Past Course offerings:
Spring 2000

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.
 
 

Courses in Creative Writing:
 

Courses in Literature
 

COURSE	TITLE	TIME	INSTRUCTOR	MAX. NUMBER
ENG 52 General	View of English Literature	5-3+	Genster	60
ENG 59	Continuity of American Literature	B-3	Johnson	90
ENG 68	Shakespeare	5-3+	Bamber	90
ENG 92A	Poets on Poetry	Z4	Digges	30
ENG 92B	Jane Austen: Novels and Films	A-3+	Genster	30
ENG 92C	Reading Black Women’s Texts: Body, Memory, Representation	5-3+	Sharpe	40
ENG 92D	Postmodernism and Film	7-3+	Edelman	74
ENG 92E	Celebrity, Publicity, Art	6-3+	Litvak	30
ENG 101	Old English	M,W, 10-11:15	Fyler	25
ENG 129	Romantic Writing and Culture: Monsters, Dreamers, and the End of the World	5-3+	Hofkosh	30
ENG 129WW	Writing Workshop for Romantic Writing and Culture	8-1	Hofkosh	12
ENG 139	Early African-American Literature	M,W, 10-11:15	Rodríguez	30
ENG 141	American Literature from Columbus to the Revolution	Z1	Rosenmeier	25
ENG 141WW	Writing Workshop	TBA	Rosenmeier	20
ENG 143	Whitman and Dickinson	D-3	Cavitch	25
ENG 144	Poe, Hawthorne, Melville	D-3	Lebowitz	40
ENG 147	American Women Writers	D-3	Sharpe	30
ENG 148	American Indian Writers	Y3	Ammons	25
ENG 157	D. H. Lawrence	5-5+	Cavitch	25
ENG 192A	Asian American Literature	T, Th, 10-11:15	Hsiao	25
ENG 192B	What the Novel Knows	Z*2	Litvak	25
ENG 192C	Contemporary Jewish Fiction Co-listed w/JS 192	B-3	Wilson	25
ENG 192D	Modern Novel	A-3+	Cantor	25
ENG 192E	Theoretical Fictions	Z1	Edelman	20
ENG 192F	Perspectives on American Poetry	D-3	Bamber	25
ENG 192G	Ovidian Tradition	6-3+	Fyler	25

Courses Restricted to Graduate Students
 

COURSE	TITLE	TIME	INSTRUCTOR	MAX. NUMBER
ENG 292A	American Puritianism	Z3	Rosenmeier	15
ENG 292B	Forms of Desire in Early Modern England	Z2	Haber	20
ENG 292C	The Slave Narrative in the African American Literary Tradition	Z1	Rodríguez	20

 

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
 
 

ENGLISH 6A, 6B CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION 6A

Z1-- HERSHMAN

6B --Z*4

A fiction workshop focusing not only on basic fiction skills–characters, plot, dialogue–but also on the power to be found in concision, where the writer’s eye for crafting details and selectively editing serves to strengthen a work. In the first four weeks, students will read and discuss published stories and write interlinked short scenes. The balance of the term is devoted to the workshop format. Students will write two short stories, as well as rewrite the more challenging of these two works.

ENGLISH 6C CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

Z1-- 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 word), 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.
 
 
 
 

ENGLISH 6D, 6E CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION 6D T,Th, 5:30-6:45

6E A-3+ --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 6F CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

A-3+ --WEESNER

This course is an introduction to fiction writing. Our primary business will be in workshopping students’ 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 6H CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

B-3 STRONG

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.

ENGLISH 6I, 6J CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

6I-- Z3

6J-- W1 --JOHNSTON

English 6I and 6J 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%.
 
 

ENGLISH 6K, 6L CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION

6K -- B-3 -- SIMONS

6L-- T,TH 10-11:15
 
 

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 6M, 6N CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

6M 5-3+ -- RIVARD

6N B-3

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 6O CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

W3-- SNEFF

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.
 
 

ENGLISH 6P CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

A-3+-- GIBSON

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 some assigned exercises.

