Past Course offerings:
Spring 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 6-A, 6-B -- 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 not knowing what you’re going to say, and then you say it. There are no rigid or absolute rules, but there are some common notions of craft that help. I’ll be talking about metaphor and simile, tone, image, strategy and structure, point of view, etc. The class is run in workshop format, with assigned exercises.
PROFESSOR: RIVARD
TIME BLOCK: 6A -- 5-3+/6B -- D-3
ENGLISH 6-C -- CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
An immersion-course in the language of incantation. No particular background in poetry or poetry writing is required, but members of the class are expected to share a commitment to an exploration of the powers of the written and uttered word. I expect that at times this exploration may take us right off the page as we seek to widen the range of our poetic voices and sonic expressiveness, drawing from the models of -- to name just a few -- spells, chants, and lullabies, as well as from sonnets, villanelles, triolets, etc. This course is run as a workshop; subject-matter of your poems will be up to you, but there will be weekly assignments to facilitate development of the ear, alertness to the poetic tradition, and a deep and inventive awareness of poetic structure.
PROFESSOR SNEFF
TIME BLOCK: Z-2
ENGLISH 6-D -- 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 6-E -- CREATIVE WRITING: JOURNALISM
The texts for this course: newspapers, magazines, and the students' own work; the focus: how writers report and direct ideas in order to persuade rather than manipulate readers. Assignments include: personal opinion article, hard news, review, interview, and the editing process.
PROFESSOR HERSHMAN
TIME BLOCK: 6-5+
ENGLISH 6-G, 6-H -- CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
Here you will find exercises and lectures designed to help you further develop the essential elements of creative prose: voice, description, and empathy. Particular emphasis will be placed on precision of language, and how the voice of a story must work in tandem with conscience. For some of you, these will be new concepts: I think you will see in time that they are quite basic.
You’ll also have a look at fiction, poetry, and essays written by masters. We will investigate the current publishing world, and how to make a living involving writing. Finally, I would like you to read your work in progress on class days that we will schedule together, and to comment carefully and thoughtfully on the work of your classmates when they do the same.
PROFESSOR HURKA
TIME BLOCK: 6G-- B-3/ 6H-- A-3+
ENGLISH 6-K, 6-L -- CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
In this section of English 6, we will focus most of our energy and attention on students’ work-excercises and completed fiction manuscripts, in particular. We will also read and discuss published stories as we consider the fundamentals of fiction writing including characterization, dialogue, conflict, and point of view.
PROFESSOR TREADWAY
TIME BLOCK: 6K-- C-3/ 6L-- E-3
ENGLISH 6-M -- CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
My section of English 6 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 STRONG
TIME BLOCK: 6-3+
ENGLISH 6-P -- CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
A workshop in writing poetry is a place to experiment. We will try on various accomplishments in the poetic tradition- metrics, rhyme schemes, free verse, stanza breaks, shapes, tone, even content etc.. In this class, you will sometimes attempt to imitate, and find it oddly liberating. You may throw out these experiments once accomplished, and try something entirely different. You may embrace old forms as your own. Sometimes, the very poems you’ve shied away from are the ones waiting to teach you. The class is a workshop with assigned exercises.
PROFESSOR KAISER
TIME BLOCK: W-4
ENGLISH 10 -- WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE
English 10 is designed for students who have had some experience in writing fiction. It will provide deadlines, a forum for reading aloud and constructively criticizing each other's work, and the expectation that you will create life on the page in a language natural to you. Genre writing will be discouraged. Regular attendance and spirited participation will be valued. A sample of your fiction (it needn't be long or completed, but it should be something you're pleased with) should be submitted to Professor Strong's mailbox or East Rm. 314 at pre-registration. A final class list may not be available until the first day of classes. Consent of the instructor is required.
PROFESSOR STRONG
TIME BLOCK: D-3
ENGLISH 11-A -- NON-FICTION 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 subject and approaches. Limited to 15.
PROFESSOR ULLMAN
TIME BLOCK: 5-3+
ENGLISH 11-B -- NON-FICTION: INTERMEDIATE JOURNALISM
This course is intended for students with some training or experience in print journalism (newspapers and magazines) who want to hone their reporting skills. We will concentrate on getting and writing the story. Students will practice finding and using sources (human, written, electronic), investigating and analyzing events, covering a beat, reporting the news accurately and engagingly, and writing feature stories. We will also look at ethical and legal issues of concern to reporters. Prerequisite: Beginning Journalism (ENG. 5 or 6) or journalistic experience.
