Courses

Courses

Spring 2008 Courses

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019. Femmes Fatales, Lady Killers, and Other Dangerous Women
Aviva Briefel T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55
Explores a popular cinematic image: the dangerous—and sometimes deadly—woman. By analyzing a range of films from classical Hollywood cinema to the present day, explores the various forms that this female figure assumes: the femme fatale, the jealous or vindictive woman, the murderous lesbian, the revenge seeker, etc. In addition to examining the various permutations of the dangerous female, explores why she has attained such a prevalent place on the silver screen. What is so seductive about the deadly woman? Also introduces students to film criticism. Films may include Basic Instinct, Carrie, Eve’s Bayou, Fatal Attraction, Gilda, Kill Bill, Mildred Pierce, Rebecca, and Thelma and Louise.

020. Lesbian Personae
Peter Coviello T 8:30 - 9:55, TH 8:30 - 9:55
A study of the varied representations of same-sex desire between women across a range of twentieth-century novels and films. Concerned with questions of the visibility, and invisibility, of lesbian life; of the contours of lesbian childhood and adolescence; of the forms of difference between and among lesbians; and of the tensions, as well as the affinities, that mark relations between queer women and queer men. Authors may include Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, Ann Bannon, and others.

021. Migration Narratives: Writers of the Caribbean
Jarrett Brown M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25
International as well as intra-national, geographical as well as psychological, migratory movement is a powerful theme that offers explanations for modernity, memory, identity, and transnationalism. This course will examine selected writers engaged primarily with Caribbean migratory experience. Authors may include Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners; Claude McKay; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Caryll Phillips, A Distant Shore; V.S Naipaul; Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here; and Edwidge Danticat, Farming of Bones.

022. Of Comics and Culture
Elizabeth Muther T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25
Explores hybrid works of image and text: illuminated manuscripts to cyber-constructs, comics in mass and “zine” formats, and graphic narratives and novels. Focuses on the history and social function of “sequential art” of various forms. Contemporary comics and cultural theory are of special interest.

023. The Nuclear Plot
Marilyn Reizbaum M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55
An examination of the nuclear age in literature and film, documents and documentary. Works include Hersey’s Hiroshima, Frayn’s Copenhagen, The Atomic Cafe, Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Them, Fail Safe. Excerpts from Einstein, Kahn, Arendt, Lifton.

024. Poetry-Writing Workshop
William Watterson M 2:30 - 3:55, W 2:30 - 3:55
In addition to crafting original work, students read poems by Robert Frost, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, James Wright, Sharon Olds, James Schuyler and others.

060. English Composition
Celeste Goodridge T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25
Practice in developing the skills needed to write and revise college-level expository essays. Explores the close relationship between critical reading and writing. Assignment sequences and different modes of analysis and response enable students to write fully developed expository essays. Does not count toward the major or minor in English.

106. Introduction to Drama
Aaron Kitch T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55
Traces the development of dramatic form, character, and style from classical Greece through the Renaissance and Enlightenment to contemporary America and Africa. Explores the evolution of plot design, with special attention to the politics of playing, the shifting strategies of representing human agency, and contemporary relationships between the theater and a variety of forms of mass media. Authors may include Sophocles, Aristophanes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dryden, Ibsen, Wilde, Beckett, Mamet, and Churchill.

110. English Literature and Social Power
David Collings M 2:30 - 3:55, W 2:30 - 3:55
Considers whether works of literature encode modes of social power, articulate styles of cultural entitlement, revise norms of behavior from the perspective of leisured domesticity, create satisfying narrative solutions to urban conflict, and absorb the difficulties of social life into the workings of individual consciousness. Do literary works reinforce fictions of social power, contest them, or both? Examines the relationship between ideology and literary form, placing both in the context of transformations in English culture from the early eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Discusses writings by Defoe, Pope, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, and Woolf alongside critical and interpretive essays.

128. Introductory Fiction Workshop
None None M 6:30 - 9:25
Begins with an examination of some technical aspects of fiction writing. In particular, considers those that we tend to take for granted as readers and need to understand better as writers, e.g. point of view, characterization, dialogue, foreshadowing, scene, and summary. Students read and discuss published stories, and work through a series of exercises to write their own stories. Workshop discussion is an integral part of the course. Admission based on writing samples. Not open to students who have credit for English 69. Formerly English 66.

129. Advanced Fiction Workshop
None None T 6:30 - 9:25
Presumes a familiarity with the mechanics of fiction and, ideally, previous experience in a fiction workshop. Uses published stories and stories by students to explore questions of voice and tone, structure and plot, how to deepen one’s characters, and how to make stories resonate at a higher level. Students write several stories during the semester and revise at least one. Workshop discussion and critiques are an integral part of the course. Formerly English 70.

201. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Mary Edsall T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55
Learn Middle English and enjoy and analyze a wide selection of the stories told on Chaucer’s great literary road-trip. Includes a focus on medieval history, material culture, literary backgrounds, social codes, and social conflicts. Attention given to trends in Chaucer studies. Note: This course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for English majors.

211. Shakespeare's Tragedies and Roman Plays
William Watterson M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55
Examines Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus in light of recent critical thought. Special attention is given to psychoanalysis, new historicism, and genre theory. Note: This course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for English majors.

245. Modernism/Modernity
Marilyn Reizbaum M 2:30 - 3:55, W 2:30 - 3:55
Examines the cruxes of the “modern,” and the term’s shift into a conceptual category rather than a temporal designation. Although not confined to a particular national or generic rubric, takes British works as a focus. Organized by movements or critical formations of the modern, i.e., modernisms, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, cultural critique. Readings of critical literature in conjunction with primary texts. Authors/directors/works may include T.S. Eliot, Joyce’s Dubliners, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Sontag’s On Photography, W. G. Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction, Ian McEwen’s Enduring Love, Stevie Smith, Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic, and Coetzee’s White Writing. Formerly English 261.

252. Topics in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Empire of Feeling
Peter Coviello T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25
A study of the relations between sentiment and belonging across the American nineteenth century. Considers both how a language of impassioned feeling promised to consolidate a nation often bitterly divided, and some of the problems with that promise. Centers on a reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Other authors may include Jefferson, Wheatley, Melville, Hawthorne, Wilson, Harper, and Du Bois. Formerly English 277. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

256. Literary and Cultural Production during the Cold War
Celeste Goodridge W 1:00 - 3:55
Interdisciplinary examination of literary texts by Truman Capote, Salinger, Plath, Patricia Highsmith, Tennesee Williams, Baldwin and Mary McCarthy in conjunction with cultural representations of the period (in magazines, film, the construction of icons, visual art, and photography), focusing on how “high” and “low” forms of cultural production construct, reflect, and subvert the dominant ideologies associated with cold-war America. Research projects are required, along with critical essays. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

257. Classic Twentieth-Century LGBT Cultural Texts
Guy Foster T 8:30 - 9:55, TH 8:30 - 9:55
Analyzes some of the most enduring, and in some cases infamous, lesbigay and transgendered cultural texts of the twentieth century. Whether authored by avowed LGBT authors or by non-LGBT cultural producers, such works reflect some of the specific challenges that U.S. and European writers and others have continued to face in depicting portrayals of same-sex identities and desires that seek to reject totalizing narratives of pathology and criminalization. Possible texts include: The Well of Loneliness, Death in Venice, Giovanni’s Room, The Boys in the Band, The Front Runner, Stone Butch Blues, Hitchcock’s Rope, The Children’s Hour, “Will and Grace,” and “Six Feet Under.” Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

259. The Place of Nation in Chicano/Latino Literature since World War II
William Arce M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25
During the past half century, Chicano/Latino writers have created new hybrid literary and cultural genres in which constructions of Nation differ substantially from those of other American authors. Explores literary constructions of the Nation in Chicano/Latino literature from the 1950s to the present. Of special interest are major developments such as the farm workers’ movement, the Chicano/Brown Power movement, the emergence of Chicana/Latina authors, and the current concept of “Hispanidad,” as reflected in novels, poetry, plays, short stories, and films. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

261. African American Poetry
Elizabeth Muther F 1:30 - 4:25
African American poetry as counter-memory—from Wheatley to the present—with a focus on oral traditions, activist literary discourses, trauma and healing, and productive communities. Special emphasis on the past century: dialect and masking; the Harlem Renaissance; Brown, Brooks and Hayden at mid-century; the Black Arts Movement; black feminism; and contemporary voices. Formerly English 276. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

263. Staging Blackness
Guy Foster T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55
Examines the history and contributions of African Americans to United States theater from the early blackface minstrel tradition, to the revolutionary theater of the Black Arts writers, to more recent postmodernist stage spectacles. Among other concerns, such works often dramatize the efforts of African Americans to negotiate ongoing tensions between individual needs and group demands that result from historically changing forms of racial marginalization. A particular goal is to highlight what Kimberly Benston has termed the “expressive agency” with which black writers and performers have imbued their theatrical presentations. Potential authors include Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ron Milner, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, George C. Wolfe, Anna Deavere Smith, Afro Pomo Homos, and August Wilson. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

272. Asian-American Female Gothic
Belinda Kong T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25
A study of Gothic elements in contemporary fiction by Asian-American women writers. Investigates crossovers between realism and supernaturalism, with attention to how Gothic motifs such as the ghost and the doppelgänger are mobilized to negotiate cultural identity, racial politics, and historical traumas. Also explores the relationship between gender and genre in Asian-American literature. Authors may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Lan Samantha Chang, lê thi diem thúy, Lan Cao, Mia Yun, Nora Okja Keller, Cynthia Kadohata, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Vyvyane Loh. Note: This course fulfills the literature of the Americas requirement for English majors.