ENGLISH 6Q CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

W3-- 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 6R CREATIVE WRITING: JOURNALISM

A-3+-- MILLER

This course is an introduction to the nuts-and-bolts of print journalism. We’ll focus on researching and writing new stories, features, profiles, opinion pieces, and reviews. The aim of the course will be develop reporting and interviewing skills, master journalistic principles and forms, and encourage clear thinking and clear writing. Students will work on stories both on and off-campus. They will read their work in class, with class members taking on the roles of editors. We’ll also take a close look at the local and national press and examine how they cover various stories.

ENGLISH 10A WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE

G-3+ --STRONG

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. 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 10B WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE

Z*3-- CANTOR

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.

ENGLISH 11A NON-FICTION WRITING

5-3+-- ULLMAN
 
 

ENGLISH 11B NON-FICTION:

B-3-- LEVINSON

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.

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.
 
 

ENGLISH 14 WRITING FICTION: ADVANCED

Z*3-- LEBOWITZ

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.
 
 

ENGLISH 22 FORMS OF POETRY

Z1 -- 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 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.

ENGLISH 52 GENERAL VIEW OF BRITISH LITERATURE

5-3+-- GENSTER

This course surveys the development of British literature from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, moving from the era of national revolution to that of world war. We will read, with careful attention to formal and thematic concerns, a wide range of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. We will also attempt to place works and their authors in the context of the political, social, and literary histories that those works both register and shape.
 
 

ENGLISH 59 CONTINUITY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

B-3 -- JOHNSON

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.

ENGLISH 68 SHAKESPEARE

5-3+ -- BAMBER

A study of eight Shakespeare plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale. Although we will engage a variety of historical and critical contexts, our primary focus will be on the close reading of the plays.

ENGLISH 92A POETS ON POETRY

Z4 -- DIGGES

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

ENGLISH 92B JANE AUSTEN: NOVELS AND FILMS

A-3+ -- GENSTER

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.
 
 

ENGLISH 92C READING BLACK WOMEN’S TEXTS : BODY, MEMORY, REPRESENTATION

5-3+-- SHARPE

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

ENGLISH 92D POSTMODERNISM AND FILM

7-3+-- EDELMAN

Everyone talks about postmodernism, but what exactly does it mean and how does it affect contemporary cultural production and analysis? This course aims to introduce students to the central tenets of postmodernism by studying a wide array of films in relation to important texts by postmodernist critics and philosophers. While providing students with an opportunity to read from the works of some of the most significant (and controversial) figures in postmodern thought (including Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Donna Harraway, and Jean Baudrillard), this course will open up those readings by engaging them in the context of the various films that will occupy the center of our discussions each week. In the process, we will consider whether film as a medium has something distinctive to tell us about the movement between modern and postmodern and how it transforms our ideas about history, narrative, and visual perception.

We will explore a range of films, both modern and "postmodern," that allow us to consider the ways in which these two modes of conceptualizing the human–especially insofar as the "human" is construed with reference to such categories as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and race–intersect with and diverge from one another. The films we will study are likely to include: Welles’ Touch of Evil and ‘F" is for Fake; Polanski’s Chinatown; Almodovar’s The Law of Desire; Beineix’s Diva; Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?; Cameron’s The Terminator; Scott’s Blade Runner; Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys; Coen’s Fargo; and Wachowski’s The Matrix.

No prior experience in the study of film or theory is required, but students enrolling in this class should come prepared to think seriously about them both. Students will also be required to attend weekly screenings of films in the Tisch Audio-Visual Lab on an evening to be determined.

ENGLISH 92E CELEBRITY, PUBLICITY, ART

6-3+-- LITVAK

Cultural commentators like to point out that the line separating "art" from the frankly commercial sphere of advertising, mass consumption, and celebrity-worship has been blurred, if not erased. But what exactly are the stakes and the implications of this blurring? What really happens when "high culture" ("art" here can include literature as well as the visual arts) finds itself in the middle of the mass marketplace? Instead of simply condemning this phenomenon, and instead of simply celebrating it, we will try to specify and analyze the various pleasures, fears, fantasies, and desires that constitute the world in which we are all consumers and, whether we know it or not, (self-)advertisers. We will consider a wide variety of cultural texts and objects, from television commercials to films (Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, Gus Van Sandt’s To Die For, Robert Downey’s Putney Swope) to novels (Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?), to visual art by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and others. We will also read and discuss critical works by authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. There will be occasional evening screenings of films in addition to regular class sessions.

