Faculty Members On Leave
The following professors will be on leave during the Spring 2005 semester: Jay Cantor, Joseph Litvak, and Alan Lebowitz.

English 1- 4

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

English 5- 99

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

English 100- 199

• Schedule
• Course descriptions

English 200+

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 0006A
Creative Writing: Fiction
Alonso, J

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

ENG 0006B
Creative Writing: Fiction
Downing, M

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

ENG 0006C 
Creative Writing: Fiction
Hershman, M

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

ENG 0006D 
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; students also will 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."

ENG 0006E 
Creative Writing: Fiction
Hurka, J

Block: M+  Time: TR 5:30-6:45 PM

ENG 0006F 
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.

ENG 0006G
Creative Writing: Fiction
Johnston, S

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

ENG 0006H 
Creative Writing: Fiction
Johnston, S

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

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.

ENG 0006I
Creative Writing: Fiction
Levinson, N

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

ENG 0006J 
Creative Writing: Fiction
Simons, M

ENG 0006K
Creative Writing: Fiction
 Weesner, T

Block: 10  Time: M 7:00-10:00 PM

ENG 0006L
Creative Writing: Fiction
Weesner, T

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

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

ENG 0006M
Creative Writing: Journalism
Miller, N

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

ENG 0006N
Creative Writing: Journalism
Miller, N

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

ENG 0006O 
Creative Writing: Poetry
Gibson

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

ENG 0006P
Creative Writing: Poetry
Gibson, R

A workshop in writing poetry is a place to experiment. We will try on various accomplishments in the poetic tradition – metrics, rhyme schemes, free verse, stanza breaks, shapes, tone, even content, etc. In this class, you will sometimes attempt to imitate, and find it oddly liberating. You may throw out these experiments once accomplished, and try something entirely different. You may embrace old forms as your own. Sometimes, the very poems you’ve shied away from are the ones waiting to teach you! The class is a workshop with some assigned exercises.

ENG 0006Q
Creative Writing: Poetry
Rivard, D

Block: F+ TR  Time: TR 12:00-1:15 PM

ENG 0006R
Creative Writing: Poetry
Rivard, D

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

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.

ENG 0010A
Writing Fiction: Intermediate
Strong, J

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

ENG 0010B 
Writing Fiction: Intermediate
Strong, J

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

This section of English 10 is designed for students who have had some experience in writing fiction. It will provide deadlines, a forum for reading aloud and constructively criticizing each other's work, and the expectation that you will create life on the page in a language natural to you. Regular attendance and spirited participation will be valued. 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.

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.

ENG 0011B
Non-fiction Writing
Ullman, M

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

A course intended to improve students’ writing while they are discovering and exploring various forms of non-fiction: journals, journalism, autobiography, biographical or historical essays, reviews, features, magazine writing. I urge students to develop their own subjects and approaches.

ENG 0014 
The Writing of Fiction
Wilson, J

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

More advanced than English 10, English 14 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 14 may be repeated for credit.

ENG 0022 
Forms of Poetry: Advanced Poetry Workshop
Digges, D

Block: 5  Time: M 1:30-4:30 PM

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.

ENG 0036 
Black World Literature
Sharpe, C

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

This course is an introduction to African literature and the cultures of Africa and its diaspora in the US, the Caribbean and Britain. We will explore a variety of African cultural forms– fiction, film, drama, poetry– and trace their transformation and transmission. The selection of films and texts is not meant to be exhaustive but aims to allow us to begin examining the political and cultural meanings of the "black" world. Texts may include: Things Fall Apart, Nervous Conditions, In the Castle of My Skin, Maru, Disgrace.

ENG 0052 
General View of English Literature II
Hofkosh, S

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

This survey provides a selective introduction to poetry, prose, and dramatic literature of England, Scotland, and Ireland from the time of revolutionary social change in the late 18th Century to the World Wars in the first half of the 20th Century. Attending to the particular themes and formal features of individual works (from Blake and Burns to Joyce and Woolf) in the context of wider historical trends and cultural issues, we will read some of the great literary highlights of the British tradition.

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.

ENG 0064
American Fiction 1950 -present
Johnson, R

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

American Fiction from 1950 to the Present: This study of diverse novels written after 1950 will focus on the emergence of the postmodern in U.S. arts and culture, with emphasis on formal developments, aesthetic consequences, and social implications. We will read a wide range of texts from a variety of American perspectives to explore the decline of canonical exclusivity and the rise of multicultural pluralism in American fiction. Our study will note the hybridization of forms and the appropriation of non-literary discourses to fashion fictive texts. It will consider as well the decentering of the traditional subject and the configuration of numerous and diverse subjectivities newly empowered in literary discourse and through social change in this period–the period which engendered and has become our present moment. Reading the texts against each other and in their moment of composition and publication, we will piece together an understanding of what it means to be "American" in the postmodern era. The course will ask you to think about whether, as it is already said, we are in the post-postmodern moment, and, if so, what that could mean in terms of trends and preferences in forms and styles of contemporary American literature.

