Faculty Members On Leave
The following professors will be on leave during the Fall 2005 semester: Deborah Digges, Barbara Rodríguez, Lecia Rosenthal, Christina Sharpe, and Jonathan Wilson.

English 1- 4

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

English 5- 99

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

English 100- 199

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

English 200+

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

<< Back to course info

English 1- 4: Schedule

English 1- 4: Course descriptions

English 1, which fulfills the first half of the College Writing Requirement, explores the principles of effective written communication and provides intensive practice in writing various types of expository prose, especially analysis and persuasion. Essays by contemporary and earlier authors will be examined as instances of the range and versatility of standard written English. English 1 is offered both semesters, with substantially fewer sections in the spring.

More information on First Year Writing.

English 2 fulfills the second half of the College Writing Requirement. Like English 1, English 2 is a composition course designed to provide a foundation for writing in other courses. Unlike English 1, English 2 offers students the opportunity to choose among several seminar topics, all of which are approached in an interdisciplinary way. While drawing on various materials including fiction, essays, films and other visual and aural texts, English 2 puts the primary emphasis on students' own writing. English 2 is offered both semesters, with substantially fewer sections in the fall.

Return to top

African American Experience

What have been the experiences of African Americans in the U.S.? How have African Americans attempted to construct their own identities and how have other Americans attempted to define "Blackness"? How have issues of class, gender, sexuality, regionalism, and skin tone impacted the formation of a collective African American identity? In this course, which is primarily devoted to increasing writing proficiency, we will use readings and texts from various disciplines to think about what it means to be African American in the U.S. and how this heterogeneous identity is expressed in different forms.

Return to top

Asian American Experience

This is a composition course exploring the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Asian American identity construction through close examination of texts by both Asian Americans and non- Asian Americans. How have Asian Americans been represented in films and books? Can only Asian American artists authentically portray Asian Americans? Do Asian American writers and filmmakers have a social responsibility to counter and challenge stereotypical depictions, or can they just tell an "American" story? Students will read stories about "coming of age" in various media, such as the film, Better Luck Tomorrow; the novel, American Son; and Asian American X, the anthology of essays by college- age Asian Americans. Through class discussions students will consider identity formation, but the primary mode of expression will be writing. Students will consistently practice writing and discuss their processes with their colleagues.

Return to top

Conformity and Rebellion

How does one act on discontent? What are its consequences? Does conformity always imply a sacrifice of individuality? Does rebellion always lead to marginalization? We will examine the tensions between conformity and rebellion in a variety of contexts: political, social, familial, and religious. Readings will include novels, short stories, plays and essays, and we may also consider other media such as film or music. Discussion of these materials and the issues raised by them will provide the basis for the student writing that is at the center of the course.

Return to top

Differences

What does it mean to be "different"–politically, religiously, racially or ethnically, sexually, or by reason of class or disability–from the social "norm"? How do those in the social "norm" react when they encounter those who are different? If the social norm is white, Protestant, male, heterosexual, and middle class, how do writers in other categories imagine themselves in relation to this "norm"? What are the special problems and opportunities for writers who are "different"? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course which is devoted, primarily, to increasing proficiency in writing.

Return to top

Environmental Visions

With globalization at the forefront of current events, environmental issues have a greater urgency now than at any time in the recent past. This course will focus on some of the most immediate issues in current environmental politics: global climate change, environmental justice, the rights of indigenous people, animal rights, and recent proposals to drill for oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge. In addition, we will consider the connections between environmental crises and war. Students will explore the causes of environmental problems, their extent, and possible solutions through a variety of books, essays, and films—as well as through their own writing of persuasive essays and creative non- fiction.

Return to top

Family Ties

This writing course explores the family as a locus for conflict, alienation and reconciliation, as a center for the formation of identity, and as a source of joy. We will hear the voices of mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons as they speak of the experience of being within a family; and we will ask how families are formed. Strands of shared DNA define some, while legal documents establish others. Often people who are unrelated by biology or law nonetheless consider themselves family. While the work of novelists, essayists, biographers, and filmmakers will be the basis of our inquiry into topics as ancient as sibling rivalry and as contemporary as the ethics of reproductive technology, we will focus most of our attention on students' own writing about family ties.

