Past Course offerings:
Spring 2002

SPRING 2002 COURSE LISTING FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT IF YOU REGISTER FOR A CLASS BUT DO NOT SHOW UP FOR THE FIRST MEETING, YOU MAY LOSE YOUR SPOT.

The Department of English offers a wide range of courses in British, American, ethnic, and world literatures in English, film, literary theory, and creative writing. Though diverse, these offerings are unified by the study of texts and by the practice of writing in English. Courses in the department examine literary works in their most illuminating contexts--historical, social, philosophical, and political--and engage students in traditional and recent methodologies, canons, and approaches. The department's courses in expository and creative writing enable students to explore the creative process and refine their skills through reading, frequent writing assignments, and discussion.

The department serves the interests of students who plan to become teachers or writers of literature, as well as those preparing for other professions or fields that demand skills in cultural analysis, effective writing, close reading, symbolic interpretation, and media analysis. Our courses are especially valuable to a liberal arts education because they engage students in the study of information, language, and symbolic representations in a technologically changing world.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR ENGLISH MAJORS

English majors work out a sequence of courses with their advisors. Students must take ten courses listed or cross-listed in the department above English 1 and 2, as follows:

1.) One survey course: English 36,51,52, or 59. 2.) Two non-survey courses in American, British, or other Anglophone literature written before 1860, including at least one course in British literature prior to 1830. No more than one such course may be on Shakespeare. 3.) Two non-survey courses from the following: American literature since 1860, or Anglophone literature since 1860, British literature since 1830.

In constructing their majors, students are expected to work with their advisors to design a coherent but wide-ranging course of study. English majors should take survey courses early in their study in order to establish valuable foundations. We encourage all students majoring in English to explore the full historical range of offerings; to investigate the spectrum of textual differences to be found in the study of Anglophone literatures, film, and oral traditions; and to include exposure to recent approaches in English studies, such as women's studies, literary theory, historical materialism, and cultural studies.

ENGLISH MINOR REQUIREMENTS

The Minor in English requires students to take six courses in the department. The purpose of the minor is to allow students to experiment freely or to follow a particular interest with some concentration. Therefore each minor will be individual not only in content but also in concept. All students should try, however, to include at least one course numbered below 100 and one above 100 and should consult with faculty members as they pursue their minors.

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT GRADUATE PROGRAM

Students who are considering the possibility of pursuing their English studies in graduate school should plan their undergraduate programs carefully in order to ensure adequate preparation. Most graduate schools will expect students to be able to demonstrate a reading knowledge of at least one foreign language (and often two or three). They will generally be looking for students whose undergraduate course work in literature exceeds the minimum requirements for graduation, and they will be especially interested in students who have done extensive work in upper-level courses. In addition, they will in most cases look more favorably on applicants whose course selections demonstrate a familiarity with texts from a variety of literary periods and genres. Students can maximize their preparation for graduate school by choosing their courses at Tufts so as to acquaint themselves both with the major authors of the literary canon and with the newer critical and theoretical approaches that challenge the ways in which the canon has been formulated.

For further information and advice, see Professor Modhumita Roy.

STUDY ABROAD PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

First and second-year students who are thinking of applying to the Tufts programs in England should consult with Professor Fyler about courses to take ahead of time in Medford and during the junior year in England. The English Department at University College, London, will not consider students who have had fewer than three or four courses in literature (i.e., not creative writing); and Pembroke College, Oxford, requires at least a 3.7 cumulative average and a background of four major courses.

SENIOR HONORS THESES

In their senior year, English majors may apply to write an honors thesis. A full-time faculty member, willing to direct the project, must present the student's written proposal at a department meeting early in the fall term, so students are expected to confer with potential thesis directors well in advance, ideally in the spring of junior year.

For a critical writing thesis, as student is expected to have done previous course work or other research in the proposed field, to have demonstrated an ability to sustain an extended independent project, and to present a detailed and seriously thought out proposal.

For a creative writing thesis, a student must have taken at least two courses in the relevant genre, one of them above the beginning level, and must have the support of two full-time members of the department, having submitted for their consideration a substantial body of creative work.