273. Writing China from Afar
Belinda Kong T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25
The telling of a nation’s history is often the concern not only of historical writings, but also of literary ones. Examines some shaping moments of twentieth-century China—the Second World War, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Massacre—with specific focus on contemporary literature by authors born and raised in China but since dispersed into a western diaspora. Considers works written in English, as well as those in translation. Critical issues include language use and the role of translation, the distinction between emigration and exile, the relationship between history and literature, the grounds of representational authority, and the task of narrating violence. Authors may include Eileen Chang, J. G. Ballard, Hong Ying, Shan Sa, Dai Sijie, Gao Xingjian, Anchee Min, Annie Wang, Ha Jin, and Bei Dao. Formerly English 283.

275. Post-Colonial Literatures
Hilary Thompson M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55
Examines writing in English from former colonized countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia and asks how this “new” literature makes inventive, even subversive, use of traditional English literary forms. How has the complex relationship of Britain to its colonies been addressed in these texts, and what new strategies of writing and reading does this new field propose?

282. Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory
Aviva Briefel T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55
Introduces a range of new questions that, over the last three decades, have challenged the fundamental assumptions of literary and cultural studies: How are notions of authorship, greatness, or “high” art shaped by other forms of social power? How might literary modes of reading apply to forms of cultural expression other than literature, including popular culture? To what extent is any text consistent with itself, or does it inevitably undermine its key concepts in the course of articulating them? Do texts that encode social privilege—whether of class, gender, race, nationality, or sexuality—resist it as well? How reliable are the oppositions that anchor critical reading, such as male/female, white/black, home/exile, straight/gay? Where is meaning (or an unsettling non-meaning) to be found: in the text itself, symptoms of its unconscious desire, its relation to prior texts, its implication in contemporary discourses, or its intervention into its historical moment? Examines theoretical statements of these and other questions and applies them in experimental readings of short texts chosen in conjunction with the class.

313. Disastrous Enjoyment
David Collings T 6:30 - 9:25
Explores the theme of disastrous enjoyment—of deathly pleasure or unpleasure—in English Gothic and Romantic literature. Focuses on the rhetoric and poetics of the sublime; the horrified fascination with the excesses of the French Revolution; the cultivation of transgressive experience in Gothic fiction; the collapse of narrative into repetition, compulsion, or circular statement; the ambivalent poetics of war, desolation, and apocalypse; the encounter with an unearthly, terrifying divinity; the persona of the world-weary, ruined poet; constructions of the vampire and the monster; and the philosophical repudiation of the future. Includes writing by such authors as Burke, Sade, Lewis, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Polidori, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley, as well as writing in psychoanalysis and cultural theory.

317. The Arts of Power
Aaron Kitch T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55
Examines the intersection of aesthetics and politics in the English Renaissance, as the Tudor court utilized literary, dramatic, and visual arts in new ways to express its magnificence. Explores the development of spectacular masques by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones for the court of King James, as well as the enabling system of royal patronage that made them possible. Topics include royal mythology, fashion at court, portraiture, and the arts of perspective in the context of court-specific styles of literature. Authors may include Wyatt, Sidney, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Spenser, Lanyer, and Jonson, with secondary readings on the structure of the English monarchy, the history of theatrical design, and the function of spectacle. Students have the opportunity to develop their own research projects during the semester. Note: This course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for English majors.

321. Medieval Drama
Mary Edsall M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25
A seminar on medieval English drama focusing on Mumming Plays, liturgical drama, the Mystery Cycles, and Morality Plays. Engages with different scholarly approaches to the study of medieval drama, discusses how the drama of the Middle Ages differed from modern conceptions of the theater, and reflects on how drama functioned in a society with a very different sense of the boundary between the secular and the sacred. Topics include the ritual aspects of religious drama, the mapping of sacred space within the secular, and the drama’s dialogue with social and political contexts. Participation in a production of a Mumming play and of a medieval play is one of the course requirements.