English 6 — 99

Please Note: Class times are subject to change. Before you register, consult course lists posted in the English Department.

Pre-requisites: English 1 and 2. English majors will note that courses are designated for degree requirement purposes either pre-1830/1860 or post-1830/1860 in the following table:

(Pre-requisite: English 1 and 2)

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ENG  0005A            Creative Writing:  Fiction		J+	Alonso

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

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ENG  0005B            Creative Writing:  Fiction		K+ MW	Downing

ENG  0005C            Creative Writing:  Fiction		L+	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.

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ENG  0005D            Creative Writing:  Fiction		8	Hershman

ENG  0005E            Creative Writing:  Fiction		J+	Hershman

This is a fiction workshop focusing on the power to be found in concision, where the writer's skill in selecting and shaping key details serves to strengthen a work. During the first four weeks we will have 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 creation of voice, plot, and character development. The balance of the term is devoted to the workshop-discussion format. Students will present to the class two complete short stories, a rewrite of the more challenging of these two works, and one short "turn-around."

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ENG  0005F            Creative Writing:  Fiction		J+	Hurka

ENG  0005G            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.

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ENG  0005H            Creative Writing:  Fiction		1	Johnston

ENG  0005I            Creative Writing:  Fiction		6	Johnston

This section of English 5 is a beginning course 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%.

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ENG  0005J            Creative Writing:  Fiction		H+ TR	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.

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ENG  0005K            Creative Writing:  Fiction		K+ MW	Simons

ENG  0005L            Creative Writing:  Fiction		L+	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.

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ENG  0005M            Creative Writing:  Fiction		G+	Strong

ENG  0005N            Creative Writing:  Fiction		K+ MW	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. 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.

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ENG  0005O            Creative Writing:  Journalism		K+ MW	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.

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ENG  0005P            Creative Writing:  Poetry			11	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.

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ENG  0005Q            Creative Writing:  Poetry			M+	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.

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ENG  0005R            Creative Writing:  Poetry			F+ TR	Rivard

ENG  0005S            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.

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ENG  0009A            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.

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ENG  0009B            Writing Fiction: Intermediate		5	Wilson

A middle level workshop in the writing of short fiction. We'll generate our own stories for discussion, and look at the work of some masters of the genre. This 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.

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ENG  0011A            Intermediate Journalism			J+	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.

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ENG  0011B            Nonfiction Writing			G+	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 of interest. Students will read their work in class as often as possible, with classes functioning as workshops. 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.

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ENG  0013            Writing Fiction:  Advanced			7	Lebowitz

More advanced than English 9, English 13 is open without permission to students who have already taken at least two fiction-writing courses at any level. Students who have not taken two courses but who have done a fair amount of writing on their own may be admitted with permission of the instructor. English 13 may be repeated for credit.

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ENG  0022            Forms of Poetry				5	Digges

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. 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. English 22 may be repeated for credit.

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ENG  0045            Non-Western Women Writers			F+ TR	Roy

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

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

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ENG  0051            General View of English Literature		F+ TR	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.

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ENG  0051WW            Writing Workshop (Optional)		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.

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ENG  0059            Continuity of American Literature		H+ TR	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.

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ENG  0067            Shakespeare				K+ MW	Bamber

A study of eight Shakespeare plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, I Henry IV, King Lear, Hamlet, 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.

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ENG  0077            The Modern Mind				H+ TR	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.

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ENG  0080            Hitchcock:  Cinema, Gender, Ideology	G+	Edelman

A hundred years after his birth, Alfred Hitchcock's name is synonymous not only with cinematic suspense, but also with the appeal of film as a medium of popular entertainment. That popularity reflects our continuing fascination with the visual satisfaction the medium affords even as it testifies to our cultural investment in the narrative forms (thriller, suspense film, romantic melodrama) in which Hitchcock primarily worked. This course will explore the relation between Hitchcock's achievement of cinematic "mastery" and his constant, almost obsessive attention to questions of gender, sexuality, and cultural authority—questions that always underpin the narratives of suspense in his films. We will examine in detail how the act of seeing gets framed in Hitchcock's films by being associated with practices of political and erotic surveillance and we will attend to his consequent inflection of "looking" and therefore of cinematic spectatorship as well, in the direction of sexual perversions such as voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, and masochism. In this regard, we will consider the pleasures that Hitchcock's style affords: Whose pleasure is it? To what does it respond? How does its insistent perversity affect our reading of Hitchcock's popular appeal? To answer these questions we will read a number of theoretical accounts of Hitchcock's cinema, including a number of recent interventions from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory. Students should be prepared to explore and discuss the politics of sexuality as it intersects with the politics of reading and interpretation. Our energies will be devoted primarily, however, to studying and learning how to read closely some of the most complex, compelling, and stylish texts of Western cinema. These will include The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie.

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ENG  0091A            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, Deliver Us from Evie, 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

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ENG  0091B            Introduction to African American Literature	E+ MW	Rodríguez

This course will begin with a discussion of the literature of slavery and freedom. We'll read important autobiographical accounts of the institution of slavery by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Olaudah Equiano. We'll also study the oral tradition, thinking about the way that these authors—and other writers like Charles Chesnutt and Paul Lawrence Dunbar (also on our reading list) comment on vernacular forms. Texts written in the first half of the 20th-century including James Weldon Johnson's fictional autobiography, The Autobiography an Ex-Coloured Man, sections of W.E.B. DuBois' "collective autobiography" Souls of Black Folk and Ida B. Wells-Barnett's A Red Record, an indictment of lynching, will foreground our discussion of later texts. These will include works by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and a number of contemporary authors.

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ENG  0091C            The Epic Strain				J+	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.

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ENG  0091D            Poets in Exile				8	Digges

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

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ENG  0091E            Writers in Hollywood			L+	Litvak

Stereotypically, writers in Hollywood–verbal artists working in a visual medium, and in a visually oriented culture–are unappreciated, exploited, and marginalized. While feeling the pain of the writer in Hollywood, we will attempt to think in less stereotypical ways about the relations between the verbal and the visual, as well as between the artistic and the commercial, the intellectual and the popular, the East Coast and the West Coast. We will approach the topic of writers in Hollywood by studying writers on Hollywood. We will thus focus on the "Hollywood novel," considering various examples of this subgenre along with a series of films that are about writers in Hollywood, have screenplays by Great Writers, or raise interesting questions about the place of screenwriting within mainstream U.S. cinema. Novels will include West's The Day of the Locust, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, Waugh's The Loved One, and Didion's Play It as It Lays. Films will include Barton Fink, The Player, In a Lonely Place, and Sunset Boulevard. We will do some reading in cultural history and film criticism. Films will be screened outside of regular class sessions.

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ENG  0091F	Representation & Violence:  Readings in 20th C British Literature F+ TR	Rosenthal

How does literature respond to and represent violence? From the theatres of imperialism to the fronts of the two World Wars, from fascism to the Cold War, from imagined trauma to historical catastrophe, British literature has taken up violence as both a political-ethical question and a problem of representation. Reading selected texts from 20th-century British fiction, poetry, and drama, this course will address the relationships between aesthetics and violence, memory and mourning, narrative and testimony. Authors may include Wells, Shaw, Conrad, Kipling, Yeats, Huxley, Forster, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, Rushdie.