ENG 0101-01
Old English
Fyler, J

An introduction to the Old English language and literature, and to Anglo-Saxon culture. Like any course in a foreign language, this one requires a certain amount of memorization-of vocabulary and grammatical paradigms. But Old English is not that difficult to learn, and our emphasis will be literary. We will read a selection of prose works and lots of poetry, including "The Seafarer," "The Battle of Maldon," and Beowulf.
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ENG 0123-01
Frankenstein's Sisters: Austen & Shelley
Hofkosh, S

Between 1811 and 1818 Jane Austen published six books known as domestic fiction or novels of courtship, each of which focuses on the interior life of a young woman falling in love in the proper, limited, provincial world of the English gentry. Starting with Frankenstein in 1818, Mary Shelley wrote books about misshapen monsters, forbidden passions, war, betrayal, suicide, and plague. What do these two apparently so different writers share? With some attention to context and 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 link Austen and Shelley as creators of "subjectivity" or what could be called "the human," from the nightmare fantasies of Austen's Northanger Abbey to Shelley's representation of the end of the world in The Last Man.
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ENG 0128-01
19^th Century English and European Fiction
Emerson, S

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 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. Download a list of titles and editions.
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ENG 0134-01
James Joyce's Ulysses
Rosenthal, L

Celebrated as a crowning achievement of modernist poetics, James Joyce's Ulysses has long challenged its readers to confront the non-obviousness of the values and languages of art. In this course, taking Ulysses as our focus, we will examine modernism as discourse of formal innovation. How does Ulysses attempt to recreate the novel and what are the terms by which it claims for itself the possibility of the new? How does Ulysses appropriate prior texts (Homer, folklore, phonebooks) and to what end? Approaching Ulysses as an aesthetic experiment, we will also investigate its relationship to tradition, the rewriting of Irishness, the boundaries of cultural identity.
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ENG 0136-01
Major Figures of the Irish Literature Renaissance
Ullman, M

In this course, we will consider, and perhaps stretch, the idea of the Irish Literary Renaissance that is generally thought of as occurring in the late 19th century and early 20th century. We shall be looking at major writers: the reading list will include Yeats, Synge, Joyce (Dubliners and Portrait). Others may be Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Moore. I am particularly interested in the interplay of specifically "Irish" culture and politics and literary traditions, and the internationalist leanings of some of these figures.
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ENG 0149-01
American Literature 1620-1815
Rosenmeier, J

"For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill." Governor John Winthrop, 1630. "Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us-and our governments, on every level, national, state, and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their grave, trust and their great responsibility." President-elect John F. Kennedy, 1960.

Let us resolve that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill." President-elect Ronald Reagan, 1980.

"We will save America; we will save the world." President-elect Barack Obama, 2008.

We will study the American origin and development of the literary genres of poetry, history, sermon, captivity narrative, autobiography, drama, and novel. Readings will include Native American Indian myths, Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse, William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, John Cotton, The Way of Life, Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanac, Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Phyllis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Hannah Foster, The Coquette, Royall Tyler, The Contrast, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntley.

We will place these texts in the context of early American culture, including the displacement of native peoples, the puritans as immigrants, the beginnings of slavery, the longing for and yet never-to-be-realized American dream of a glorious future, gender relations, the growth of democracy, and the ever-present tension between individualism and community.

Participants will be invited (but not required) to go on two field trips, one to the Founders Trail in Boston, the other to Plymouth Plantation.

A journal will be required. No exams.

Graduate students will be invited to participate in a separate section which will include additional readings.
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ENG 0153-01
American Realism
Ammons, E

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, anti-immigrant policies and attitudes, modern feminism, contemporary racism, 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, The Birth of a Nation and 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.
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ENG 0155-01
American Women Writers
Sharpe, C

The texts in this course will emphasize the heterogeneity of American literature. We will read a variety of texts that trace and retrace the contours and concerns of race, nation, belonging, and representation from the end of the nineteenth-century to the present. In addition to reading novels we may also see a number of films and view other visual arts as we think through "American women writing" and the practice and politics of representation. This is a seminar. Class will be run on a discussion basis and active student participation is required. Texts may include but are not limited to:

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Helen Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South, among others.
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ENG 0159-01
Contemporary Jewish Fiction
Freedman-Bellow, J

A look at novels and stories by authors whose work has reflected, challenged, shaped and altered contemporary Jewish consciousness. We'll read fiction by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Nathan Englander, Cynthia Ozick, Anne Michaels, Art Spiegelman, and others.
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ENG 0165-01
Perspectives on American Poetry
Bamber, L

