Past Course offerings:
Fall 1999

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.

LIST OF COURSES

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

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH  FALL 1999  COURSE SCHEDULE
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.
COURSE	COURSE TITLE	TIME BLOCK	INSTRUCTOR	MAX #
Courses in Creative Writing:
Eng 5A	Creative Writing: Poetry	W3	Richards	15
Eng 5B	Creative Writing: Poetry	W4	Lease	15
Eng 5C	Creative Writing: Poetry	5-3+	Rivard	15
Eng 5D	Creative Writing: Poetry	W3	Rivard	15
Eng 5E	Creative Writing: Fiction	A-3+	Alonso	15
Eng 5F	Creative Writing: Fiction	X1	Johnston	15
Eng 5G	Creative Writing: Fiction	X3	Johnston	15
Eng 5H	Creative Writing: Fiction	B3	Hurka	15
Eng 5I	Creative Writing: Fiction	A-3+	Hurka	15
Eng 5J	Creative Writing: Fiction	D-3	Simons	15
Eng 5K	Creative Writing: Fiction	B-3	Simons	15
Eng 5L	Creative Writing: Fiction	5-3+	Strong	15
Eng 5M	Creative Writing: Fiction	B-3	Weesner	15
Eng 5N	Creative Writing: Fiction	A-3+	Weesner	15
Eng 5O	Creative Writing: Fiction	Z1	Downing	15
Eng 5P	Creative Writing: Fiction	Z2	Downing	15
Eng 5Q	Creative Writing: Journalism	TBA	TBA	15
Eng 9A  *must have instructor's consent	Creative Writing: Fiction: Intermediate	D-3	Strong	15
Eng 9B *must have instructor's consent	Creative Writing: Fiction: Intermediate	Z*2	Wilson	15
Eng 11A	Intermediate Journalism	Z*3	Levinson	15
Eng 11B	Non-Fiction Writing	TBA	TBA	15
*must have instructor's consent
Eng 13	The Writing of Fiction	Z*3	Lebowitz	15
Eng 22	Forms of Poetry	Z1	Digges	15
Courses in Literature:
Eng 36	Black World Literature and Film	5-3+	Sharpe	50
Eng 45	Non-Western Women Writers	6-3+	Roy	40
Eng 50	Literary Studies	5-7	Cavitch	15
Eng 51	General View of English Literature	8-7	Haber	60
Eng 63	American Fiction 1900-1950	B-3	Johnson, R.	100
Eng 67	Shakespeare	5-3+	Dunn	80
Eng 80	Hitchcock	6-3+	Edelman	74
Eng 91A	The Architecture of the Imagination	Z4	Digges	30
Eng 91B	Underworlds	A-3+	Genster	30
Eng 91C	Literature and the Law	D-3	Sharpe	30
Eng 110	Chaucer	6-3+	Fyler	25
Eng 110WW	Recitation/Chaucer	M 3:30-4:20	Fyler	20
Eng 113	Literature of the English Renaissance	6-3+	Haber	25
Eng 115  Cross-listed w/CR 192B	English Bible	D-3	Dunn	25
Eng 132	Women & Fiction	5-3+	Bamber	25
Eng 134	Art and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Britain	6-5+	Emerson	25
Eng 142	Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau	D-3	Cavitch	25
Eng 145	American Realism	T,Th 10-11:15	Ammons	30
Eng 163	Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner	D-3	Lebowitz	40
Eng 191A	Perspectives on American Poetry	D-3	Bamber	25
Eng 191B	James Joyce's Ulysses	5-3+	Ullman	25
Eng 191C	Feminist Literature & Theory	5-3+	Hofkosh	25
Eng 191D	Studies in American Ethnic Literature	Z1	Rosenmeier	20
Eng 191E	Epic Strain	D-3	Genster	25
Eng 191F	Mass Entertainment, Minority Entertainers	7-3+	Litvak	25
Eng 191G	Nineteenth-Century Fiction	5-3+	Emerson	20
Courses Restricted to Graduate Students:
Eng 291A	Chaucer	Z3	Fyler	20
Eng 291B	Literary Theory	Z*2	Edelman	20
Eng 291C	Dickens, Eliot, Proust	Z1	Litvak	20

Course Descriptions

ENGLISH 5A -- CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
TIME BLOCK:  W3
PROFESSOR: RICHARDS

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.