OTHER ITEMS OF IMPORTANCE

FACULTY MEMBERS ON LEAVE

The following professors will be on leave during the spring semester: Barbara Rodríguez, Christina Sharpe, Jonathan Wilson.

IF YOUR ENGLISH CLASS REQUIRES YOU TO MAKE MULTIPLE COPIES OF YOUR WORK TO DISTRIBUTE IN CLASS, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING:

The English Department does not have a photocopier for student use. The Department does have a ditto machine in East, Room 316, so that you may make copies. You do not have to type on a ditto form to use the machine. HOWEVER, TO USE THE DITTO MACHINE YOU MUST DO THE FOLLOWING:

1) Bring a photocopy of your paper with you to the ditto machine. Without this photocopy, the thermafax machine* will not work. Please do not attempt to cajole or bribe the staff to let you use the photocopier in East Hall; students cannot use the photocopier. This is a very important point to remember.

2) Another important point: Come to East 316 during the appropriate hours and allow plenty of time to make your copies. You may need as much as twenty minutes.

HOURS THE DITTO MACHINE IS AVAILABLE:

Monday through Friday:

9 am to 12 pm, and 1 pm to 5 pm.

*The thermafax machine is the machine that will make a "ditto form" for you. DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH SPRING 2002 COURSE SCHEDULE

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 6 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: 

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
 
 

ENG 6A CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
M 3:30-6:00 -- HERSHMAN

6K CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
Z*3 --  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 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.

ENG 6B CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
Z*3 -- WEESNER

This course is an introduction to fiction writing. Throughout the semester our mission will be to demystify the essential elements of this art. Often we will come together as a workshop, where we will help a writer to see the range of possibility in his or her story. Other activities will include weekly readings from an anthology of contemporary fiction-to take apart, to study as potential models-and exercises that will allow for the practice of various fictional techniques. Of the two longer stories you write, one will be substantively revised. In a larger sense you will have the opportunity to locate both your creative voice and the stories you need to tell. By delving into the craft of fiction writing, we will uncover a measure of the mystery and art of literature.

ENG 6C CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
Z-3 -- DIGGES

This course is a beginning poetry workshop whose primary text is your poems. Each week we will read and discuss your work. We'll be thinking about what makes a powerful free verse poem and from time to time we'll work with traditional forms as you develop a more sophisticated vocabulary regarding the high art of making poems. I like to meet with students in conference as often as possible. Requirements for the class include your willingness to write a great deal, to memorize three poems throughout the term from our anthology, and to attend class regularly.

ENG 6D CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
7-6+ -- GOLDSMITH

This workshop-based class is designed for the beginning writer of poetry - whether fanatic or simply fan. The course will be comprised of two components - production of poetry and discussion of poetry. In production we will focus on the use of techniques such as imitation, dialogue, and sensory-overload writing in order to produce poetry as well as learning to navigate and use workshop feedback to improve and refine individual poems. Ostensibly the first tasks will take up the bulk of our class time, but the discussion of the culture of poetry is essential to our ability to produce quality work. We will move from a consideration of classical forms and examples to an examination of the most contemporary experimental work. Somewhere along the way, participants will find their unique voices and concerns and ample opportunity to articulate them.

ENG 6E CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
Z*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 some assigned exercises.

ENG 6F CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
A-3+ -- HURKA
6N CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
T,TH 5:30-6:45 --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 6G 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.

ENG 6H CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
A-3+ -- 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 6I CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
8-3+ -- 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 6J CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
Z*2 -- DOWNING
ENG 6R CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
5-3+ -- 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 6L CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
W-3 -- 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.

ENG 6M CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
W-2 -- RICHARDS
6S CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
W-3 -- 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.

ENG 6O CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
A-3+ -- ALONSO

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

ENG 6P CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
W-1 -- JOHNSTON
6Q CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
W-3 --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%.

