Past Course Offerings:
Fall 2002

• Course Schedule
• English 5-191 Course Descriptions
• English Graduate Course Descriptions

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 5 AND ABOVE:

English majors will note that courses are designated for degree requirement purposes either pre-1830/1860 or post-1830/1860 in the following table:  
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COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:  ENGLISH 5 - 191

 ENG      5A        Creative Writing:  Poetry                          11                    Richards

                                                                                                (6:45-9:15 P.M.)

 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.

 ENG      5B        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           G+                   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.

 ENG      5C        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           J+                    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 longer, 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.

 ENG      5D        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           L+                    Blake Simons

ENG      5J         Creative Writing:  Fiction                           K+ MW            Blake Simons

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

 ENG      5E        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           J+                    Hurka

ENG      5M       Creative Writing:  Fiction                           M+                   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 conscience.

 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.

 ENG      5F         Creative Writing:  Poetry                          F+ TR               Rivard

ENG      5N        Creative Writing:  Poetry                          12                    Rivard

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

ENG      5G        Creative Writing:  Fiction               5 (1:30-4:00 P.M.)      Hershman

ENG      5K        Creative Writing:  Fiction               2 (9:10-11:40 a.m.)    Hershman

  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 we will have frequent in-class writing exercises; in addition, students will 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.  Students will write and present to the class two complete short stories, as well as a rewrite of the more challenging of these two works.

  ENG      5H        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           L+                    Downing

ENG      5I         Creative Writing:  Fiction                           K+ MW            Downing

  In this workshop, you will work as a writer and reader of new fiction.  All participants write original short stories, which they read aloud in class, discuss with their colleagues, and revise during the semester.  In addition, they address specific challenges of tone, style, structure, and point of view by writing brief experimental fictions (50 to 250 words), which illustrate how writers invent dramatically different solutions to a single problem.  There are two fundamental requirements:  Be present.  Be productive.  At the semester’s end, writers select their best work and compile a portfolio to represent their progress and accomplishments.

  ENG      5L        Creative Writing:  Journalism                              J+                    Miller

  This course is an introduction to the nuts-and-bolts of print journalism.  We'll focus on researching and writing news stories, features, profiles, opinion pieces, and reviews.   The aim of the course will be to develop reporting and interviewing skills, master journalistic principles and forms, and encourage clear thinking and clear writing.  Students will cover 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.

ENG      5O        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           10                    Johnston, S.

ENG      5P        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           12 *                 Johnston, S.

                                                                                                  * (6:45-9:15 P.M.)

English 5O and 5P 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%.

ENG      5Q        Creative Writing:  Fiction                           J+                    Alonso

A course open to all interested students who want practice and instruction in a workshop situation.

ENG      5R        Creative Writing:  Poetry                          K+ MW            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 some assigned exercises.

ENG      9A        Writing Fiction:  Intermediate                   7                      Cantor

Students will read their own fiction in a workshop setting.  We will try to discern what the story is trying to do, where it succeeds, and (supposing it’s not perfect) how to make it better—but on its own terms.  We will consider any kind of work, in any prose genre.  The course is open to students who have taken English 5 or 6 without permission of the instructor, or to students who haven’t taken the preliminary course, with permission.

ENG      9B        Writing Fiction:  Intermediate                   K+ MW            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 learn to 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 instructor is required.

ENG      11A      Intermediate Journalism                            H+ TR              Levinson

This course offers an unusual opportunity for students to sharpen their reporting and writing skills while learning the craft and business of good journalism.  They will work independently, covering topics of their choosing, as they practice the nuts and bolts of journalism: getting the story, finding and using sources, investigating and analyzing events, reporting accurately and engagingly, working with editors, and getting published.  The class will also meet with professional journalists to discuss ethical, legal and practical issues in the news media.  Qualified students should be familiar with the basics of news writing.

ENG      11B      Nonfiction Writing                                       F+ TR               Miller

This course will explore various forms of non-fiction writing, including memoir, profile, descriptive and personal essay, travel-writing, and reviews.  Throughout the semester students will work on series of short weekly papers.  Towards the end of the course, they will complete a longer piece of work in a particular area

During the semester, the instructor will assign readings that correspond to the area of non-fiction we are focusing on at a particular point, and these readings will be discussed in class.  Limited to 12.   

