Catalogue 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
English Department
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Chair: Wendy Graham;
Professors: Mark C. Amodioab, Robert DeMariaa, Leslie C. Dunn, Wendy Graham, Michael Joyceb, Jean M. Kane, Paul Kaneb, Amitava Kumarb, Paul Russell, Susan Zlotnick;
Associate Professors: Peter Antelyesab, Heesok Chang, Eve Dunbarb, Hua Hsuab, Zoltán Márkus, Molly S. McGlennen, Hiram Perez, Tyrone Simpson, II;
Assistant Professor: Kathleen Gemmill;
Visiting Assistant Professor: Rob Smith, Talia Vestri;
Post Doctoral Fellow: Erin Sweany;
Adjunct Associate Professors: M. Mark, David Means, Ralph Sassone;
Adjunct Assistant Professor: Owen King;
Adjunct Instructor: Nina Shengold.
a On leave 2019/20, first semester
b On leave 2019/20, second semester
ab On leave 2019/20
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 and Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing. The department.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Although the content of each section varies, this course may not be repeated for credit; see the First-Year Handbook for descriptions.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 170 - Approaches to Literary Studies Semester Offered: Fall and 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 current 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.
Topic for 2019/20a: Tools for Reading Narrative. Everyone today has a story to tell. But are all stories worth telling? What makes for a good story? What’s the difference between telling stories and telling lies? In order to come to terms with the “narrative turn” in the arts and sciences we adapt a dueling approach: the first technical and the second imaginary. On the one hand, we pillage useful studies of narrative from the ancients to the moderns. Here our goal is to acquire a durable set of tools and concepts: plot, description, narrator, free indirect style, focalization, storyworlds, etc. On the other hand, to test these lenses, we examine (and perhaps create) fictional texts that both bind and unravel narrative conventions. These might include: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow,” Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World, and short stories by Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Acker, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Mary Butts, and others. Heesok Chang.
Open to first-year students and sophomores, and to others by permission; does not satisfy the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Three 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 174 - Poetry and Philosophy: The Ancient Quarrel
0.5 unit(s)
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.
No specialized knowledge of poetry or philosophy required.
The class is ungraded.
First and second six-week course.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 177 - Special Topics
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 177 and URBS 177 )
First six-week course.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 180 - Improvisational Writing Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
This course uses techniques of improvisational generation of creative material drawn from schools such as Oulipo, writers such as Raymond Roussel, and teachers such as Ruth Danon. All of them aim to subvert the critical mind in order to allow the unexpected to emerge in directed free writing exercises. The course consists of such writing exercises, as well as direction in using the material that emerges as a platform for further work and drafts. It focuses on the genres of fiction and poetry.
The course is designed to direct writing practice at the stage of generation of material. Focus on generation increases tools for overcoming writing blocks and develop muscles in an area that such creative writing classes don’t allow as much time for as they do criticism and analysis of completed pieces. Jean Kane.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 183 - Building a Queer Oral History Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 183 ) This intensive provides students with practical training and experience in conducting oral history interviews. The goal is for each student, by the end of the semester, to contribute an oral history (including transcription) to the Vassar College LGBTQ Oral History Archive. In addition to practical training, students read about oral history methodology and theory; this includes engaging various ethical questions relevant to our work. Students also familiarize themselves with the LGBTQ Oral History Archive collection. Additionally, students collaborate in expanding the LGBTQ Oral History Archive to include a queer mapping component that geo-locates queer spaces and memories at Vassar and within Poughkeepsie. Our goal is to complement the oral histories in the collection with a map that documents the spaces that hold queer memories for our narrators. This course entails conducting, transcribing, and archiving oral histories. Students will apply for IRB approval. Hiram Perez.
Course Format: INT
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. First-year students 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 first-year students.
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ENGL 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms
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).
Not offered in 2019/20.
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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.
Not offered to first-year students.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 206 - Introductory Creative Writing Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 .
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction
1 unit(s)
Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 .
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 209 - Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of narrative, with particular emphasis on the short story. Amitava Kumar (a); Owen King (b).
Special permission. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 211 - Advanced Creative Writing: Verse Semester Offered: Spring
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. Paul Kane.
Special permission. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 213 - The English Language
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 214 ) An exploration of the intersections among language, form, genre, and medium, this course aims to deepen your appreciation for and understanding of multimodal authorship. To do so, we focus our critical gaze upon one of the more experimental periods of textual production: literary modernism. Together, we consider selections of poetry, short fiction, the novel, woodcut narratives, autobiography, letters, manifestos, essays, and film produced by a diverse range of authors such as Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, Mu Shiying and Mikhail Bulgakov, Max Ernst and Zora Neale Hurston––as well as more canonical figures like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Our discussions center on the ways in which writing emerges from its immediate historical contexts, and also how genre and medium look beyond their present moment, revising models inherited from the past and anticipating future forms of expression. Ultimately, this course helps us to better analyze and construct arguments about distinct types of texts through the sustained practice of close critical reading and recursive writing, and to sharpen our ability to facilitate dialogue about complex ideas and various modes of communication. Matthew Schultz.