Return to top

Films About Love, Sex, & Society

Many films deal with romantic relationships and the possibilities for happiness in them, raising questions about male and female social roles and about lovers both heterosexual and homosexual at odds with society or coming to terms with it. We will look at a selection of films, some older and black and white, some more recent, some English- language, some foreign- language (with subtitles); and we will talk about the issues they raise. Readings will be assigned on the films and on the broader issues. Students will be required to attend film screenings on specified evenings. We will do various types of writing, including formal analytical essays, film reviews, and informal response papers; and students' writing will be central.

Return to top

Love and Sexuality

In addition to examining love and sexuality both separately and with regard to one another, we will look at related issues such as gender, sex roles, sex, homosexuality, heterosexuality, narcissism, sadism, masochism, affection, marriage, marriage alternatives, divorce, adultery, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence. Course materials will include some of the following: essays, theoretical writings, fiction, mythology, oral traditions, popular culture, and advertising. Students' ideas, interests, and experience will help guide the class, and students' writing will be the center of it.

Return to top

Other Worlds

What is real? Who says so? The common theme of this course is the human urge to explore other dimensions of reality and create alternate representations of consciousness. Readings may address myths, the supernatural, fairy tales, medieval romances, underworlds, and futurist visions. We will share our own ideas about boundaries—or lack of boundaries—between worlds. A central concern will be students' writing.

Road Stories

All writing involves exploration, but writing about travel has always provided people with a distinctive opportunity to explore, re- imagine and then represent themselves, other cultures and other natures. This semester, we will be writing about travel in the age of globalization and the information superhighway. How does tourism change tourists and the cultures they visit? Can a quest come from a brochure? Why go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Mecca when many of us can see these sites on our computer screens every night? Indeed, why travel at all? To help us answer such questions, we will be reading a variety of texts, both fiction and non- fiction, and we will view at least one road movie. But the focus of the course will remain on our own writing. How do we explore and then represent our own insights into the meaning of travel today?

Return to top

What is Queer?

In this writing seminar, we will interrogate what is called "queer" by turning to a range of essays, fictions, films, and television programs. We will start by looking at gender identity, and will investigate theories about how we acquire our genders, and what we do with them once we have them. We will move toward a consideration of various modes of queer sexuality, including—among others—gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender sexualities. As we focus on students' essay- writing and research, our broad context will include issues of race, culture, normativity, transgression, power, desire, affection, marriage, and alternatives to marriage.

Return to top

Lynn Stevens, Director

Designed for international students and for students who speak English as an additional language, English 3 fulfills the first half of the College Writing Requirement. Like English 1, this course explores the principles of effective written communication and provides intensive practice in writing various types of expository prose, especially analysis and persuasion. Essays by contemporary and earlier writers will be examined as instances of the range and versatility of standard written English. Offered in the fall semester; consent of the instructor is required for admission.

Return to top

Philosophy 1: (Introduction to Philosophy)

Students interested in taking Philosophy 1 as an English 2 equivalent should contact the Department of Philosophy. Students must register for Philosophy I in the Philosophy Department.

Return to top

English 5- 99: Schedule

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:

English 5- 99: Course descriptions

(Pre- requisite: English 1 and 2)

ENG 0005A
Creative Writing: Fiction
Alonso, J

Block: J+ Time: TR 4:00- 5:15 PM

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

Return to top

ENG 0005B
Creative Writing: Fiction
Downing, M

Block: K+ MW Time: MW 4:00- 5:15 PM

Return to top

ENG 0005C
Creative Writing: Fiction
Downing, M

Block: L+ Time: MW 5:30- 6:45 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0005D
Creative Writing: Fiction
Hershman, M

Block: 8 Time: R 1:30- 3:55 PM

Return to top

ENG 0005E
Creative Writing: Fiction
Hershman, M

Block: J+ Time: TR 4:00- 5:15 PM

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, read 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."

