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.