ENGLISH 101 OLD ENGLISH

M,W, 10-11:15-- FYLER

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 (including several written around the year 1000), and lots of poetry, including "The Seafarer," "The Battle of Maldon," and Beowulf. (This course will next be offered in the Spring of 2002.)

ENGLISH 129 ROMANTIC WRITING AND CULTURE: MONSTERS, DREAMERS, AND THE END OF THE WORLD

5-3+-- HOFKOSH

King George is insane. The Prince Regent, ruling in his father’s place, is profligate. England is at war with France as the rapacious Napoleon threatens England’s growing imperialist domination. Lord Byron, according to one of his many mistresses, is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." The teenaged Mary Godwin elopes with the married radical poet Percy Shelley and then imagines the making of a monstrous creature. Thomas de Quincey takes opium. John Keats writes poems of fallen gods, buried heads, and what dreams may come in "the honey’d middle of the night," while Felicia Hemans, abandoned by her husband, writes for her life. Mary Prince, going to England as a slave from the West Indies, arrives to find that freedom may be its own kind of dream.

In this course, we will study a range of poems, novels, and autobiographical writing which addresses the social, psycho/sexual, national, and racial constructions of identity and power in British culture from 1807-1837. Readings will include poetry by Byron, Hemans, Keats, and P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Prince’s The History of Mary Prince.

PLEASE NOTE: This course has a WW (writing-workshop) component that students can elect to take as a small section in addition to regular class meetings. This section, which will meet Mondays at 2:30 (8-1) will be devoted to learning through writing (journal writing, exploratory writing, draft work, revision) and to small group discussion and peer interaction. Students in this section will not have extra graded work, but rather will use various informal (ungraded) writing exercises in class and in their journals to enhance both their understanding of the material and their ability to formulate and express their ideas about it. This component allows for attention to paper writing as process in addition to product and is directed towards student-initiated learning.
 
 

ENGLISH 139 EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

M,W, 10-11:15-- RODRÍGUEZ

Frederick Douglass called his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave. His subtitle and designation evoked American ideals of independence, liberty, and self-made success, at the same time that it called attention to the fact that the system of slavery circumscribed Douglass’ identity even after he escaped to the North, and to "freedom." This course will begin with a reading of Douglass’ Narrative, and will continue with a treatment of other slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano, John Gronniosaw and others. We will devote much of the first half of the semester to questions about the idea of the "tradition" itself; the authors of slave narratives read each other’s works, and developed a formula for the life-story of the fugitive slave. The rest of the course will involve analyses of African-American literature. Complementing this will be readings from other disciplines; we will read historical documents, Supreme Court rulings, and works of philosophy and anthropology.
 
 

ENGLISH 141/141WW AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM COLUMBUS TO THE REVOLUTION

Z1-- ROSENMEIER

We will consider texts (including oral expression) from the many ethnic groups that interacted in all of North America and the Caribbean prior to the creation of the United States as a nation. We will study native myths, Spanish travel narratives, Anglo histories, sermons, poems, and captivity narratives. We may also view some modern filmic treatments of the early interaction between Europeans and indigenous groups, e.g., Black Robe and Cabeza de Vaca.

Students are urged to join the writing workshop attached to the course. The opportunity to engage in a writing process over several months helps develop the most important communication skill the most important of all communication skills. Integrating writing with close reading is a rewarding and often surprising endeavor, for as we write and revise we find ideas coming to us (and from within us) that we were not aware we had but which deepen our understanding of what we read, help vitalize our writing, and contribute to the development of other aspects of our intellectual and emotional life.

ENGLISH 143 WHITMAN AND DICKINSON

D-3-- CAVITCH

Intensive study of the works and lives of these contrasting 19^th century American contemporaries. We will consider issues of poetic form and genre, the applications of biography to critical analysis of art, and the poets’ redefinitions of their national culture.