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ENGL 215 - Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 1800
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 215 ) 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.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
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.
Topic 2019/20a: Dysfunctional Families. This course explores modern American plays that present debacles in the private sphere and its most widely accepted, codified, and institutionalized social manifestation: the family. As a site of incessant conflicts and negotiations between the individual and the other, and between the intimate and the public, the family offers an ideal framework and subject matter for commentary on a variety of moral and social issues. Through an overview of contemporary American drama, this course pays particular attention to the vestiges of the American Dream in a range of dramatic representations of dysfunctional families. As a survey with a special focus, the course may include plays by Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, David Henry Hwang, Basil Kreimendahl, Tracy Letts, Taylor Mac, Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Eugene O’Neill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. We also read selected theoretical texts about the role and significance of family in the 20th century. Zoltán Márkus
Two 75-minute periods.
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ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation
1 unit(s)
A study of various critical theories and practices ranging from antiquity to the present day.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 218 - Literature, Gender, and Sexuality Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 218 ) Topic for 2019/20b: Madwomen in the Attic. In 1979, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar articulated a crucial point that was, at the time, shifting the terrain of literary studies: “The poet’s pen,” they remark, “is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis.” Male gender, in other words, had somehow become a necessary requirement for creative genius. No robust critical architecture existed by which to understand and appreciate work written by female authors, especially those of the Victorian period, for the predominant hermeneutics of analysis had not only been produced by male writers but remained about them as well. Since the publication of Madwoman in the Attic and other feminist critiques of the 1970s and 1980s, scholars have expanded the horizons of literary studies to address the many ways that women’s voices make meaning, both inside and outside the textual body. What work remains left to do? What value is there, in other words, in examining an exclusive heritage, or sisterhood, of women’s literature? In this course, we will engage writing by British female-identified authors to explore the obstacles and successes involved when women pick up the pen. Authors studied in this course may include Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Michael Field (aunt-niece pair Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Zadie Smith.
Talia Vestri.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 219 - Queer of Color Critique Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We will assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students will determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? Hiram Perez.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 222 - Early British Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course offers an introduction to British literary history, beginning with Old and Middle English literature and continuing through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the establishment of Great Britain, the British Civil War, the Puritan Interregnum, and the Restoration. Topics 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; and the formation and evolution of the British literary canon. Authors, genres, critical and theoretical approaches, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.
Topic 2019/20a: Love, Labor, & Loss: Romance and Gender in Early British Literature: This course introduces students to British poetry, drama, and prose from the middle ages through the eighteenth century—a wide swath of historical territory, indeed. To ground our discussions, we will explore texts that deal with themes of romance, love, courtship, sex, and marriage. From the bawdy farce of Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” to the murderous tragedy of Shakespeare’s Othello, our attention will focus on both careful close reading—attending to formal nuances of genre and style—as well as ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and nationality. Canonical authors may include Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Swift, and Richardson, to be read alongside female writers such as Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Talia Vestri.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 225 - American Literature, Origins to 1865
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).
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
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. Wendy Graham
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors Semester Offered: Fall
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? Eve Dunbar.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 228 - African American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 228 and DRAM 228 ) Topic for 2019/20b: From the Page to the Stage: Turning Black Literature into Black Drama. This course will explore the expressive possibilities of 20th century black literature by means of critical reading, critical writing, and critical performance. Students will examine key works in their historical context, paying attention to the criticism and theory that have shaped their reception (Hayden, Giovanni, Brooks, Hurston, Baldwin, Morrison, Johnson, Whitehead). They will then attempt to transform parts of these texts into scenes as informed by past and present theories of performance and theatre making. Their work will culminate in a public performance of the pieces they have conceived. Tyrone Simpson.
Two 75-minute periods and one 2-hour lab.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 229 - Asian-American Literature, 1946-present
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 230 ) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of “Latinx Literature.” The category “Latinx” presents us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographic does “Latinx” isolate (or create)? How does it differ from the categories “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizx,” or “Boricua,” to name only a few alternatives, and how should these differences inform our critical reading practices? When and where does Latinx literature originate? Together, we work to identify what formal and thematic continuities might characterize a Latinx literary heritage. Some of those commonalities include border crossing or displacement, the tension between political and cultural citizenship, code-switching, indigeneity, contested and/or shifting racial formations, queer sexualities, gender politics, discourses of hybridity, generational conflict, and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation).
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 231 - Native American Literature
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 231 ) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of writing and spoken stories, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the varied theoretical debates and frameworks that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework positions the literature as the creative work of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities and complicated by the on-going legacy of colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Richard Van Camp, among other Native theorists, spoken word artists, filmmakers, and artists.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 235 - Old English Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 235 ) Introduction to Old English language and literature.