PROFESSOR LEVINSON
TIME BLOCK: B-3
ENGLISH 14 -- WRITING FICTION: ADVANCED
More advanced than English 10, English 14 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 14 may be repeated for credit.
PROFESSOR LEBOWITZ
TIME BLOCK: Z*3
ENGLISH 22 ADVANCED 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 work 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 submit a sample of their writing at pre-registration to Professor Digges’ mailbox on the second floor in East Hall. English 22 may be repeated for credit.
PROFESSOR DIGGES
TIME BLOCK: Z-1
ENGLISH 36 -- BLACK WORLD LITERATURE AND 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, Ng g 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 ROY
TIME BLOCK: A-3+
ENGLISH 51 -- GENERAL VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
A survey of English literature from the beginning through the eighteenth century. Readings will include; selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell and Pope; 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. Class participation is encouraged; three papers and a final exam are required.
PROFESSOR GENSTER
TIME BLOCK: ARRANGED -- T TH 10:00-11:15
ENGLISH 59 -- CONTINUITY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
An examination of the chief themes and forms in the development of American literature from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century, with emphasis on the religious heritage, the rise of literary nationalism, and the creative flowering of the 1850's.
PROFESSOR CAVITCH
TIME BLOCK: 5-7
ENGLISH 61 -- SHORT FICTION
The practical aim of this course is to give students the understanding and confidence to enjoy reading short (and long) fiction on their own. Since the short story has evolved into a uniquely compact way of studying modern life, it should also provide important insights into the world we have inherited. The focus of this course is on the relationship between life and art. We will explore a variety of ideas and techniques in the works of Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Lessing, Paley, Kundera, and many others.
In this course, we will undertake a careful study of nine of Shakespeare's plays: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Coriolanus, and The Winter's Tale. Although we will engage these plays in a variety of historical and theoretical contexts, our primary focus will be on close reading.
PROFESSOR HAMILTON
TIMEBLOCK: 5-3+
ENGLISH 92-A -- JANE AUSTEN: NOVELS AND FILMS
Reading and discussing of Austen’s six published novels, and of some recent films derived from her works, including Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Clueless. We’ll ask how this most resolutely verbal of authors translates to the screen, and what our current fascination with her work tells us about ourselves.
PROFESSOR GENSTER
TIME BLOCK: A-3+
ENGLISH 92-B -- CONTEMPORARY U.S. LATINO/A LITERATURE AND CULTURE
The course will examine a diverse collection of literary and other cultural texts by women and men from a variety of "U.S. Latino" cultures (primarily but not exclusively Chicano, Cuban and Puerto Rican), all of whom combine in their works questions of sexual and national politics. The literary texts will cover the range of literary genres, from the novel and short fiction to drama to autobiography and memoir. The course will also feature alternative and often popular cultural texts, such as lyrical work by Latino/a musicians (Tish Hinojosa’s Culture Swing, Albita Rodríguez’s No Se Parece A Nada), videos of Latino/a comics and other performers (John Lequizamo’s Mambo Mouth) and recent films with Latino/a themes (Anders’ Mi Vida Loca, last year’s Star Maps).
Students will be encouraged to examine for themselves, through their readings and discussions of the assigned texts, and through individual research projects, the complex forces (historical, political, geographic, economic) that simultaneously unite and divide the many "Latino" communities of the U.S., and that shape the literary and other cultural products those cultures generate. They will also be encouraged to examine the roles that gender and sexuality continue to play in the formation and deformation of "latino/a" identity within and among these several communities. Sexual symbolics certainly continue to shape prevailing discourses of nationalism and national identity in these communities, as much in the patriarchal insistence on the value of machismo as in the nostalgics of return to various "motherlands," often embodied in the image of the Virgin Mary as national patroness.Much of the ideological work of gender-symbolism has already been analyzed by a number of U.S. Latino scholars, among them Gustavo Pérez-Firmat in Life on the Hyphen, Ramón Saldívar in Chicano Narrative, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano in her many essays on Cherríe Moraga and Chicana experience. Students will have the opportunity to explore such influential critical statements as part of their own research projects.