ENG      13        Writing Fiction:  Advanced                         7                      Lebowitz

                                                                                                            (1:30-4:00 P.M.)

More advanced than English 9A and 9B, English 13 is intended for those 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 pre-registration.  Consent of the instructor is required.  English 13 may be repeated for credit.

ENG      22        Forms of Poetry                                                       12                    Richards

This course offers a more advanced approach to writing than English 5, as students put 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 format 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 Rm. 210, English Dept. Main Office, East Hall.  English 22 may be repeated for credit.

ENG      37        20th Century African-American Literature      F+                     Rodríguez

This course surveys 20th-century African-American literature from James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man to the poetry of Rita Dove. We will frame our analysis of these texts with a brief discussion of the piece of early African-American literature, the slave narrative. This discussion will inform our reading of Johnson's fictionalized autobiography, Ellison's Invisible Man, Wright's Native Son, and Hurston's Their Eyes.

The second half of the course will treat important modern and contemporary novels, plays, and poems. Secondary critical and theoretical works will also be assigned.

ENG      51        General View of Eng Lit                                           D                      Genster

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.

ENG      51WW              General View of Eng Lit                               TBA                  Genster

The optional writing workshop section of 51 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.

ENG      59        Continuity of American Literature                       H+ TR              Johnson, R.

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 read Shakespeare’s The Tempest; it will be part of the lecture and discussion of the first meeting.

  ENG      67        Shakespeare                                                 F+ TR               Bamber

A study of eight Shakespeare plays: Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry IV, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Although we will engage in a variety of historical and critical contexts, our primary focus will be on the close reading of the plays.

  ENG      77        The Modern Mind                                                       J+                    Cantor

  Is there a “modern mind?”  The question should raise anxieties about our own reaction to history.  Are we-as Nietzsche said-“the heirs to all 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 ways 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.

 ENG      91A      The Invisible Spectacle:  Cinema, Discipline, & Desire       H+ TR              Edelman

  Our attention in this class will be directed toward appreciating the ideological complexity of some of our culture’s most influential and popular films. We will look at film noir and its variants (including The Maltese Falcon and The Talented Mr. Ripley), “screwball” comedy (including Bringing Up Baby and Pillow Talk), black comedies (including Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Fight Club), animated film (including The Little Mermaid and some Bugs Bunny shorts), and contemporary thrillers (including The Crying Game, Basic Instinct, The Silence of the Lambs, and Pulp Fiction). Our aim will be to examine how narrative cinema effects, in complex and contradictory ways, the production and disciplinary regulation of desire. We will focus, for example, on the dominance of heterosexual romance as the near-universal medium of cinematic narrative that structures virtually every film, regardless of its genre. But we will explore how these normalizing visions of heterosexual domesticity get played out in relation to another, less obvious, story: one this course will define as the invisible spectacle of these films. That other story, that counterplot, involves the symptomatic inscription of fantasies and anxieties about the possibility of resistance to sexual normativity; it speculates about alternatives to heterosexual desire, about the potential for female empowerment outside of dominant cultural scripts, and about the potential eruption, from within the most normative, apparently law-abiding subjects, of desires–in the most inclusively transgressive sense “queer”–that threaten the framework within which cultural meaning is maintained. In short, we will explore how cinema defines and contains the desires of sexual subjects even as it expresses a counter-pressure that marks its cinematic unconscious.

  Students who enroll in this class must be prepared to study film closely, to work their way diligently through the critical and theoretical texts we will be reading, and to think openly about the intersections of cinematic, sexual, and textual logics. Students will be responsible for viewing a film each week (outside of class time) and for a set of readings that will engage theoretical issues in cultural studies, gender, sexuality, and cinema. Those unwilling to think candidly, forthrightly, and sometimes counter-intuitively about sexuality and sexual representations might prefer another course.