Topic for 2019/20a: Old English: In a time when Latin was the language of the learned and the literate, the language of the law and of the prevailing Christian faith, Old English was significant enough (in England) to be used for legal, religious, scientific, and literary texts. Thus, Old English is significant not only in the history of English itself but also in the history of vernacular writing in western Europe. Furthermore, texts recorded in Old English have important, if seldom-acknowledged, effects on the modern world. For example, Thomas Jefferson thought that instruction in Old English should begin in elementary school and that the language had democratic ideals embedded in it—ideas that are only the tip of his disturbingly expansionist and nationalistic agenda for the language. And, in the 19th c., Old English was the vehicle by which American women scholars advanced academic careers in a period when the academy was dominated by men (although while still reifying existing hierarchies of race and class). Vassar may have been the first women’s college in the United States to offer Old English, making this course a significant Vassar tradition.
In this class we learn and practice the grammar and vocabulary of this earliest form of English. You also get to experience the genres of writing in which Old English was used by its speakers and learn about the social values and literary motifs that this corpus preserves. This knowledge prepares you to read Beowulf in its original form, which is the focus of English 236. Erin Sweany.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 236 - Beowulf Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 236 ) In-depth study of the early English epic in the original language. Erin Sweany.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 235 or demonstrated knowledge of Old English, or permission of the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 237 - Medieval Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course serves as an introduction to medieval literature, with a focus on Middle English literatures (c. 1066-1550). Students will become familiar with the linguistic and stylistic features of Middle English, and will read a variety of texts from the period. Special topics for the course vary from year to year; examples of topics include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer, the Chaucerian tradition, women’s writing in the Middle Ages, transnational/comparative medieval literatures (including French and Italian), medieval “autobiography,” the alliterative tradition, Piers Plowman and the Piers tradition, dream visions, fifteenth century literature and the bridge to the “early modern,” literature and heresy, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval mystical writing. Students engage throughout with the process of establishing English as a “literary” language; authorial identity; the grounding of English literary tradition; and the role of translation and adaptation in medieval writing. The course also prepares students who might wish to pursue work in medieval literature at the 300 level, and/or pursue a senior thesis in the period.
Topic for 2019/20a: The Canterbury Tales. In this course we spend the semester on the road with Chaucer in a collective reading of his encyclopedic human comedy, The Canterbury Tales, sauntering with him through fourteenth-century England. An important part of this leisurely immersion is sensory and linguistic, as we experience the text in the original Middle English, acquiring as an added benefit facility in English philology. Through close reading, class discussion, and writing we consider the Tales as they provide diverse, intersecting pathways into Medieval critical attitudes toward social and class distinctions, religious and gender antagonisms, town/gown animosities, discourses of desire and sexuality, and conflicts born of a developing urbanism during England’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern society. Besides this “social Chaucer” we consider the “clerkly Chaucer,” and what the Tales tell us about his influential insights into authorship and reading, language and meaning, science and nature, philosophy and ethics, history and collective memory, psychology and the construction of a modern self. Thomas Hill.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 240 - Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies.
Topic for 2019/20a: Shakespeare and Gender. This course offers an introduction to Shakespeare studies through the discussion of seven Shakespeare plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest. Situating these plays in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we are able to appreciate significant differences as well as intriguing continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic concepts and institutions as gender, family, filial and marital duties, marriage, the “private sphere,” and sexuality. Moreover, by examining these plays in production both on the stage and on the screen, we try to determine their current meanings and cultural significance. To attain this second crucial aim, we view and discuss a stage production as well as several film adaptations of our plays and organize staged readings of selected scenes. Zoltán Márkus.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241 -ENGL 242 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 241 - Shakespeare
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.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .
Yearlong course 241-ENGL 242 .
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 242 - Shakespeare
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.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .
Yearlong course ENGL 241 -242.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 245 - The Enlightenment
1 unit(s)
Study of poetry, intellectual prose, and drama of importance in Great Britain in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century. Famous Enlightenment philosophers include John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Focus, however, will be on the great literary writers of the period: including John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Mary Leapor, William Cowper, James Boswell, and Olaudah Equiano.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2019/20b: Miss Behavior: Transgressive Women in 18th-Century British Fiction. The focus of this course is eighteenth-century English fiction that features “girls gone wild,” women who violate the stringent social codes dictating their behavior in this period. We read a range of critical texts—some contemporary to us, and others contemporary to the 18th-century writers on our syllabus—to learn what constituted “misbehavior” for women, and who was making the rules. Conduct books, educational treatises, periodical literature, pamphlets and political writings give us a cultural context, and prepare us to examine how fiction writers were reflecting and reshaping codes of conduct for their own social, political and artistic ends.