ENG 6T CREATIVE WRITING: JOURNALISM
MW 10-11:15 -- MILLER

6U CREATIVE WRITING: JOURNALISM
6-3+ -- 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 10A SCREENWRITING
Z*3 -- CANTOR

The course will focus on the rudiments of story telling for the screen. We will look at how screenplays are formatted, and why; at the things you can and can't do (so far, anyway) in the screenplay form. We will study Hollywood screenplay structure. And our strongest emphasis will be on story--on how to plot for the screen. Students must have taken either English Five or Six. Preference will be given to juniors and seniors.

ENG 10B WRITING FICTION: INTERMEDIATE
A-3+ -- STRONG

English 10B 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. Pre-registration does not guarantee admittance.

ENG 11A INTERMEDIATE JOURNALISM
D-3 --LEVINSON

In this course, students will hone their journalistic skills by acting as journalists; i.e. covering beats and writing feature stories. You are encouraged to work independently on topics of your choosing. We will work on getting and writing the story; finding and using sources (human, written, electronic); investigating and analyzing events; and reporting the news accurately and engagingly. We will also look at ethical, legal and practical issues of concern to reporters. Qualified students should be familiar with the basics of news writing; some experience, training or classwork in journalism would be helpful.

ENG 11B NON-FICTION WRITING
5-3+ --ULLMAN

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 subjects and approaches.

ENG 14 WRITING OF FICTION
Z*3 -- LEBOWITZ

More advanced than English 11, 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.

ENG 22 FORMS OF POETRY
Z-1 -- 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.

ENG 36 BLACK WORLD LITERATURE
6-3+ -- ROY (MANDATORY SECTIONS TBA)

This course is an introduction to the literatures and cultures of Africa and its diaspora in the Caribbean and in Britain. We will explore a wide spectrum of cultural forms-fiction, autobiography, poetry, drama, film and music--and trace their transmission and transformation in the Caribbean and in the "mother country," Britain. The selection of texts is obviously not exhaustive. It aims to be broad enough to allow us to begin examining the political, social and cultural meanings of the "black" world as a distinctive formation. The course will include the writings of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Caryl Phillips, Ama Ata Aidoo, Sembene Ousmane, Aimee Cesaire, Sam Selvon, Mustapha Matura, Joan Riley among others.

ENG 52 GENERAL VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
5-3+ AND 1 SECTION  -- CHOOSE EITHER ENG52-A (M. 11:30 - 12:20) ENG52B (M 3:30 - 4:20) OR
ENG 52C (M 11:30 - 12:20)
EMERSON

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

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

ENG 61 SHORT FICTION
5-3+ -- BAMBER

He said she was disagreeing with him. She said, No, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That it should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in. -Lydia Davis

Do you like this story? It is reproduced in its totality, and it is a sample of the kind of thing we will consider in this course. The short story emphasizes form far more than does the novel; we will be considering formal innovations and general fooling around. Some authors we will consider are: Langston Hughes, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, James Joyce, Anton Chekov, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sarah Orne Jewett, Franz Kafka, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, and David Foster Wallace.

ENG 68 SHAKESPEARE
6-5+  PLUS SECTION  -- CHOOSE EITHER ENG68A (M 3:30 - 4:20), ENG 68B (T 5:30 - 6:20),
ENG 68C (F 9:30 - 10:20) OR ENG 68D (F 11:30 - 12:20)
HABER

In this course, we will undertake a careful study of nine of Shakespeare's plays: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Coriolanus, and The Winter's Tale. Although we will engage these plays in a variety of historical and theoretical contexts, our primary focus will be on close reading of the texts.

Students enrolled in this course must also register for a weekly discussion section.

ENG 92A BLACK COMEDY
A-3+ -- LITVAK

The term "black comedy" suggests a type of narrative in which the comic effect of pleasure is inseparable from the supposedly uncomic experience of pain-or in which, more disturbingly, it only hurts when you laugh. Looking at various examples of black comedy, drawn mainly from film, but also from fiction, television, and the theater, we will attempt in this course to think more broadly about the relations between comedy and cruelty, between laughter and shame, between joy and fear, between escapism and satire, and between entertainment and provocation. Although the course will not focus primarily on racial issues, one of our concerns will be the not-so-coincidental ambiguity whereby "black comedy" has also come to mean comedy by African Americans. The list of edgy entertainments we are likely to consider includes films such as Fargo, Nashville, Dr. Strangelove, Heathers, To Die For, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Do the Right Thing, Deconstructing Harry, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Tokyo Drifter, Election, The Original Kings of Comedy, and Something Wild; novels such as Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, and Don DeLillo's White Noise; and television comedies such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker. Students should be prepared not only to attend frequent screenings outside of class, but also to read critical works about comedy's political and psychological implications.