ENG      91B      Girls' Books                                                  G+                   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, Girls of Limberlost - then some of your own classics – Blubber, Flowers in the Attic, A 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 carol.flynn@tufts.edu

ENG      91C      Un-American Activities:  POPULAR

CULTURE AND THE LEFT                                                M+                   Litvak

Critics of mainstream American movies, television, and journalism often accuse them of conducting a liberal or even subversive conspiracy against the rest of the country.  Yet the left--a remarkably elastic category, in which "liberalism" isn't always distinguishable from, say "communism"--hasn't exactly triumphed in American mass entertainment.  In fact, the story of popular culture in this country is in some sense the story of how left-liberal politics keep getting stigmatized as "un-American" which is why leftist content often has to disguise itself, and why its enemies must work to unmask it.  This course will focus on the most notorious episode in the history of the left in U.S. popular culture:  the period of the blacklist, McCarthyism, and the red scare, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, when, as a result of investigations of the entertainment industry by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, left-liberal ideas and people were subjected to an explicit and systematic campaign of destruction.  But while we will take into account the ravages of this campaign, we will also want to look at the ways in which the "un-American" left resisted it, to survive and transform itself in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, as the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, feminism, the sexual revolution, and gay and lesbian liberation came to reshape popular culture and the culture as a whole.  We will be examining films, plays, novels, television shows, and memoirs, as well as some historical and critical texts.  Objects of study may include films such as Redford's Quiz Show, Rossen's Body and Soul, Polonsky's Force of Evil, Robson's Home of the Brave, Dmytryk's Crossfire, Kazan's On the Waterfront, Zinneman's High Noon, Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, and Ritt's The Front; plays such as Miller's The Crucible and Kushner's Angels in America; novels such as Ellison's Invisible Man, Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, and Roth's I Married a Communist; memoirs such as Hellman's Scoundrel Time and  Bernstein's Inside Out; and television dramas such as The West Wing and Oz.  We will also look at the careers of such exemplary artists and performers as Paul Robeson, Lee Grant, John Garfield, Zero Mostel, and Ronald Reagan.  Students will be expected to see films outside of regular class sessions.

ENG      91D      The Epic Strain                                                          F+ TR               Genster

The course’s title means to register two recurrent preoccupations of epic writers:  first, the idea that the epic is a kind of writing with a particular history and second, that the genre asks a lot of those who aim to practice it.  We will look at the epic’s origins, the claims it makes on writers and readers, and the ways the form has been inhabited, and inhibited, in different historical periods.  Our reading will take us through classical, Biblical, and English epic and mock epic, and into the novel and biography.  Finally, we will look at some contemporary novels which examine the intersections between modernity and epic aspiration.  The authors whose works we may read include Homer, Virgil, Milton, Pope, Fielding, Rushdie, and Robinson.

ENG      91E      20th Century British Literature:

Catastrophe and Memory                          G+                   Rosenthal

At least since the Great War, British literature has been marked by problems of representing, evaluating and perhaps even redeeming catastrophic events. This course will explore the ways in which literary representations of the end of Empire, the two World Wars and the deadly freeze of the Cold War partake of and reproduce notions of catastrophe. Such notions, while far from uniform, share similar themes and rhetoric, including an ongoing treatment of the catastrophic event as an eruption of brute reality into language. Throughout the course we will pay close attention to problems of representation and the catastrophic event as exceeding or contained by the possibilities of verification, witnessing, and mourning. Related questions will include: What constitutes and sets off catastrophe? How does catastrophe relate to the categories of tragedy and the accident? If, as is so often the case, catastrophe is said to be marked by the unexpected, the unprecedented, the unimaginable, the new, how do we understand those categories? How does literature remember, commemorate, and critically rewrite the past? Is memory gendered? How does literature imagine the unimaginable? Authors will include Mansfield, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, Sitwell, Lessing, Gordimer, Naipaul, Munro, Desai, Rushdie, Coetzee, Ballard, Barker, and Amis.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:
  ENGLISH 115 - 191

ENG 115     English Bible     E+ MW      DUNN     

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.

 ENG      118      Renaissance Drama: Over-the-Top

Performance and Radical Play                            K+ MW            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. 