ENGLISH 5B -- CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
TIME BLOCK:  W4
PROFESSOR: LEASE

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.

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 there 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, strategy and structure, point of view, etc. The class is run in workshop format, with assigned exercises.

ENGLISH 5F, 5G CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  5F (X1)  5G (X3)
PROFESSOR: JOHNSTON

If you're interested in exploring your creative processes through writing fiction, these courses are designed to help you, guiding you through writing a short story.  We'll spend a couple of weeks reading and discussing published and unpublished stories and essays (including some student writing) in order to understand how writers' choices create and inform their work, to develop critical discernment, and to establish a common vocabulary.  After that, the class will be a writing workshop-meaning that you'll pass out copies of your story, draft by draft, and lead discussions of it in class.  (Not as scary as it sounds.)  Through constructive and honest feedback, students will help each other through the revision process.  We will also read some theory, do writing exercises in and out of class, and, to the extent that it's necessary, brush up on grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  This will be the fun part.  Warning: These courses require a significant amount of focused time.  You'll be doing reading and writing assignments every week of the semester, and my artistic and technical standards are high.  Students unacquainted with the creative process may need to do extra work to keep up.  Your grade will be based primarily on your fiction writing (two to four drafts of one short story, to be completed and handed in at the end of the semester), but also on exercises and other written work, and on class participation.  This is a fairly intensive course.  If you're serious and enthusiastic about writing, you'll have fun and learn a lot.

ENGLISH 5H, 5I CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  5H (B3)         5I (A-3+)
PROFESSOR: HURKA
 

This course is designed to help you 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 the conscience of the author.

You'll also have a look at fiction, poetry, and essays written by masters.  We will investigate the current publishing world, so that if you want to send out your work at the end of the semester, you can do so.  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.

ENGLISH 5J, 5K CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  5J (D3)        5K (B3)
PROFESSOR: SIMONS

This class is an introduction to writing fiction.  We will write stories and exercises; read stories, some poems, and some non-fiction by established writers; and talk about the basic elements of the short story, especially character, voice, dialogue, action, and conflict.  In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor writes, "In most good stories it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story."  That is what interests me most, both as a writer and as a reader.  Students will be encouraged to use the stuff of their lives--the world and the people they know--to make stories.

 ENGLISH 5L CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  5-3+
PROFESSOR: STRONG

My section 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.

ENGLISH 5M, 5N  CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  5M (B3)           5N (A-3+)
PROFESSOR: WEESNER

This course is an introduction to fiction writing.  Our primary business will be in workshopping student stories: working as a class, we will seek to help the writer see all range of possibility in the story under consideration.  Other activities will include weekly readings in an anthology of contemporary fiction (to act as possible models) and exercises that will focus on various craft points.  Of the three stories you will write, two will be revised extensively (or "re-seen").  Our larger mission will be to help you locate and refine your own particular voice and also the stories you need to tell.  Finally, we will work to uncover some of the mystery of stories and in the process delve into craft and technique.

ENGLISH 50, 5P  CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  5O(Z1)        5P (Z2)
PROFESSOR: DOWNING
 

In this workshop, you will work as a writer and a critical reader of new fiction. All participants will write original short stories, which they will read aloud, discuss with their colleagues, and revise during the semester.  In addition, you will have the opportunity to address specific challenges of voice, tone, style, and point of view by writing brief experimental fictions (50 to 250 words), which will help us to understand how writers can invent dramatically different solutions to a single problem or fictional situation. There are only two fundamental requirements:  Be present.  Be productive.  At the semester's end, you will select your best original work and compile a portfolio, including drafts and revisions, to represent your progress and accomplishments.

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.

English 9 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. 210 at pre-registration.  A final class list may not be available until the first day of classes.  Consent of the instructor is required.