ENG 92B CONTEMPORARY FICTION
T,TH 10-11:15 -- GENSTER

We will read a variety of very recent novels-- and perhaps some memoirs and a graphic novel- in an attempt to figure out some connections between what's on our pages and what's on our minds. Discussion will attend closely to verbal construction and formal choices. Authors whose works may be studied include Alice Munro, Norman Rush, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Penelope Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Tobias Wolff, Nadine Gordimer, and John Updike.

ENG 92C POSTMODERNISM AND FILM
5-3+ -- EDELMAN

Everyone talks about postmodernism, but few understand what it means. This course aims to introduce students to some major tenets of postmodern thought by studying a wide array of films in relation to important essays by postmodern critics and philosophers. While providing students with an introduction to work by some of the most significant figures in postmodern theory (including Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard), this course will explore those readings in the context of 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 thought and how these two modes of conceptualizing the human intersect with and diverge from one another as they take up the question of identity. In the process, we will consider how postmodern theory transforms our ideas about history, narrative, and visual perception.

We will explore various films that raise issues central to postmodernism, but that doesn't mean that the films we'll be studying are all postmodern films. In fact, the tension between the postmodern ideas the films put into play and the resistance to those ideas by the films themselves will be central to our discussions. Films we will study are likely to include: the Wachowskis' The Matrix; Scott's Blade Runner; Lasseter's Toy Story; Polanski's Chinatown; Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit?; Cameron's The Terminator; Beineix's Diva; Gilliam's 12 Monkeys; Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense; Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; and Singer's The Usual Suspects.

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. There will be a weekly film screening outside of class time in the Tisch Media Lab on Thursdays at 6:30. Although students who cannot make this screening may arrange to view the films on their own, it is strongly recommended that students try to arrange their schedules so they can attend the Thursday evening screenings.

ENG 92D JANE AUSTEN: NOVELS AND FILM
5-3+ -- 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.

ENG 92-DWW WRITING WORKSHOP
TBA -- GENSTER

There is an optional writing workshop section of English 92D 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 examination of the course material.

ENG 92E THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CANON
6-3+ -- DREW

Explores the question of canonicity in African American literature. Emphasis on major literary and cultural debates, historical and political contexts, and issues of representation and self-representation. Works by Douglass, Wright, Hurston, Morrison, and others. Relevant theory and criticism, including that of Gates, Baker, Christian, and Spillers.

ENG 92F THE ENDS OF LITERATURE: READINGS IN 20TH-CENTURY BRITISH FICTION
5-3+ -- ROSENTHAL

What is literature for? In the 20th century, the self-reflexivity of literature has turned not only towards the purpose of literature but also towards its limits. Articulations of the ends of literature have in some instances merged with representations of other ends - the end of empire, the end of history, the end of man. In close readings of seven novels from the British 20th century, this course will address problems of ends and endings alongside related issues such as: the relationship between text and context; the function of allegory; the status of literature as social, political and cultural critique.

Texts on the syllabus may include: Conrad, Nostromo; Lawrence, Women in Love; Woolf, Orlando; Greene, The Heart of the Matter; Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; Swift, Waterland. As the priority of the course will be to examine what these novels can teach us about how we read literature, related questions will include: How do the novels construct reality, challenge notions of representation, and redefine the boundaries of fiction? What do they teach us about the limits and effects of narrative? As we reflect upon these questions, we will also discuss the terms realism, modernism, and postmodernism.

ENG 110 CHAUCER
6-3+ -- FYLER

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

ENG 110WW CHAUCER
TBA -- FYLER

110WW is an optional writing-workshop section of 110 that will meet once a week in addition to regular class meetings. The workshop pays special attention to paper writing and revision; it also emphasizes the function of writing in the learning process through informal, exploratory assignments and journal entries that encourage a closer examination of the course material.