Primary Reading List: Julia Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies; Junot Díaz, Drown; Rafael Campo, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban; Arturo Islas, Rain God; Eduardo Machado, Floating Islands; Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation; Richard Rodríguez, Days of Obligation; Robert Santiago, Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings.
PROFESSOR ORTIZ
TIME BLOCK: MW 3:30-4:45 PM
ENGLISH 92-C -- COMING OF AGE, BLACK IN AMERICA
This course explores the coming-of-age process as depicted in African American literature. We will work together to understand what it means to come of age-- what the process (in general) entails, how it occurs, what fosters it, what inhibits it, and what its consequences are. In addition, however, we will be concerned with the ways in which being black in this country affects the coming-of-age process. We will of course, need to consider as well how the issues of gender, region, social status, and age determine the parameters within which individual characters mature. (For instance, both the requirement to mature and the freedom to act on newly acquired maturity differ considerably for Linda Brent, the protagonist in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and the fair-skinned male protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), written nearly fifty years after Emancipation.)
In addition to the Jacobs and Johnson texts named above, reading will include Richard Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar (1974) Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1983), Brent Staples’ Parallel Time: Growing up in Black and White (1994), Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying (1993), and Charlise Lyles’s Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? (1994).
PROFESSOR CAREY
TIME BLOCK: 8-7
ENGLISH 92-D -- BLOOMSBURY ON FILM
This course will focus on textual and filmic representations of the coterie of early twentieth-century English writers and artists commonly referred to as the Bloomsbury Group. We will begin by constructing a definition of Bloomsbury through Quentin Bell’s study, Bloomsbury, and through two films: Tom and Viv and Carrington. These sources will be used to determine the salient features of the group and to introduce students to its "members," including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Dora Carrington. Bloomsbury will be read as a roughly contemporaneous study of the Group by a second-generation member. The two films will be examined as late-twentieth century revisions of Bloomsbury that rely heavily on stereotype and oversimplification.
Then, we will examine the intertextual resonances of filmic adaptations of the novels of two prominent "Bloomsberries" E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. The themes and figures of Forster’s novels A Room with a View, Maurice, and A Passage to India will be compared to those represented in the 1980s film versions of these three texts. We will be particularly interested in the films’ Thatcher-era nostalgia for Edwardian class rigidity and masculine- imperialist power. Finally, we will analyze film adaptations of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando in relation to the novels themselves. The main focus here will be on the use of experimental film techniques to reproduce both the innovative narrative strategies of Woolf’s novels and the critiques of gender and sexual norms that form a prominent aspect of her textual project.
PROFESSOR PIGGFORD
TIME BLOCK: ARRANGED --T,Th 6:30-7:45
ENGLISH 92-E ROMANCE
Romance is one of the most interesting and historically most popular genres, combining as it does the sheer delights of storytelling with the working out of seemingly endless variations on a few common themes: alienation; the quest; the loss of and search for identity; the incest taboo; magic; disguise; doubling and repetition as a generator of narrative. We will read a number of romances, across a broad historical range, as we explore the genre’s distinctive features. The reading will include at least some of the following works: Homer’s Odyssey; medieval Arthurian romances, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the works of Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory; Shakespeare’s late plays; Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
PROFESSOR FYLER
TIME BLOCK: 8-3+
ENGLISH 92-E--WW RECITATION
This is an optional writing workshop section of 92E 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 for a closer exploration of the course material.
PROFESSOR FYLER
TIME BLOCK 4-4
ENGLISH 92-F -- FEMINIST THEORY: WOMEN’S (AND SOME MEN’S) WAY OF BEING, READING AND WRITING
This course will explore some novels, short stories, and feminist theorists with the goal of inviting students to see relationships, power, language, desire, and narrative in ways that depart from traditional patriarchal notions. Students will read works of fiction juxtaposed with a new theorist each week. Reading and literature will include "A Jury of Her Peers" (Susan Glaspell), "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), "A White Heron" (Sarah Orne Jewett), The Book of Thel (William Blake), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf), July’s People (Nadine Gordimer), The Country of the Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett), Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), The Shipping News (E.Annie Proulx), and Zami (Audre Lorde). Theorists will include Patricia Tobin, Mieke Bal, Nancy Jay, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Maragaret Homans, Jessica Benjamin, Domna Stanton, Peggy Kamuf, and Barbara Johnson. These theorists will be the basis of discussions on procreation and narrative, violence and counterviolence, sacrifice and women’s times, mothers and mothering, language, desire, and metaphor.