Because the act of writing itself often constituted misbehavior for eighteenth-century women, texts by women differ considerably from those by men with regard to topics, style and genre. In the first half of the course, we see male authors diversely imagining female cross-dressers, “female husbands” (a contemporary term for women who sought to partner with other women), prostitutes, witches, sadists and pleasure-seekers. In the second half, we see women writers working in two literary modes—the gothic, and the novel of manners—to respond to oppressive societal concerns about femininity and modesty. Students leave this course not only with a strong sense of the cultural history of female comportment in eighteenth-century England, but also having looked closely at how these pervasive social codes interacted with literary form to shape the fiction of the period. Katie Gemmill.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of texts from the Romantic era, a period charged with revolutionary spirit and a desire for new forms of thought and literature. Topics may include the French revolution and the emerging discourse of individual human rights; the gothic, the supernatural and the sublime; poetry and its relationship to altered states of consciousness; literary renderings of nature and landscape; introspection, imagination and the self; and political movements such as abolitionism, workers’ rights and feminism. Authors may include such poets as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats; prose writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey; and novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley.
Topic of 2019/20a: The Age of Romanticism: Revolution and Rebellion. This course surveys the literature of the Romantic period through the lens of revolution and rebellion, both of which characterize this period in British history on a number of levels. Across the English Channel, French civilians were overthrowing their monarchy; revolutions in science and technology were catapulting Europe into the industrial era; English poets were rebelling against what they perceived to be the antiquated poetic forms of the eighteenth century; and prose writers were producing some of the original human rights manifestos, calling for women’s empowerment and the abolition of the British slave trade. Paying close attention to these historical and political contexts, we will examine how writers of the period mobilized the concept of revolution in their literary works and used it as an impetus for experimentation, on both thematic and formal levels. Surveyed poets include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Barbauld, Robinson, Byron, Shelley and Keats; fiction writers include Austen, Shelley and Polidori; and prose writers include Burke, De Quincey, Prince and Wollstonecraft. Katie Gemmill.
Themes, topics, genres: The Gothic and the supernatural, Origins of the vampire myth, Literature of addiction, Poetry and dreams, Theories of poetic innovation, Abolitionism, Political and feminist poetry, The Romantic sublime.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 251 ) 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.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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ENGL 252 - Writing the Diaspora: Verses/Versus
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 than in hip-hop culture generally and hip-hop music specifically. This semester’s Writing the Diaspora class 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.
Prerequisite(s): One course in literature or Africana Studies.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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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).
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as VICT 255 ) The nineteenth century was a preeminent age for novel writing in Great Britain, and in one semester we cannot acquaint ourselves with all the great books, or all the major novelists, of the period. Instead, the aim of this course is to learn how to read a nineteenth-century British novel by familiarizing ourselves with the conventional plots of the period (i.e., the marriage plot, the inheritance plot), its common literary idioms (such as realism, melodrama, and the Gothic) as well as some characteristic forms (the bildungsroman, the fictional autobiography) and central preoccupations (domesticity, industrialism, urbanization, imperialism, social mobility, and class relations). We also focus on careful reading and writing through short close reading assignments as well as through a few longer critical essays. Finally, this course introduces students to secondary literature, in anticipation of the work carried out in 300-level English courses. Readings vary but includes novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Susan Zlotnick.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
British and Irish Literature from the first half of the 20th century. The mix and focus of genres, topics and authors varies depending on the instructor. However, the period in question covers such writers as Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Vera Brittain, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, and Graham Greene. Paul Russell.
Prerequisite(s): AP credit or one unit of First-Year English.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945 Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The novel in English as it has developed in Africa, America, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, India, Ireland, and elsewhere. Heesok Chang.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 265 - Selected Author
1 unit(s)
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 275 - Caribbean Discourse
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 275 and LALS 275 ) 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.
Open to sophomores, junior, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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ENGL 277 - Global Literatures in English
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 277 ) This course explores themes, concepts, and genres that span literary periods and/or national boundaries. The focus varies from year to year.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 280 - The Futures of Africana Studies Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 280 ) Diaspora is both a condition and a process. Diaspora carries the sense of being dispersed and transported from an origin. It also carries the possibility of sustaining ties to that point of origin and to others who share that point of origin and that experience of dispersal. The project of Africana Studies is to track and make meaning of the dispersal of peoples of African descent from the continent and the various social, political, and artistic legacies that have emerged out of this experience. In some respects, the field is also a condition and a process. It exists—and has done so for decades in the United States—it is also in process—still developing and honing its protocols and its modes of inquiry.