ENG 115 ENGLISH BIBLE
B-3 -- 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 115WW OPTIONAL RECITATION/ENGLISH 115
T 2:30-3:30 -- DUNN

115WW is an optional writing-workshop section of 115 that will meet once a week in addition to regular class meetings. The workshop pays special attention to paper writing and revision; it also emphasizes the function of writing in the learning process through informal, exploratory assignments and journal entries that encourage a closer examination of the course material.

ENG 121 ENGLISH LITERATURE  OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
A-3+ -- DUNN

We will begin with a series of "topographies," examining the poetics of the three "places" in the traditional division of the seventeenth-century society: city, court, and country. After sections on London, the courts of James I and Charles I, and the countryside, we will then move through a series of topics that will include courtly love poetry, devotional poetry and religious controversy, the contrasting cultures of urbanism and rural retirement, and the prose of the Scientific Revolution. Among the authors we will read are John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Thomas Carew, Amelia Lanyer, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Robert Herrick, Katherine Philips, and Andrew Marvell.

ENG 135 EMPIRE AND COUNTERCULTURE: BRITISH LITERATURE, 1860-1900
6-5+ -- EMERSON

Is the art of Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries merely (as has been claimed) a "perversion," a "decay" of inherited values, or does it assert differences which have vital repercussions for us in the turn into the twenty-first century? This is a question we will be trying to answer as we consider novels, poems, paintings, art criticism and literary criticism of the last decades of the nineteenth century. We will pay particular attention to changes in the perception of science and of art which together affected the representation of human nature, race, nationality, gender, sanity--and especially insanity. Above all, we will be talking about changes in the perception of perception itself.

We will begin the semester with the revolution worked on the preoccupations and modes of art by Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), and will go on to consider both frequently anthologized and less familiar literature. The readings will include works by Ruskin, D.G. Rossetti, C. Rossetti, Huxley, Arnold, LeFanu, Morris, Pater, Hopkins, Stevenson, Wilde, M.E. Coleridge, Hardy, Mew, Shaw, Barrie, and others. Students interested in getting a headstart should read The Picture of Dorian Gray (in the Penguin Portable Oscar Wilde, preferably).

ENG 140 AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL
8-3+ -- DREW

An exploration of the genre in the context of cultural history. Works by Frances Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman.

ENG 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.

ENG 156 MODERN EUROPEAN NOVEL
D-3 -- CANTOR

Something happened around 1900 to 1939. C.S. Lewis wrote, "I do not think any previous age produced work which was, in its own time as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists and Picasso have 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 what of the novel, what Lawrence called "the bright book of life"? Did it, too, become new in a new way? We will look at works by Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce. We may take a sidelong glance at Sigmund Freud, and at modern art and philosophy. Is the work really as new as Lewis describes? And why? What changed in the world so much that the novel in order to do its jobs--to educate, entertain, enlighten and terrify--had to become so damn different from the works of the past?

Students are advised (but not required) to have taken a good background in the novels preceding our period.

ENG 192A PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN POETRY
D-3 -- BAMBER

The contemporary philosophy that has been so important to literary studies, deconstruction, and the ancient philosophical religion of Buddhism are both versions of "the negative way." Both are attacks on the center and on the hierarchical, dualistic, teleological tendency of Western metaphysics. Both are intent on taking things away from us-things like our identity as a separate self, the difference between Here and There, the idea of Truth or God or any word that begins with a capital letter. Both are silent or deliberately frustrating on the question of what we gain by so much renunciation. "I don't talk about the dharma," says the American Buddhist teacher Charlotte Beck. "Why talk about it? My job is to notice how I violate it." Barbara Johnson, a Harvard deconstructionist, writes "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 the 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., Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, Mary Kean) who are themselves Buddhists and who are part of the current effort to translate Buddhism into a modern American idiom. (As one Buddhist teacher put it, we need to understand how Buddhism changes when life is no longer a matter of "Chop wood, carry water," but "Make love, drive freeway.") Then we will consider the two great American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, to see if they can be understood as part of an alternative tradition. Other poets we might read are Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Norman Fischer.

