENGL 245 - Pride and Prejudice: British Literature from 1640-1745 Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of various authors who were influential in defining the literary culture and the meaning of authorship in the period. Authors may include Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Anne Finch, John Gay, Eliza Haywood, Mary Leapor, Katherine Philips, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
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ENGL 246 - Sense and Sensibility: British Literature from 1745-1798
1 unit(s)
Study of the writers who represented the culmination of neoclassical literature in Great Britain and those who built on, critiqued, or even defined themselves against it. Authors may include Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, William Beckford, William Cowper, Olaudah Equiano, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Anne Yearsley, and Hannah More. Mr. DeMaria.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels
1 unit(s)
Readings vary but include works by such novelists as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Austen.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism, 1789-1832
1 unit(s)
Study of British literature in a time of revolution. Authors may include such poets as Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats; essayists such as Burke, Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt, Lamb, and DeQuincey; and novelists such as Edgeworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, and Scott.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature: Culture and Anarchy Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of Victorian culture through the prose writers of the period. This course explores the strategies of nineteenth-century writers who struggled to find meaning and order in a changing world. It focuses on such issues as industrialization, the woman question, imperialism, aestheticism, and decadence, paying particular attention to the relationship between literary and social discourses. Authors may include nonfiction prose writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as well as fiction writers such as Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Ms. Graham.
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ENGL 250 - Victorian Poets Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
A study of major English poets in the period 1830 to 1900, with special emphasis on the virtuosity and innovations of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Other poets include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), and Thomas Hardy. Consideration will be given to Pre-Raphaelite art and to contemporaneous works of literary criticism. Mr. Kane.
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ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.
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ENGL 252 - Writing the Diaspora: Verses/Versus Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 252 ) Black American Culture expression is anchored in rhetorical battles and verbal jousts that place one character against another. From the sorrow songs to blues, black music has always been a primary means of cultural expression for Afirican Americans, particularly during difficult social periods and transition. Black Americans have used music and particularly rythmic verse to resist, express, and signify. Nowhere is this more evident then in hip hop culture generally and hip hop music specifically. This semester’s Writing the Diasporaclass concerns itself with close textual analysis of hip hop texts. Is Imani Perry right in claiming that Hip Hop is Black American music, or diasporic music? In addition to close textual reading of lyrics, students are asked to create their own hip-hop texts that speak to particular artists/texts and/or issues and styles raised. Mr. Laymon.
Prerequisites: one course in literature or Africana Studies.
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ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature
1 unit(s)
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).
Not offered in 2014/15.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Readings vary but include works by such novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Trollope, George Eliot, and Hardy. Ms. Zlotnick.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Novels
1 unit(s)
Significant twentieth-century novels from Great Britain and Ireland. Mr. Chang.
Prerequisite: AP credit or one unit of Freshman English.
Not offered in 2014/15.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945
1 unit(s)
The novel in English as it has developed in Africa, America, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, India, Ireland, and elsewhere. Mr. Crawford.
Not offered in 2014/15.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 260 - Modern British Literature, 1901-1945
1 unit(s)
Study of representative modern works of literature in relation to literary modernism. Consideration of cultural crisis and political engagement, with attention to the Great War as a subject of memoir, fiction, and poetry, and to the new voices of the thirties and early forties. Authors may include Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf, Conrad, Graves, Vera Brittain, Rebecca West, Orwell, and Auden. Mr. Russell.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 261 - Literatures of Ireland
1 unit(s)
Authors, genres, themes and historical coverage may vary from year to year. Readings may range from the Táin Bó Cuailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) and other sagas; to Anglo-Irish authors of various periods, including Swift, Goldsmith, Thomas Moore, Maria Edgeworth, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde; to the writers of the Irish literary revival, including Roger Casement, Lady Gregory, Padraic O’Conaire, Pádraig Mac Piarais, Synge, and Yeats; to modernists Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Elizabeth Bowen; to contemporary Irish poets, novelists, dramatists, and musicians.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of contemporary literature written in English from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. Readings in various genres by such writers as Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Patrick White. Some consideration of post-colonial literary theory. Mr. Kumar.