This course will attempt to look at these alternative notions as they have a bearing on women’s and men’s ways of being, reading, and writing. Writing assignments will include a reading journal, 2 or 3 short papers, a midterm and a final exam.
PROFESSOR LISBERGER
TIME BLOCK: B-3
ENGLISH 92-G -- HOUSEHOLD DRAMAS
This course will study drama over several centuries with a focus on how drama depicts relationships and problems in households. As students compare and contrast plays over time, they will focus on three main questions: Why write a play when you can write a story or a novel? How does the staging and voicing of drama affect the depiction of power relations? Why is tragedy or comedy used to depict a certain household drama? Students will be expected to keep a reading journal and to write 2 or 3 short papers. There will be a final exam and possibly a midterm. Students should also be prepared to consider writing their own household dramas in the style of the writers we study and eventually, perhaps, their own styles. Plays may include: Oedipus Rex and Antigone (Sophocles), L’Ecole des Femmes (Moliere), Phaedre (Racine), The Country Wife (Wycherly), The Man of Mode (Etherege), The Way of the World (Congreve), She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), A Doll’s House (Ibsen), Miss Julie (Strindberg), Trifles (Glaspell), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (O’Neill), The Glass Menagerie (Williams), Death of a Salesman (Miller), A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry), Night, Mother (Norman), Fences (Wilson), The Heidi Chronicles (Wasserstein), and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (Shange).
PROFESSOR LISBERGER
TIME BLOCK: 3-7
ENGLISH 92-H -- MOVEMENTS AND MOMENTS IN 20TH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
This seminar is designed as a survey of key moments and movements in twentieth-century Black America, from post-Reconstruction to the Nobel Prize, passing through the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement and the 1992 L.A. Riots. Our primary texts will be literary (poetry, essays, short stories and novels), but, we will also explore cultural expression in music (Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Rap) and performance art (Shange, Salt-n-Peppa, Queen Latifah). We will read selections from W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Nella Larsen, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Molefi Asante, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Derrick Bell, and others. Special attention will be given to the socio-political contexts of these cultural products.
PROFESSOR ELIA
TIME BLOCK 4-7
ENGLISH 101 -- OLD ENGLISH
An introduction to the Old English language and literature, and to Anglo-Saxon culture. Like any course in a foreign language, this one requires a certain amount of memorization--of vocabulary and grammatical paradigms. But Old English is not that difficult to learn, and our emphasis will be literary. We will read a selection of prose works, and lots of poetry, including "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer," and Beowulf.
PROFESSOR FYLER
TIME BLOCK C-3
ENGLISH 115 THE ENGLISH BIBLE
In this course we will read substantial selections from the Bible. Although we will consider theological and historical perspectives in reading the text, our primary focus will be literary, with particular emphasis on narrative. (Cross-listed as Religion 192B.)
PROFESSOR DUNN
TIME BLOCK: 7-3+
ENGLISH 129 ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND CULTURE: THE REGENCY WRITERS
King George is insane. The Prince Regent, ruling in his father’s place, is profligate. England is at war with France as Napoleon threatens England’s growing imperial domination. Lord Byron, one of the most famous writers of the Regency period is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" (according to one of his many mistresses). In this course, we will examine literary representations of madness, badness, and the dangers of various kinds of knowledge in terms of the social, sexual, national, and racial constructions of identity and power in British culture from 1807-1837. Readings will include a range of poetry by Byron, Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, and Percy Bysse Shelley, as well as fictional and non-fictional prose works such as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave.
PROFESSOR HOFKOSH
TIME BLOCK: 5-3+
ENGLISH 135 -- EMPIRE AND COUNTERCULTURE: BRITISH LITERATURE, 1860-1900
Is the art of Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries merely (as has been claimed) a "perversion," a "decay" of inherited values, or does it assert differences which have vital repercussions for us in the last decade of the twentieth century? This is a question we will be trying to answer as we consider novels, poems, paintings, art criticism and literary criticism of the last decades of the nineteenth century. We will pay particular attention to changes in the perception of science and of art which together affected the representation of human nature, race, nationality, gender, sanity--and especially insanity. Above all, we will be talking about changes in the perception of perception itself.