Return to top

ENG 0005F
Creative Writing: Fiction
Hurka, J

Block: M+ Time: TR 5:30- 6:45 PM

Return to top

ENG 0005G
Creative Writing: Fiction
Hurka, J

Block: P+ Time: TR 7:00- 8:15 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0005H
Creative Writing: Fiction
Johnston, S

Block: 1 Time: T 8:30- 11:30 AM

Return to top

ENG 0005I
Creative Writing: Fiction
Johnston, S

Block: 2 Time: W 8:30- 11:30 AM

This is an intensive course for those who really want to learn to write. No previous experience is necessary, though students who have studied creative writing before are welcome and often enjoy the course—we even get some former students who return for a second semester. In the course, you'll work closely on every phase of writing fiction: generating ideas, drafting, and revision. As you do so, you'll have a chance to explore and discover your voice as a writer, as well as learning how to develop strong fictional characters, working with the elements of plot and point of view, learning to write and punctuate dialogue, and employing setting, subtext, and theme. Be prepared to work hard, but if you love to write, you'll get a lot of feedback on your work. Student response from the past indicates that this course is challenging but fun.

Return to top

ENG 0005J
Creative Writing: Fiction
Levinson, N

Block: F+ TR Time: TR 12:00- 1:15 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0005K
Creative Writing: Fiction
Strong, J

Block: G+ Time: MW 1:30- 2:45 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0005L
Creative Writing: Fiction
Talusan, G

Block: 10 Time: M 7:00- 10:00 PM

Should fiction entertain, reflect reality, or present possibility? Do writers have a responsibility, and if so, to what? To whom?

We will read short stories from writers of color and pay particular attention to the unique position and challenges of writers who are traditionally underrepresented in literature. How are the concerns and aesthetic of the minority writers expressed? What do their stories illuminate? Aren't all literary writers, as creators of imaginary worlds and careful observers of life, somehow outside the mainstream? This is an introduction to writing narrative and is open to anyone who admires stories and wants to practice writing them. Through consistent writing, students will practice elements of craft. Through close reading and analysis of stories, as well as essays on writing, students will examine fundamentals of the story.

Return to top

ENG 0005M
Creative Writing: Fiction
Weesner, T

Block: 11 Time: T 7:00- 10:00 PM

Return to top

ENG 0005N
Creative Writing: Fiction
Weesner, T

Block: 12 Time: W 7:00- 10:00 PM

This course is an introduction to fiction writing. Our mission through the semester will be to examine and practice the craft that underpins any quality short story. Often we will come together as a workshop, where we will help a writer to see the range of possibility in his or her work. 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 further 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 hope to uncover a measure of its mystery and art.

Return to top

ENG 0005O
Creative Writing: Journalism
Miller, N

Block: K+ MW Time: MW 4:00- 5:15 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0005P
Creative Writing: Poetry
Gibson, R

Block: 10 Time: M 7:00- 9:30 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0005Q
Creative Writing: Poetry
Rivard, D

Block: F+ TR Time: TR 12:00- 1:15 PM

Return to top

ENG 0005R
Creative Writing: Poetry
Rivard, D

Block: 12 Time: W 7:00- 10:00 PM

Like any creative activity, the process of writing poems can often be mysterious. Most of the time, you sit down not knowing what you're going to say and then you say it. In that sense, there are no "rules." On the other hand, there are many elements of craft and technique that poets rely upon. So we'll be talking about such things as metaphor and simile, tone, image, metrics, free verse, rhyme, diction, the voice, narrative, revision, strategy and structure, point of view, etc. The class is run in a workshop format, with assigned exercises. We'll look at the work of a wide- range of poets, and I'll help you develop a vocabulary of appreciation for that work (as well as some tools for criticizing your own work). This is a class where we'll all learn to make and remake ourselves as writers.

Return to top

ENG 0009A
Writing Fiction: Intermediate
Strong, J

Block: L+ Time: MW 5:30- 6:45 PM

This section of English 9 is designed for students who have had some experience in writing fiction. It will provide deadlines, a forum for reading aloud and constructively criticizing each other's work, and the expectation that you will learn to create life on the page in a language natural to you. Regular attendance and spirited participation will be valued.