ENG      123      The Age of Unreason                                     E+ MW Flynn

  We will be reading first about the breakdown of authority: what happens when a king is restored and fails to meet his country’s expectation.  When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he met high hopes and even higher disappointments, particularly after London was ravaged by the plague in 1665 and almost burnt to the ground in 1666.  We will read Dryden, Aphra Behn and Rochester to understand the erotics of court life that shocked, dismayed, and tantalized Charles watchers, and Pepys and Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to understand the dynamics surrounding the plague and fire. 

  The middle of the course will explore colonizing dreams of escape and exploitation.  Heading out for the territories, English subjects and authors imagined great rewards in the new world, rewards that often eluded them and almost always depended upon the slavery of others.  We will read Behn’s Oroonoko, a novel about a slave rebellion in Surinam, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s subversive retelling of the colonial story, Lady Wortley Montagu’s “Turkish Letters,” excerpts from Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Gay’s Polly, a play about pirates and Indians and indentured servants all living happily ever after.

  Finally we will look at the crash, represented in the Great South Sea Bubble.  Think dotcom, with a great deal of slavery thrown in.  The South Sea Bubble was the first major blip in the Globalization scheme that still underlies our own economy.  This section will deal with the financial myth behind the Bubble, exemplified in many of the Spectator Papers, and reinforced by Pope’s poetry about the use of  “riches,” and Mandeville’s defense of luxury.  We will end with Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which makes financial disaster almost fun.

  ENG      132      Women & Fiction                                                       J+                    Bamber

  “But I digressed and was free.” Grace Paley

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

  Some authors we will read are:  Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Grace Paley and Maxine Hong Kingston.  We may also see several woman made movies:  Clueless, Strangers in Good Company, The Gleaners and I, and The Taste of Others.

  ENG      134      Art & Social Crisis:  The Victorian Past

in the American Present                                          K+ MW            Emerson

What difference does art make?  What difference can it make, in the midst of social crises 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, poetry and plays, looking at popular fantasies as well as at "classics" of "high" Victorian “realism.”  Attention to painting, photography, and music will extend our grasp of relations between particular forms of art and particular social forces in nineteenth-century Britain—and our grasp of them here, now.  Readings will include works by Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, C. Brontë, Tennyson, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw.             

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

  ENG      170      Sexuality, Literature, & Contemporary

Criticism                                                                    M+                   Edelman

  This course, intended as a small seminar for advanced students with an interest in contemporary literary theory, will focus on exploring some major texts of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. We will trace the logic by which each of these modes of thought reconfigures our understanding of the nature of writing, its power to represent “reality,” and the authority by which meaning is posited and secured. In the process, we will take up a number of questions posed by various theorists, including: How, where, and by whom is the “meaning” of a text produced? What is the nature of the relationship between “theory” and “literature”? What underwrites the critic’s authority in relation to her or his act of interpretation? How do the lenses of identity through which various critics may seek to read literary texts function as literary products necessitating analysis themselves? Because we will be studying a number of extremely demanding works of contemporary theory, students who enroll should be prepared to accept the demands imposed by these texts and to engage them with all the passion and energy they would bring to the study of novels, poems, or plays. Authors to be read will probably include: Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, Barbara Johnson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Slavoj Zizek, Diana Fuss, Judith Butler, Hortense Spillers, Leo Bersani.  

ENG      175      Contemporary Jewish Amer Fiction                      E+ MW      Freedman-Bellow

  An exploration of the novels and short stories of writers whose work has been at the 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.

  ENG      191A    19th Century Fiction                                                8                      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, Hoffmann, C. Brontë, Balzac, E. Brontë, Turgenev, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, and a few present-day filmmakers 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.

   ENG      191B    Speak, Memory:

Contemporary Memoir                                            G+                   Wilson

  We will look at a number of contemporary memoirs, "fictional memoirs," and works of fiction paying particular attention to blurring of borders between the genres. To this effect, we will sometimes read two books by the same author, one fiction, one memoir, both of which cover the same territory e.g. Philip Roth's memoir The Facts and his novel My Life As A Man. Other reading will include Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried, Tobias Wolff In Pharaoh's Army, Kathryn Harrison The Kiss, Lorna Sage Bad Blood, Jamaica Kincaid My Brother, Daniel Mendelsohn The Elusive Embrace, Frederick Exley A Fan's Notes, Nick Hornby Fever Pitch and George Perec W or the Memory of Childhood.