We will begin the semester with the revolution worked on the preoccupations and modes of art by Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), and will go on to consider both frequently anthologized and less familiar literature. The readings will include works by Ruskin, D.G. Rossetti, C. Rossetti, Arnold, Morris, Pater, Hopkins, Stevenson, Wilde, M.E. Coleridge, Hardy, Mew, Conrad, Barrie, and others. Students interested in getting a headstart should read The Picture of Dorian Gray (in the Penguin Portable Oscar Wilde, preferably) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Norton Critical Edition, preferably).
PROFESSOR EMERSON
TIME BLOCK: 6-5+
ENGLISH 141 -- AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM 1620-1815
We will consider texts (including oral expressions) from the many ethnic groups that interacted in all North America prior to the creation of the United States as a nation. For example, we will study Indian myths; Spanish travel narratives; Anglo histories, sermons, and poems; captivity narratives. We will also view some modern filmic treatments of the early interaction between Europeans and indigenous groups, e.g., Black Robe and Cabeza deVaca.
PROFESSOR ROSENMEIER
TIME BLOCK: 6-3+
ENGLISH 144 -- POE, HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE
We’ll take our cue from Poe, who wrote: "The supposition that the book of an author is a thing apart from the author’s self is I think, ill-founded." Starting with Poe, we’ll consider all the complex relations between "book" and "self" in the major works of all three writers.
PROFESSOR LEBOWITZ
TIME BLOCK: D-3
ENGLISH 147 -- AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
This course concentrates on contemporary texts and emphasizes the multicultural make-up of American literature, giving equal time to African American, Asian American, Native American, white European American, and Latina authors. We will read fiction, poetry, and some theory and criticism; and always we will be thinking about the ways in which class, race, and sexual orientation, as well as gender, affect the writers' lives and work. We will ask if there is such a thing as women's art. Are language, story, and form used by women in distinctive ways? How does art enact and participate in political struggle? Where is there common ground and where difference and dissonance among the texts we examine? Perhaps most important, how can we use what we gain from our reading in our lives beyond the classroom? Class will be run on a discussion basis; active student participation will be part of the course; and men as well as women are, of course, welcome.
Our readings in theory and criticism will include Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," Merle Woo's "Letter to Ma," Elizabeth Spelman's "Changing the Subject," Peggy McIntosh's "Unpacking the Knapsack," Gloria Yamato's "Something About the Subject Makes It Hard to Name," and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera; and we will view a filmed interview with Leslie Marmon Silko. Fiction and poetry will include, but not be limited to, Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, Lorna Dee Cervantes' Emplumada, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Audre Lorde's Our Dead Behind Us, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Janice Mirikitani's Shedding Silence, Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day. Also I hope we will be able to watch a couple of films.
PROFESSOR AMMONS
TIME BLOCK: ARRANGED -- T,Th 10-11:15
ENGLISH 192-A AMERICAN INDIAN WRITERS
We will read a small number of late 19th and early 20th century texts and then focus on contemporary fiction, film, and some poetry. We will think about issues of representation and self-representation; how the dominant culture sees and has seen Native Americans, from stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the Ignoble Savage to the Indian Princess and the Squaw/Drudge; forms of resistance to white racist exploitation, commodification, and theft; debate and difference between and among Indian-authored texts; connections and contrasts between the past and the present, both artistically and politically; and contemporary Indian critiques of the present and visions of the future. To help establish context, our study will include some historical readings and films, and students will have the opportunity to do research. Early texts will include Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883), parts of Luther Standing Bear’s My People the Sioux (1928), and Zitkala S ’s American Indian Stories (1921); also we will read Joe Starita’s documentary history, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995). Modern and contemporary texts will include two 20th-century classics, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), Leslie Marmon Silko’s brilliant, difficult political novel Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Sherman Alexie’s very contemporary postmodern fiction Reservation Blues (1995). We will listen to Awiakta’s Selu, and films will include Imagining Indians, a movie about the Carlisle Indian School, documentaries about particular authors, and Pow wow Highway.