ENGLISH 144 POE, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE

D-3 --LEBOWITZ

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.

ENGLISH 147 AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

D-3-- SHARPE

This course concentrates on contemporary texts and emphasizes the multicultural make-up of American literature. We will focus on texts by Latina, Black, Asian, Native American, and white European 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, Comfort Woman, Bone, Mean Spirit, Memory Mambo, and Rat Bohemia.

ENGLISH 148 AMERICAN INDIAN WRITERS

Y3-- AMMONS

We will begin with a few late 19^th-century texts and then concentrate on five contemporary writers: N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, and Joy Harjo. Throughout the course we will view and discuss films that focus on issues raised in the literature or augment our reading, and we will probably end with the popular movie Powwow Highway. Also, to help us place the literature in historical and political context, students will present short reports on assigned essays, including work by activist artists and scholars such as Awiakta and Ward Churchill. During our study, we will think about issues of representation/self representation; the pervasiveness of dominant culture stereotypes from the Noble Savage and the Ignoble Savage to the Indian Princess and the Squaw/Drudge; the history of indigenous resistance to white racism, exploitation, commodification, and theft; the realities of cultural autonomy and self-definition; connections and disjunctions between the past and the present artistically and politically; our own subject positions and responsibilities in relation to the material in the course; and contemporary Native American critiques of the present and vision of the future. Our class will be a seminar, so student participation will be an important element.

ENGLISH 157 D. H. LAWRENCE

5-5+-- CAVITCH

D.H. Lawrence is one of very few writers who produced distinctive, and often great, work in all the literary modes and genres. We will study a selection of his best novels, poetry, essays, travel books, stories, drama, and personal letters. We will attend to the history of Modernism, 1900-1930, as the broad cultural context of his work. Such immersion for a semester presents an awful lot of one writer, and students should be committed to following through critically on your identifications and quarrels with Lawrence.
 
 

ENGLISH 192A ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

T, TH 10:00-11:15-- HSIAO

This course will explore a range of literary writing spanning the twentieth century, with an emphasis on those written after the first flowering of the literature in the post-60's. Among others, the authors will include Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Chang-Rae Lee, and Cathy Song. We will focus on four areas of development: finding a voice, crafting a form to fit the experience of Asians and their descendants in America, naming their home, and translating and transforming identities. The starting point is the all-American myth of reinventing the self. Students will each give an oral presentation on the social and historical experience of the divergent Asian groups subsumed under the term Asian American. A journal, two papers, and active class participation make up the remaining requirements.
 
 

ENGLISH 192B WHAT THE NOVEL KNOWS

Z*2-- LITVAK

This course will proceed from the hypothesis that the genre of the novel has distinctive ways of thinking about the world, and about itself-that it knows things that other kinds of writing don’t know, or can know only through it. What the novel knows, moreover, isn’t the same as what the novelist knows: we will be concerned here less with the individual author’s consciousness than with the cognitive and imaginative possibilities afforded by the novelistic form itself. Instead of applying, say, psychoanalysis or sociology to novels, then, we will be talking about what novel have taught psychoanalysis and sociology. We will also be interested in novelistic knowledge that can’t be translated so easily into other disciplinary contexts. A strategically heterogeneous list of books to be read may include such texts as Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge.
 
 

ENGLISH 192C CONTEMPORARY JEWISH FICTION

B-3-- WILSON

Cross listed w/JS 192

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.
 
 

ENGLISH 192D THE MODERN NOVEL

A-3+-- CANTOR

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?

ENGLISH 192E THEORETICAL FICTIONS

Z1--EDELMAN

Intended as a small seminar for advanced undergraduates and interested graduate students, this class will explore how fictional energies emerge in texts of contemporary theory and how theoretical perspectives get taken up and engaged in some modern and postmodern fictional texts. We will focus on the uses and power of narrative in various analytic works and the appeal of literary self-consciousness as an instrument of fictional authority. This will entail a consideration of questions involving modernism and postmodernism, the shifting functions of writer and critic in contemporary culture, the use (and abuse) of genre, and the rhetoric of authenticity. Students who enroll should be prepared to take an active part in the course. Writers to be examined may include: Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Nabokov, Jacques Derrida, Ishmael Reed, Julian Barnes, Roland Barthes, Angela Carter, Manuel Puig, D.A. Miller, Jeanette Winterson.

