Courses

Courses

Spring 2007 Courses

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020. Femmes Fatales, Lady Killers, and Other Dangerous Women
Aviva Briefel T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Adams-104
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, we explore the various forms that this female figure assumes: the femme fatale, the tragic mulatto, the jealous or vindictive woman, the murderous lesbian, the revenge seeker, etc. In addition to examining the various permutations of the dangerous female, we examine 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, Double Indemnity, Fatal Attraction, Gilda, Kill Bill, Mildred Pierce, Sunset Boulevard, Thelma and Louise, and Vertigo.
LAB
Aviva Briefel M 7:00 - 8:55 VAC-Beam Classroom
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, we explore the various forms that this female figure assumes: the femme fatale, the tragic mulatto, the jealous or vindictive woman, the murderous lesbian, the revenge seeker, etc. In addition to examining the various permutations of the dangerous female, we examine 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, Double Indemnity, Fatal Attraction, Gilda, Kill Bill, Mildred Pierce, Sunset Boulevard, Thelma and Louise, and Vertigo.
021. Reflections on Empire
David Collings M 2:30 - 3:55, W 2:30 - 3:55 Mass-McKeen Study
Considers novels written by members of colonizing, imperialist, or racist governing groups – in India, Malaysia, Burma, Vietnam, and South Africa - which reimagine, undercut, or oppose empire. Discusses the success or failure of these attempts at self-critique. Authors may include Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Orwell, Greene, Gordimer, and Coetzee.
022. Questioning the Modern
Peter Coviello T 8:30 - 9:55, TH 8:30 - 9:55 VAC-Picture Study
An examination of late modernity from 1800 to the present, focusing on the vexed relations between the shaping principles of modernity and several of the more violent human undertakings with which it was historically conjoined: enslavement, the subjugation of women, and the Holocaust. How in the light of these matters do we understand modernity’s chief concerns with freedom, autonomy, the self, scientific mastery, and historical progress? Authors and artists may include Kant, Goya, Marx, Manet, Freud, Woolf, Picasso, DuBois, and Nabokov.
024. Jane Austen
Ann Kibbie M 8:00 - 9:25, W 8:00 - 9:25 Mass-McKeen Study
A study of Jane Austen’s major works, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, and their film adaptations.
025. Elizabethan Heroes
William Watterson T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 Searles-116
English drama, poetry, and prose fiction of the later sixteenth century abound in heroes and heroic paradigms. Moral, intellectual, civic, rhetorical, chivalric, picaresque, and “ordinary” heroes are examined. Works considered include Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, excerpts from Sidney’s Arcadia, Books I and II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, and Deloney’s Jack of Newbury.
026. Shakespeare's Afterlives
Aaron Kitch T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 CT-16 Whiteside Room
Richard III in Nazi Germany. Romeo on the beach. King Lear on a farm in Iowa. Examines the industry that is adapting and rewriting Shakespearean plays, plots, characters, and themes, tracking both the ordinary and bizarre ways multiple genres have been revised and adapted for film, television, novels, and the stage. Explores issues of political allegory, cultural translation, and the mythification and de-mythification of the Bard by authors trying to assert their own literary authority. In addition to reading several plays by Shakespeare, students screen Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Other authors may include Nahum Tate, John Keats, Bertolt Brecht, Paula Vogel, and Jane Smiley.
060. English Composition
Elizabeth Muther T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25 CT-16 Whiteside Room
Practice in analytic and critical writing, with special attention to drafting and revision of student essays. Assignment sequences allow students to engage a variety of modes and topics that build toward the developed expository essay. Practice in grammar as well. Does not count toward the major or minor in English.
066. Introductory Fiction Workshop
Margot Livesey M 6:30 - 9:25 Mass-McKeen Study
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 taken English 69.
070. Advanced Fiction Workshop
Margot Livesey T 6:30 - 9:25 Mass-McKeen Study
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.
