Past Course offerings
FALL 2001 COURSE SCHEDULE

FACULTY MEMBERS ON LEAVE

The following professors will be on leave during the fall semester: Jonathan Wilson, Kevin Dunn, Christina Sharpe, and Barbara Rodriguez:

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

Click Here to view  the schedule of  English 1, 2, and 3 -- Freshman Composition and Writing Seminars -- Course descriptions are available in room 316, on the third floor of East Hall.
 

COURSE TITLE TIME INSTRUCTOR MAX. NUMBER BLOCK

Courses in Creative Writing:

ENG 5A Creative Writing: Poetry Z1 Richards 12

ENG 5B Creative Writing: Fiction B3 Strong 12

ENG 5C Creative Writing: Fiction D3 Levinson 12

ENG 5D Creative Writing: Fiction B3 Simons-Blake 12

ENG 5E Creative Writing: Fiction G3 Hurka 12

ENG 5F Creative Writing: Poetry 7-6+ Sneff 12

ENG 5G Creative Writing: Fiction Z1 Hershman 12

ENG 5H Creative Writing: Fiction Z1 Downing 12

ENG 5I Creative Writing: Fiction TBA Downing 12

ENG 5J Creative Writing: Fiction D3 Simons-Blake 12

ENG 5K Creative Writing: Fiction Z*3 Hershman 12

ENG 5L Creative Writing: Journalism A-3+ Miller 15

ENG 5M Creative Writing: Fiction A-3+ Hurka 12

ENG 5N Creative Writing: Poetry A-3+ Kaiser-Gibson 12

ENG 5O Creative Writing: Fiction W1 Johnston 12

ENG 5Q Creative Writing: Poetry W3 Richards 12

ENG 5R Creative Writing: Fiction W3 Johnston 12

ENG 9A Writing Fiction: Intermediate A-3+ Strong 15

*must have instructor's consent

ENG 9B Intermediate Fiction Z*3 Cantor 15

*must have instructor's consent

ENG 11A Non-Fiction Writing D3 Miller 15

ENG 11B Intermediate Journalism B3 Levinson 15
 

ENG 13 Writing Fiction: Advanced Z*3 Lebowitz 15

*must have instructor's consent

ENG 22 Forms of Poetry Z1 Digges 15

*must have instructor's consent
 

Courses in Literature:
 

ENG 45 Non-Western Women Writers 6-3+ Roy 50

ENG 51 General View of English Literature 5-3+ Genster 80

ENG 63 American Fiction 1900-1950 B3 Johnson, R. 80

ENG 67 Shakespeare TBA Bamber 100

ENG 76 Twentieth-Century Poetry B3 Edelman 30

ENG 77 Modern Mind D3 Cantor 75

ENG 80 Hitchcock: Cinema, Gender, Ideology A-3+ Edelman 74

ENG 91A Underworlds D3 Genster 30

ENG 91AWW Optional Recitation TBA Genster 25

ENG 91B Writers in Hollywood D3 Litvak 30

ENG 91C Girl's Books D3 Flynn 40

ENG 91D Twentieth-Century British Literature TBA TBA 30

ENG 118 Renaissance Drama: Over-The-Top Performance and Radical Play

6-5+ Haber 25

ENG 124 Reason and Revolt 5-3+ Flynn 25

ENG 128 Romantic Literature and Culture 5-3+ Hofkosh 30

ENG 132 Women and Fiction D3 Bamber 25

ENG 134 Art and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Britain

6-5+ Emerson 25

ENG 191A Henry James and Gore Vidal Z1 Litvak 25

ENG 191B Major Figures of the Irish Renaissance 5-3+ Ullman 25

ENG 191C Dickinson, Bishop, and Plath Z4 Digges 25

ENG 191D Hemingway and Faulkner D3 Lebowitz 25

ENG 191E Nineteenth-Century Fiction Z3 Emerson 25

ENG 191F Contemporary Jewish Writing 5-3+ Freedman-Bellow 30

ENG 191G British Modernism TBA TBA 20

ENG 191H Imagining "India" Z2 Roy 20

ENG 191I Studies in Ethnic Literature Z1 Rosenmeier 25

ENG 191WW Optional Recitation TBA Rosenmeier 25

ENG 191J Asian-American Literature T, Th 10-11:15 Hsiao 25

ENG 191K Black-American Women Writers Z*4 Coleman 20
 
 