This fall, the Africana Studies Program is commemorating its 50th year at Vassar College by hosting a conference that accounts for the past and present work of the Field of Africana Studies. An international cast of scholars will assemble in Poughkeepsie to account for how it has chronicled and analyzed the black experience in sites across the globe. The intensive course aims to familiarize students with the work of these scholars and with how scholarship develops over a lifetime. It also supports students to arrive at their own definition of Africana Studies as they ferret out the harmonies and tensions that exist between the work of these scholars. Tyrone Simpson.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 282 - Vassar Critical Journal Intensive Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
The Vassar Critical Journal intensive provides students with publishing experience at every stage of the process. Students begin as writers, submitting their own work to the journal. They then act as literary agents, reading all submissions and deciding which essays they enjoy and which will proceed to the editing level. They each offer editorial comments and advice on each accepted submission, sending the essays back to the writers for revision and doing final copy edits for publication. They also are expected to promote the journal throughout the course and be responsible for the layout and look of the issue on the whole. In addition, students perform due diligence by reading the literary texts and criticism featured in the articles under submission. (This task is divided among them.) Collectively, students compose an editors’ note to be placed at the head of the publication. By the end of the course, students have collaboratively created a journal of their own making and design. Class meets once a week, but during the initial and final stages of the process, more time is needed. The intensive is intended for the editorial board of the VCJ, and is open to a few more students who wish to join. Wendy Graham.
Prerequisite(s): Two 200-level English courses required.
First six-week course.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 283 - Storytelling and the Black Literary Archive Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This intensive seeks to provide students with practical training and experience in undertaking archival research within the “manuscripts, rare books, and papers” division of centers devoted to Black Studies. The goal for each student, by the end of the semester, is to tell an “original” story about Black literature using archival documents. To do this work, students make multiple visits to the Schomburg Center for Research In Black Culture in Harlem (NYC), as well as access various digital archives available for the study of Black literary history. Students receive practical training in working with finding aids and archival documents, as well as become versed in the procedures for visiting archives and special collections. Additionally, students read contemporary Black archive theory. Writing workshops dedicated to the production of dynamic, accessible fiction/non-fiction prose round out this intensive experience. Eve Dunbar.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Fridays, 12:00-4:00 pm.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 284 - New York Stories Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
“New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald. For this intensive, we read stories – novels, short fiction, journalism, memoirs – set in New York City. We visit, and in many cases, attempt to conjure, the vanished places where the stories were set. Only by haunting these physical sites and recreating them through the virtual technologies of history and literature will we get to see not only what the authors saw, but what they saw that wasn’t there, and what was there they didn’t see. Your main mentored assignment entails constructing a walking tour for your classmates based on one of the narratives. Texts might include: Teju Cole’s Open City, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, Joseph Cassara’s The House of Impossible Beauties: A Novel, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Patti Smith’s M Train, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Luc Sante’s Low Life, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City” … you name it. We devise the syllabus together. Class meets every other week, including, depending on funding, three or four daylong trips to the city. No prerequisites; open to sophomores, juniors and seniors. Heesok Chang.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 285 - Resistance Literature: Protest, Activism, and American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 285 ) In 1926 the African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois declared, “all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.” These were and continue to be fighting words for many writers who value “craft” over ideology. But does the distinction matter? Should it? Can a text be well-crafted and move us to (want to) change the world? At some level, these are rhetorical questions. American literature is rife with stories, novels, poems, and essays that have incited or speak to the necessity of our fighting for significant shifts in American culture. Thus, this course examines how US-based writers have used their art to right/write the world otherwise. Topics covered may range from abolition, the climate crisis, food justice, Civil Rights, #BlackLivesMatter, gender equity, #MeToo, and prison reform/abolition. We will work between the genres of realism and the speculative (utopic/dystopic) in the hopes of thinking about how literature has and continues to allow us to see and be the change we need. Eve Dunbar
Two 75 minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 287 - Reviewing Shakespeare Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
This course has a double objective of developing the students’ understanding of a selected Shakespeare play performed in New York City as well as enhancing their analytical and writing skills by learning how to write theater reviews. At the beginning of the semester, we decide on viewing a selected production of a Shakespeare play in New York City (funding for travel and theater tickets is available from Vassar College).
This intensive exercise has the following assignments:
1/ At the beginning of the semester, students read assigned studies on the selected Shakespeare play as well as on issues and methods of analyzing stage performances. In preparation of viewing the play, the students write an analytical paper about an assigned topic of the play and its stage history.
2/ After having viewed the play, each student collects 5-10 reviews about the stage production and writes a “review of reviews” with special attention to the methodology and structure of the discussed review articles.
3/ As the culmination of the preparatory work listed above, the students write their own review of the stage production. Zoltan Markus.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 290 - Community-Engaged Learning Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): Two units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 298 - Independent Study Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): Two units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.
Course Format: OTH
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 and 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. The Department.
Special permission.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 302 - Adaptations
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.
One 3-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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ENGL 304 - Creative Writing Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. Molly McGlennen.
Open to juniors and seniors in all departments with permission of the instructor.
Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 305 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. David Means.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Open to seniors in all departments. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
Yearlong course 305-ENGL 306 .
