English 100 — 199

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

(Pre-requisite: English 1 and 2)

ENG      124	Reason and Revolt:  Or Talking About Revolution     G+		Flynn

The two great revolutions of the 18^th century, both American and French, changed the way that English intellectuals understood elementary ideas of freedom and equality. Human rights became suddenly tangible and inclusive and dangerous. The Rights of Men became, at least in theory, the rights of women, the rights of the enslaved, the rights of chimney sweeps, and the rights of 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.

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ENG      135	Empire and Counterculture:  British Literature, 1860-1900  K+ MW	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 fiction, poetry, music, 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, LeFanu, Morris, Pater, Hopkins, Stevenson, Wilde, M.E. Coleridge, Hardy, Shaw, Barrie, and others. Students interested in getting a headstart should read The Picture of Dorian Gray (in the Penguin Portable Oscar Wilde, preferably).

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ENG      141	Early American Literature, 1620 - 1815              5		Rosenmeier

We will consider texts (including oral expressions) from the many ethnic groups that interacted in all North America prior to the creation of the United States as a nation. For example, we will study Indian myths; Spanish travel narratives; Anglo histories, sermons, and poems; captivity narratives. We will also visit Plimouth Plantation to see how the present constructs the past.

ENG      141WW	Early American Literature, 1620 - 1815		TBA		Rosenmeier

English 141 will offer a Writing Workshop which I hope you all will take. I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to develop a rich and nuanced presentation of self (which is what writing does). Writing is especially useful in doing interdisciplinary work where the connections between and among disciplines are often not immediately evident. Integrating writing with close reading is also delightfully surprising, for as we write and revise, ideas appear that we did not know we had. As a result, our creativity is unlocked, our writing energized, our cognition and emotions enriched, and our confidence in presenting ourselves to the world increased.

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ENG      144	Poe, Hawthorne, Melville                            H+ TR	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.

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ENG      146	African American Women Writers                      1		Rodríguez

This course surveys the works of African-American Women Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Rita Dove. In 1773, Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book, and in 1993 Dove became the first African-American to be named the nation's poet laureate. We will discuss innovative contributions made by these authors to the African-American literary tradition, attending also to the historical and social contexts that inform this literature. Secondary critical works will be assigned and will complement our analyses of the primary texts.

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ENG      147	American Women Writers                              J+		Sharpe

This course concentrates on contemporary texts and emphasizes the multicultural make-up of American literature. We will focus on texts by Latina, Black, Asian, and European American authors. Class will be run on a discussion basis; active student participation will be part of the course.

Texts may include: Corregidora, Sarah Phillips, Woman Hollering Creek, Abeng, Dogeaters, Map to the Door of No Return.

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ENG      148	American Indian Writers                             2		Ammons

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

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ENG      156	Modern European Novel                               J+		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.

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ENG      192A	The Architecture of the Imagination                8		Digges

The Architecture of the Imagination focuses on poetry and prose written through the ages in which dwellings, literal and metaphorical, real and imagined, are built of words. In this class we will investigate how writers through time have been drawn to create such structures built of abstractions-- that is, language-- and how these structures serve, solve and create certain artistic, cultural and philosophical problems. We will investigate the nature of such structures, how they reflect and "house" meaning. This course draws upon literature, philosophy, music, the natural sciences and visual arts. We will sift through "archeological" sites of caves, hovels, gardens, towers, and many other dwellings. In this context we will examine the nature of poetic and prose forms as they shelter and/or exclude writer, content, and world. Some of our readings include Heidegger's essay "On Building, Dwelling, and Thinking," excerpts from Dante's "Inferno," Thoreau's "Walden," poetry by Dickinson, Frost, Kom.

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ENG      192B	Writing Lives                                      2		Flynn

18^th century writers were famous for observing each other. Samuel Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets, describing Richard Savage, for instance, "the bastard poet" who scandalized London with his wild and aggressive claims. James Boswell observed Johnson, and observed himself observing Johnson in his journals and biography. Hester Thrale wrote her anecdotes observing a "different" Johnson. In fact Boswell and Thrale fought over their claims to "know" Johnson and claim him as their own "literary" creation. Fanny Burney observed every body, suffering shyness in public, but exerting comic, sometimes bitchy wit in her novels and diaries. Ignatius Sancho, an African Man of Letters, created a more perfect, witty, composed Sancho in his letters that sound a lot like Laurence Sterne's.

We will read these self-conscious literary productions, and also write our own observations. I want us all to compose one "letter" each week that either "observes" someone you know (or would like to know) or observes instead yourselves observing. We will also write critical essays.

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ENG      192C	Representing the Jew                               F+ TR	Litvak

This course considers Jewish representations and self-representations in England and America, and in literature and popular culture. Topics will include mass culture and the Jews, anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, relations between Jews and other minority groups, Jewishness and sexuality, differences between authorship and performance, and the politics of assimilation. We will begin by looking at two Victorian novels, Dickens's Oliver Twist and Du Maurier's Trilby, and then discuss films such as The Jazz Singer, Gentleman's Agreement, and Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Broadway plays and musicals such as Death of a Salesman, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Producers, television shows such as The Jack Benny Show and Seinfeld, and performers such as Fanny Brice, Barbara Streisand, and Woody Allen. We will also read important critical texts by authors such as Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Theodor Adorno.

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ENG      192D	Modernism & the Novel                         	 K+ MW		Rosenthal

While the association between modernism and fragmentation has become commonplace, the implications and scene of the fragmentary remain productively unresolved. If modernism confronts a world without unity, how does it represent, transform and perhaps betray that constitutive incoherence? Theodor Adorno argues that it is only in the celebration of "dissonance" that the modern novel can "serve freedom," but what

marks and validates the taking place of this crucial aesthetic achievement? Where and how does art "properly" (or, for that matter, improperly) represent the servitude, contradiction and violence of modernity? In this class we will read prose works by canonical British modernists including Joyce, Woolf, and Conrad. We will also read selections from works by Forster, Richardson, Aldington, Lawrence, and Ford, figures whose status within the shifting boundaries of the modern remain contested. Alongside the fiction, we will read criticism that takes up the complex relationships between aesthetic and politics, art and the world, literature and its contexts. The focus of the class throughout will be directed towards theories and readings of the novel as we address the ways in which the novel responds to and represents crises of disruption, dislocation and dissolution. Critical texts will include essays by Woolf, Lukacs, Adorno, Jameson, Said.

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ENG      192E	Philip Roth & Company                              G+		Wilson

We will take a tour through Philip Roth's fiction and non-fiction reading his work alongside that of a number of writers whom he has parodied, refracted, obsessed about and appropriated. Texts will include: Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, The Human Stain (all by Roth), Gogol's "The Nose," Kafka's "Metamorphosis", Henry James's "The Lesson of the Master" and Milan Kundera's The Book of

Laughter and Forgetting.

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ENG      192F	17TH Century English Poetry            		 4		TBA

A study of prominent poets of the era including Milton and Donne.

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