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ENGL 265 - Selected Author
1 unit(s)
Study of the work of a single author. The work may be read in relation to literary predecessors and descendants as well as in relation to the history of the writer’s critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with ENGL 365 .
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 275 - Critical Ethnic Studies: Caribbean Discourse Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
A topics course examining the multiple forms of cultural expression and resistance that arise in response to systemic racial oppression. This course focuses on transnational and/or historical variants of racial and colonial domination. Key concepts and methodologies may include border studies, comparative racializations, decolonization, diaspora, hip hop, indigeneity, nation, and sovereignty. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.
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
1 unit(s)
This course explores themes, concepts, and genres that span literary periods and/or national boundaries. The focus will vary from year to year.
Open to sophomores, junior, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair.
Not offered in 2014/15.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 281 - The Comics Course Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 281 ) This course examines the medium of comics by focusing on major forms of comic art from 1900 to the present, including comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, and independent mini-comics. It is organized both historically and thematically, with classes exploring such topics as: the formal properties of medium, from the page to the platform; the roles played by gender, sexuality, race, and class in the creation and marketing of comic art; the debates over the morality of comics, and the effects of the “Comics Code”; the relation of comics to various subcultures, such as the “underground” movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s; the positioning of “graphic novels” in the academy and the literary world more generally. Among the artists/works we might consider: McCay (Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland), Herriman (Krazy Kat), Siegel and Shuster (Superman), Schulz (Peanuts), Spiegelman (Maus), Barry (The Greatest of Marlys), McGruder (Boondocks), Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), Satrapi (Persepolis), and Bechdel (Fun Home). We will also be looking at criticism and theory in the areas of media and cultural studies. Mr. Antelyes.
Two 75-minute periods. -
ENGL 290 - Field Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1/2 to 1 unit(s)
Prerequisite: 2 units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.
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ENGL 298 - Independent Study Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1/2 to 1 unit(s)
Prerequisite: 2 units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.
English: III. Advanced
Prerequisite: Open to Juniors and Seniors with 2 units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor. -
ENGL 300 - Senior Tutorial Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)
Preparation of a long essay (40 pages) or other independently designed critical project. Each essay is directed by an individual member of the department.
Special permission.
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ENGL 302 - Adaptations Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as CLCS 302 and MEDS 302 ) If works of art continue each other, as Virginia Woolf suggested, then cultural history accumulates when generations of artists think and talk together across time. What happens when one of those artists switches to another language, another genre, another mode or medium? In the twenty-first century we may reframe Woolf’s conversation in terms of intertextuality—art invokes and revises other art—but the questions remain more or less unchanged: What motivates and shapes adaptations? What role does technology play? Audience? What constitutes a faithful adaptation? “Faithful” to what or whom? In this course we consider the biological model, looking briefly at Darwin’s ideas about the ways organisms change in order to survive, and then explore analogies across a range of media. We’ll begin with Virgil’s Georgics; move on to Metamorphoses, Ovid’s free adaptations of classical myths; and follow Orpheus and Eurydice through two thousand years of theater (Euripides, Anouilh, Ruhl, Zimmerman); painting and sculpture (Dürer, Rubens, Poussin, Klee, Rodin); film and television (Pasolini, Cocteau, Camus, Luhrmann); dance (Graham, Balanchine, Bausch); music (Monteverdi, Gluck, Stravinsky, Birtwistle, Glass); narratives and graphic narratives (Pynchon, Delany, Gaiman, Hoban); verse (Rilke, H.D., Auden, Ashbery, Milosz, Heaney, Atwood, Mullen, Strand); and computer games (Battle of Olympus, Shin Megami Tensei). During the second half of the semester, we investigate other adaptations and their theoretical implications, looking back from time to time at what we’ve learned from the protean story of Eurydice and Orpheus and their countless progeny. Ms. Mark.
Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period. -
ENGL 305 - Creative Writing Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Students enrolled in 305-ENGL 306 undertake a creative senior thesis as part of the course work. Open to seniors majoring in English. Deadline for submission of writing samples immediately before spring break. Ms. Kane.
Yearlong course 305-ENGL 306 .
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ENGL 306 - Creative Writing Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Students enrolled in ENGL 305 -306 undertake a creative senior thesis as part of the course work. Open to seniors majoring in English. Ms. Kane.