Our readings will include authors such as Jack Kerouac, John Okada, Grace Metalious, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Chuang Hua, Norman Mailer, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich, Andrew Holleran, Ishmael Reed, Douglas Coupland, Edwige Danticat, Jonathan Franzen.

ENG 0068 
Shakespeare 
Haber, J

Block: K+ MW  Time: MW 4:00-5:15 PM

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

ENG 0080 
Hitchcock: Cinema, Gender, Ideology 
Edelman, L

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

ENG 0080R  
Hitchcock: Cinema, Gender, Ideology  
Edelman, L

Block: ARR Time: ARR

More than a century 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 satisfactions 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 narrative suspense of 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.

ENG 0092A 
Architecture of the Imagination
Digges, D

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

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 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, and others. A final project will be due at end of term.

ENG 0092B 
Contemporary Fiction 
Genster, J

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

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

 ENG 0092WW 
Contemporary Fiction - Writing Workshop
Genster, J

Block: G R Time: R 3:00-3:50 PM

0092WW is an optional writing-workshop section of 0092 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.

English 100- 199: Schedule

English 100- 199: Course descriptions

(Pre-requisites: English 1 and 2)

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ENG 0110
Chaucer
Fyler, J

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

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

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ENG 0110WW
Chaucer - Writing Workshop (optional)
Fyler, J

Block: A R Time: R 9:30-10:20 AM

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

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ENG 0118
Renaissance Drama: Over-the-Top Performance and Radical Play
Haber, J

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

The Renaissance is generally thought of as the greatest age of the drama in England: Shakespeare's plays are only the most well-known examples of the outpouring of theatrical activity that occurred during this period. In this course, we will read the always fascinating (and sometimes gruesome) plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors, many of whom adopted more radical stances toward the major issues of their time. As we examine their presentations of various forms of power, their constructions of gender and sexuality, and their attitudes towards language and the theater, we will discover why many of these plays have been termed "oppositional drama" and "radical tragedy." We will begin by examining Christopher Marlowe's frontal assaults on contemporary orthodoxies, and we will consider the construction of sodomy in his plays. We will go on to explore the development of the drama of blood and revenge, which was introduced in The Spanish Tragedy, and which exploded in what has been called the "parody and black camp" of The Revenger's Tragedy. We will then explore the tensions which tear apart Ben Jonson's more conservative comedies. Finally, we will look at a selection of 17-century plays about women--The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The Roaring Girl, The Changeling, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and The Convent of Pleasure; we will discuss their varying attitudes toward female autonomy and desire, and consider why women became such central figures in the drama at this time. Throughout the course, we will think about these plays' investment in their own (sometimes quite extreme) theatricality, and we will attempt to do justice to their pervasive sense of play.

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ENG 0123
The Age of Unreason
Flynn, C

Block: L+ Time: MW 5:30-6:45 PM    

We will be reading first about the breakdown of authority: what happens when a king is restored and fails to meet his country’s expectation. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he met high hopes and even higher disappointments, particularly after London was ravaged by the plague in 1665 and almost burnt to the ground in 1666. We will read Dryden, Aphra Behn and Rochester to understand the erotics of court life that shocked, dismayed, and tantalized Charles watchers, and Pepys and Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to understand the dynamics surrounding the plague and fire.

The middle of the course will explore colonizing dreams of escape and exploitation. Heading out for the territories, English subjects and authors imagined great rewards in the new world, rewards that often eluded them and almost always depended upon the slavery of others. We will read Behn’s Oroonoko, a novel about a slave rebellion in Surinam, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s subversive retelling of the colonial story, Lady Wortley Montagu’s "Turkish Letters," excerpts from Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Gay’s Polly, a play about pirates and Indians and indentured servants all living happily ever after.

Finally we will look at the crash, represented in the Great South Sea Bubble. Think dotcom, with a great deal of slavery thrown in. The South Sea Bubble was the first major blip in the Globalization scheme that still underlies our own economy. This section will deal with the financial myth behind the Bubble, exemplified in many of the Spectator Papers, and reinforced by Pope’s poetry about the use of "riches," and Mandeville’s defense of luxury. We will end with Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which makes financial disaster almost fun.