Return to top

ENG 0009B
Writing Fiction: Intermediate
Cantor, J

Block: 7 Time: W 1:30- 4:30 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0011A
Intermediate Journalism
Levinson, N

Block: J+ Time: TR 4:00- 5:15 PM

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. Students will work on writing for newspapers and magazines, which includes feature writing. 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.

Return to top

ENG 0011B
Nonfiction Writing
Miller, N

Block: E+ MW Time: MW 10:30- 11:45 AM

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 15.

Return to top

ENG 0013
Writing Fiction: Advanced
Lebowitz, A

Block: 7 Time: W 1:30- 4:00 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0022
Forms of Poetry
Gibson, R

Block: 11 Time: T 7:00- 9:30 PM

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. 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.

Return to top

ENG 0045
Non- Western Women Writers
Roy, M

Block: E+ MW Time: MW 10:30- 11:45 AM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0051
General View of English Literature
Haber, J

Block: K+ MW Time: MW 4:00- 5:15 PM

A survey of English literature from the beginning through the middle of the seventeenth century. Readings will probably include Beowulf, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost, lyrics by Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Queen Elizabeth, Amelia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, and Andrew Marvell, and plays by Marlowe and/or Shakespeare. 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.

Return to top

ENG 0059
Continuity of American Literature
Johnson, R

Block: H+ TR Time: TR 1:30- 2:45 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0061
Short Fiction
Bamber, L

Block: K+ MW Time: MW 4:00- 5:15 PM

Some of the stories we will read in this course will be the classic ones, but we will read many quirky, unconventional and idiosyncratic ones as well. The emphasis will be on language and form as we interrogate the genre by exploring its margins. Many of the stories we will read have the linguistic density of poetry; many dispense with what we take to be the necessities of fiction - -  plot, character and action - -  in favor of formal experimentation. The stories vary in all sorts of ways: from the meticulous, self- effacing prose of Gustave Flaubert to the post- modernist self- indulgence of David Foster Wallace; from the political engagement of Gina Berriault and Langston Hughes to the aesthetic distances of Anton Chekov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; from the slow, "old fashioned" style of Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett to the intense, elliptical prose of Isaac Babel; from the extreme reliance on "voice" of Juno Diaz to the cool omniscience of Flannery O'Connor; from novel- length "stories" like Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat to a "story" by Lydia Davis of less than a sentence. Students will be required to undertake a peer teaching project as well as to write the usual papers and response papers and to contribute in class.

Return to top

ENG 0067
Shakespeare
Genster, J

Block: H+ TR Time: TR 1:30- 2:45 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0067WW
Shakespeare -  Writing Workshop
Genster, J

Block: IT Time: T 3:00- 3:50 PM

67- WW 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.

Return to top

ENG 0077
The Modern Mind
Cantor, J

Block: J+ Time: TR 4:00- 5:15 PM

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.

Return to top

ENG 0081
Postmodernism and Film
Edelman, L

Block: K+ MW Time: MW 4:00- 5:15 PM

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, Frederic 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 precisely around questions of identity. In the process, we will consider how postmodern theory transforms our ideas about history, narrative, and visual perception.

Although we will attend to a number of films that raise issues central to postmodernism, that doesn't mean that the films we will study 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. The following are likely to be among the cinematic texts considered in class : the Wachowski's The Matrix (with a glance at The Matrix Reloaded), 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, Amenabar's Abre los Ojos, and Luhrman's Moulin Rouge.

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.