ENGLISH 9B WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE
TIME BLOCK:  Z*2
PROFESSOR: WILSON

A middle level workshop in the writing of short fiction.  We'll generate our own stories for discussion, and look at the work of some masters of the genre.  Those wising to enroll should submit an example of their work at pre-registration.  Consent of the instructor is required, registration alone does not guarantee a place in the class.

ENGLISH 11A INTERMEDIATE JOURNALISM
TIME BLOCK:  Z*3
PROFESSOR: LEVINSON

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.

ENGLISH 11B NON-FICTION WRITING
TIME BLOCK:  TBA
PROFESSOR:  TBA

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.

ENGLISH 13  THE WRITING OF FICTION
TIME BLOCK:  Z*3
PROFESSOR: LEBOWITZ

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.

ENGLISH 22 FORMS OF POETRY
TIME BLOCK:   Z1
PROFESSOR: DIGGES

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, 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.

ENGLISH 36 BLACK WORLD LITERATURE AND FILM
TIME BLOCK:       5-3+
PROFESSOR: SHARPE

This course is an introduction to African literature and the cultures of Africa and its diaspora in the US, the Caribbean and Britain.  We will explore a variety of African cultural forms– fiction, film, drama, poetry– and trace their transformation and transmission.  The selection of films and texts is not meant to be exhaustive but aims to allow us to begin examining the political and cultural meanings of the "black" world.  This course may include works by Michelle Cliff, Sembene Ousmane, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid, Ama Ata Aidoo, George Lamming, Toni Morrison.

ENGLISH 45 NON-WESTERN WOMEN WRITERS
TIME BLOCK:  6-3+
PROFESSOR: ROY

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.

ENGLISH 50 LITERARY STUDIES
TIME BLOCK:  5-7
PROFESSOR: CAVITCH

Please note: Enrollment is reserved for Fall freshmen students entering with AP scores of 5 in English.  Please do not pre-register.

The course will examine a few representative examples of major literary forms.  Beginning with lyric poetry we'll study works by John Donne, William Carlos Williams, and W. B. Yeats.  Moving to the novel we'll read Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence.  For short fiction we'll turn to Daisy Miller by Henry James.  Taking notice of contemporary fascination with autobiographical writing, we'll read the memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.  Three long essays and several shorter papers required.

ENGLISH 51 GENERAL VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
TIME BLOCK:   8-7
PROFESSOR: HABER

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.

ENGLISH 63 AMERICAN FICTION 1900-1950
TIME BLOCK:  B-3
PROFESSOR: JOHNSON

This course explores the emergence and character of American modernism, the self-conscious intellectual and aesthetic movement dating roughly from 1910 to 1945.  We will study modernism in its experimental literary expressions; as a social period encompassing the First World War, women's suffrage, Prohibition, and the Depression; as a period of diverse cultural expressions that include the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, European expatriation, and urban bohemianism.  We will focus on modernist writers' struggles to efface or subordinate plot or structure in narrative (an effort only more or less successful and oscillating in its visibility in the texts under study); the condition of the modern subject, alienation; and representations of gender, racial designations, and sexuality, with emphasis on class across these categories and the difficulties attending ideas of or efforts to achieve class mobility or economic self-sufficiency in this period.

Texts will include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby;  Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Jean Toomer, Cane;  W.E.B. Du Bois, from The Souls of Black Folk; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust; selections from the writings of Gertrude Stein; William Faulkner, The Bear; Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding; James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room, and others.

There will be mid-term and final examinations, as well as at least one paper.

ENGLISH 67 SHAKESPEARE
TIME BLOCK:  5-3+
PROFESSOR: DUNN

A study of eight Shakespeare plays: The Merchant of Venice, 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.  This course will include a discussion section.

