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)

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ENG 0101       Old English                 Fyler, J
Block: D+        Time: TR 10:25-11:40 AM  

An introduction to the Old English language and literature, and to Anglo-Saxon culture. Like any course in a foreign language, this one requires a certain amount of memorization-of vocabulary and grammatical paradigms. But Old English is not that difficult to learn, and our emphasis will be literary. We will read a selection of prose works and lots of poetry, including “The Seafarer,” “The Battle of Maldon,” and Beowulf.  

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ENG 0101WW            Old English - Writing Workshop (optional)              Fyler, J
Block: A R       Time: R 9:25-10:15 AM  

101WW is an optional writing-workshop section of 101 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.    

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ENG 0124       Reason and Revolt                                                                  Flynn, C
Block: G+        Time: MW 1:30-2:45 PM  

The two great revolutions of the 18th century, both American and French, changed the way that England 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 right 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 0129       Romantic Literature & Culture II: Monsters, Dreamers, and the End of the World                         Hofkosh, S
Block: E+ MW  Time: MW 10:25-11:40 AM  

King George is insane. The Prince Regent, ruling in his father's place, is profligate. England is at war with France as the rapacious Napoleon threatens England's growing imperialist domination. Lord Byron, according to one of his many mistresses, is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." The teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin elopes with the married radical poet Percy Shelley and then imagines the making of a monstrous creature. Thomas de Quincey takes opium and wanders the streets of London. John Keats writes poems of fallen gods, buried heads, and what dreams may come in "the honey'd middle of the night," while Felicia Hemans, abandoned by her husband, writes for her life. Mary Prince, going to England as a slave from the West Indies, arrives to find that freedom may be its own kind of fantasy. In this course, we will study a range of poems, novels, and autobiographical writing which addresses the social, psycho/sexual, national, and racial constructions of identity and power in British culture from 1807-1837. Readings will include lyric and narrative poetry by Byron, Hemans, Keats, and P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley's fiction, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Prince's The History of Mary Prince.    

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ENG 0156       Modern European Novel                                                         Ullman, M
Block: E+        Time: MW 10:25-11:40 AM  

The novelists in this course would agree on very little, perhaps, except that somehow the books they were writing were radically different from earlier novels: more realistic, more true psychologically, less sentimental, more intriguing in form. We will look at the modernisms embodied in writers such as Zola (Germinal), Proust (Swann’s Way), Kafka (The Trial), Mann (Death in Venice), Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway) and Joyce (Portrait of an Artist). And perhaps we will also read a bit of Nietzsche and of Freud. Is Zarathrustra a novel? Dora?  

It might be helpful if students could get started reading the listed books. We will have two papers and possible quizzes.  

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ENG 0175       Contemporary Jewish Fiction                                                Freedman-Bellow, J
Block: D+        Time: TR 10:25-11:40 AM  

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

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ENG 0191A     The Politics of Reading: Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson          Edelman, L
Block: L+        Time: MW 5:25-6:40 PM  

With the rise of “deconstruction” in America, the activity of literary criticism unexpectedly found itself at the center of a noisy debate played out not simply in the halls of the academy, but also in the pages of newspapers and periodicals across the country. “Deconstruction” entered the popular imagination as a threat to the core values of Western Civilization; people who had never read a word by any “deconstructive” theorist were encouraged to experience outrage at the fact that such theories were being taught in our universities. At the very moment when deconstructive criticism was turning its attention to the most emphatically literary questions–questions of language, of rhetoric, of the relation between the literal and the figurative–it engendered a massive political reaction that made the debate about literary theory a significant part of the culture wars played out in the United States from the mid-seventies through the end of the century. This course, intended to be a small seminar for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, will study the work of the two most influential American exponents of deconstructive thought, Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson. In carefully reading their various works of literary criticism, we will attend to “the politics of reading” in two senses of the phrase: both as deconstruction’s own attempt to rethink the protocols governing the practice of literary interpretation and as the social and political consequences that such a rethinking persistently occasions. As a result, we will think about de Man’s theorization of the inevitability of resistance to theory as well as about the scandal that attended the revelation of his wartime publications; we will think about Barbara Johnson’s meditations on the figure of personification as well as about her extension of those meditations to redefine the debates on abortion. By focusing on the work of these two critics, we will arrive not only at a better understanding of their contributions to literary theory, but also at an understanding of the relations among deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, and the socio-cultural politics of late twentieth-century America.  

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ENG 0191B     Memory for Forgetting                                                           Sharpe, C
Block: E+ MW  Time: MW 10:25-11:40 AM  

In this course we will think about memory, trauma, loss, and belonging through reading and viewing a variety of texts and films. Texts may include: Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss, Thylias Moss's Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, as well as readings by Cathy Caruth, Hortense Spillers, and others.  

Films may include: Daughters of the Dust, The Nasty Girl, and Secrets and Lies.    

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ENG 0191C     Hemingway & Faulkner                                                          Lebowitz, A
Block: K+ MW  Time: MW 4:00-5:15 PM  

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

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ENG 0191D     19th-Century Fiction                                                               Emerson, S
Block: 5          Time: M 1:30-4:30 PM  

In this course we'll read "classics" of nineteenth-century English fiction in relation to "classics" written during the same period by German, French, Russian, Norwegian, and Irish writers. We'll look closely at the ways in which the authors read and reacted to each other, at the continuities and discontinuities between the forms they developed for their fictions, and at the bearing on these fictions of their historical, social, and cultural contexts. As we pair and compare English fictions with others written elsewhere, we will also explore the issues raised by translation--making and reading them, in the nineteenth century and now. The authors we'll discuss will probably be Austen, Kleist, the Grimm brothers, Hoffmann, C. Brontë, Balzac, E. Brontë, Turgenev, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, and a few present-day filmmakers who work with nineteenth-century subjects and conventions.  