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ENG 0132
Women & Fiction
Bamber, L

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

"But I digressed and was free." Grace Paley

Do (or should) women’s narratives emphasize the experience of women in patriarchy? If you say "yes," you’re wrong, and if you say "no," you’re also wrong. In this course we will look at the different ways in which women writers simultaneously include and evade these issues. The authors we will consider are for the most part committed to both narrative and anti-narrative, representation and language. This is a course for readers who are as interested in matters of language and form as in matters of gender and identity.

Some authors we will read are: Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Grace Paley and Maxine Hong Kingston. We may also see several woman made movies: Strangers in Good Company, The Gleaners and I, and The Taste of Others.

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ENG 0134
Art & Social Crisis: The Victorian Past in the American Present
Emerson, S

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

What difference does art make? What difference can it make, in the midst of social crises that set groups against groups, individuals against individuals, and individuals against themselves? The Victorians' answers to these questions powerfully shaped the answers that emerged in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America (whether Americans realize it or not), for the Victorians were the first to live in a modern industrialized democracy, and to contend with problems and possibilities that are still unresolved and unexhausted today.

In this course we'll explore a range of fiction, non fiction, poetry and plays, looking at popular fantasies as well as at "classics" of "high" Victorian "realism." Attention to painting, photography, and music will extend our grasp of relations between particular forms of art and particular social forces in nineteenth-century Britain—and our grasp of them here, now. Readings will include works by Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, C. Bronte, Tennyson, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw.

The list of novel titles and editions will be available through the English Department office in late April.

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ENG 0135
Empire and Counterculture: British Literature, 1860-1900
Emerson, S

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

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, painting, 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 0148
American Indian Writers
Ammons, E

Block: 5 Time: M 1:30-4:30 PM        

Many people can name only one or two American Indian writers–or none. Some are even surprised to find they exist. What does this erasure mean? What is its history? What dominant culture systems create and maintain it today? How do indigenous writers in the United States refuse and resist this racism? We will begin with three late 19th/early 20th century authors, Sarah Winnemucca, Luther Standing Bear, and Zitkala Sa, and then concentrate on six contemporary texts: N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn; Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings; Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues; and Wendy Rose, Bone Dance. Throughout the course we will view and discuss films that focus on important issues for Native people today. Also we will study historical and political contexts. Major topics will include: the politics of representation/self-representation; Indian resistance to white colonialism, exploitation, and theft; Native people’s self-definitions and demand for sovereignty; connections and disjunctions between the past and the present; the relationship between art and political struggle; our own subject positions and responsibilities in relation to the material in the course. Also, the issue of activism will be an overt part of our work together. The course is a seminar, so active student participation will be an important element.

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ENG 0192A
Environmental Justice & U.S. Literature
Ammons, E

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

1% of the U.S. population owns 38% of the nation’s wealth. The U.S. consumes over 40% of the world’s gasoline and more paper, steel, aluminum, energy, water, and meat per capita than any other society. Four additional planets would be needed if each of the Earth’s inhabitants consumed at the level of the average American.

How does contemporary U.S. literature contribute to the environmental justice movement? What do writers have to say about environmental racism, ecofeminism, homophobia and the social construction of nature, U.S. environmental imperialism, and urban ecological concerns? What analyses and insights can we gain? What is the role of art in the struggle for social change? Our study will be multicultural, foregrounding authors from diverse racial locations–Asian American, African American, Native American, white American, and Latino/a; and an anti-racist analytical framework will be central. Literary texts will include Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; William Haywood Henderson, Native; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Awiakta, Selu; and Simon Ortiz, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land. Also we will read poems by Audre Lorde, Janice Mirikitani, Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich, and Ishmael Reed; view several videos; and discuss selected essays in environmental justice theory. The goal of this course is empowerment for social change. How can each of us participate as a change agent in the struggle for environmental justice, locally and globally? How can our understanding of literature contribute? Group work, a field trip, one research paper, and active class discussion will be important parts of the course. Nonmajors as well as majors are welcome.

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ENG 0192B
Writing Lives
Flynn, C

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

18th 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 0192C
Philip Roth & Company
Freedman-Bellow, J

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

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 either influenced, parodied, refracted, obsessed about or appropriated. Texts will include: Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, Patrimony, 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 0192D
The Epic Strain
enster, J

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

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 0192E
Toni Morrison
King, S.

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

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ENG 0192F
Studies in Ethnic Literature
Rosenmeier, J

Block: 0  Time: M 8:30-11:30 AM

This spring we will study selected texts from various ethnic groups in the U.S. As far as possible, the texts will reflect the ethnic make-up of the class. The following texts will likely be included: Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker, Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow. Students will be asked to keep a journal and to present a group final project. Class discussions will encourage participants to share their cognitive as well as their affective responses to the texts.