105. Introduction to Poetry
Marilyn Reizbaum M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55 Druckenmiller-004
An examination of how to read a poem and how the poem is made. Includes the study of poetic form(s) and cultural and aesthetic contexts. Focuses on the modern poem in English and English translation from diverse poetic traditions, considering in particular the challenges to generic boundaries provided by the twentieth century.
108. Introduction to Black Women's Literature
Guy Foster T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 Adams-208
Examines the twin themes of love and sex as they relate to poems, stories, novels, and plays written by African-American women from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. Explores such issues as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, motherhood, sexism, group loyalty, racial authenticity, intra- and interracial desire, homosexuality, and the intertextual unfolding of a literary tradition of black female writing, as well as how these writings relate to canonical African American male-authored texts and European American literary traditions. Students are expected to read texts closely, critically, as well as appreciatively. Authors may include Harriet Jacobs, Nella Larsen, Jessie Faucet, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, Sapphire.
226. Topics in English Literature: English Renaissance Sexualities
Aaron Kitch T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Searles-213
Explores the literary and cultural functions of sex as a historically determined category of human experience in the English Renaissance. Building on competing theories of the body in Renaissance England, explores how sexual attachments shaped social, personal, religious, and political practices. Tracing the way that different genres take different approaches to representing sex, considers the Petrarchan sonnet; lyric poetry of the eroticized court of Queen Elizabeth; minor epics by Shakespeare and Marlowe; and satires by John Marston, Joseph Hall, and Ben Jonson. Also considers the politics and poetics of same-sex desire, as well as the erotics of theatrical performance by boy actors on the London stage. Additional authors include Ovid, Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Mary Wroth. Secondary texts by Michel Foucault, Bruce Smith, Jonathan Goldberg, and James Grantham Turner further inform the readings.
230. Theater and Theatricality in the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
Ann Kibbie M 1:00 - 2:25, W 1:00 - 2:25 Sills-109
An overview of the development of the theater from the re-opening of the playhouses in 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century, with special emphasis on the emergence of new dramatic modes such as Restoration comedy, heroic tragedy, “she-tragedy,” sentimental comedy, and opera. Other topics include the legacy of Puritan anxieties about theatricality; the introduction of actresses on the professional stage; adaptations of Shakespeare on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage; other sites of public performance, such as the masquerade and the scaffold; and the representation of theatricality in the eighteenth-century novel.
244. Victorian Crime
Aviva Briefel T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 Sills-117
Investigates literary representations of criminality in Victorian England. Of central concern is the construction of social deviancy and criminal types; images of disciplinary figures, structures, and institutions; and the relationship between generic categories (the detective story, the Gothic tale, the sensation novel) and the period's preoccupation with transgressive behavior and crime. Authors may include Braddon, Collins, Dickens, Doyle, Stevenson, and Wells.
269. The Modern Novel
Marilyn Reizbaum M 2:30 - 3:55, W 2:30 - 3:55 Hubbard-Conference Room West
A study of the modern impulse in the novel genre in English. Considers origins of the modern novel and developments such as modernism, postmodernism, realism, formalism, impressionism, the rise of short fiction. Focuses on individual or groups of authors and take into account theories of the novel, narrative theory, critical contexts. Topics shift and may include Philip Roth, Henry Roth, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, Lorrie Moore, Ford Madox Ford, J.M.Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Banville, Ian Watt, Peter Brook, and Franco Moretti.
271. The American Renaissance
Peter Coviello T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25 Sills-117
Considers the extraordinary quickening of American writing in the years before the Civil War. Of central concern are the different visions of "America" these texts propose. Authors may include Emerson, Poe, Douglass, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Stowe, Dickinson, and Whitman. Note: This course is offered as part of the curriculum in Gay and Lesbian Studies.
274. Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Celeste Goodridge T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 CT-16 Whiteside Room
Readings in modern and contemporary poetry, with an emphasis on different modes of poetic influence, allusions to mass culture, and the use of narrative, biography, mythology, and performance in this work. Authors may include Williams, Levine, Doty, Collins, Gluck, Laurie Sheck, Margaret Holley, Clampitt, and Carson.
275. African American Fiction: Short Stories
Elizabeth Muther F 1:30 - 4:25 Mass-Faculty Room
Explorations of short fiction by African American writers from fugitive narratives to futurist science fiction. Focuses on strategies of cultural survival as mapped in narrative form—with special interest in trickster storytellers, alternative temporalities, and double-voicing. Close attention paid to the exigencies of the short form, the experimental ground of the short story and its role for emerging writers, and notable anthologies and the role of stories in movement-making.
281. African-American Utopias: Colonization, Emigration, and Black Nationalisms
Dan Moos T 11:30 - 12:55, TH 11:30 - 12:55 Sills-205
As early as 1773, African Americans petitioned whites in power for their removal from America so that they might start a community or nation of their own. Examines the impulses toward colonization and emigration in African-American history, including movements that looked to Africa as an African-American state. Looks at historical documents, essays, and speeches, but focuses primarily on the speculative possibilities offered by African-American authors such as Oscar Micheaux, Martin R. Delany, Surron Griggs, and Toni Morrison. Explores real and fictional black nations, black towns, and even secret black governments and tries to determine the impulse for this departure, as well as the ideological import of black separation from the American nation.
282. Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory
David Collings M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55 Adams-304
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.
283. Writing China from Afar
Belinda Kong T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 Sills-205
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, the Tiananmen Massacre, and most recently, the Three Gorges Dam project – with specific focus on literature by authors born and raised in China, but since dispersed into a western diaspora, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and France. Considers works across multiple genres, written in English as well as those in translation. Critical issues include the distinction between immigration and exile, the relationship between history and literature, the grounds of representational authority, and the complexities of narrating violence. Authors may include Ha Jin, Annie Wang, Anchee Min, Ying Chen, Jung Chang, Hong Ying, J. G. Ballard, Gao Xingjian, Dai Sijie, Shan Sa, Yang Lian, and Bei Dao.
316. Shakespeares Sonnets
William Watterson T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55 Mass-McKeen Study
Close reading of Shakespeare’s one hundred and fifty-four sonnets and the appended narrative poem “A Lover’s Complaint,” which accompanies them in the editio princeps of 1609. Required texts include the “New Arden” edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1998). Critical issues examined include the dating of the sonnets, the order in which they appear, their rhetorical and architectural strategies, and their historical and autobiographical content. Note: This course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for English majors. Note: This course is offered as part of the curriculum in Gay and Lesbian Studies.
317. Asian Diaspora: War and Displacement
Belinda Kong T 1:00 - 2:25, TH 1:00 - 2:25 Mass-McKeen Study
Most of us can trace our roots to a place other than the one of our current residence. This place may be generations or continents removed from us, but nonetheless we feel an attachment toward it. We call this place “origin,” and the phenomenon of being dispersed from origin is given the name “diaspora.” Considers fiction written in English by Asian-descended authors, exploring how diasporic writers negotiate the tensions between their land of descent and their place of dwelling. Focuses on forms of displacement as a consequence of war. Authors may include Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Joy Kogawa, Chang-rae Lee, Ha Jin, Wendy Law-Yone, Lan Cao, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, and Vyvyane Loh.
339. Interracial Narratives
Guy Foster T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25 Kanbar Hall - 109
Violence and interracial sex have long been conjoined in U.S. literary, televisual, and filmic work. The enduring nature of this conjoining suggests there is some symbolic logic at work in these narratives, such that black/white intimacy functions as a figural stand-in for negative (and sometimes positive) commentary on black/white social conflict. When this happens, what becomes of “sex” as a historically changing phenomenon when it is yoked to the historically unchanging phenomenon of the “interracial”? Although counter-narratives have recently emerged to compete with such symbolic portrayals, i.e. romance novels, popular films, and television shows, not all of these works have displaced this earlier figural logic; in some cases, this logic has merely been updated. Explores the broader cultural implications

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