Deadline for submission of writing samples immediately before spring break.
Yearlong course ENGL 305 -306.
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ENGL 307 - Senior Creative Writing Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Mr. Joyce.
Open to seniors from all departments.
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)
This course offers advanced study in the relationship between performance and text. Performance in this case is broadly conceived. It can include dramatic performances of plays, as well as storytelling, comic or musical performance, performance art, and poetry. The course may also explore such categories as gender or identity as forms of performance.
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
1 unit(s)
Advanced study of problems and schools of literary criticism and theory, principally in the twentieth century. May include discussion of new criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, new historicism, and Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and feminist analysis. Ms. Park.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 318 - Literary Studies in Gender and Sexuality Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 318 ) Advanced study of gender and sexuality in literary texts, theory and criticism. The focus will vary from year to year but will include a substantial theoretical or critical component that may draw from a range of approaches, such as feminist theory, queer theory, transgender studies, feminist psychoanalysis, disability studies and critical race theory.
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
1 unit(s)
Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course examines various literary traditions. The materials may cross historical, national and linguistic boundaries, and may investigate how a specific myth, literary form, idea, or figure (e.g., Pygmalion, romance, the epic, the fall of man, Caliban) has been constructed, disputed, reinvented and transformed. Topics vary from year to year.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.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 325 - Studies in Genre Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
An intensive study of specific forms or types of literature, such as satire, humor, gothic fiction, realism, slave narratives, science fiction, crime, romance, adventure, short story, epic, autobiography, hypertext, and screenplay. Each year, one or more of these genres is investigated in depth. The course may cross national borders and historical periods or adhere to boundaries of time and place.
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
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 326 and URBS 326 ) An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 328 - Literature of the American Renaissance Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of major works by American writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Authors may include: Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Fuller, Stowe, Delany, Wilson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. In addition to placing the works in historical and cultural context, focusing on the role of such institutions as slavery and such social movements as transcendentalism, the course also examines the notion of the American Renaissance itself. Mr. Antelyes.
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ENGL 329 - American Literary Realism
1 unit(s)
Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 330 - American Modernism Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of modern American literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to the concept of “modernism” and its relation to other cultural movements during this period. Authors may include Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, Frost, Anderson, Millay, Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, H. D., Faulkner, Wright, Eliot, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Crane, Yezierska, Toomer, Hughes, Cullen, Brown, Hurston, McKay, and Dos Passos. Ms. Graham.
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ENGL 331 - Postmodern American Literature
1 unit(s)
Advanced study of American literature from the second half of the twentieth century to the present date. Authors may include Welty, Ellison, Warren, O’Connor, Olson, Momaday, Mailer, Lowell, Bellow, Percy, Nabokov, Bishop, Rich, Roth, Pynchon, Ashbery, Merrill, Reed, Silko, Walker, Morrison, Gass, and Kingston. Mr. Hsu.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 340 - Studies in Medieval Literature
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of selected medieval texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation. Issues addressed may include the social and political dynamics, literary traditions, symbolic discourses, and individual authorial voices shaping literary works in this era. Discussion of these issues may draw on both historical and aesthetic approaches, and both medieval and modern theories of rhetoric, reference, and text-formation.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 341 ) Intensive study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.
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)
Advanced study of Shakespeare’s work and its cultural significance in various contexts from his time to today.
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 Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of John Milton’s career as a poet and polemicist, with particular attention to Paradise Lost. Mr. DeMaria.
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ENGL 350 - Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature
1 unit(s)
Focuses on a broad literary topic, with special attention to works of the Restoration and eighteenth century.
Not offered in 2014/15.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 351 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
1 unit(s)
Study of a major author (e.g., Coleridge, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde) or a group of authors (the Brontes, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters) or a topical issue (representations of poverty; literary decadence; domestic angels and fallen women; transformations of myth in Romantic and Victorian literature) or a major genre (elegy, epic, autobiography).
Not offered in 2014/15.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 352 - Romantic Poets: Rebels with a Cause Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of the major poetry and critical prose of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge (English 352), and Byron, Shelley, and Keats (ENGL 353 ) in the context of Enlightenment thought, the French Revolution, and the post-Napoleonic era. Readings may include biographies, letters, and a few philosophical texts central to the period. Some preliminary study of Milton is strongly recommended. Mr. Sharp.
