Past Course offerings:
Fall 1998

Please Note: Class times are subject to change. Before you register, consult course lists posted in the English Department.

FRESHMAN ENGLISH 1, 2, 3, AND 4

The schedule and course descriptions for English 1, 2,3, and 4, Freshman Composition and Writing Seminars, will be available in room 316, on the third floor of East Hall.

ENGLISH 5I, 5J -- CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

My sections of English 5 will provide deadlines, a forum for reading aloud and constructively criticizing student work, and the expectation that you will learn to create life on the page in a language natural to you.  Genre writing will be discouraged.  You will tell stories as only you can tell them.  There will be no exercises or outside reading; the work must come from you.  Regular attendance and spirited participation are valued highly—-as is the ability to keep attacking the problems and challenges that present themselves.

Professor:  Jonathan Strong        Time Block:  5 I -- 6-3+
                                                                       5J -- D-3
 

"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime," said Eudora Welty. This course covers the fundamentals of fiction writing including characterization, dialogue, conflict and point of view.  Class focuses on students' manuscripts, fiction readings and exercises aimed at finding and developing a narrative voice.

Professor:  Treadway            Time Block:  5K -- B-3
                                                                   5L-- D-3

ENGLISH 5M -- CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

This course is a workshop for beginning fiction writers.  We will  read and constructively criticize each others short stories. I will also bring in some wonderful short stories by established writers for us to admire and learn from.

Professor:  Kevin Dunn        --         Time Block:  5-3+

ENGLISH 5N --  CREATIVE WRITING: JOURNALISM 

The texts for this course: newspapers, magazines, and the student's own work; the focus: how writers report and direct ideas in order to persuade rather than to manipulate readers.  Assignments include: personal opinion article, hard news, review, interview, and the editing process

Professor Hershman        Time Block:  6-5+

ENGLISH 5O, 5P CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

My main goal in this course is to introduce you to some of the techniques of poetry writing.  To do this, I'll share with you some poets whose work I admire, and help you develop a vocabulary of appreciation for the work of others, as well as some tools for criticizing your own work.  Writing poems is a creative process, often mysterious, of discovery through language.  Most of the time, you sit down not knowing what you're going to say and then you say it.  There are no rigid or absolute rules but are some common notions of craft that help.  I'll be talking about metaphor and simile, tone, image, metrics, free verse, rhyme, diction, the voice, narrative, revision, strategy and structure, point of view, etc.  The class is run in a workshop format, with assigned exercises.

Professor:  David Rivard            --        Time Block:  Eng 5O-- D-3
                                                                                 Eng  5P -- 5-3+

ENGLISH 5Q --  CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

We'll explore such aspects of the craft of poetry as rhythm, images, voice, and lyric structure as dramatic action ( in other words, how poems make experience actual in a construct of words). Likewise, we'll explore narrative, dialogue, description, and scene structure. We will experiment with traditional and innovative approaches to poetic form. Each of us has stories to tell, and as we come to write them, those stories may redefine poetry for us. I'll share the work of some of the poets I admire with you, but our primary text will be student work. Among the goals of the workshop: to help you expand your imagination and experiment with the language, subject matter, and formal beauty of poetry.

Professor:  Lease                Time Block:  W-2

ENGLISH 5R-- CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

This course is designed to explore and expand your imagination. For this purpose, we will study some of the methods for writing and reading poems. Since one of the most effective methods is for writers to struggle and celebrate together, we will approach this workshop as an occasion for establishing such a community. We will develop a vocabulary of terms that will be useful, not only in discussing the poets we read, but also for assessing the needs and aspirations in our own work. We will study various moments in the poetic tradition, as well as some of the more exciting experiments in contemporary poetry. In addition, to poets I admire, I'll share with you essays designed to demystify the relationship between your mind and the page.