ENGLISH 192F PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN POETRY-- D-3-- BAMBER

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

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

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

ENGLISH 192G OVID AND THE OVIDIAN TRADITION-- 6-3+--FYLER

Ovid is the most powerfully influential Roman poet in European literature from the twelfth century on. His erotic poems—the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris—fully explore the pathos and comedy of love, and make Ovid the Freud of the Middle Ages: he provides the most elaborate and memorable terminology for describing the uncertain stability of the lover’s mind. The Metamorphoses, an epic or anti-epic, serves as a bible of pagan mythology for later poets. We will look in detail at these works and at some of the most memorable examples of their later influence. We’ll read two French works in translation, the Roman de la Rose and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, as well as a number of shorter works in English. Authors to be studied may include Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Spenser.
 
 

GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES
 
 

AMERICAN PURITANISM -- Z3 -- ROSENMEIER

This seminar will explore the uses of memory in various genres of English and American puritan literature. As English culture changed radically in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, puritans responded by insisting that only a transformed identity could provide the unshakable divine assurance that they thought they and their fellow English men and women needed to cope with uncertainty. Their belief that the assurance of such a changed identity was possible was based on the construction of memory that printing made possible. With the power of literacy, women, children, and men could potentially encounter the past unmediated by hierarchical structures. In sermon, poem, conversion narrative, travel account, biography, history, and autobiography, puritans spoke and wrote about their coming face-to-face, however darkly, with the divine.

We will begin by looking at the changes mnemonics have undergone in the last twenty-five years, changes that are as great as those of five hundred years ago. Next we will take a brief look at the classical texts that shaped Western mnemonics from the Greeks to the Renaissance, including Ad Herenium, Cicero, De Oratore, and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria , Susan Engel, Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory, and Frances Yates, The Art of Memory will help frame our discussions. We will then turn to the sermons of William Perkins and Richard Sibbes who profoundly influenced two major kinds of American Puritanism. Our next topic will be the impact of exile, after which we will look in depth at the Antinomian Controversy of 1636-1638 when many views on puritan identity clashed sharply. We will pay special attention to the role puritan women played in deciding the uses of the past. The Antinomian Controversy took place simultaneously with the Pequot War; we will study how the interactions between the puritan and native peoples changed the way the various groups came to define their identities. We will then turn to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, and to William Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation. We will finish with a look at the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson who came to New England as a young child.

If members of the seminar wish, we can arrange a trip to Plymouth Plantation to see how we are now constructing some of our early England past.
 
 

ENGLISH 292B FORMS OF DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Z2 -- HABER

This seminar will focus on the representation of varieties of eroticism in 16th-and-17-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 will use current criticism to aid us in formulating questions about the intersection (s) of representation and sexual desire, of literary and erotic form. Readings will probably include poems and plays by Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Wroth, Donne, Webster, Middleton, Cavendish, and Marvell.

ENGLISH 292C THE SLAVE NARRATIVE IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION

Z1 -- RODRÍGUEZ

This seminar will theorize the development of this literary genre during the 19^th century and its persistent negotiations in later African-American writing. We will examine the cultural and historical contexts that surround in writing. We will examine the cultural and historical contexts that surround in both factual and fictionalized expressions of the genre, discussing also the idea of the literary tradition itself. Narratives will include those by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, John Gronniosaw, Nat Turner/Wm. Gray, Michael Harper, Patricia Williams, Robert Hayden, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Sherley Anne Williams. We will also treat works of American painting and installation. Theoretical and critical models discussed will include those sketched by H.L. Gates, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Wm Anderew, Patricia Williams, Barbara Johnson, Elaine Scarry, Orlando Patterson. Also, texts by Locke, Lacan, De Man, Freud, among others.