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

ENG 192B THE DIFFERENCES OF MODERNISM: THE WORK OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
A-3+ -- ROSENTHAL

In her indictment of what she calls the "materialist" fiction of her male, Edwardian predecessors, Woolf argues for a new aesthetic that would allow for and write the "disconnected and incoherent" ("Modern Fiction"). In this course, we will examine the ways in which Woolf's fiction articulates a poetics of indeterminacy and, at the same time, remains invested in the philosophical, ethical, and political function of art. We will consider what is particular about Woolf's response to debates within modernism: If modernism is critical of past aesthetic ideologies (romanticism, realism, idealism, naturalism), how does it also project a new, and possibly even redemptive, function for art? How does Woolf's fiction relate to what she calls, in A Room of One's Own, the problem of Women and Fiction? Of particular concern throughout will be Woolf's figurations of: violence and the aftermath of war; the possibility and mark of the "new" in literature; the charged relationship between writing fiction and writing history; the gendered differences of modernist aesthetics. Readings will be selected from Woolf's novels, short stories, and essays.

ENG 192C MAPPING LONDON
6-3+ -- FLYNN

We will consider London as an urban space that can be mapped, measured, ordered, and imagined. The course will concentrate on two major maps of London: the 1746, John Rocque map, measuring thirteen feet by six and a half feet, an unwieldy feat of representation, and the Tallis Street Views, 1738-1740, representations of individual streets, published serially, showing front views of buildings, elevations, including brief histories of neighborhood, packed with advertisements originating from establishments on each street. Applying the theory of Benjamin, Foucault and deCerteau, we will study "urban" texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century including Ned Ward's London Spy, Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance, Rochester's London oetry, Gay's Beggar's Opera, Defoe's narratives of the life of Jack Sheppard, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, Pope's Dunciad, Swift's urban poetry, Fielding's Amelia, Burney's Evelina, Boswell's London Journal, Wollstonecraft's Maria, Blake's London poetry, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair. An important part of this course will be the Bolles Collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century maps, artifacts, guide books, and illustrations, located in the archives. It is particularly rich in nineteenth century material.

ENG 192D WHAT THE NOVEL KNOWS
5-3+ -- LITVAK

There's a kind of smartness that belongs to the novel as a literary genre; this course will explore some especially compelling examples of that smartness. We will be concerned less with the individual novelist's consciousness than with the cognitive and imaginative possibilities afforded by the novelistic genre itself. Attending to what novels know that we don't already know-to the ways in which they challenge our moralistic assumptions about, for instance, gender, race, and power-we will try to develop techniques of novel-reading that take into account how novels read us. Texts may include such works as Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, and Willa Cather's The Professor's House.

ENG 192E MULTIRACIAL AMERICA BEFORE 1860
MW 10:00-11:15 -- AMMONS

An upper-level multicultural focus on 19th-century America before the Civil War. Who was here? How do we recover a multiracial range of voices and texts? We will divide our time equally among Native American, Asian American, African American, European American, and Mexican/Mexican American voices, reading work by African American writers such as Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Harriet Wilson; Native American authors such as William Apess, Nancy Ward, and John Rollin Ridge; white European American writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Chinese American writing by Hab Wa, Tong K. Achick, and Lai Chun Chuen; and Mexican/Mexican American authors such as Juan Nepomucén Seguin, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, and Mar?a Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Also, selected videos and readings in history will be part of our study. Issues we will examine include: anti-Asian racism and resistance to it, slavery and the anti-slavery struggle, the emergence of US feminism, "Manifest Destiny" and the campaign of genocide against Native Americans, invasion and confiscation of Mexican land. We will ask: In this context of social upheaval, oppression, and struggle for human rights, what role can literary art play? What inherited literary forms serve writers well and what new forms do authors try to shape to express new and often insurgent views? Also we will ask: What relevance does any of this have to our lives today? Our class will be based on discussion and active student participation. There will be one or two field trips-to the only known standing slave quarter in New England and, I hope, to Mashpee. Paper(s) in the course will include historical research. As indicated on p. 5 of this brochure, this new course may be used to fulfill the pre 1830/1860 requirement of the English major.