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 306 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry for experienced creative writers. David Means.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Open to seniors in all departments.
Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
Yearlong course ENGL 305 -306.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 315 - Studies in Performance
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.
.
Limited enrollment.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 318 - Literary Studies in Gender and Sexuality
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.
Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English or by permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 319 - Race and its Metaphors
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 319 ) 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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 320 - Studies in Literary Traditions
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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 325 - Studies in Genre
1 unit(s)
An In-depth 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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 326 - Challenging Ethnicity Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.
Topic for 2019/20b: Racial Melodrama. (Same as AFRS 326 and AMST 326 ) Often dismissed as escapist, predictable, lowbrow or exploitative, melodrama has also been recuperated by several contemporary critics as a key site for the rupture and transformation of mainstream values. Film scholar Linda Williams argues that melodrama constitutes “a major force of moral reasoning in American mass culture,” shaping the nation’s racial imaginary. The conventions of melodrama originate from popular theater, but its success has relied largely on its remarkable adaptability across various media, including print, motion pictures, radio, and television. This course investigates the lasting impact of such fictions as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life, the romanticized legend of John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas, and John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly. What precisely is melodrama? If not a genre, is it (as critics diversely argue) a mode, symbolic structure, or a sensibility? What do we make of the international success of melodramatic forms and texts such as the telenovela and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain? How do we understand melodrama’s special resonance historically among disfranchised classes? How and to what ends do the pleasures of suffering authenticate particular collective identities (women, the working-class, queers, blacks, and group formations yet to be named)? What relationships between identity, affect and consumption does melodrama reveal? Hiram Perez.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 328 - Literature of the American Renaissance Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In-depth 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. Peter Antelyes.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 329 - American Literary Realism Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 329 ) 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.
Topic for 2019/20a: American Literary Realism and Naturalism: A Reading of Major American Novels Written Primarily Between 1870 and 1910. After the Civil War, the U.S. experienced increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth of industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population due to immigration, and a rise in middle-class affluence, which provided a fertile literary environment for writers interested in explaining these rapid shifts in culture. A grand explanatory narrative directs the plot and action of these novels. Authorial intentions give way to a set of laws or principles derived from the dominant ideologies that supported America’s maturation into a super-power: Social Darwinism, the Gospel of Efficiency (new Protestant work ethic), or Imperialism (new Manifest Destiny). Surprisingly, the myth of American ‘progress’ is tested and found wanting in almost every book on the syllabus. In seeking scientific objectivity, writers plied a representational strategy focused on ‘hard facts’ and minute detail, which as often as not found the protagonist at odds with his or her environment. Though post-war, the terrain we cover is embattled: race riots, strikes, downward economic mobility, criminality, and homelessness. Shut out of the canon by reason of changing fashions in literary tastes, the less familiar authors on the syllabus belong to the emerging protest novel. Authors include: Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Thorstein Veblen, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Wendy Graham.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 330 - American Modernism
1 unit(s)
In-depth 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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 331 - Postmodern 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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 340 - Studies in Medieval Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Advanced 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. Talia Vestri.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 341 ) In-depth study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.
Topic 2019/20b: Sex and the City in 1600: Gender, Marriage, Family, and Sexuality in Early Modern London. This course explores everyday life in the rapidly expanding early modern metropolis of London at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. We pay special attention to religious, social, legal as well as informal control mechanisms that influenced issues of gender, marriage, and sexuality in various layers of London society. We anchor our investigations in a handful of plays by Beaumont, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Rowley, and Shakespeare, but also explore other literary and non-literary texts. By situating our early modern texts in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we will be able to appreciate the historical differences as well as the occasional continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic cultural and social issues as citizenship, class and gender difference, political agency, race and ethnicity, urbanization, and subject-formation. Zoltán Márkus.
One 2-hour period.
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ENGL 342 - Studies in Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 342 ) Advanced study of Shakespeare’s work and its cultural significance in various contexts from his time to today.
Topic for 2019/20a: After Shakespeare: The Poetics and Politics of Adaptation. While Shakespeare has long served as an icon of England and Englishness, he is also the most popular playwright in the non-Anglophone world, and his cultural currency circulates across nations, languages, and media. This course explores the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare for worldwide audiences. We address issues of authenticity and authority, representations of difference, postcolonial appropriation, and cross-cultural translation. We also reflect critically on our own positions as contemporary readers, viewers, and consumers of Shakespeare. Each seminar member completes an original research or creative project. Leslie Dunn.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
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. Robert DeMaria.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 350 - Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 350 ) Focuses on a broad literary topic, with special attention to works of the Restoration and eighteenth century. Robert DeMaria.