Courses Restricted to Graduate Students:
 

ENG 291A Troilus and Criseyde Y5 Fyler 20

ENG 291B Race, Racism and American Literature Z2 Ammons 20

ENG 291C Forms of Desire in Early Modern England Z3 Haber 20
 
 

ENGLISH 5C CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION D3 LEVINSON
 

This course is for students who want to write good stories. One way to develop that ability is to write a lot, so work includes several short pieces, a long, fully-realized story, some revisions and lots of talk. The class operates primarily as a workshop, in which we discuss each other's work and the elements and sum of accomplished fiction. Students also work on developing their ideas about good writing by reading published stories and what writers have to say about their work.

ENGLISH 5F CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY 7-6+ 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 5G, 5K CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION 5G Z1 HERSHMAN

5K Z*3
 

A fiction workshop focusing on the power to be found in concision, where the writer's skill at editing-selecting and shaping key details-serves to strengthen a work. During the first four weeks there will be frequent in-class writing exercises; students will also study published works and write interlinked short scenes to highlight issues of craft, with an emphasis on plotting, creation of voice, and character development. The balance of the term is devoted to the workshop-discussion format. Student will write and present to the class two complete short stories, as well as a rewrite of the more challenging of these two works.
 

ENGLISH 5A, 5Q CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY 5A Z1 RICHARDS

5Q W3

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 5E, 5M CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION 5E G3 HURKA

5M A-3+
 

Here you will find exercises and lectures designed to help you further develop the essential elements of creative prose: voice, description, and empathy. Particular emphasis will be placed on precision of language, and how the voice of a story must work in tandem with conscience. For some of you, these will be new concepts: I think you will see in time that they are quite basic.
 

You'll also have a look at fiction, poetry, and essays written by masters. We will investigate the current publishing world, and how to make a living involving writing. Finally, I would like you to read your work in progress on class days that we will schedule together, and to comment carefully and thoughtfully on the work of your classmates when they do the same.
 

ENGLISH 5B CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION B3 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 5N CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY A-3+ KAISER-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 assigned exercises.
 

ENGLISH 5O, 5R CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION 5O W1 JOHNSTON

5R W3
 

In this section of English 5, we will focus most of our energy and attention on students' work-excercises and completed fiction manuscripts, in particular. We will also read and discuss published stories as we consider the fundamentals of fiction writing including characterization, dialogue, conflict, and point of view.
 

ENGLISH 9A WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE A-3+ STRONG
 

English 9A is designed for students who have had some experience in writing fiction. It will provide deadlines, a forum for reading aloud and constructively criticizing each other's work, and the expectation that you will create life on the page in a language natural to you. Genre writing will be discouraged. Regular attendance and spirited participation will be valued. A sample of your fiction (it needn't be long or completed, but it should be something you're pleased with) should be submitted to Professor Strong's mailbox or East Rm. 314 at pre-registration. A final class list may not be available until the first day of classes. Consent of the instructor is required.
 

ENGLISH 9B WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE Z*3 CANTOR
 

SEE ENGLISH 9A DESCRIPTION

ENGLISH 11A NON-FICTION WRITING D3 MILLER
 

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 11B INTERMEDIATE JOURNALISM B3 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 13 WRITING OF FICTION Z*3 LEBOWITZ
 

More advanced than English 9A and 9B, 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 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 45 NON-WESTERN WOMEN WRITERS 6-3+ ROY
 

This course is designed to introduce you to the diversity of women's writing from countries often referred to as "third world." Through an eclectic selection of texts, the course will explore some of the key concerns of women in places such as South Asia, the West Indies, Africa and Latin America. We shall be concerned also with issues of literary technique, genre and representation. We shall focus on the connection between literary texts and the social and political contexts within which the writing was produced. Authors will include Ama Ata Aidoo, Marta Traba, Joan Riley, Anita Desai, Merle Hodge among others.
 

NOTE: This course counts towards World Civilization, Women's Studies, Africa and the New World and Peace and Justice.
 