ENG 192F THE QUESTION OF FEMINISM: LITERATURE & THEORY
T,TH 10-11:15 -- HOFKOSH

Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft's early struggle to articulate feminism in Maria; Or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), we will read a range of 19th and 20thC imaginative literature in conjunction with contemporary theoretical writing to explore what feminism(s) is (are): how it has (over time and in different places) understood the oppression of women and the potential for women's empowerment; how it raises and tries to answer questions about biological difference and social construction, about identity and solidarity, about the very definition of "woman." We will look at both the Anglo-American tradition of liberal feminism developed from Wollstonecraft and challenges to its basic assumptions and categories by "French feminists", women of color, and non-Western writers and activists. Readings will include novels, poems, and theoretical texts by Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Assia Djebar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Nora Okja Keller, Audre Lorde, Chandra Mohanty, Cherrie Moraga, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Jeanette Winterson, Monique Wittig, Virginia Woolf, and other thinkers about women, gender, and feminism.

ENG 292A THE DECADE OF REVOLUTION: BRITAIN IN THE 1790'S
Z*3 -- FLYNN

The two great revolutions of the 18th 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 the Irish people. We will read revolutionary writers like William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Robert Bage, Equiano, Helen Maria Williams, and Wolfe Tone. 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 monarch and authority, Edmund Burke and Frances Burney. Burney, especially complicated in her political views, writes in The Wanderer as a feminist who nonetheless attacks Wollstonecraft for her revolutionary posture. Finally, we'll read at least one gothic novel as a site of sublime terror that becomes inevitably political. We will also read Raymond Williams on the politics of language.

ENG 292B THE LANGUAGE OF LITERARY THEORY
Z*2 -- EDELMAN

We will focus this semester on the trajectory that leads from the centrality of language and linguistic operations in the criticism of (primarily) post-structural theorists to the emergence of various modes of analysis that explore and embrace anti-humanism. Writing against identity - against the complacency of dominant cultural truisms as well as against the pieties of a multiculturalism propped up on similarly undertheorized humanistic nostrums - the works we will study insist on an encounter with the alien, with the radically unfamiliar, that is central to the act of reading and argue against the reassurance of finding one's image, or one's preconceived political ideas, reflected back in a literary text. They insist on the non-"human" element inherent in textual production, and, by extension, in everything we come to imagine, by way of language, as human. Theorists whose writings we are likely to study include Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Joan Copjec, Leo Bersani, Homi Bhabha, Barbara Johnson, Roland Barthes, Jean Laplanche, and Jacqueline Rose.

ENG 292C AMERICAN PURITANISM
Z-1 -- ROSENMEIER

"The Art of Salvation is but the Art of Memory." John Donne, "Sermon on Psalm 38.2." "Memory believes before knowing remembers." Faulkner, Light in August.

This seminar will explore the relationship of memory, body, sexuality, and literary style 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 assurance that they and their fellow English men and women needed to cope with uncertainty. Their belief that assurance of such a changed identity was possible was based on the construction of memory made possible by printing. With the apparent certainty of the printed text, puritans thought that they could encounter the past unmediated by hierarchical structures, that they could enjoy an original relationship to the divine.

We will begin by looking at the changes mnemonics have undergone in the last twenty-five years, changes that are as great or greater than those of five hundred years ago. Our text will be Susan Engel, Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory.

Next we will explore the roots of the puritan "plain style" in their mnemonics of the naked-the plain--body's lovemaking. The text will be Edmund Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality. Next we will look briefly at the classical texts that shaped Western mnemonics from the Greeks to the Renaissance, including Ad Herennium, Cicero, De Oratore, Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria. Frances Yates's The Art of Memory will help us 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 of 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 puritans and native peoples changed the way the various groups came to identify themselves, including the emergence of the idea of the puritans as a "peculiar people." We will then turn to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, and to William Bradford's Of Plimouth Plantation.

Next we will read Edward Taylor's poems on the Song of Songs, and we will finish with a look at the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson. Our central biblical text will be the Song of Songs.

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