PROFESSOR AMMONS
TIME BLOCK: Y-5
ENGLISH 192-B LITERARY THEORY
Literary theory undertakes to explore what it means to study literature, how we interpret what literature means, and whether or not "interpretation" is to be construed as the necessary goal of every critical reading. Though many approach the reading of literature as if the foundational principles of "reading" were eternally fixed and self-evident, the changing emphases of literary theory allow us to recognize the historically-specific contexts of our modes of dealing with literary works, not to mention the cultural and historical variations in what counts as "literature" itself. This course, intended to be a small seminar allowing students to study some critical approaches to literature and literary texts, will explore the ways in which modern criticism, building on the insights of structural linguistics, has elaborated various strategies of reading--deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, feminisms, and queer theory--that revise our ways of thinking about the possible intersections of language and life. Although our attention will be directed toward reading and interpreting difficult texts of contemporary theory, we will maintain a perspective throughout that will focus on the social and political consequences of those theoretical perspectives as well. Authors to be studied will probably include Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Jane Gallop, Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, Barbara Johnson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Judith Butler, and Diana Fuss, among others.
PROFESSOR EDELMAN
TIME BLOCK: Z-1
ENGLISH 192-C -- FICTION<-->NON-FICTION
In this course we will explore nineteenth-century visions, and twentieth-century revisions, of the boundaries between "fiction" and "non-fiction," and between the activities of the "artist" and those of the "critic" of art. The syllabus will include essays, novels, short stories, selections from memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries; we will dwell in particular on instances where a given writer has treated the same subject matter in both "fictional" and "non-fictional" forms. Authors will include Plato, Tennyson, W. Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, Wilde, H. James, J. Malcolm, Lawrence, Woolf, Wittig, Winterson, Kingston, Duras, E. White, L. Moore. In addition to our readings from published texts, each student’s writings--whether "critical" or "creative," "fictional" or "non-fictional"--will be an important basis of our discussions this semester.
PROFESSOR EMERSON
TIME BLOCK: Z-3
ENGLISH 192-D EAST MEETS WEST
This course is as much about politics and history as it is about ideologies of imaginative representations. We shall examine the contestation over the idea of "India" in texts, British and Indian, over the course of the century. We shall not only chart the competing, often contradictory, ideological constructions of "India" but we shall, as well, map the shifts and changes in the dynamic between a crumbling empire and an increasingly effective nationalist movement. Some of the questions the course will attempt to address are: what is the connection between political shifts and imaginative expressions? How has India been constructed in the British imagination and in what ways is India differently imagined by Indians?
We shall begin with the Mutiny of 1857 and its literary representation and end with contemporary, postcolonial challenges to the very idea of nationhood. Of the texts likely to be included are E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath, Kamala Markandaya’s Some Inner Fury, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal. In addition, we shall read a significant amount of literary critical texts.
I strongly recommend reading a basic text of modern Indian history before the semester begins.
PROFESSOR ROY
TIME BLOCK: Z-2
ENGLISH 192-E -- CONTEMPORARY JEWISH FICTION
A look at novels and stories by authors whose work has reflected, challenged, shaped and altered Jewish consciousness in the second half of the twentieth century. We’ll read fiction by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Woody Allen, Art Spiegelman and others.
PROFESSOR WILSON
TIME BLOCK: B-3
ENGLISH 192-F -- ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Why do we often feel like "outsiders" in the country we live? How might this feeling shape a writer’s work? What does it mean to be an Asian-American? Why do we need a separate course to focus on Asian American literature? These and other questions will guide us as we study the novels, plays, poems, and film included in this course. Works by Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Kodohata, Chang-Rae Lee, Bharati Mukherji, Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh, Cathy Song, among others, will reflect the heterogeneity and richness of Asian America. We will analyze the literature in its social and historical context. In addition to short writing assignments, students will keep a journal, give one oral presentation, and write two papers.
PROFESSOR HSIAO
TIME BLOCK: MW 10-11:20
ENGLISH 192-G -- STUDIES IN AMERICAN ETHNIC LITERATURE
This spring we will study selected texts from various ethnic groups in the U.S. As far as possible, the texts will reflect the ethnic make-up of the class. The following texts will be included:
Chang Rae-Lee, Native Speaker
Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow
Students will be asked to keep a journal and to present a group final project. Class discussions will encourage participants to share their cognitive as well as their affective responses to the texts.