Professor:  Richards            Time Block:  W-3

ENGLISH 5S  -- CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

In this section of Introduction to Poetry, I hope to explore, together as a group, the history of poetry, of words, but moreover, the world within each of us that is as extraordinary as poetry itself. We write because we must; we write to tell stories, our feelings, to share our experiences - but fundamentally, we write because we must confront ourselves. Writing is one of the ways to discover about ourselves, to explore what it means to be a human being in the late twentieth century. I often think of writing as coming back from a journey. When one travels, the referential points are gone, and the only thing left is the self. We are removed from landscape which offers us time and space to search within ourselves, to examine it, and at the end, discard anything outdated or obsolete. One is not born a writer, one is born a human; your obligation  - if there is any - is to live to the fullest, making each moment, each second as important as the previous moments and moments to come, and to feel, and to love, not to observe only. And to express our experiences, both wondrous and painful, in words.

Professor:  Nagai        Time Block:  Y-5

ENGLISH 9A --  WRITING FICTION:  INTERMEDIATE

A middle-level workshop in the writing of fiction. Those wishing to enroll should submit a sample of their writing at preregistration. Consent of the instructor is required.

Professor:  Jay Cantor        --     Time Block:  Z*-3

ENGLISH 11--  NONFICTION WRITING

A course intended to improve students' writing while they are discovering and exploring various forms of non-fiction: journals, journalism, autobiography, biographical or historical essays, reviews, features, magazine writing.  I urge students to develop their own subjects and approaches.  Limited to 15.

Professor:  Michael Ullman        Time Block:  5-3+

ENGLISH 13  --   WRITING FICTION: ADVANCED

More advanced than English 9, English 13 is intended for people who have already taken a creative writing course or who have written a fair amount of fiction on their own.  Those wishing to enroll should submit a sample of their writing at preregistration.  Consent of the instructor is required.  English 13 may be repeated for credit.
 

Professor:  Alan Lebowitz        --        Time Block:  Z*3

ENGLISH 18 --  LITERARY STUDIES

Enrollment is limited to entering freshmen, class of ‘02, with AP scores of 5 in English.

The aim of the course is to practice written literary criticism by analyzing major forms. We will begin by studying lyric poems, especially works by John Donne and William Carlos Williams. Our consideration of the novel will examine Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, including accounts of the same events in his contemporaries' memoirs. We will look at autobiography in the example of Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Then we'll turn to narrative poetry by reading Book Eleven of the The Prelude by William Wordsworth. The course requires several short exercises and four longer essays.

Professor:  David Cavitch            --    Time Block:   5-7

ENGLISH 22 -- FORMS OF POETRY

This course offers a more advanced approach to writing than English 5, as students put a greater pressure on experience and therefore the language of poetry. A number of contemporary texts will serve us as we investigate the tensions created between form and content, content and context. Our primary text will be the student works as we discuss the issues raised in your poems and experiment with various approaches to the language. At least eight poems will be turned in at the end of the term. A few short papers will be assigned as well. Those wishing to  enroll must have taken English 5 or 6 (Poetry).

Professor:  Deborah Digges        --        Time Block:  Z-1

ENGLISH 36 --  BLACK WORLD LITERATURE & FILM

This course is an introduction to African literature and the culture of Africa and its diaspora in the Caribbean and in Britain.  We will explore a wide spectrum of African cultural forms--fiction, autobiography, poetry, drama, film and music--and trace their transmission and transformation in various Caribbean nations and in the "mother country," Britain.  The selection of texts and films is obviously not exhaustive but aims to be broad enough to allow us to begin examining the political and cultural meaning of the "black" world as a distinctive formation.  The course will include the writings of Chinua Achebe, Ngug  Wa Thiong'O, Caryl Phillips, Sembene Ousmane, Alex La Guma, Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, Louise Bennet, Jamaica Kincaid, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Joan Riley among others.