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ENGL 353 - Romantic Poets: Rebels with a Cause
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of the major poetry and critical prose of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge (ENGL 352 ), and Byron, Shelley, and Keats (English 353) in the context of Enlightenment thought, the French Revolution, and the post-Napoleonic era. Readings may include biographies, letters, and a few philosophical texts central to the period. Some preliminary study of Milton is strongly recommended.
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 355 - Modern Poets Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of selected modern poets, focusing on the period 1900-1945, with attention to longer poems and poetic sequences. Consideration of the development of the poetic career and of poetic movements. May include such poets as Auden, Bishop, Eliot, Frost, Hopkins, Moore, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Williams, and Yeats. Mr. Kane.
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ENGL 356 - Contemporary Poets Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of selected contemporary poets, with attention to questions of influence, interrelations, and diverse poetic practices. May include such poets as Ashbery, Bernstein, Brooks, Graham, Harjo, Heaney, Hill, Merrill, Rich, and Walcott. Ms. Gill.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 357 - Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Intensive study of literatures of the twentieth century, with primary focus on British and postcolonial (Irish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, etc.) texts. Selections may focus on an author or group of authors, a genre (e.g., modern verse epic, drama, satiric novel, travelogue), or a topic (e.g., the economics of modernism, black Atlantic, Englishes and Englishness, themes of exile and migration).
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.
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ENGL 362 - Text and Image Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Explores intersections and interrelationships between literary and visual forms such as the graphic novel, illustrated manuscripts, tapestry, the world-wide web, immersive environments, the history and medium of book design, literature and film, literature and visual art. Topics vary from year to year.
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)
Study of the work of a single author. The work may be read in relation to literary predecessors and descendants as well as in relation to the history of the writer’s critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with ENGL 265 .
Not offered in 2014/15.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 370 - Transnational Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 370 ) This course focuses on literary works and cultural networks that cross the borders of the nation-state. Such border-crossings raise questions concerning vexed phenomena such as globalization, exile, diaspora, and migration-forced and voluntary. Collectively, these phenomena deeply influence the development of transnational cultural identities and practices. Specific topics studied in the course vary from year to year and may include global cities and cosmopolitanisms; the black Atlantic; border theory; the discourses of travel and tourism; global economy and trade; or international terrorism and war.
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
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 378 and FREN 378 ) This multidisciplinary course examines black cultural productions in Paris from the first Conference of Negro-African writers and artists in 1956 to the present. While considered a haven by African American artists, Paris, the metropolitan center of the French empire, was a more complex location for African and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and artists. Yet, the city provided a key space for the development and negotiation of a black diasporic consciousness. This course examines the tensions born from expatriation and exile, and the ways they complicate understandings of racial, national and transnational identities. Using literature, film, music, and new media, we explore topics ranging from modernism, jazz, Négritude, Pan-Africanism, and the Présence Africaine group, to assess the meanings of blackness and race in contemporary Paris. Works by James Baldwin, Aime Césaire, Chester Himes, Claude McKay, the Nardal sisters, Richard Wright. Ousmane Sembène, Mongo Beti, among others, are studied. Ms. Célérier and Ms. Dunbar.
Not offered in 2014/15.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 380 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2014/15b: The In-Between Novel. These novels have been called “barely disguised essays.” David Markson’s This is Not a Novel, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, or Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever. But that description might also hold true of books like Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and the fiction of Lydia Davis or Susan Sontag. We read those books, and others like W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Teju Cole’s Open City. The idea behind grappling with this in-between form is to write, even if this appears a somewhat counterintuitive, more imaginative, and bravura, essays. For this purpose, we take guidance from David Shield’s anti-novel manifesto, Reality Hunger. Each student will make a class-presentation on one of the readings and will write a final essay about twenty double-spaced pages in length. Mr. Kumar.
One 2-hour period. -
ENGL 381 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 382 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 383 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 384 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 385 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 386 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2014/15.
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ENGL 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1/2 to 1 unit(s)
Open by permission of the Chair.
One unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.
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