ENGLISH 80 HITCHCOCK
TIME BLOCK:  6-3+
PROFESSOR: EDELMAN

Throughout this year, the centenary of Hitchcock's birth, the world is paying tribute to one of cinema's greatest directors. A major conference will be held at New York University this October to assess the
impact of his career; scholarly and popular books are being prepared to commemorate the occasion; and movie-houses around the globe are mounting retrospectives to showcase his accomplishments. Never has the work of "the master" been more insistently in the public eye. What better time to consider the relation between the achievement of that "mastery" and the constant almost obsessive attention to questions of sexuality, gender, and cultural authority in Hitchcock's films? We will examine how the act of seeing, the cinematic operation par excellence, gets "framed" in Hitchcock's films in relation to cultural practices such as political and erotic surveillance practices that Hitchcock's films allow us to recognize as central to any act of cinematic production. The films we will study merit such protracted critical attention not only because they trace the lineaments of our culture's fears and fantasies about power, sexual identity, unconscious desire, and the institution of the family, but also
because they complicate these issues, working against the grain of dominant ideologies, by deploying a distinctive cinematic language that enshrines Hitchcock's aesthetic of style. We will consider the pleasures Hitchcock's style affords while raising a host of questions about spectatorial pleasure in relation to Hitchcock's films: Whose pleasure is it? To what does it respond? How can we understand the connections it forges between aesthetic value and political ideology? To answer these questions we will read a number of theoretical accounts of cinema in general and of Hitchcock's cinema in particular (giving particular emphasis to recent feminist and queer analyses of his films). Our energies will be devoted primarily, though, to studying and learning how to read a number of Hitchcock's films, including The 39 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.

ENGLISH 91A THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE IMAGINATION
PROFESSOR:  DIGGES
TIME BLOCK:   Z4

Since the beginning of written language, poets have been constructing caves, rooms, hermits' cabins, abandoned houses, temples, the nine rings of hell, the tower of Babel, a marvelous garden called Eden, houses set safely inland, houses built close to sea, all dwellings made of words.

In this course designed around the approaching millennium, we will study these architectures of the imagination to discover how, through the ages, they reflect and house the artistic mind.  We'll also investigate the literary implications of such constructions and consider philosophical dynamics such as the nature of outside space and interior space.  Readings will be collected for students in a text created by the professor, a text including Plato's Allegory of the Cave, excerpts from Dante's Inferno, and Milton's Paradise Lost, as well as modern and contemporary writings such as Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Wittgenstein's language games, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Richard Kenny, and others.  We will also watch some films such as "Blade Runner," and "2001."  Two short papers and a final project will be required.

ENGLISH 91B UNDERWORLDS
TIME BLOCK:  A-3+
PROFESSOR: GENSTER

In classical mythology, the underworld is the kingdom of the dead, and yet its queen returns to the upper world for half the year, bringing with her the return of vegetative life.  For the goddess Persephone the movement from one world to the other is an annual migration, but for mortals, except under the most extraordinary circumstances, strictly forbidden.  Such a journey, from upper to lower world--with all the dangers, difficulties, and loss that attend mortals on the passage--is the subject of many of the most poignant myths and most powerful epics, from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to Dante's Inferno.  The capacity to undertake and to understand the journey is, in fact, one of the characteristics of the hero of epic.  Our aim in this class will be to study works which deal with such a movement, whether figured in the terms offered by classical epic in Homer, or Judeo-Christian iconography in Milton and Pope, or in Dickens' hybridization of epic norms and novelistic representation in Our Mutual Friend, or in modern variants on those terms, as in the subversive shadow worlds offered in the fictions of Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, in Marilynne Robinson's transpositions of epic from patriarchal to matriarchal.

One might describe the evolution we'll trace as a movement from a notion of the underworld as entirely separate from the living, to the idea of an underground as a kind of shadow world, hidden within the larger culture, though not acknowledged by it.  In such versions, the underworld is the site of insurgence rather than burial, as in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which uses the trope of a shadow world as a way to explore race relations.  Works to be studied may include Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, and selections from Homer's Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Lost and Pope's Dunciad, and Anthony Minghella's film Truly, Madly, Deeply.