PROFESSOR ROSENMEIER
TIME BLOCK: 7-3+
ENGLISH 192-H -- MODERNISM, COLONIALISM, PRIMITIVISM
An important context for reading modernist literature is colonialism, particularly the use by Great Britain of subject peoples, particularly racial "others," for economic and political gain. This course will examine the colonial project as a kind of "spectre" that "haunts" the texts of British writers of the early twentieth century. For many modernist authors, colonized people, viewed consistently as ethnic, racial and often gendered "others," are characterized as shadows and doubles for a white, British "self." The characterizations of those subjected to British imperialism are often used emphasize the alienation of Europeans from their unconscious minds. Modernist texts often ignore or downplay the material conditions (poverty, disease) and political predicaments (lack of representation and power) of the colonized. The metaphor of colonialism thus often attempts to erase the social signficance of, for exampe, race by emphasizing the psychological. Primitivism provides a rationale for this move, by locating colonized cultures in a prehistoric or precivilized past.
Class discussions will most likely focus on the following topics: alienation and otherness in Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness"; the colony as "negative space" in Conrad’s Victory and Katherine Mansfield’s "Prelude" and "At the Bay"; myth and colonial history in the poetry of W.B. Yeats; the trope of exile James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "The Sisters," and "The Dead"; missionary positions in W. Somerset Maugham’s "Rain" and E.M. Forster’s "The Life to Come"; representations of primitivism in T.S. Eliot’s and Edith Sitwell’s poetry and in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love; the triumph of the primitive in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust; and, the trap of colonialism in George Orwell’s "Shooting an Elephant."
PROFESSOR PIGGFORD
TIME BLOCK: A-3+
ENGLISH 192-I -- BLACK SOUTHERN LITERATURE
This course examines the social, political, gender, regional, and psychological concerns, as well as the narrative, poetic, and dramatic techniques of Black Southern writers. Emphasis is on literature published after the Civil War. Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays (1992), edited by John Oliver Killens and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., and Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1997) edited by William L. Andrews and Minrose C. Gwin, will serve as our touchstone texts. In addition to the aforementioned anthologies, reading may include Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autoboigraphy of Miss Emma Jane Pittman (1971), Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar (1974), Tina McElroy’s Baby of the Family (1990), Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Eric Lincoln’s The Avenue, Clayton City (1996), and Deborah E. McDowell’s Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (1996).
PROFESSOR CAREY
TIME BLOCK: ARRANGED -- MW 10-11:20
GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES
ENGLISH 292-A -- MAPPING LONDON
We will consider London as an urban space that can be mapped, measured, ordered, and imagined. The course will concentrate on two major maps of London: the 1746, John Rocque map, measuring thirteen feet by six and a half feet, an unwieldy feat of representation, and the Tallis Street Views, 1738-1740, representations of individual streets, published serially, showing front views of buildings, elevations, including brief histories of neighborhood, packed with advertisements originating from establishments on each street. Applying the theory of Benjamin, Foucault and deCerteau, we will study "urban" texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century including Ned Ward’s London Spy, Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance, Rochester’s London Poetry, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Defoe’s narratives of the life of Jack Sheppard, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Pope’s Dunciad, Swift’s urban poetry, Richardson’s Clarissa, Fielding’s Amelia, Burney’s Evelina, Boswell’s London Journal, Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Blake’s London poetry, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. An important part of this course will be the Bolles Collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century maps, artifacts, guide books, and illustrations, located in the archives. It is particularly rich in nineteenth century material.
PROFESSOR FLYNN
TIME BLOCK: Z-1
ENGLISH 292-B -- FORMS OF DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
This seminar will focus on the representation of varieties of eroticism in 16th- and 17th-century English writing. We will explore sexualities both orthodox (Petrarchism and its discontents) and marginalized (sodomy, female desire), and we will examine contemporary constructions of gender and the body. Throughout the course, we ask questions about the intersection(s) of representation and sexual desire, of literary and erotic form. Readings will include poems and plays by Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Webster, Middleton, Cavendish, and Marvell.
PROFESSOR HABER
TIME BLOCK: Z-3
ENGLISH 292-C -- WHITMAN AND DICKINSON
Intensive study of the works and lives of these contrasting 19th-century contemporaries who exemplify a public and a private voice of poetry. Each writer’s career will be studied in relation to mid- century America and its history of religious, political and racial turmoil. We will examine what happens to conventional lyric forms when taken in innovative directions by unconventional poets. Following their focus on self-representation we will test various critical approaches including biographical, psychoanalytic, and gay studies.
The first half of the semester will require a number of short papers on specific inquiries. The second half will require seminar reports on larger critical and cultural issues.
PROFESSOR CAVITCH
TIME BLOCK: Z*2