ENGLISH 51 GENERAL VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE GENSTER

5-3+
 

A survey of English literature from the beginning through the eighteenth century. Readings will include; selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels; poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell and Pope; and plays by Marlowe (Dr. Faustus) and Webster (The Duchess of Malfi). Designed as an introduction to the English major, this course will be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain both a broad overview of earlier English literature and a good understanding of the basic techniques of literary analysis. Class participation is encouraged; three papers and a final exam are required.

ENGLISH 63 AMERICAN FICTION 1900-1950 B3 JOHNSON, R.

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 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 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. DuBois, from The Souls of Black Folk; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nathaniel 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
 
 
 
 
 

ENGLISH 67 SHAKESPEARE TBA 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 in a variety of historical and critical contexts, our primary focus will be on the close reading of the plays.
 

ENGLISH 76 TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY B3 EDELMAN
 

This semester we will survey the achievements of American poets from the beginning of the century to the present day. After considering the canonical authors of American "high modernism," we will move on to explore the emergence of a variety of poets who sought to revise the meaning of "America" and of literary "modernism"-poets who insisted on exploring the centrality of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in the construction of the "American" imagination. The complex fate of the American artist will be a topic to which we will often return as we consider how the poetry of our century both constructs and refutes the stability of the "American" as a cultural category. Poets to be studied will probably include Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, Robert Hayden, Essex Hemphill, Langston Hughes, Li-Young Lee, Robert Lowell, Paul Monette, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Cathy Song, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Jay Wright.
 

ENGLISH 77 MODERN MIND D3 CANTOR
 

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

ENGLISH 80 HITCHCOCK: CINEMA, GENDER, IDEOLOGY

A-3+ EDELMAN
 

A hundred years after his birth, Alfred Hitchcock's name is synonymous not only with cinematic suspense, but also with the appeal of film as a medium of popular entertainment. That popularity reflects our continuing fascination with the visual satisfaction the medium affords even as it testifies to our cultural investment in the narrative forms (thriller, suspense film, romantic melodrama) in which Hitchcock primarily worked. This course will explore the relation between Hitchcock's achievement of cinematic "mastery" and his constant, almost obsessive attention to questions of gender, sexuality, and cultural authority - Questions that always underpin the narratives of suspense in his films. We will examine in detail how the act of seeing gets framed in Hitchcock's films by being associated with practices of political and erotic surveillance and we will attend to his consequent inflection of "looking" and therefore of cinematic spectator ship as well, in the direction of sexual perversions such as voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, and masochism. In this regard, we will consider the pleasures that Hitchcock's style affords: Whose pleasure is it? To what does it respond? How does its insistent perversity affect our reading of Hitchcock's popular appeal? To answer these questions we will read a number of theoretical accounts of Hitchcock's cinema, including a number of recent interventions from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory. Students should be prepared to explore and discuss the politics of sexuality as it intersects with the politics of reading and interpretation. Our energies will be devoted primarily, however, to studying and learning how to read closely some of the most complex, compelling, and stylish texts of Western cinema. These will include 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 UNDERWORLDS A-3+ GENSTER
 

In classical mythology, the underworld is a 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, it is 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 in Dante's Inferno. The capacity to undertake and to understand the journey is, in fact, one of the characteristics of the hero in the terms offered by classical epic in Homer, or Judeo-Christian iconograohy in Milton or Poe, or in Dicken's 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 Pyncon, 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, Thomas Pyncons'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 Duncaid, and Anthony Minghella's film Truly, Madly, Deeply.
 

ENGLISH 91AWW OPTIONAL RECITATION TBA GENSTER
 

This is an optional writing workshop section of 91A that will meet once a week in addition to regular class meetings. The workshop pays special attention to paper writing and revision; it also emphasizes the function of writing in the learning process through informal, exploratory assignments and journal entries that allow opportunities for a closer exploration of the course material.
 