ENGLISH 91C LITERATURE AND THE LAW
TIME BLOCK:  D-3
PROFESSOR: SHARPE

In this course we will look at the text of various laws that have had a tremendous impact in the U.S.  We will, for example, look at the text of Executive Order 9066, the order that interned Japanese Americans, in relation to the literary and filmic productions that arose in response to that Order.  Among other things, we will read, Brown V. Board of Education in relation to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the Chinese Exclusion Acts in relation to Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, and Proposition 187 and Cherríe Moraga's The Last Generation.  We will also view several films like Ancestors in America and History and Memory.  This course will have a multiethnic literature focus with reading by Native American, Black, Latina, Euro-American, and Asian American writers.

ENGLISH 110 CHAUCER
TIME BLOCK:  6-3+
PROFESSOR: FYLER

This course explores the works of one of the three or four greatest poets in English.  We'll read Chaucer in Middle English, but he is in almost every respect easier to understand than Shakespeare, who lived two centuries later.  We will spend roughly half of the semester on the Canterbury Tales, the other half on Chaucer's most extraordinary poem, Troilus and Criseyde.  Chaucer is primarily a narrative rather than a lyric poet: though the analogy is an imperfect one, the Canterbury Tales are like a collection of short stories, and Troilus like a novel in verse.  We will talk about Chaucer's literary sources and contexts, the interpretation of his poetry, and his treatment of a number of issues, especially gender issues, that are of perennial interest.
 

ENGLISH 110WW CHAUCER/WRITING WORKSHOP  M 3:30-4:20 FYLER

110WW 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 encourage a closer examination of the course material.
 

"All the world's a stage," says Jaques in As You Like It, "and all the men and women merely players."  The theatrical attitude toward life evident in these lines was characteristic of the Renaissance.  Not only was this the greatest age of the English drama, it was an age that was deeply dramatic:  in both the "literary" and the "non-literary" texts of the period, the possibility repeatedly surfaces that everyone is continually playing a part—that each of our identities consists merely of a set of inconsistent roles.  This possibility could be extremely liberating, permitting one to escape the confines of fixed social and gendered positions, and enabling the creation of "other worlds"—alternative societies or utopias.  It could also, of course, be deeply frightening:  taken to an extreme, it threatens the foundations of traditional beliefs about religion and society.  We will examine how these conflicting attitudes manifested themselves in the poetry and prose of the period:  we will begin with early humanist writings, look closely at the development of the lyric, and read prose and poetic romances, national epics and erotic epyllia (small epics).   We will consider carefully the self-consciousness about representation that is evident in most of these texts, and we will explore their authors' ever-present delight in—and distrust of—the powers of language and art.  Readings will probably include works by More, Erasmus, Castiglione, Sidney, Greville, Labé, Queen Elizabeth, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

ENGLISH 115 ENGLISH BIBLE
TIME BLOCK:   D-3
PROFESSOR: DUNN
 Co-listed w/CR 192B

In this course we will read substantial selections from the Bible.  Although we will consider theological, textual and historical perspectives in reading the text, our primary focus will be literary.  Our most sustained inquiries will be into questions of narrative, but we will also consider issues of poetics, genre, and translation.  Finally, we will discuss the place the Bible has in the history of interpretation, with particular emphasis upon the way the book interprets itself and establishes its own canonicity.

 ENGLISH 132 WOMEN AND FICTION
TIME BLOCK:   5-3+
PROFESSOR: BAMBER

"But I digressed and was free."  Grace Paley

Do (or should) women's narratives emphasize the suffering of women in patriarchy?  If you say "yes," you're wrong, and if you say "no," you're also wrong.  In this course we will look at the different ways in which women writers simultaneously include and evade what might be called the Matter of Women.  The authors we will consider are for the most part committed to both narrative and anti-narrative, representation and language.  This is a course for readers who are as interested in matters of language and form as in matters of gender and identity.

Some authors we will read are: Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, and Maxine Hong Kingston.  We will also see several woman-made movies: Clueless, Strangers in Good Company, and  I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.