Return to top

ENG 0091A
Girls' Books
Flynn, C

Block: 2 Time: W 8:30- 11:30 AM

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

Return to top

ENG 0091B
Sisters, Daughters, Mothers
King, S

Block: M+ Time: TR 5:30- 6:45 PM

Almost all great literature on some level involves an exploration of human relationships. While the texts we read in this course reflect a wide range of voices and experiences, they share a common thread in their presentation of the multiplicity of roles that women play throughout their lives. Through narratives that unfold like densely layered tapestries, the lives portrayed in these texts are woven together in complicated patterns of mother- daughter, sister- to- sister and inter- generational ties that sometimes restrict, and at other times liberate, the characters. Looking across cultures and genres, this course will explore works by such Afro- Caribbean writers as Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat; semi- autobiographical works by Latinas such as Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Aguilera and Esmeralda Santiago; short fiction by Gish Jen and Jhumpa Lahiri; and emerging cross- racial and cross- national voices like that of Zadie Smith.

Return to top

ENG 0091C -  CANCELLED
Representing Horror: The Middle Passage and American Slavery
Rodríguez, B

Block: D+ Time: TR 10:30- 11:45 AM

This course focuses on the challenges that the horrors of slavery pose to representation. We will begin with readings of the artifacts, objects, and genres generated by and depicting the Trans- Atlantic slave trade. For instance, we will read Olaudah Equiano's account of the Middle Passage together with the infamous schematic Description of a Slave Ship, an image of the hold of a slave ship that continues to be widely reproduced. We will compare these narrative accounts of the Middle Passage with the records produced by the Trade to show, for instance, that Equiano describes the horrors of the Middle Passage as unspeakable at the same time that he calls attention to the careful economic equations structuring the Slave Trade. Likewise, the authors of the Description signify on the packing instructions generated by the Trade's captains: the Description of a Slave Ship interprets Dolben's Act, a 1788 regulatory law intended to boost the industry's profits by decreasing its mortality rates, to document the Trade's precise calculations of the body's requirements for survival. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the ways that Middle Passage texts contextualize a sustained discussion of the law in the African American literary tradition, defining it as a manifestation of a traumatic history. Readings for the course will also include contemporary texts that also depict the horrors of slavery, including "Middle Passage" (1945) by Robert Hayden, Middle Passage (1990) by Charles Johnson. We will also read texts that depict new world slavery including Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Edward Jones' The Known World, and Valerie Martin's Property.

Return to top

ENG 0091D
Screening for Race
King, S

Block: 8 Time: R 1:30- 4:30 PM

For better or for worse, some portion of how we perceive race and ethnicity is influenced by how racial difference or "otherness" is portrayed on the silver screen. In addition to examining how race is constructed in movies, by whom, and who- - racially speaking- - is the intended audience, this course will explore how racial representation has evolved or stagnated in mainstream film, and to what extent it creates or reflects prevailing racial attitudes and assumptions. To do this, we will view films in pairs, juxtaposing "classic" treatments of ethnicity from Hollywood's Golden Years with more contemporary, mainstream examples. Classic films include To Kill A Mockingbird, Imitation of Life, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Giant, placed alongside their more contemporary counterparts such as The Green Mile, Monster's Ball, Jungle Fever and Lone Star.

Return to top

ENG 0091E
Black Comedy
Litvak, J

Block: L+MW Time: MW 5:30- 6:45 PM

In narratives called "black comedies," the comic effect of pleasure is inseparable from the supposedly uncomic experience of pain. Looking at various examples of black comedy, drawn mainly from film, but also from fiction and television, we will attempt in this course to think about the relations between comedy and cruelty, between laughter and shame, between joy and fear, between escapism and satire, and between entertainment and insult. 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, Dr. Strangelove, Heathers, To Die For, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Bamboozled, Election, and The King of Comedy; novels such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, and Muriel Spark's Memento Mori; plays such as Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Joe Orton's Loot, 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.