Topic for 2019/20b: Origins of the Periodical Essay. Although periodical publications got started in Europe shortly after the invention of printing, there was in England such a vast increase in their numbers and importance during the British Civil Wars (1642-60) that it’s reasonable to think of that period as giving rise to periodical writing in its modern form. In the later seventeenth century periodical publications became important vehicles for a new kind of writing aptly called the periodical essay. Among the most important eighteenth-century practitioners of this form were John Dunton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith. This course will examine the periodical writing of these authors in the context of the newspapers and journals for which they wrote: The Athenian Oracle; The Review; The Tatler; The Spectator; The Female Spectator; The Gentleman’s Magazine; The Rambler; and The Bee, among other. There will be several meetings of the class in Special Collections, and students will be expected to write on an early journal or periodical writer, making use of the original publications.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 351 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as VICT 351 ) 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).
Topic for 2019/20b: The Brontë Sisters. The aim of this course is two-fold: a detailed study of the major works of Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë as well as an examination of the criticism that has been written about the sisters’ novels and poems. We acquaint ourselves with the different critical lenses through which the Brontës have been viewed (e.g., biographical, feminist, historicist, postcolonial) in order to explore the ways in which the meaning of the Brontë sisters and their writing has changed over time. Primary texts include Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the Brontës’ poetry and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. Susan Zlotnick.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 352 - Studies in Romanticism Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 352 In-depth study of Romantic-era texts with the option of pursuing a select group of writers under the rubric of a specific genre, methodological approach, topic or theme. This course aims to deepen students’ expertise in one or more of the topics covered in English 248.
Topic for 2019/20b: What’s Queer About Romanticism? Why is it that the most influential and ambitious work in queer studies has rarely emerged from the field of Romanticism? As Michael O’Rourke and David Collings rightly note, “We have had [scholarly studies called] Queering the Middle Ages, Queering the Renaissance, Victorian Sexual Dissidence, and Queering the Moderns—but no Queering the Romantics.” Accounting for this critical gap, Richard Sha argues that the Romantic period has been mischaracterized as a “seemingly asexual zone between eighteenth-century edenic ‘liberated’ sexuality…and the repressive sexology of the Victorians.” In reality, this relatively brief cultural moment in England produced a diverse range of queer figures, both historical and literary: from Anne Lister, whose diary records hundreds of pages in code about her sexual relationships with women, to the Ladies of Llangollen, who openly cohabited with the support of English high society, to the myth of the modern vampire, a deeply sexualized and often queer figure. Given the richness of the terrain, then, why are queer studies lagging behind in Romantic circles?
In this advanced seminar, we address this underdeveloped area of scholarly research through our reading of primary and secondary texts, our class discussion, and our critical research projects. Reading theory and criticism from Romanticism studies and adjacent scholarly fields, we ask ourselves—what is queer about this literary-historical moment that has not yet been accounted for? Our goal is to redefine the boundaries of queer Romanticism—beyond a simplistic search for queer characters in the primary texts—to include broader theoretical categories such as queer affect and queer temporality, among others. We focus primarily on the poetry of the period, but also attend to some prose genres, including the diary and the essay. Katie Gemmill.
One 2-hour period.
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ENGL 355 - Twenty- and Twenty-First Century Poetry Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In-depth study of selected Anglophone poets. The course may focus on particular eras, schools, topics, and theories of prosody, with consideration of identity groups or locations. Jean Kane.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 357 - Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In-depth 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). Heesok Chang.
Topic for 2019/20a: Lost In Translation: Some Other Modern Novels. translate (verb): early 14c., “to remove from one place to another,” also “to turn from one language to another,” from Old French translater and directly from Latin translatus ”carried over,” serving as past participle of transferre ”to bring over, carry over” (see transfer), from trans ”across, beyond” (see trans-) + lātus “borne, carried.”
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 362 - Text and Image
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 362 )
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
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 .
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 370 - Transnational Literature
1 unit(s)
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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 378 - Black Paris
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 378 and FFS 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.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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ENGL 380 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 380 ) Topic for 2019/20b: Then Whose Negro Are You?: On the Art and Politics of James Baldwin. When interviewers sought out some sense of James Baldwin’s ambition, the artist often responded, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” The forces constellated around Baldwin’s career made this hardly a simple declaration. The issue of becoming a writer was an arduous task in itself, so much so that Baldwin felt he had to leave the United States, particularly his adored Harlem, to do so. Getting in the way of his artistry was the nation’s troubled negotiation with its own soul: the US was trying to figure out what it wanted to be—an apartheid state? A nuclear dreadnought? A den of prudish homophobes? An imperial power? A beloved community? A city on the Hill? This course looks at all things Baldwin, or at least as many things as we can over a four-month period. It certainly indulges his greatest hits-his essays, Notes of A Native Son; his novel, Giovanni’s Room; his play, Blues for Mr. Charlie’s–and several other writings both published and unpublished. It does so with an eye toward understanding Baldwin’s circulation as a celebrated author and a public intellectual both in the mid-twentieth century and the present day. Tyrone Simpson.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 381 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2019/20a: Fanny Howe. “I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction./The paper slept but the night in me woke up,” begins Fanny Howe’s poem, “A Hymn.” In this seminar we travel through the work of this American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and activist, the author of more than 40 books of poetry and prose, doing so not only in hopes of waking the night in us, but also exploring what Howe calls “bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics.” Michael Joyce.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 382 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2019/20a: James Joyce’s Ulysses. A close reading of Ulysses. Paul Russell.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 383 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2019/20b: Sibling Theory. What role do siblings play in literature (and in our lives)? Are these characters secondary, incidental, merely complements to a protagonist—the organizing central consciousness—of a novel? Do they appear in poetry only as companions or sidekicks? Or, perhaps, do sibling relations offer a different set of tools for cultivating ways of knowing and being in the world that extend beyond, and even counter, the idea of a single, autonomous self?