ENGLISH 134 ART AND SOCIAL CONFLICT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
TIME BLOCK:            6-5+
PROFESSOR: EMERSON

What difference does art make?  What difference can it make, in the midst of social conflicts that set groups against groups, individuals against individuals, and individuals against themselves?  The Victorians' answers to these questions have powerfully shaped the answers that have emerged in twentieth-century America (whether Americans realize it or not), for the Victorians were the first to live in a modern industrialized democracy, and to contend with problems and possibilities that are still unresolved and unexhausted today.

In this course we'll explore a range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, looking at popular romances as well as at "classics" of "high" Victorian realism.  Attention to painting, photography, and music will extend our grasp of relations between art and social forces in nineteenth-century Britain.  Throughout the semester 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, C. Brontë, Tennyson, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw. 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.

Note:  students who have previously taken "English 134:   Victorian Literature" may not take this course for credit.

ENGLISH 142 COOPER, EMERSON, THOREAU
TIME BLOCK:   D-3
PROFESSOR: CAVITCH

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.

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 film makers 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.

ENGLISH 163 HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER
PROFESSOR: LEBOWITZ
TIME BLOCK:  D-3
We will read the major novels, focusing on the authors' careers and creative lives and on the environment–cultural and psychological–which influenced their work.

ENGLISH 191A PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN POETRY
PROFESSOR: BAMBER
TIME BLOCK:   D-3

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 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 Buddhists 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 Deconstruction is required.

ENGLISH 191B JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES
TIME BLOCK:  5-3+
PROFESSOR: ULLMAN

After a cursory examination of Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, we shall spend the semester going through Joyce's masterwork Ulysses, elucidating many of the difficulties and trying to understand its structure as well as its details.  I will lecture on Joyce's predecessors briefly, his place in the history of the novel, his philosophical background, and say some things about Irish history, when it is necessary background.  But most of our time will be spent on the actual novel.  Two papers, one a shorter one at midterm and the second a longer one at the end of class, will be required, as will class attendance and participation.

No prerequisites, but it would be helpful if students had read Dubliners, Portrait, and perhaps The Odyssey before the semester begins.

ENGLISH 191C FEMINIST LITERATURE & THEORY: WOLLSTONECRAFT TO WOMANISM
TIME BLOCK:  5-3+
PROFESSOR: HOFKOSH

Starting with the early feminist work of British writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), we will explore questions of women's nature, place, and power by reading a range of imaginative literature in conjunction with theoretical writings from the 19th and 20th centuries.  We will look both at the Anglo-American tradition of liberal feminism developed from Wollstonecraft and challenges to its basic assumptions from French feminists, non-Western writers and activists, and women of color.  Readings may include novels, poems, or theoretical prose of Charlotte Brontë, Hèléne Cixous, Buchi Emecheta, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Jean Rhys, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Ida B. Wells, Jeanette Winterson, Monique Wittig, Virginia Woolf, and a variety of contemporary thinkers about women and gender.

ENGLISH 191D STUDIES IN AMERICAN ETHNIC LITERATURE
TIME BLOCK:   Z1
PROFESSOR: ROSENMEIER

This fall we will study selected texts from various ethnic groups in the U.S.  As far as possible, the texts will reflect the ethnic makeup 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 group final projects.  Class discussions will encourage participants to share their cognitive as well as their affective responses to the texts.

ENGLISH 191E EPIC STRAIN
TIME BLOCK:  D3
PROFESSOR: GENSTER

Reading and discussion of a variety of epics and mock-epics in poetry and prose, with a focus on how writers have adapted epic to the requirements of their times and their voices.  We will look particularly at the way that the epic has been explored by imitation, by parody, and by extension into novel and autobiography.  Writers to be read may include Homer, Virgil, Milton, Pope, Fielding, Burney, Boswell, and Marilynne Robinson.