Professor:   Rodriguez             --        Time Block:  Monday/Wednesday 10:00-11:15am
 

This course is designed to introduce you to an eclectic body of texts written in the "non-western" world.  Through these texts we shall focus on issues of power and powerlessness; the relationship between metropolitan cultures (such as the U.S.) and formerly colonized nations; the complex connection of race, class and gender.  In addition to the political and historical, we shall raise literary questions about genre, voice and narrative techniques adopted by authors to articulate their political vision.  The course will include women writers from South Asia, Africa, the Arab world, Latin America and the West Indies.

NOTE:  THIS COURSE WILL COUNT TOWARDS THE INTERDISCIPLINARY MINOR IN     WOMEN'S STUDIES AND TOWARDS WORLD CIVILIZATION REQUIREMENT.

Professor:  Modhumita Roy            Time Block:  6-3+

ENGLISH 51 -- GENERAL VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

A survey of English literature from the beginning through the middle of the seventeenth century.  Readings will include Beowulf, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Milton's Paradise Lost, lyrics by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Marvell, and plays by Marlowe (Dr. Faustus) and Webster (The Duchess of Malfi).  Designed as an introduction to the English major, this course will be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain both a broad overview of earlier English literature and a good understanding of the basic techniques of literary analysis.

Professor:  Judith Haber        --        Time Block:  3-7

ENGLISH 52 -- GENERAL VIEW OF BRITISH LITERATURE

This course offers a survey of British literature from the late eighteenth century through the twentieth century.  The emphasis will be on poetry, fiction, prose non-fiction, and drama written in four significant modes: romanticism, realism, modernism, postmodernism.  We will examine how these four modes have been employed by British writers and assess the ways that they have been periodized in the literary academy.  Throughout the semester we will focus on ways that the thematic and formal features of a particular text may be related to historical and cultural contexts.

Professor:  George Piggford                Time Block:  A-3+
 

A look back at the century's end at ten novels which have shaped American literary consciousness and frequently offered a challenge to literary, social, political or moral norms. The texts we will read include Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

Professor: Jonathan Wilson        --        Time Block:  3-7

ENGLISH 67 -- SHAKESPEARE

A study of nine Shakespeare plays: The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Henry IV, Part One, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Pericles and The Tempest.  Although we will engage a variety of historical and critical contexts, our primary focus will be on the close reading of the plays.

Professor:  Kevin Dunn        --        Time Block:  5-3+

Is there a "modern mind"? The question should raise anxieties about our own reaction to history. Are we--as Nietzche said-- "the heirs to all the ages" (a condition he described as being close to madness)? Is history our burden, something we have left behind, or our field of play? Is modern consciousness a state of fragmentation and crisis, a sickness in love with itself, a continual crisis that is always looking for ways to reconstitute itself? What have the effects of Freud's and Marx's thought been on our attitudes towards ourselves, our culture and our civilization? Do we have a "culture"? How can we conduct our lives without gods, "without culture, " in a constant state of flux? Are there limits to interpretation (and to production) or must we (and can we) learn to live in a dizzying world without boundaries, without fixed points? What new ideas of the meaning and conduct of politics might we derive from the work of modern artists, using the operation of the poetic imagination as a guide for our thinking about our work and the future of our world? The course will try (and fail) to look at all these impossible questions in texts of Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and their inheritors (N.O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse). And we will consider a range of modern poets, prose writers, and artists who both embody and describe modernism and its resonances.