 
 
 
 

ENGLISH 91B WRITERS IN HOLLYWOOD D3 LITVAK
 

Stereotypically, writers in Hollywood-verbal artists working in a visual medium, or in a film-dominated culture-are unappreciated, exploited, and marginalized. While feeling the pain of the writer in Hollywood, we will attempt, in this course, to think in less stereotypical ways about the relations between the verbal and the visual, as well as between the artistic and the commercial, the intellectual and the popular, the East Coast and the West Coast. We will approach the topic of writers in Hollywood by studying writers on Hollywood. We will thus focus on the "Hollywood novel," and then proceed to examine a series of films that are about writers in Hollywood, have screenplays by Great Writers, or raise interesting questions about the place of screen writing within mainstream U.S. cinema. Novels may include Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon; West, The Day of the Locust; Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?; Mailer, The Deer Park; Didion, Play It As It Lays; Fisher, Postcards from the Edge; Wagner, I'm Losing You. Films may include Barton Fink, Leaving Las Vegas, The Player, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, and Lolita. We will do some reading in film criticism and critical theory. Films will be screened outside of regular class sessions.
 

ENGLISH 91C GIRL'S BOOKS D3 FLYNN
 

Girls' Books construct our ideas about femininity, sometimes deliberately, sometimes quite incidentally. This course will examine the various cultural values that girls' books produce. Without being too subjective, we will probably unpack some of the values that have become part of your own cultural baggage. We will read some of the classical nineteenth century texts- Little Women, The Secret Garden, Girl of Limberlost- then some of your own classics- Blubber, Flowers in the Attic, Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy. Finally, we will look at contemporary girls' books that explore issues of multi-cultural and sexual diversity - texts like Weetzie Bat, Eva, Toning the Sweep, and Finding My Voice. We will also read cultural critics Gilligan and Pipher. We will read quite a lot of books. If you sign up for this course, I would like you to email me a short list of the girls' books that you find most important to you. I can't promise to include them all, but I am interested in adding texts that strongly interest you. We will also be doing a great deal of writing, both analytical and creative.

My email address is cflynn1@emerald.tufts.edu.
 

ENGLISH 91D TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

TBA TBA
 
 
 

ENGLISH 118 RENAISSANCE DRAMA: OVER-THE-TOP PERFORMANCE AND RADICAL PLAY

6-5+ HABER
 

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

ENGLISH 124 REASON AND REVOLT: in other words, Talking About Revolution

5-3+ FLYNN
 

The two great revolutions of the 18^th century, both American and French, changed the way that English intellectuals understood elementary ideas of freedom and equality. Human rights became suddenly tangible and inclusive and dangerous. The Rights of Men became, at least in theory, the rights of women, the rights of the enslaved, the rights of chimney sweeps, and the rights of Irish people. We will read revolutionary writers like William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Robert Bage, and Equiano. In their political writings and in their novels and memoirs, they challenge social and literary conventions. Their novels, more than their political writings, seem to take into account the cost of revolution. Both Wollstonecraft's Maria and Godwin's Caleb Williams measure its cost as they examine the relatively powerless position of the revolutionary subject. Blake is defiantly unaware of the cost of revolutionary action; his system of poetical/graphic expression overthrows contemporary critical assumptions while it produces revolutionary social spaces. We will also read at least two defenders of monarchy and authority, Edmund Burke and Frances Burney. Burney, especially complicated in her political views, writes in The Wanderer as a feminist who nonetheless attack Wollstonecraft for her revolutionary posture. Finally, we'll read Matthew Lewis' gothic novel, The Monk, a text that embodies the terrors of incarceration, terrors that become inevitably political.
 

ENGLISH 128 ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND CULTURE: 5-3+ HOFKOSH

THE REGENCY WRITERS
 

King George is insane. The Prince Regent, ruling in his father's place, is profligate. England is at war with France as Napoleon threatens England's growing imperial domination. Lord Byron, one of the most famous writers of the Regency period is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" (according to one of his many mistresses). In this course, we will examine literary representations of madness, badness, and the dangers of various kinds of knowledge in terms of the social, sexual, national, and racial constructions of identity and power in British culture from 1807-1837. Readings will include a range of poetry by Byron, Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, and Percy Bysse Shelley, as well as fictional and non-fictional prose works such as Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave.

ENGLISH 132 WOMEN AND FICTION D3 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 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 of Song.
 

ENGLISH 134 ART AND SOCIAL CONFLICT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

6-5+ 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 powerfully shaped the answers that 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 present-day reactions to them. Readings will include works by Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, C. Bronte, Tennyson, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw.
 