In this course, we will investigate the kinship of brothers and sisters in British and American fiction and poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To inform our literary explorations, we will look at recent feminist and queer critiques of scholarly thinking about the family, kinship, and marriage, critiques that have at times turned to siblinghood as an alternate locus for the development of identity, culture, ethics, and politics. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore research in fields such as gender studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, and sociology to help us inquire how siblinghood acts as a form of networked and collective existence, and how these networks confront previous paradigms of the family that are structured as reproductive, patriarchal, and linear.
Fictional texts for the course may include, but are not limited to, Antigone, Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Franny and Zooey, Atonement, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which we will read in tandem with feminist and queer scholarship (e.g., Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Leonore Davidoff, Juliet Mitchell) that challenges prior twentieth-century theories on kinship (Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss). Talia Vestri
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 384 - English Seminar
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 385 - English Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
One 3-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
ENGL 386 - English Seminar:Vassar Poetry Review
0.5 unit(s)
This Intensive offers students writing poetry the opportunity to revise and prepare their work for publication in a journal devoted to verse. It would be an enhancement of the current ENGL 211 Advanced Creative Writing: Verse , for those in the class wishing to learn about the principles and processes of publication, including design, editing and printing. However, it it is not limited to students in ENGL 211, but open to any qualified students, whether majors or non-majors. Mr. Kane serves as Editor but students are involved in all phases of the project. Paul Kane.
Weekly group meetings. Additional individual meetings as needed.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 387 - Antipodes Editorial Assistant
1 unit(s)
The student intern assists Professor Kane in the selection process for poems submitted to the journal Antipodes, which is published twice-yearly by the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies. Duties include precise record keeping; evaluative reports on each submission; editing poems for publication; drafting and editing contributor notes for each issue; corresponding with contributors about contracts and payments. The student is trained in all of these areas to a professional standard and the work overseen and approved by me. Paul Kane.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 388 - True Crime and the American Novel Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 388 ) This intensive would be offered to eight students of ENGL 329 American Literary Realism , where the relationship between journalism and literature is a constant feature. Most of the writers on the syllabus were either journalists, before they became novelists, or wrote for or edited magazines throughout their lives. Literary naturalism, a sub-genre of realism, eschews literary devices and stylistic preciosity, instead describing characters and events in the direct, unembellished prose of the newspaper account. From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (inspired by the Wilmington, NC race riot of 1898) to Frank Norris’s Mcteague (inspired by the murder of a charwoman) to Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (inspired by Charles Yerkes financial chicanery) to Richard Wright’s Native Son (inspired by newspaper accounts of a murder) the American novel has relied on ‘real events’ to generate ideas for character and plots. Students may conduct research into the events inspiring these and other novels for the course and present their findings to the group (signed up for the intensive). In addition, students may choose a crime from any period or region (be it Lizzy Borden’s alleged murder of her parents, Jack the Ripper’s murders, serial killers, political assassinations, the murder of Emmett Till) and locate and compare multiple representations of the event (whether in novels, plays, movies, comics, newspapers, trials, forensic science). In most instances, representations highlight historical, class, and racial tensions (or obliviousness) over the subject and even who has a right to speak for the victim. (The recent controversy over the Whitney museum’s exhibition of Dana Schutz’s depiction of the open casket funeral of Emmett Till is a good example. Schutz is a white artist and her detractors objected to her appropriation of an iconic black figure and potentially profiting from her work.) Students are not limited to 19th century crimes or media for their final projects. The recent Kavanaugh hearings raise questions about the extrapolation of the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty beyond the courtroom. What should be the status of hearsay or personal testimony in determining ‘the truth’ of allegations? I see this as fertile ground for projects with a women’s studies slant. Wendy Graham.
Prerequisite(s): For juniors and seniors and with permission of the instructor.
Second six-week course.
Course Format: INT -
ENGL 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Open by permission of the Chair.
One unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.
Course Format: OTH
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