ENGLISH 191F MASS ENTERTAINMENT, MINORITY ENTERTAINERS
TIME BLOCK:   7-3+
PROFESSOR: LITVAK

What does it mean that so much of mainstream entertainment in the United States has been produced by members of marginalized, oppressed, or unpopular minorities?  Focusing on the contributions of Jews, African Americans, and lesbians and gay men to U.S. mass culture in the twentieth century, this seminar will examine the various strategies that members of these groups have developed for surviving within, transforming, and even disturbing the cultural mainstream.  The course will look at continuities and changes in cultural production from the twenties to the present, traveling by way of Tin Pan Alley, the Broadway musical, and the classic Hollywood cinema.  We will consider not only exemplary texts and performances from the worlds of film, theater, television, popular music, and advertising, but also important works of cultural history, criticism, and theory; the former may include films like The Jazz Singer, Stormy Weather, Superfly, Lady Sings the Blues, and The Nutty Professor (both versions), musicals like Funny Girl, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cabaret, and television shows like Seinfeld, Ellen, Frasier, and The Simpsons, while the latter may include works by such authors as Donald Bogle, bell hooks, Vito Russo, D. A. Miller, and Kobena Mercer.  Students will be required to attend frequent screening in addition to regular class sessions.

ENGLISH 191G NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
TIME BLOCK:5-3+
PROFESSOR:   EMERSON

In this course we'll read "classics" of nineteenth-century British fiction in relation to "classics" written during the same period by German, French, Russian, and American writers.  We'll look closely at the ways in which the authors read and reacted to each other, at the continuities and discontinuities between the forms they developed for their fictions, and at the relations between these fictions and their historical, social, and cultural contexts.  As we pair and compare each of six British fictions with another written elsewhere, we will also explore the issues raised by translation--making and reading them, in the nineteenth century and now.  The authors we'll discuss will probably be Austen, Kleist, C. Brontë, Balzac, E. Brontë, Turgenev, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Tolstoy, Stoker, James.

Nineteenth-century fiction tends to be long, so you should get started on the reading during vacation.  A list of titles and editions will be available in the English Department office in April.

ENGLISH 291A CHAUCER
TIME BLOCK:  Z3
PROFESSOR: FYLER

This seminar, restricted to graduate students, will be concerned with Chaucer before the Canterbury Tales, the courtly poet for whom French, Italian, and Latin literature are deeply influential.  Our focus will be on Chaucer's greatest work, Troilus and Criseyde, its sources in Boccaccio and in the Latin epics of Vergil and Statius, and a close reading of its text.  We will be concerned with a number of issues the poem raises, about narrative technique, historiography, gender, and the nature and meaning of love.

This course will offer students an opportunity to examine the transformations in literary analysis effected by the movement from structuralism to post-structuralism and from post-structuralism to cultural studies. The question of reading will occupy the center of our discussions as we investigate theories of textuality and the textuality of theory. We will devote our attention, that is, not only to mastering the discursive "content" of theoretical works, but also to exploring how those works themselves operate within and against the paradigms of reading that they propose. Beginning with Saussure's investigations of the nature of the signifier, and moving onto Derridean and Lacanian revisions of philosophy and psychoanalysis that draw upon his work, we will trace the vicissitudes of textuality--the theoretical and performative engagement with figure, representation, and the imperatives of meaning--through documents of contemporary criticism to see how theories of rhetoric affect our understandings of, among other things, literature, history, notions of the aesthetic, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity. Topics of discussion will include the politics of theory, the matter of style, the question of excess, and the rhetorics of history. Readings will probably include works by Saussure, Derrida, de Man, Lacan, Johnson, Gates, Foucault, Butler, Miller, Barthes, Bersani, and Laplanche.

ENGLISH 291C   DICKENS, ELIOT, PROUST
TIME BLOCK:  Z1
PROFESSOR: LITVAK

We will read works by these three authors in an attempt to elaborate a larger theory of the novel as a cultural practice.  While considering, that is, the particular relations among the two major Victorian novelists and their foremost European Modernist heir, we will be concerned with more general questions such as realism, sympathy, comedy, sentimentality, irony, and worldliness.  We will pay particular attention to the politics of novelistic style, and we will read extensively in the relevant criticism and theory.  Texts will include Dickens's Bleak House and Dombey and Son, Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, and Proust's Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove, as well as works by such theorists and critics as Theodor Adorno, Leo Bersani, Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Gallagher, and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick.