Past Course offerings:
Spring 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.

ENGLISH 6A
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 6C, 6D
CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

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.

PROFESSOR:   HURKA
TIME BLOCK:  6C --  B-3;6D -- A-3+

ENGLISH 6H, 6I
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 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.

PROFESSOR:  RIVARD
TIME BLOCK:   6H-- D-3; 6I 5-3+

 ENGLISH 6G, 6J
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:  6G-- D-3; 6J-- 5-3+
 

ENGLISH 6K, 6L
CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

English 6K and 6L are beginning courses in fiction writing.  We will spend several weeks reading and discussing published and unpublished stories and essays in order to understand how writers' choices create and inform their work, and to develop critical discernment.  Beginning in week four or five, the class will be a writing workshop–meaning that you will discuss each other's stories in class.  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.  (The fun part.)  Warning: the course will require a significant amount of focused time.  You'll be doing reading and writing assignments every week.  Your grade will be based on your fiction writing (two to three drafts of one short story, to be completed and handed in at the end of the semester)–50%, exercises and other written work– 25%, and on class participation–25%.

PROFESSOR:   JOHNSTON
TIME BLOCK:  6K-- 4-7; 6L-- Z1

ENGLISH 6M, 6N
CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

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.

PROFESSOR:   SIMONS
TIME BLOCK:  6M-- D-3; 6N-- A-3+

ENGLISH 60
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:  GIBSON
TIME BLOCK:  D-3
 

ENGLISH 6P
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:  W-2

ENGLISH 6Q
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 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 Cantor'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.

PROFESSOR:  CANTOR
TIME BLOCK:  Z*3

ENGLISH 11A
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 11B
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:  D-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
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 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:    Z1

ENGLISH 52
GENERAL VIEW OF BRITISH LITERATURE

This course offers a survey of British literature from the late eighteenth through the twentieth century.  Our emphasis will be on poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose in the dominant tradition, and on juxtapositions of these works with writings from outside of the dominant tradition.  We will be looking at how this tradition developed and at how it is changing now, along with the definitions of such familiar words as "English," "literature," and "author."  Throughout the semester we will attend to ways in which the internal thematic and formal features of a particular text may be related to its historical, social, and cultural contexts.

PROFESSOR: EMERSON
TIME BLOCK:  5-3+

ENGLISH 59
CONTINUITY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course surveys literature of the United States and the Americas through to the middle of the nineteenth century, exploring ways in which contemporary issues of race and gender, ambition and class, exclusion and enfranchisement, individuality and the common weal have been prominent in and since the earliest indigenous and European narratives.  We will question the traditional view that American literary history is a sequential progression of key texts–a canonized narrative of literary and cultural development, a continuity–by studying an array of voices that have constituted that history.  We will consider how, rather than a continuous single narrative of development, our literary heritage is shaped by multiple narratives that are by turns conflicting, complementary, esoteric, eccentric.  Observing the way binary figures of light/dark, civilized/savage, godly/heathen (among others) pervade our literature and much traditional thought about it, we will analyze the naturalization, modification, evolution, and dispute of such binaries in texts from the early period to the middle of the nineteenth century.  We will contextualize the literature in its historical and cultural moment, and topics will include questions of conformity and difference, notions of individualism, and paradigms for dissent and its suppression.

Readings begin with Shakespeare's The Tempest, European contact narratives, and Native American expressions, followed by selections from Puritan writings and other texts through to Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley.  We will then concentrate on early to middle nineteenth-century literature, including short fiction by Poe and Melville; works of Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs; and Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Our Nig.  Requirements include two papers and a final exam.  It would be helpful to have read Uncle Tom's Cabin, an especially long novel, before the semester begins.

Please come to the first class having already read Shakespeare's The Tempest; it will be part of the lecture and discussion of the first meeting.

PROFESSOR:  JOHNSON
TIME BLOCK:  B-3

ENGLISH 68
SHAKESPEARE

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:   HABER
TIME BLOCK:  6-5+

ENGLISH 92A
POETS IN EXILE

The American poet Emily Dickinson wrote in seclusion.  Elizabeth Bishop moved to Brazil where she wrote some of her great poems.  Massachusetts-born Sylvia Plath finished Ariel while living in London and Devon.  Then there are the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva who during Stalin's reign wrote in secret their pure lyrics.  The Cuban dissident poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela spent two years in Castro's prison where she found herself writing (in her head) the work of her life.  Women who exile themselves.  Or who are exiled by political circumstance.  Women who write poetry to find home.  To stay alive.  In this course we will read these women, and others (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Varela in translation), read carefully their poems, letters, and parts of their biographies as we look at a poetry that often ignores history, culture, political systems to find for itself a place in a clearing.  Several short papers, memorization of poems, writing exercises, a few field trips, and a longer paper at the end of the term will be required.

PROFESSOR:  DIGGES
TIME BLOCK:  Z-4

Reading and discussion 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 92D
NARRATIVES OF ENSLAVEMENT

In this course we will read slave narratives and contemporary works that take as their subject enslavement and its after-effect, and the enslaved body.  We will read a variety of theoretical texts such as "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," and "Seduction and the Ruses of Power."  We will also, hopefully, see a number of films, among them: Sankofa, Beloved, The Journey of August King and Jefferson in Paris. Class will be run on a discussion basis and each student will be responsible for a 15-20 minute presentation on one article or book.

Texts may include: Celia, A Slave, Our Nig, Puddin'head Wilson, The Cattle Killing, Corregidora, The Life of Gustavus Vassa, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.

PROFESSOR: SHARPE
TIME BLOCK: Z-1

ENGLISH 92E
MODERN POETRY

Stream-of-consciousness...verse libre...imagism...prose
poetry...facades...gyres...epiphanies...silence...fragments....

English and American poets writing in the first half of this century attempted to come to terms with the collapse of religious narratives, critiques of class relations, the rise of technology, increasing urbanization, and a pervasive pessimism about the future of Western society.  Modernism represents the impulse to "make it new": to recreate and rejuvenate literature and culture by reorganizing its detritus, to reimagine the tradition by overcoming or challenging it.  This course will focus on writers who engaged with the modernist dilemma(s) and who, indeed, theorized modernism.  Thus, in addition to a wide range of poetic texts, we will examine modernist apologias, including Pound's "Imagisme," Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Crane's "Modern Poetry," and Stein's "What are Masterpieces and Why are There So Few of Them?"

PROFESSOR: PIGGFORD
TIME BLOCK: W-1

ENGLISH 92F
MEDIEVAL WOMEN

This is a search for the voices of dissent, subversion, and rebellion in the most notoriously antifeminist period in Western history.  We will hear from those who, officially, had no voice, yet who manage to speak to us, powerfully, from a remote and often fascinatingly bizarre period.  We will seek out women authors, such as Christine de Pizan (The City of Women), who fought back against the misogynism of the time; and Margery Kempe, who wrote "the earliest known autobiography of an English person," and who berated bishops in their own palaces in a period when lay women were being burned alive for unauthorized religious activities.  We'll encounter the forbidden love of Héloïse and Peter Abelard and its peculiar consequences.  We'll look at Chaucer's complex and remarkably persistent attempts to construct feminine perspective outside the standard misogynist conventions.  We'll encounter devils.  Witchcraft.  Heresy.  Erotic fantasies about Jesus.

PROFESSOR:  BENNETT
TIME BLOCK:  Z*3

ENGLISH 115
THE ENGLISH BIBLE
 Cross listed with REL 115

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.

PROFESSOR:  DUNN
TIME BLOCK:  7-3+

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 (preferably in The Writings of Oscar Wilde, published by Oxford and edited by Isobel Murray) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (preferably in the Norton Critical Edition).

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:   Z-1
 

ENGLISH 143
WHITMAN AND DICKINSON

Intensive study of the poetry and lives of these contrasting 19th century American contemporaries.  Two critical essays, and a few short exercises on individual poems.

PROFESSOR:  CAVITCH
TIME BLOCK:  D-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

AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

This course concentrates on contemporary texts and emphasizes the multicultural make-up of American literature.  We will focus primarily on texts by Latina, Black, and Asian American authors.  We will read fiction and some theory and criticism and always we will be thinking about the ways in which race, class, gender and sex affect the writers' lives and work.  How does art enact and participate in political struggle?  Class will be run on a discussion basis; active student participation will be part of the course.

Texts may include: Mama Day, Woman Hollering Creek, The Dogeaters, Comfort Woman, Memory Mambo, Free Enterprise, and Rat Bohemia.

PROFESSOR:  SHARPE
TIME BLOCK: B-3

ENGLISH 157

JOYCE AND LAWRENCE

In contrasting ways in their fiction, Joyce and Lawrence changed the meaning of literary realism.  They also changed general views about sexuality.  We will examine their innovative, controversial representations of consciousness and its connections to an external world.  We will attend to the history of Modernism, 1900-1930, as the broad cultural context of their work.  Two critical essays.

PROFESSOR: CAVITCH
TIME BLOCK:  5-5

ENGLISH 192A ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

How might the feeling of being an outsider, at home and in society, shape a writer's work?  What does it mean to be an Asian American?  How do the historical experiences of Asians in America shape the identity quest of their writers?  These and other questions will guide us as we read fiction, drama, and poetry by Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, Bharati Mukherji, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Philip Kan Gotanda, Cathy Song and others.  In addition, we will also study criticism and film.  Students will keep a journal, give one oral presentation, and write two papers.

PROFESSOR: HSIAO
TIME BLOCK:  TTH 10:05-11:20

ENGLISH 192B QUEER THEORY

"Queer": strange, odd, perverse, eccentric, bent, spinsterly, deviant.  This course will trace the rise of queer studies from two principal disciplines: feminism and lesbian and gay studies.  Our approach will thus be broadly genealogical, emphasizing the encounter--between these fields and poststructuralist philosophy--which produced a theoretics of "queerness."  The texts of influential figures such as Adrienne Rich, Robert K. Martin, Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Michael Warner, Lee Edelman, et al. will be utilized to establish the lineaments of queer theory.  In the second half of the semester, we will attempt to put theory into (critical) practice, by engaging with texts and cultural products that foreground the complications of sexual desire.  These will include Plato's Symposium, Sappho's poetry, Aelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship, Marlowe's (and Derek Jarman's) Edward II, Whitman's "Calamus," Forster's (and Merchant Ivory's) Maurice, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, recent "AIDS poetry," In & Out, Will & Grace.

 PROFESSOR:  PIGGFORD
TIME BLOCK:   W2

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

Something happened.  Maybe around 1900-1939 or so.  C.S. Lewis wrote: "I do not think any previous age produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewildering new as the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists and Picasso has been in ours.  And modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other ‘new poetry' but new in a new way, almost in a new dimension."

And the novel, that bright book of life?  We will look all too carefully at three of the greatest modernists:  Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Marcel Proust-and we'll glance a time or two at Sigmund Freud, Joseph Conrad, and modern art and philosophy.  Is it really as new as all that?  In what ways?  And why–what changed so much that in order to do his job (to educate, entertain, enlighten and terrify) each of these writers had to become so damn different from each other and from the novels of the past?

PROFESSOR:  CANTOR
TIME BLOCK:  A-3+

ENGLISH 192E
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE EARLY MODERN CITY:  ENGLAND AND JAPAN
    Cross listed w/HIST 193GL & WC 192LF

This interdisciplinary course, team-taught by an historian of Japan in the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868) and a cultural critic of English literature from 1660-1780, will examine the great early modern cities of Edo (Tokyo) and London.  We will be asking how these two cities developed, how their cultures were constructed, and most importantly, why the cultures of London and Edo share remarkable similarities when they developed in relative isolation from each other.  It is generally agreed that the rise of capitalism shaped the culture of early modern London, resulting in productions, both high and low, that represent the strains and conflicts of a system which increasingly commodified social, domestic and intellectual relations.  The rise of capitalism in Tokugawa Japan has received far less attention in the Western scholarship.  There are remarkable similarities in the cultural productions of the two largest urban centers of the early modern world.  Issues of status and class, sexuality and gender, sanitation and public order, crime and punishment, individuality and social discipline dominate elite and popular works of the period.  Asking first "What is the city?" and "what is Early Modern?"  We will employ both primary and secondary sources to understand the construction of early modern culture in London and Edo.

Texts pertaining to London will include Etherege's Man of Mode, some poetry of Rochester, Dryden and Pope, Ward's London Spy, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and Hogarth's Harlot's Progress and The Rake's Progress.

PROFESSOR: FLYNN/LEUPP
TIME BLOCK:  Z-2

How does a book get described as evil?  We'll read and discuss a variety of works which at least some of their contemporaries considered shocking, immoral, or dangerous.  We'll also look at the responses of both institutional (governmental, religious) and ordinary readers to the books in question, ranging from derision to book banning to offers of a bounty for killing its author.  By examining these works and their reception we'll try to understand the relations among the texts, their authors, and the cultural context of reception.  Texts may include: Hobbes, Leviathan; Byron, Don Juan; Wollstonecraft, Mary; C. Brontë, Jane Eyre; Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Nabokov, Lolita; Rushdie, The Satanic Verses.

PROFESSOR:  GENSTER
TIME BLOCK:   8-3+

The expert reader is a detective, a gatherer of clues and intimations, a tireless questioner whose queries unwrap the layers of the text.  We will use the terrain of American literature to explore "madness" as gendered phenomenon, as spiritual dislocation, as repressed cultural conscience.  First-person narrators, poetic speakers and manic soliloquizers characterized as marginal, as Other, as distressed, disturbed, meandering and tainted will unite our reading and critical thinking.  From Melville's alienated scrivener, James's "possessed" children and Gilman's "madwoman" in the attic, to Ozick's dispossessed holocaust survivor, Ford's manipulative and murderous "victim," Hawkes's doomed driver and Pynchon's American Oedipa, we will examine illness as metaphor and the construction of "madness," with its concomitant labeling, prescriptions and "cures."  Critical reading will include Foucault's Madness and Civilization and Sontag's Illness As Metaphor; the films  Twelve Monkeys, and "Meshes of The Afternoon" will complete our fictive landscape of instability, insanity and imagination.

Questions, close readings, comparative critical essays and original theoretical arguments will be expected.

 Course Requirements

 *Attendance and active participation every week in the form of prepared questions or close readings (30%).
 *Oral presentation which will consist of five pages: one page of questions on the text, one page of selected passages to be analyzed, one page of issues or theoretical paradigms, and two pages which summarize and react to a critical or historical article (35%).
 *One 8 page critical essay on Jazz, the topic to be decided in consultation with the instructor, due May 7th  (35%).
 NO LATE PAPERS OR ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE ACCEPTED

 Required Texts

 Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; Henry James, "The Turn of The Screw"; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Sylvia Plath, Ariel; Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl; Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted; Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor;  Michel Foucault, Madness & Civilization;  Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; John Hawkes, Travesty;
 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49;  Toni Morrison, Jazz

PROFESSOR:  WHELAN
TIME BLOCK:  Y-2

ENGLISH 292A CULTURES OF BLACK BRITAIN

When the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury docks in 1948, it brought the first wave of post-war immigrants into labour-scarce Britain.  Massive labour recruitment from India, Pakistan and the West Indies brought in tens of thousands of "commonwealth" subjects who changed and challenged British culture and politics.  The collective experience of becoming "black" British citizens, the continuous struggle to define what that meant and, in the process redefining "Britishness" for the culture as a whole, has been at the very centre of cultural production by those who are still disparagingly referred to as "immigrants."
 
This course will focus on the ways in which black British culture forged for itself an identity and political agenda and has attempted to resist the assault of the British "mainstream," fundamentally calling into question "authentic forms of Englishness."  We shall read the works of Britain's black intellectuals such as C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, A. Sivanadan, Pratibha Paramer, Paul Gilroy (among others) to chart the shifts in the politics and theoretical debates of the past two decades.  The course also includes fiction, poetry, music and films.  A nodding acquaintance with post-war British history would be helpful.

Novels likely to be included are: V.S. Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival; John Riley's Unbelonging; Caryl Phillips; The Final Passage; Sam Selvon's  Moses Ascending; Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses;           Leena Dhingra's Amritvela; George Lamming's Pleasures of Exile.

PROFESSOR:   ROY
TIME BLOCK:  Z*2

ENGLISH 292B
ROMANTICISM AND GENDER

Initial feminist considerations of romantic period writing examined the ways the feminine was represented in canonical poetry and remarked the absence of women writers during this period, defining romanticism as an essentially masculine movement.  With the rediscovery of the work of many women writers–of poems, novels, journals, and political polemic–and in the light of recent explorations of the flexibility and complexity of gender categories, we must redefine the field and ask again what it might reveal about the history of sexuality.  Reading a variety of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writing in conjunction with critical studies and theory, we will collaboratively venture such a redefinition.  Authors may include Austen, Barbauld, Byron, Hermans, Keats, Owenson, PB Shelley, C. Smith, Tighe, W. Wordsworth.

PROFESSOR: HOFKOSH
TIME BLOCK:  Th 1:00-4:00PM