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ENG 0192F-WW
Studies in Ethnic Literature - Writing Workshop
Rosenmeier, J

Block: ARR Time: ARR

Students are urged to join the writing workshop attached to the course. Integrating writing with close reading is a rewarding endeavor. It is also often delightfully surprising, for as we write and revise, we find ideas coming to us that we were not aware we had. As a result, our creativity is unlocked, our writing vitalized, and our understanding deepened.

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ENG 0192G
Feminism, Literature, Theory
Rosenthal, L

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

What is feminism and why is it still interesting? What to make of the recent, tendentious label, "post-feminist," and what does it say about gender relations and feminist discourse in our own time? This course will explore feminist theory as it engages categories of representation, power, difference. Paying particular attention to the questions feminism has posed to literary texts, we will investigate feminism’s relationship to psychoanalytic, marxist, literary, postcolonial, queer and critical race theory.

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ENG 0192H
Virginia Woolf
Rosenthal, L

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

Widely recognized as an icon of British modernism, Virginia Woolf is also associated with 20th-century feminism, pacifism and queer theory. Recently popularized by the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, her name, thanks in large part to the lyrical title of Edward Albee’s famous play, has long provided a convenient short-hand for threats and problems ranging from elitism and anti-intellectualism to mental illness, suicide, and intractable gender ambiguity. In this course we will examine some of the reasons Woolf, both because and in spite of the complexity of her work, has served so well as a metonym and exemplary voice for such a wide range of debates and cultural discourses. Readings will be selected from Woolf’s novels, short stories, and essays.

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ENG 0192I
"Home is Where the Hatred Is"
Sharpe, C

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

Drawing its title from Gil Scott-Heron's song, in this course we will read literature, and theory to explore questions of "belonging". Among other topics we will explore the ways that citizens are produced (made and unmade), the ways that borders are drawn and redrawn to create insiders/outsiders, that violent histories are reimagined and redeployed. Class will be run on a discussion basis; active student participation will be part of the course.

Readings may include (but are not limited to) essays by Hortense Spillers and Anne Anlin Cheng.

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English 200+: Schedule

English 200+: Course descriptions

(Graduate students only)

ENG 0292A
Austen & Shelley
Hofkosh, S

Block: 6 Time: T 1:30-4:30 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 in love in the proper, provincial world of the English gentry. Starting with Frankenstein, in 1818, Mary Shelley wrote books about misshapen monsters and murder, forbidden passions, exile and suicide, and the end of the world. With substantial attention to recent critical approaches to Austen and Shelley, as well as supplementary material such as letters, journals, and other contemporary contexts, we will examine what looking at these two authors together may help illuminate about each, as about the possibilities envisioned or contained in early 19th Century narrative.

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ENG 0292B
The American Slave Narrative--cancelled
Rodríguez, B

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

This seminar will theorize the development and negotiations of this literary genre during the 19th century, and its persistent reemergence in later African-American writing. We will examine the cultural and historical contexts that surround both factual and fictionalized expressions of the genre, discussing also the idea of the literary tradition itself. Narratives will include those by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, John Gronniosaw, Nat Turner/Wm. Gray, Michael Harper, Patricia Williams, Robert Hayden, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Sherley Anne Williams. We will also treat the expression of the slave narrative in American painting, photography, and installation. Theoretical and critical models discussed will include those sketched by H.L. Gates, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Wm. Andrews, Patricia Williams, Barbara Johnson, Elaine Scarry, Orlando Patterson. Also, texts by Locke, Lacan, De Man, Freud, among others.

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ENG 0292C
Postcolonialism: in Theory and Fiction
Roy, M

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

Postcolonial theory has become an important and controversial new field in literary, cultural, and historical studies. The exact definition of the term, however, remains diffuse and the subject of intense and often contentious debates. The purpose of this seminar is to historicise the term and to develop its intellectual genealogies. We shall focus on the central debates and ideas forming/informing postcolonial theory. We shall begin with such figures as Lenin in order to trace the "origins" of the theories of colonialism and imperialism and then move to discussions of current disputes that have emerged in the field. Our understanding of the central issues of postcolonial theory will then be tested via readings of literary texts. We shall read the works of Aijaz Ahmad, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, among others. Literary texts may include novels by Jean Rhys, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Tayeb Salih, Michelle Cliff, Ama Ata Aidoo, Amitava Ghosh, Salman Rushdie.

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