Professor:  Jay Cantor      --     Time Block:  A-3+
 

Although this course will focus specifically on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, considering both his aesthetic development and his cinematic "mastery," our central concern will be with the relation between the achievement of that "mastery" and the insistent--almost obsessive--attention to questions of sexuality, gender, and cultural authority displayed throughout his films. In this context we will examine how the act of seeing, the cinematic operation par excellence, gets analyzed and "framed" in Hitchcock's work in relation to cultural practices such as political and erotic surveillance--practices that Hitchcock's films allow us to recognize as central to the power of cinematic visualization. It is important to note at the outset, therefore, that Hitchcock's films, as products of our dominant culture, contain within them the markings of offensively misogynist, homophobic, and racist assumptions. They are worthy of our sustained attention, however, not only for the force with which they articulate the ideological contours of our culture's fears and fantasies about gender, sexuality, and the family, but also for the ways in which the assurance of Hitchcock's cinematic discourse, the stunning and inescapable effects of his insistence on style, complicate these various issues and occasion a critical analysis that allows us to think about them differently. A significant portion of our energies will be directed toward the examination of how those ideological assumptions are related to the specifically cinematic consciousness of Hitchcock's films and to how those assumptions can be recontextualized by recent work in feminist and gay cultural analysis. We will be interested throughout in the distinctive ways in which Hitchcock's films generate spectatorial "pleasure" and we will want to examine the nature of that pleasure: whose pleasure is it and to what does it respond? To answer these questions we will read a number of theoretical accounts of cinema in general and of Hitchcock's cinema in particular. Our energies will primarily be devoted, however, to studying and learning how to read a large number of Hitchcock's films, including The Thirty-Nine Steps, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie.

Students who wish to take this class must be willing to engage seriously with questions of cinema, sexuality, and cultural representation; they should expect to produce two papers and a final examination; and they must be prepared to attend a weekly screening that will be held in the Tisch  Audio-Visual Lab on Sunday evenings.
 
Professor:  Lee Edelman        --        Time Block:  8-3+

For two years no, Tufts University and the city of Somerville have held "The Somerville Conversations: Ethnic Experiences, the Immigration Experience and What It Means to be an American." 40 members of the Tufts and Somerville communities have met in conversation circles to explore their cultural identities as members of communities that are constantly renewed by their immigration experiences.

The city of Somerville is particularly rich in its ethnic histories. As a "gateway city" for new immigrations from the eighteenth century on, its identity has been shaped by its new immigrations, which became, over the generations, the "older" ethnic segments of its populations. German, Irish, Jewish, African-American and Italian ethnicities have been recently transformed by the arrivals of immigrants from Haiti, Cape Verde, Brazil, El Salvador, the Azores and Viet Nam. The "Conversations" provide a safe and stimulating space for us to explore our differences. Somerville is producing the conversations again this fall. As a member of the Tufts community, you can, and I hope that you will, take part in the conversations. You can also take this course, which will deepen your understanding of the conversation experience.

"Narrative and American Identity" allows Tufts students the opportunity to explore the ways the ethnicity figures in the construction of the "American" identity that we have individually come to own. The course will continue to operate on two levels:

Personal:
1) We will read narratives -- memoirs, essays, poetry, short stories -- that document the construction of individual American identities in the 20th century.

2) We will write narratives that document the formation of your personal and public identities. These can be autobiographical or fictional. We will explore in these narratives what it is to be "different" and what it is to be a "melted" part of a larger identity that we may or may not want to be part of. Can we change what we have become? Questions of cultural agency as well as cultural identity will be raised.
Public:
1) Each student will take part in the Somerville Conversations. This will be a commitment of three meetings, each taking two hours. You will be talking to members of the Tufts and Somerville communities.

2) Each student will enter into a relationship with the Somerville community by contributing over the semester approximately 12 hours of her time to one of the many interesting immigration, cultural, human rights and social welfare agencies. We will consult together about these experiences in class.

ENGLISH 91C --  THE MODERN SHORT STORY

"Modern" is, of course, synonymous with "new."  When Ezra Pound exhorted his fellow early-twentieth-century writers to "Make it new," he was referring both to literature and to the world.  The short story, a genre in its youth, or possibly adolescence, at the beginning of this century, has been seen as a peculiarly modern form in its brevity, emphasis on the unconscious, and deployment of an alienated subject who often desires to remake or reimagine the "world."  We will examine short stories by British writers such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, and Christopher Isherwood.  The course should be of interest and use both to students wishing to explore the significations of  modernism and to those looking for models for their own creative writing.

Professor:  George Piggford        --     Time Block:  W-2

ENGLISH 91D -- "BODY, MEMORY, REPRESENTATION"

This course will focus on how the body and memory are represented in contemporary writing and film (predominately) by and about diasporic black women.  Questions of representation are always generated by the media, film, writing, music.  We will examine some of these questions: the necessity, the dangers and impossibility of representation.  Texts will include: Corregidora, by Gayl Jones, Funnyhouse of a Negro, by Adrienne Kennedy and The Body Beautiful, by Ngozi Onwurah.

Professor:  Sharpe   --     Time Block:   Tuesday/Thursday  5:10-6:35 pm

ENGLISH 108 --  MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 

This course surveys a variety of works from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, excluding Chaucer.  Readings include the poems of the anonymous genius who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl; Malory's Morte Darthur and other Arthurian material; lyrics; mystery plays; Piers Plowman, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and The Book of Margery Kempe (in translation); and the tradition of women's mystical writings summed up by Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love.
 

Professor:  John Fyler       --      Time Block:  C-3

ENGLISH 110 --  CHAUCER 

We will read most of the Canterbury Tales, several of the minor peoms, and Troilus and Criseyde.
 
Professor:  John Fyler        --    Time Block:  6-3+

ENGLISH 110WW -- RECITATION/CHAUCER

This is an optional writing workshop section of 110 that will meet once a week in addition to regular class meetings.  The workshop pays special attention to paper writing and revision; it also emphasizes the function of writing in the learning process through informal, exploratory assignments and journal entries that allow opportunities a closer exploration of the course material.

Professor:  John Fyler                --        Time Block:  4-4

ENGLISH 128 -- ROMANTIC LITERATURE & CULTURE: 1789-1816

Responding to the radical challenges to traditional authority that reverberate across the channel from the French Revolution and the Terror, romantic writers address the transformations within British culture sparked by such volatile issues as women's rights, the abolition of the slave trade, and the emergence of industrial capitalism. We will read a range of late 18th and early 19th century fiction, poetry and autobiography to explore how literature understands and inflects these and other social issues. The readings by Austen, Barbauld, Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and others will include a novel, a slave narrative, early feminist polemic, and a private diary, as well as a variety of lyric, narrative, visionary, and parodic poetry.
 

Professor:  Sonia Hofkosh            Time Block:  5-3+

ENGLISH 132  -- WOMEN AND FICTION

Of World War I Gertrude Stein wrote, "The composition of this war, 1914-1918, was not the composition of all previous wars...in which there was one man in the centre surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism." Whether the war itself had a different shape is debatable, but certainly after World War I the modernist sensibility rebelled against "compositions" with "one man in the centre surrounded by a lot of other men." In its preference for "compositions" in which "one corner {is} as important as another corner," modernism was (and is) an opportunity for women writers. In this course we will consider ways in which the de-centering of the subject, formerly assumed to be stable and male, has affected the shapes or "compositions" of women's fiction.

Some authors we will read are: Kate Chapin, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Woolf and Hurston will be considered in greater depth than the others. In connection with these two writers, we will think about the beginnings of psychology and anthropology, two "modernist" disciplines that were important to Woolf and Hurston respectively.

Professor:  Linda Bamber        --        Time Block: D-3

ENGLISH 134 VICTORIAN LITERATURE: ART AND ACTIVISM

In this course we'll read works written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), giving particular attention to ways in which literature shapes and is shaped by contemporary developments--especially in political economy and in ideologies of sexuality, the family, and education.  We'll explore a range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, looking at sensationalistic melodrama and narratives of Victorian subcultures, as well as at the "classics" of "high" culture.  Attention to painting, photography, and music will extend our grasp of relations between art and activism in nineteenth-century Britain.  Throughout the course we will be asking questions about how authority constitutes and maintains itself--not only in institutions of the Victorian era, but also in important twentieth-century reactions to them.  Readings will include works by Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Arnold, Eliot, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning.

If you want to get a headstart on the reading, you can pick up the list of novel titles and editions in the English Department office in April.

Professor: Sheila Emerson        Time Block:  6-5+

We'll start around 1815 with the rising ferment of nationalism that shaped American culture for decades.  In his Leatherstocking Tales Cooper popularizes a legendary history for the new community.  His historical romances celebrate the progress of society against the wilderness, while lamenting the destruction of sublime nature and the losses of noble Indian and white hunters and warriors.  The grandeur of American landscape evoking a sense of divinity, for painters and writers alike, becomes an element of Transcendentalism in works by Emerson and Thoreau.  They devise new prose styles and forms to redefine democratic humanity for America, while condemning its continental imperialism and national protection of slavery.

We'll read Cooper's The Pioneers and The Deerslayer, selected essays and poems by Emerson, Walden and selected essays by Thoreau.
 
Professor:  David Cavitch       --     Time Block:  D-3

ENGLISH 145 -- AMERICAN REALISM

We will focus on fiction, prose, and film from 1880-1920, a period of unusual social upheaval and conflict that offers striking insights into a number of important issues today, such as racism in the United States, economic inequity, anti-immigrant policies and attitudes, discrimination against women, US imperialism, anti-Semitism, and changing sexual mores.  Our study will be multicultural in focus--we will read works by African American, Native American, European American, Asian American, and Mexican American writers--and we will place major emphasis on analysis of social issues in the literature.  Also we will pay special attention to how narrative form was experimented with--questioned, altered, invented--as writers and early filmmakers helped generate what we now recognize as the modern period.  We will ask: How do fiction and film operate as social criticism? Who gets to create art in America--and who does not?  That is, what are the politics of representation and who decides them and why should we care? Class will be run on a discussion basis and authors will include Zitkala Ša, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anzia Yezierska, Pauline Hopkins, María Cristina Mena, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, and Upton Sinclair. Also, we will view and discuss D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915); a contemporary film about American Indian issues during the period; and Loni Ding's documentary about Asian American immigration, Ancestors in the Americas: Sailors, Coolies, and Settlers.  Writing assignments will encourage students to experiment and, in one of the two papers, try their own hand at prose fiction.

Professor:  Elizabeth Ammons        Time Block:  Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:15 am

ENGLISH 162  --  POETS ON POETRY

This course focuses on the development of the modern American poetic sensibility. From the 1920's forward, we will trace our tradition's most influential, often controversial notions. In short, our subject is change. We hope to raise as many questions as we answer. Thorough reading and analysis of particular essays and poems, as well as through experimenting ourselves with various poetic approaches, theories, and forms, we will define and compare the any factors at work in the evolutions and overhauling of the American poetic mind, among them "the imagist school," "the poet moderns," and "the new formalists." Perhaps we might invent new categories of our own as we consider, for instance, poetry after Hiroshima, and/or the post-Darwinian consciousness. This course offers students, especially poets, a context for the contemporary arena in which they write, as well as historical perspective on the controversies inherent in our tradition. Readings will include selected essays and letters as well as poems by Emerson, Freud, Bishop, Hughes, Williams, Levertov, Ginsberg, Reed, Rich, Olds, Li-Young Lee, and many others. There will be numerous short written assignments and one major paper.

Professor:  Deborah Digges       --   Time Block:  B-3

We will read the major novels, focusing on the authors' careers and creative lives and on the environments--cultural and psychological--which influenced their work.

Professor:  Alan Lebowitz    --    Time Block D-3

ENGLISH 191A -- PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN POETRY

The contemporary philosophy that has been so important to literary studies, deconstruction, and the ancient philosophical religion of Buddhism are both versions of "the negative way."  Both are attacks on the center and on the hierarchical, dualistic, teleological tendency logical tendencies of Western metaphysics.  Both are intent on taking things away from us—-things like our identity as a separate self, the difference between Here and There, the idea of Truth or God or any word that begins with a capital letter.  Both are silent or deliberately frustrating on the question of what we gain by so much renunciation.  "I don't talk about the dharma," says the American Buddhist teacher Charlotte Beck.  "Why talk about it?  My job is to notice how I violate it."  Barbara Johnson, a Harvard deconstructionist, writes that "Truth is preserved [only] in vestigial form in the notion of error."  Both systems are a kind of dance around an empty space; the same can be said for much of the imaginative language of poetry.  "Tell all the truth but tell it slant, "says Emily Dickinson, for whom poetic language is one long evasive maneuver.

In this course we will look at selected American poets whose work is illuminated by these systems of thought.  We will begin with some contemporary poets (e.g., Allan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, Mary Kean) who are themselves Buddhist and who are part of the current effort to translate Buddhism into a modern American idiom.  (As one Buddhist teacher put it, we need to understand how Buddhism changes when life is no longer a matter of "Chop wood, carry water," but "make love, drive freeway.")  Then we will consider the two great American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, to see if they can be understood as part of an alternate tradition.  Other poets we will read are Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Mark Halliday.

No prior experience with either Buddhist thought or deconstructionism is required.

This year a member of Cambridge Insight Meditation Center will offer an optional practice group for those members of the class who wish to try zazen (sitting meditation).  It will meet on Mondays at 5:30 in East Hall Lounge, and class members may join it or not.

Professor:  Linda Bamber    --    Time Block:  5-3+

ENGLISH 191B --  RENAISSANCE DRAMA

The Renaissance is generally thought of as the greatest age of the drama in England:  Shakespeare's plays are only the most well-known examples of the outpouring of theatrical activity that occurred during this period.   In this course, we will read the always fascinating (and sometimes gruesome) plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors, many of whom adopted more radical stances toward the major issues of their time.  As we examine their presentations of various forms of power, their constructions of gender and sexuality, and their attitudes towards language and the theater, we will discover why many of these plays have been termed "oppositional drama" and "radical tragedy."  We will begin by examining Christopher Marlowe's frontal assaults on contemporary orthodoxies, and we will consider the construction of sodomy in his plays.  We will go on to explore the development of the drama of blood and revenge, which was introduced in The Spanish Tragedy, and which exploded in what has been called the "parody and black camp" of The Revenger's Tragedy.  We will examine the tensions which tear apart Ben Jonson's more conservative comedies, and which finally erupt in his grotesque carnival comedy, Bartholmew Fair.  Finally, we will look at a selection of 17-century plays about women--The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The Roaring Girl, The Changeling, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; we will explore their varying attitudes toward female autonomy and desire, and consider why women became such central figures in the drama at this time.  Throughout the course, we will think about these plays' investment in their own (sometimes quite extreme) theatricality, and we will attempt to do justice to their pervasive sense of play.

Professor: Judith Haber    --    Time Block:  B-3
 
 

ENGLISH 191C 20TH-CENTURY IRISH LITERATURE 

What does it mean to be an "Irish" writer?  Not surprisingly, in  a country whose recent history has been dominated by debates about colonialism, nationhood, and religion, we find a literature characterized by dynamism and experimentation that is often overtly political and polemical.  This course will begin in the 1890's with the controversial figure of Oscar Wilde, an Irishman whom James Joyce later labeled "Court Jester to the English."  The figure of Wilde will be seen to dominate, haunt, and trouble Irish literature of this century, as witnessed in the texts of writers such as W.B. Yeats, Joyce, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, Edna O'Brien, Seamus Heaney, and Desmond Hogan.  In this course will trace the production of Irish modernism and its effects; we will discuss in detail the relationship between Irish nationalist politics (the IRA, Sinn Fein) and literary production; we will assess the importance of Roman Catholicism in twentieth-century Irish writing; and we will generally focus on the interrelatedness of the categories of colonialism, ethnicity, gender, religion, and nation.

Professor:  George Piggford    --    Time Block:  M 3:30-6:30 pm

ENGLISH 191D -- TONI MORRISON

This course will focus on the work of Toni Morrison, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.  We will read Morrison's novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, The Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved, Jazz, her latest work, Paradise, and her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.  The course will read these texts in and against the larger contexts of the African-American and American literary traditions.  Discussion of secondary critical and theoretical articles will complement our treatment of the novels.

Professor:  Rodriguez  --  Time Block:   E-3

ENGLISH 191E -- CONTEMPORARY SOUTH-AFRICAN LITERATURE

Andre Brink once described the condition of writing in South Africa as a "state of siege."  In this course we shall focus on authors who wrote under apartheid and devised new narrative strategies to represent the political and social conditions of South Africa.  The course will explore the relationship between literature and politics and the uses and limits of literature as a form of political resistance.  The course will include the writings of Ruth First, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Elsa Joubert, Mongane Serote among others. The course will also include films such as Cry Freedom, A World Apart and Mapantsula.

Professor:  Modhumita Roy

Time Block:  Z*2

NOTE: THIS COURSE WILL COUNT TOWARDS AFRICA AND THE NEW WORLD MINOR

ENGLISH 191F --  MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURE & FILM/VIDEO BY WOMEN

In this course we will read literature by women who are often classified as part of "minority" groups.  We will examine these visual and literary texts as they engage problems of exile, sexuality, language, place, and memory.  Texts will include: Slander by Linda Lê, People Who Led to My Plays by Adrienne Kennedy, and Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman.

Professor:  Sharpe

Time Block:  M 3:30-6:30pm
 

COURSES FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY:
 

ENGLISH 291A  --  RACE TEXTS

This seminar will focus on contemporary US race theory, selected literary and film texts, and pedagogy. Our objectives will be several: to read closely in various theorists, to bring those theoretical perspectives to a small set of literary and film texts in order to test and develop critical strategies, to interrogate our own race standpoints and locations and think about the requirements of anti-racism activism within and outside the academy, and to examine issues of race study and pedagogy with an eye toward practical application in the undergraduate classroom. Our reading will include legal critical race theorists such as Patricia Williams and Ian Haney-López, sociologists such as Ruth Frankenberg, Howard Winant, and Michael Omi, historians such as Ronald Takaki, education experts such as Beverly Daniel Tatum, and literary and cultural studies thinkers such as bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gloria Yamato, Aijaz Ahmad, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Elaine Kim. Films will include Imagining Indians, The Birth of a Nation, Slaying the Dragon, and The Color of Fear. Literary texts will include Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men; Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood and Winona; and Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues. Also a pedagogy workshop on race facilitated by an outside expert will be built into the course.

Professor:  Elizabeth Ammons

Time Block:  Z-3

ENGLISH 291B --  LATE SHAKESPEARE

This course is designed to be an intensive look at Shakespeare's romances.  In an attempt to define the particular moment--political, historical, and literary--of Shakespearean tragicomedy (c.1608-11), we will also attempt to construct the political and theatrical vectors that lead up to and help construct that moment.  We will explore a number of discursive dichotomies in dialogue within and with the theater, including those of absolutism/republicanism, feudalism/bureaucracy, image/text, patriarchy/"feminism," endogamy/exogamy, and even dialogue/discourse.  As well as the Romances themselves, we will also read Richard II, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Timon of Athens by Shakespeare, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe's Edward II, Marston's The Malcontent, and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid Tragedy, Philaster and A King and No King, together with other contemporary texts and modern theoretical and historical criticism.

Professor:  Kevin Dunn

Time Block:  Z-1

ENGLISH 291C -- THE SCIENCE OF ASPECTS  

An exploration of art and theories of art in the wake of Lyell's Principles of Geology and Darwin's The Origin of Species.  Readings will probably include works by Tennyson, Huxley, Arnold, Stevenson, LeFanu, Ruskin, E. B. Browning, R. Browning, C. Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Morris, Pater, Hopkins, Wilde, James, Lee, Hardy, Conrad, Barrie, Proust.  We will also consider paintings by Turner, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and others.

Professor:  Sheila Emerson