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

ENGLISH 191A HENRY JAMES AND GORE VIDAL Z1 LITVAK
 

In this course, we will read works by these two prolific and problematically American authors. Although we will emphasize their fiction, we will also pay attention to the wider range of their production as "men of letters": we will look at their essays, plays, criticism, autobiographical texts, and, in the case of Vidal, at his writing for film and television. We will discuss the numerous points of connection between these two outrageously talented writers, one (James) working from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the other (Vidal) from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. Our discussion will center on such topics as urbanity, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism; male homosexuality and the literary career; literature, journalism, and politics; high culture and the mass media; the marketplace and the dynamics of literary fame; wit, irony, and "style." Texts by James may include Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady; The Tragic Muse; The Awkward Age, Guy Domville, The American Scene, and selected short stories; texts by Vidal may include Julian, Lincoln, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge, The Best Man, Visit to a Small Planet, and selected essays.
 

ENGLISH 191B MAJOR FIGURES OF THE IRISH RENAISSANCE

5-3+ ULLMAN
 

In this course, we will consider, and perhaps stretch, the idea of the Irish Literary Renaissance that is generally thought of as occurring in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. We shall be looking at major writers: the reading list will definitely include Yeats, Synge, Joyce (Dubliners and Portrait), and Lady Gregory. Others may be Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Elizabeth Bowen, George Moore and some minor poets. I am particularly interested in the interplay of specifically "Irish" culture and politics and literary traditions, and the internationalist leanings of some of these figures.
 

ENGLISH 191C DICKINSON, BISHOP, AND PLATH Z4 DIGGES
 

This course is an intensive study of three of the most influential poets in the American canon, each a daughter of a disquieting muse. Along with the poetry we will read from letters and dip into biographies and documents as we knit together a picture of each poet's life and work. We'll trace the development of their aesthetics and examine the influences of culture, personal relationships and mentors as we follow their poetry to the edge of its singing. Requirements for the course include several short papers and a final project.
 

ENGLISH 191D HEMINGWAY AND FAULKNER D3 LEBOWITZ
 

We will read the major novels, focusing on the authors' careers and creative lives and on the environmental, cultural and psychological influences on their work.
 

ENGLISH 191E NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Z3 EMERSON
 

In this course we'll read "classics" of nineteenth-century English fiction in relation to "classics" written during the same period by German, French, Russian, Norwegian, and Irish 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 bearing on these fictions of their historical, social, and cultural contexts. As we pair and compare English fictions with others 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, the Grimm brothers, C. Bronte, Balzac, E. Brontë, Turgenev, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, and a few present-day writers and film makers who work with nineteenth-century subjects and conventions.

There are two prerequisites for this course: that you like to spend a lot of time reading; and that you'd like to spend 2 ½ hours sitting and thinking and talking every week about writing--other people's, and your own.

If you're going to take the course, you should get started on the books during vacation. A list of titles and editions will be available in the English Department office in late April.
 
 
 

ENGLISH 191F CONTEMPORARY JEWISH WRITING

5-3+ FREEDMAN-BELLOW
 

An exploration of the novels and short stories of writers whose work has been at the center of literary life for the last half century and promises to transport us arguing, laughing and reflecting deeply into this century as well. We'll be reading fiction by Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, Anne Michaels, Primo Levi and others.
 

ENGLISH 191G BRITISH MODERNISM TBA TBA
 

ENGLISH 191H IMAGINING "INDIA" Z2 ROY
 

From Pottery Barn catalogues, Miss World competition to Hollywood films, "India" seems to be featured everywhere. In this course we shall explore the ways in which "India" has been represented, imagined, constructed by Indians themselves and by the West. We shall chart the competing, often contradictory, ideological constructions of the geographic space (seen simultaneously as beautiful, spiritual, non-violent AND filthy, overpopulated ,backward). We shall map the shifts and changes in these representations to draw connections between political shifts and imaginative expressions. Through novels, travel narratives and films the course will explore how we have come to inherit a set of ideas about India that persist powerfully in literature and culture. Readings will include Rudyard Kipling's Kim, E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, R.K. Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children among others.
 

ENGLISH 191I STUDIES IN ETHNIC LITERATURE Z1 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 make-up of the class. The following texts will likely be included:

Chang Rae-Lee, Native Speaker

Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek

O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow
 

Students will be asked to keep a journal and to present a group final project. Class discussions will encourage participants to share their cognitive as well as their affective responses to the texts.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ENGLISH 191IWW OPTIONAL RECITATION TBA ROSENMEIER
 

Students are urged to join the writing workshop attached to the course. Integrating writing with close reading is a rewarding endeavor. It is also often delightfully surprising, for as we write and revise, we find ideas coming to us that we were not aware we had. As a result, our creativity is unlocked, our writing vitalized, and our understanding deepened.
 