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

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

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ENG 0191E     Modernism and the Novel: James Joyce's Ulysses              Rosenthal, L
Block: 8          Time: R 1:30-4:30 PM  

Celebrated as a crowning achievement of modernist poetics, James Joyce’s Ulysses has long challenged its readers to confront the non-obviousness of the values and languages of art. In this course, taking Ulysses as our focus, we will examine modernism as discourse of formal innovation. How does Ulysses attempt to recreate the novel and what are the terms by which it claims for itself the possibility of the new? How does Ulysses appropriate prior texts (Homer, folklore, phonebooks) and to what end? Approaching Ulysses as an aesthetic experiment, we will also investigate its relationship to tradition, the rewriting of Irishness, the boundaries of cultural identity.  

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ENG 0191F     Twice Told Tales                                                                      Genster, J
Block: J+        Time: TR 4:00-5:15 PM  

If literature consists in a continuing conversation among authors and works, there are cases in which the exchange sharpens into a tête-à-tête. We'll look at a number of instances in which a later writer very explicitly pitches a tent on grounds earlier claimed by what J.M.Coetzee calls a "classic" work: Coetzee's own Foe as a response to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea as a reply to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres as a rewriting of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs as the boomerang to Dickens' Great Expectations. The relations between texts may be aleatory, retaliatory, both, and everything in between. We'll try to think out the terms, the motives, the satisfactions and the challenges for readers and writers of such work, and to test our conclusions against other sets of textual relations in the works of Kipling, Ondaatje and Gordimer, and Tennyson and Munro.    

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ENG 0191G     How Films Think                                                                      Edelman, L
Block: G+        Time: MW 1:30-2:45 PM  

This upper-level seminar is intended for students who want to study cinema not simply as a mode of storytelling but also as medium for exploring larger questions of representation and visual logic. We will focus on the distinctive language that cinema develops and on how various directors known for their styles enlarge and revise that language. Although we will attend to such cinematic devices as montage, the long take, point of view, shot/reverse shot, and other elements of cinematic rhetoric, we will be more interested in how they create the effect of cinematic thought. We will study, that is, how visual style produces, complements, reframes, and undoes a movie’s surface narrative by generating the need to read that narrative in relation to its cinematic consciousness. What does the movement of the camera do to the image that it depicts? How does it underscore, ironize, or think about the “content” of the image itself? To answer these questions we will focus on works by a variety of American directors acclaimed for their mastery of cinematic style and we will see how these specific styles mark distinctive modes of thought. Those whose works we are likely to study include Orson Welles, Joseph von Sternberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, and David Lynch. Films to be examined are likely to include Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Scarlet Empress, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Godfather (Parts I and II), The Conversation, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill (Volume 1), Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive.    

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ENG 0191H     Vergil and Dante                                                                     Fyler, J
Block: F+ TR   Time: TR 11:50-1:05 PM  

This course will focus on two major texts in the European literary tradition, Vergil's Aeneid and Dante's Commedia. The two are linked because Virgil is Dante's guide in his journey into Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory: he is the guide because Aeneid 6 describes an earlier trip to the underworld, but even more, because Dante has the whole Aeneid very much in mind throughout his own great poem. We will also look at a number of allusions to these works in English and American literature.    

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ENG 0191I      Perspectives on American Poetry                                          Bamber, L
Block: E+ MW  Time: MW 10:25-11:40 AM  

Is Buddhism as American as apple pie? Is America rather than Asia where Buddhism is currently evolving? There are good cultural reasons why the answer to both questions may be yes, but in this course we will be looking at literary precedents and consequences of the shift rather than the cultural history itself. Dozens of contemporary American poets find inspiration in Buddhist ideas of impermanence, non-dualism, goalessness, etc.; and the major poets of the American tradition, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, take on new interest when read in the light of Buddhist thought. Even poets who themselves have no interest in Buddhism often seem to be playing with Buddhist concepts of the Self as an imaginary construct and the price we pay for buying into its reality. The deconstruction of absolutes (God, Nature, Truth) and then the deconstruction of whatever we call their opposite (the Void, difference, emptiness) is a process that goes on in American poetry both before and after the “swans came to the lake” (i.e., Buddhism came to America).  

No previous experience of Buddhism is required. We will read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and selections from other texts of American Buddhism. We will briefly look at Buddhism in contemporary visual arts and music, considering the writings of John Cage and other relevant practitioners. Poets to be considered include: Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, Mary Kean, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Halliday and others.        

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ENG 0191J     Asian American Literature                                                      Talusan, G
Block: M+       Time: TR 5:25-6:40 PM  

What is Asian American literature? Who is Asian American? Who writes Asian American literature? Who reads it? We will examine students’ integral role in the formation of Asian American studies; scholars’ work to define, develop, and legitimize the field; and writers’ insistence to tell their own stories. We will read a variety of texts--prose, poetry, performance, film, and comic strips, by and about Asian Americans. Students will write responses to the readings, a literary analysis essay, and creative work.