English 100- 199: Schedule

English 100- 199: Course descriptions

ENG 0113
The Renaissance in England
Haber, J

Block: G+ Time: MW 1:30- 2:45 PM

"All the world's a stage," says Jaques in As You Like It, "and all the men and women merely players." The theatrical attitude toward life evident in these lines was characteristic of the Renaissance. Not only was this the greatest age of the English drama, it was an age that was deeply dramatic: in both the "literary" and the "non- literary" texts of the period, the possibility repeatedly surfaces that everyone is continually playing a part—that each of our identities consists merely of a set of inconsistent roles. This possibility could be extremely liberating, permitting one to escape the confines of fixed social and gendered positions, and enabling the creation of "other worlds"—alternative societies or utopias. It could also, of course, be deeply frightening: taken to an extreme, it threatens the foundations of traditional beliefs about religion and society. We will examine how these conflicting attitudes manifested themselves in the poetry and prose of the period: we will begin with early humanist writings, look closely at the development of the lyric, and read prose and poetic romances, national epics and erotic epyllia (small epics). We will consider carefully the self- consciousness about representation that is evident in most of these texts, and we will explore their authors' ever- present delight in—and distrust of—the powers of language and art. Readings will probably include works by More, Erasmus, Castiglione, Wyatt, Sidney, Greville, Labé, Queen Elizabeth, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

Return to top

ENG 0128
Romantic Literature & Culture: 1789- 1816
Hofkosh, S

Block: D+ Time: TR 10:30- 11:45 AM

Responding to the radical challenges to traditional authority that reverberate across the channel from the French Revolution and the Terror, romantic writers address the transformations within British culture sparked by such volatile issues as women's rights, the abolition of the slave trade, and the emergence of industrial capitalism. We will read a range of late 18th-  and early 19th- century fiction, poetry and autobiography to explore how literature understands and inflects these and other social issues. The readings by Austen, Barbauld, Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and others will include a novel, a slave narrative, early feminist polemic, and a private diary, as well as a variety of lyric, narrative, visionary, and parodic poetry.

Return to top

ENG 0145
American Realism
Ammons, E

Block: F+ TR Time: TR 12:00- 1:15 PM

We will examine fiction, prose, and film from 1880- 1920, a period of unusual social upheaval and conflict that offers striking insights into a number of important issues today, including contemporary racism, anti- immigrant policies and attitudes, modern feminism, anti- Semitism, and changing sexual mores. Our study will be multicultural in focus–we will read works by African American, Native American, European American, Asian American, and Mexican American writers–and we will place major emphasis on analysis of social issues in the literature. Also we will study how narrative form was experimented with–questioned, altered, invented–as writers and early filmmakers helped generate what we now recognize as the modern period. We will ask: How do fiction and film operate as social criticism? Who gets to create art in America–and who does not? Class will be run on a discussion basis and authors will include Zitkala Ša, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anzia Yezierska, Pauline Hopkins, María Cristina Mena, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, and Upton Sinclair. Also, we will view and discuss D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915); a contemporary film about American Indian issues during the period; and a documentary about Asian American immigration, Ancestors in the Americas: Sailors, Coolies, and Settlers. Writing assignments will encourage students to do research and to experiment in one of the two papers with writing prose fiction.

Return to top

ENG 0175
Contemporary Jewish Fiction
Freedman- Bellow, J

Block: D+ Time: TR 10:30- 11:45 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.

Return to top

ENG 0191A
Different Voices: Multicultural America before 1860
Ammons, E

Block: G+ Time: MW 1:30- 2:45 PM

Who was here before 1860? How do we recover a multicultural range of voices and texts? We will concentrate on the first half of the 19th century, dividing our time equally among African American writers such as David Walker and Harriet Wilson, Native American writers such as William Apess and John Rollin Ridge, white European American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Chinese American authors such as Hab Wa and Tong K. Achick, and Mexican American writers such as Juan Nepomucen Seguin and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Also, we will read an American slave narrative originally written in Arabic, and selected videos and readings in history will be part of our study. As we consider diverse voices and texts, we will ask: Which are remembered and taught and which are not? Why? The course gives special attention to the literary forms that authors use to express new and often insurgent views; and throughout we will think about the relevance of this material to our lives today. Class will include active student participation and there will be a field trip to the only known standing slave quarter in New England.

Return to top

ENG 0191B
Perspectives on American Poetry
Bamber, L

Block: E+ MW Time: MW 10:30- 11:45 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, differance, 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.

Return to top

ENG 0191C
19th- Century Fiction
Emerson, S

Block: 6 Time: T 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.

Return to top

ENG 0191D
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.