  ENG      191C    Hemingway & Faulkner                                            H+ TR              Lebowitz

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

  ENG      191D    Modernism/Modernity                                            K+ MW            Rosenthal

  This course will explore the relationship between aesthetics and modernity, focusing on the ways in which literature writes the vexed, shifting and contested meaning of the modern. What is the relationship between modernism and modernity? What does modernity have to do with art and with literature in particular? How do literary texts associated with the aesthetic movement known as modernism help us to understand the shifting boundaries of modernity? Is modernity a temporal, historical, spatial, economic, aesthetic, and/or political category? Reading texts drawn primarily from British literary modernism, we will examine the ways in which literature defines, problematizes, embraces, resolves the crises of modernity. Alongside texts by Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Beckett, we will read continental authors including Marx, Baudelaire, Simmel, Freud, Lukàcs, Arendt, Adorno, and Benjamin, in order to explore the association of modernity with problems of disjuncture, crisis, fragmentation, alienation, exile, blurred boundaries, and the destabilization of identity. At stake throughout will be the problem of modernity/modernism’s various others, the outsides and outsiders that are postulated from within the modern in order to assert and stabilize its boundaries.

  ENG      191E    James Joyce's Ulysses                                             D+                   Ullman

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

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

  ENG      191F     Asian-American Literature                                   D+                   Hsiao

  This course surveys nearly a century of Asian American writings from the autobiography of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far to the Pulitzer Prize winning stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Other writers include Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ruth Ozeki, Chang-Rae Lee, Cathy Song, and David Wong Louie.   To a limited extent, criticism, drama, and film will also be included.  We will ground the individual works in their social and historical context, which invariably leads to a consideration of the dominant role of race in America.  The structure of the course follows the contour of an evolving ethnic literature within the American literary tradition.  Active in-class participation, student presentations, journal keeping, and two papers are required.  

GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES

  ENG      291A    The Victorian Novel                                     8                      Litvak

  We will read novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Collins, Eliot, Trollope, Hardy, Wilde, and Stoker, placing them in the context of recent criticism and theory.  Discussions will be based on careful analysis of the novels, but we will also be considering such general literary and cultural issues as realism, the gothic, and the grotesque; comedy, sentimentality, and sensationalism; gender and the novel; subjectivity and middle-class ideology; "Englishness" and its racial others; sexuality and the marriage plot; childhood, illness and death; fiction, literacy, and the marketplace.

  ENG      291B    The Slave Narrative in the

African-American Literary Tradition     2                      Rodríguez

                                                                                                (9:10-11:40 a.m.)

  This seminar will theorize the development and negotiations of this literary genre during the 19th century, and its persistent reemergence in later African-American writing. We will examine the cultural and historical contexts that surround 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. Andrews, Patricia Williams, Barbara Johnson, Elaine Scarry, Orlando Patterson. Also, texts by Locke, Lacan, De Man, Freud, among others.

  ENG      291C    American Fictions                                        6                      Ammons

  We will focus on 20^th-century US texts, examining fictions by nine artists. Probably they will be: Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation; Richard Wright, Native Son; Michael Herr, Dispatches; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker; and Helena Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus. We will think about shared fictions in these fictions–of social critique, of spiritual yearning–and we will analyze US dominant culture fictions of meritocracy, “artistic freedom,” and unlimited opportunity as they shape and condition artistic production. Also we will ask: What fictions shape our own readings and interpretive strategies and govern the prevailing theoretical protocols of the academy? In our study, cultural and political contexts will play a major role and a race studies approach will be important. Required secondary reading will include, but not be limited to, work by Howard Zinn, Paula Gunn Allen, Gerald Vizenor, Angela Davis, David Palumbo Liu, and Aijaz Ahmad.