ENGLISH 191J ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE T, TH 10-11:15 HSIAO
 

This course will explore a range of literary writings 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, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Fae Myenne Ng, Cynthia Kodohata, Chang-Rae Lee, Samantha Lan Chang, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Henry Hwang and Cathy Song. We will focus on four areas of development: finding a voice, crafting a form to fit the experience of Asian and their descendants in America, naming their home, and translating and transforming identities. The starting pint is the all-American myth of inventing 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 191K BLACK-AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS Z*4 COLEMAN
 

This course is designed as a seminar with a focus on contemporary black (U.S.) women's writing (and film). Students will explore theoretical, philosophical, and ideological discourses of blackness and femaleness embedded within twentieth century literary and film narratives. Through an in depth examination of narrative formation, students will investigate the ways in which literary and filmic characterizations of race and gender are represented and disbursed within the socio-political framework of the U.S.. Simultaneously, students will investigate the development of the novel employing literary and film theory and criticism that considers form and aesthetics. Texts will include work by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Julie Dash, Henry Louis Gates, Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Audre Lorde, Houston Barker and others.
 

ENGLISH 291A TROILUS AND CRISEYDE Y5 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, 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.
 
 
 

ENGLISH 291B RACE, RACISM, AND AMERICAN LITERATURE Z2 AMMONS
 

This seminar will link four separate but related units: readings in contemporary US race theory; late 19^th/early 20^th century fiction and the beginnings of modern US race ideology; selected contemporary Asian American writers and issues; selected contemporary Native American writers and issues. Because any one of these units could comprise a whole course, our study will necessarily be a graduate-level introduction to each topic and the connections among them. Issues will include: understanding the construction of blackness as foundational, reading whiteness as a raced category, analyzing our own racial identity locations in relation to anti-racist teaching and scholarship, moving beyond a black/white paradigm, and confronting racism. Some theorists will be: Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Ruth Frankenberg, Ian Haney Lopez, Gloria Yamato, Toni Morrison, and Ward Churchill. Early literary texts will probably be Henry James, Washington Square (1881), Pauline Hopkins, Winona (1901), Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911), Zitkala Ša, Old Indian Legends (1901), Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), and selected stories by María Cristina Mena (1913-1918). Recent and contemporary texts will be N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1966), Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991), Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (1977), Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (1990), and Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (1995) or A Gesture Life (1999).
 

ENGLISH 291C FORMS OF DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Z3 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.
 

GRADUATE CONSORTIUM IN WOMEN'S STUDIES COURSES
 

The graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at the Radcliffe Institute is a uniquely feminist institution pioneered by the faculty at six degree-granting institutions in the Boston area and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to advance research in women's studies and foster interdisciplinary women's studies scholarship. The Consortium pursues is mission by offering a model for institutional change through an ongoing series of team-taught graduate seminars, interdisciplinary faculty workshops, and other opportunities for scholarly and administrative collaboration in the Boston community.
 

THE POLITICS OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY:

HISTORY, PLACE, AND ART IN SOCIETAL EXAMINATION OF MEMORY
 

This course is designed to examine the gendered dynamics of memory and civic dialogue as they create memorials and rebuild environments in the aftermath of mass violence and political trauma. Methods from psychology, architecture, and art will be used to look at how individuals and societies that have emerged, or are emerging, from a violent past confront that history. The discussion will focus mainly on two countries, Germany and South Africa. In Germany, we will investigate how contemporary memorials and the built environment of Berlin are part of Germany's continuing dialogue with the Nazi past. In South Africa, the course seeks to investigate how the testimonies presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions socially process the legacy of apartheid. We will also look at how traumatic experiences have been represented in artwork, movies, artists' videos and literature to expand our understanding. In all of these areas the role (or absence) of women will be highlighted and examined. This course will be team taught by Jill Reynolds, sculptor; Rachel Rapperport Munn, architect, MDS; and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Fellow, Harvard University and Faculty Associate, Brandeis University.