Return to top

ENG 0191E
Frankenstein's Sisters: Jane Austen & Mary Shelley
Hofkosh, S

Block: F+ TR Time: TR 12:00- 1:15 PM

Between 1811 and 1818 Jane Austen published six books known as domestic fiction or novels of courtship, each of which focuses on a young woman falling in love in the proper, limited, provincial world of the English gentry. Starting with Frankenstein, in 1818, Mary Shelley wrote novels about misshapen monsters, forbidden passions, betrayal, exile, murder, and suicide. With some attention to recent critical approaches to the early 19th Century novel, and especially to women's writing during that period, we will explore the issues and interests that these two apparently very different authors share, from the fictional nightmares of Austen's Northanger Abbey to Shelley's representation of the end of the human world in The Last Man.

Return to top

ENG 0191F
Hemingway & Faulkner
Lebowitz, A

Block: F+ TR Time: TR 12:00- 1:15 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.

Return to top

ENG 0191H -  CANCELLED
Toni Morrison
Rodríguez, B

Block: B+ TR Time: TR 8:05- 9:20 AM

This course will focus on the work of Toni Morrison, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. We will read a number of Morrison's novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, the Pulitzer Prize- winning Beloved, and her latest work, Love. Our reading list will also contextualize the range of Morrison's influence on the American Literary Tradition, focusing both on works that Morrison edited, and on others that- -  together with Morrison's early novels- - signaled the flourishing in the 1980s of African American women's writing; we will read Gayl Jones' Corregidora and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, among others. Our approach to these texts will be informed by Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and by other important secondary critical and theoretical articles.

Return to top

ENG 0191I
James Joyce's Ulysses
Ullman, M

Block: E+ MW Time: MW 10:30- 11:45 AM

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

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

English 200+: Schedule

English 200+: Course descriptions

ENG 0291A
The Sentimental Moment: Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and Maria
Flynn, C

Block: 5 Time: M 1:30- 4:30 PM

This is your chance to read the longest, and I think the best, novel in the English language: Richardson's Clarissa, a work that stretches the exquisite anguish of its heroine's life and death in a full throttled attempt to move, engage, and reform the reader. Samuel Johnson said that if you read Clarissa for the plot, you would hang yourself; you read it for "the sentiment." We will explore the theory and cult of sentimentality in this course, spending half of our time reading (closely) all two thousand pages of Clarissa, a novel that makes disturbing connections between patriarchy, sexuality, death, and power. We will then move on to Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a novel that excels in its careful attention to the connections between sex, identity and death and impotence. Finally we'll read Wollstonecraft's Maria, a feminist attack on a sentimentality that nonetheless drives the novel, a novel, by the way concerned with patriarchy, sexuality, death, and … If we have time, we'll also read Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a merciless and parodic attack on the sentimental values of Clarissa.

Return to top

ENG 0291B
Troilus and Criseyde
Fyler, J

Block: 7 Time: W 1:30- 4:30 PM

This seminar, restricted to graduate students, will be concerned with Chaucer before the Canterbury Tales, the courtly poet for whom French, Italian, and Latin literature are deeply influential. Our focus will be on Chaucer's greatest work, Troilus and Criseyde, its sources in Boccaccio and in the Latin epics of Vergil and Statius, and a close reading of its text. We will be concerned with a number of issues the poem raises, about narrative technique, historiography, gender, and the nature and meaning of love.

Return to top

ENG 0291C
The Long 1950s
Litvak, J

Block: 6 Time: T 1:30- 4:30 PM

Focusing on the configuration of symptoms known as McCarthyism, the blacklist, and the Red Scare, this seminar will examine United States cultural politics during and after the Cold War. As the title suggests, we will study the persistence of "the 1950s" well beyond the decade's apparent chronological end. We will be particularly interested in changes, since World War II, in the left- liberal intellectual's relation to both high culture and mass culture. We will consider fiction by Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, E. L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth; plays by Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Tony Kushner; criticism by Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris; and films such as On the Waterfront, High Noon, Pickup on South Street, The Manchurian Candidate, and Point of Order. There will also be readings in recent criticism and theory.

Return to top