Is Buddhism as American as apple pie? Is the U.S., not Asia, where it's currently most alive? Many Buddhist teachers, both Asian and American, have said it is, and certainly there are powerful resonances between Buddhist thought and American poetry. 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 are unfamiliar with Buddhism seem to be playing with Buddhist concepts of "the end of mind" (as Stevens put it); and the end of language, self and even Being as well. In this class we will learn about Buddhist practice from Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki and then see how and where it applies to the poetry of such quintessentially American poets as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and many others.
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ENG 0191-03
Hemingway & Faulkner
Lebowitz, A

We will read the major novels, focusing on the authors' careers and creative lives and on the environmental, cultural and psychological influences on their work.
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ENG 0191-05
War and American Values
Takayoshi, I

War is unique, in that it provokes the Americans to ask fundamental questions about their nation's existential values: what are the Americans defending?; what are they defending against?; in what respects are the Americans vulnerable? This course will explore how major American authors from the twentieth and early twenty-first century worked out their answers to these questions. Our emphasis will be placed mainly on some representative literary texts (mostly novels and poetry); we will explore to what extent, if any, war as the subject-matter compelled these authors to bend and renovate familiar rules governing the literary genres within which they worked. But, we will also freely range over other genres and media such as cinema, political speeches, moral philosophy, cultural criticism, and government reports, in an effort to situate war literature in the total context of the nation's cultural response to the external enemy, national emergency, and extreme violence. Readings will include the novels by Hemingway, Trumbo, Heller, Johnson; speeches by Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ, G. W. Bush; essays by Bourne, Niebuhr, and Walzer; journalism by Hersey, Liebling, Halberstam, and Herr, and excerpts from standard historiography.
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ENG 0191-06
Modern and Post-Modern American Poetry
Jackson, V

We will read a variety of "lyric" and "avant-garde" poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Eliot, Pound, Williams. Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Reznifkoff, Zukofsky, Spicer, Bishop, Lowell, Creeley, Ashbery, O'Hara, Bernstein, Mackey, Hejinian, Moxley, Mullen, Manning, Dworkin). Why are there so many different claims for a "new" poetics after 1900? What do poets have to do to make poems (and poetry) "new"?
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ENG 0191-07
Reading in Aesthetics Since 1900
Harries, M

Literature and art have changed since 1900, and the names we give to account for those changes are familiar: modernism, postmodernism, etc. This course will chart some of the writing on art and literature that tracked those changes. That is, rather than privileging the perspective of the present on historical developments in art, we will read theoretical and philosophical works that belong to the period we are trying to understand. We will focus particularly on discussions of the relationship between art and society. Authors will include Sigmund Freud, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor W. Adorno, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida, among others.
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ENG 0191-08
Reading Clarissa
Flynn, C

This is your chance of the lifetime to read the longest and one of the most influential and powerful novels in the English language. The reason that you have possibly never heard of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, (1748) is that is "too long" to teach. Usually it is taught in abridgement. That is worse than not teaching it at all. Instead I usually teach Richardson's novel Pamela, which is also an important early modern novel, but just not as important or compelling as the too often neglected Clarissa. Clarissa is around 2000 pages long, although in the paperback version we will be reading this comes to 1500 (tiny print, big pages). It tells the story of a tyrannical family and a relentlessly brilliant lover, and their discordant but mutual efforts to control their object of desire, Clarissa. The sublime heroine is imprisoned, swept away, deceived and imprisoned, raped, and dies, triumphant at last in her sublime suffering made divine. The work stretches the exquisite anguish of its heroine's life and death in a full throttled attempt to move and reform the reader, and to capture your own attention and desire by making you feel the characters' desire and pain. The work is epistolary, written from four separate points of view's: Clarissa writes to her friend and supporter, Anna Howe; Lovelace, the seducer/rapist writes to his friend and increasingly distressed fellow "rake," Belford. Reading the letters, written "to the moment," full of their mutual anguish and excitement, is like being steamrolled into submission. Instead of submitting, however, we also find ourselves questioning the very meaning of her sacrifice and what it means to the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, the price of patriarchy, and religiously endorsed family values. Richardson would be seen as a revolutionary were he not also so enmeshed in the values of his conservative culture. We will try to take his puzzle apart.

Samuel Johnson, major critic laying down the law in the eighteenth century, said that if you read Clarissa for the plot, you would hang yourself. You read the story for "the Sentiment." We will explore the theory and cult of sentimentality in this course by reading the novel itself, in eight weeks, one week for each originally printed "volume" of the novel. We will also read Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey and William Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, (short) works that in a different way make similarly disturbing connections between patriarchy, sexuality, death and power.
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