ENG 0021-01
General View of English Literature I
Genster, J

A survey of English literature from Beowulf to Gulliver's Travels. Readings will include selections of poetry from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Dryden, Pope and Swift; drama from Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Congreve; and prose from More, Behn, and Swift. The course provides a broad overview of earlier English literature, and introduces the basic techniques of literary analysis. Writing for the course includes three essays and a final exam.
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ENG 0023-01
Continuity of American Literature
Jackson, V

A survey of writing in English produced by contact with the New World, from the first English settlements in Virginia and New England, through the emergence of a national literature in the mid-nineteenth century. We will read a wide range of texts: exploration narratives, settlement propaganda, sermons, official histories, autobiographies, political pamphlets, philosophical essays, various genres of poetry and short fiction. We will conclude with two experiments in writing "America" in English in the middle of the nineteenth century: Whitman's genre-crossing Leaves of Grass, and Stowe's genre-bound Uncle Tom's Cabin.
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ENG 0032-01
Epic Strain
Genster, J

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 works which examine the intersections between modernity and epic aspiration. The authors whose works we may read include Homer, Virgil, Milton, Pope, Fielding, Rushdie, Walcott, and Robinson.
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ENG 0033-01
Art & Social Crisis: The Victorian Past in the American Present
Emerson, S

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, Tennyson, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw, Kipling. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.
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ENG 0039-01
Death and Literature 20^th Century
Rosenthal, L

As the last century documented death on an ever-increasing and perhaps unprecedented scale, literature confronted questions about the relevance, boundaries and responsibilities of the work of art. How does literature respond to and represent death? How does it write individual death, collective catastrophe, irredeemable loss? As both a limit and spur to representation, death challenges models of literality, first-person witnessing, and standards of empirical verification. Reading selected texts from 20th-century British fiction, poetry, and drama, this course will address the relationships between aesthetics and death, memory and mourning, narrative and testimony.
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ENG 0045-01
Nonwestern Women Writers
Roy, M

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.
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ENG 0046-01
Girl's Books
Flynn, C

Girls' books construct our ideas about femininity, sexuality, agency and identity. This course will examine the cultural values that girls' books produce. Without being too subjective, we will unpack some of the cultural values that have become part of our own cultural baggage. We will read some of the classical texts: Little Women, The Secret Garden, and Girl of the Limberlost, works that introduce their readers to a life of domesticity and consumerism. We will also look at the mystery genre, from Nancy Drew to Harriet the Spy and Sammy Keyes. We will finally read more contemporary texts, like Blubber, Weetzie Bat, Toning the Sweep, Finding My Voice, My Heartbeat, and Twilight. This list is subject to revision. All I can say for sure is that we will read quite a lot of books, and also do a great deal of writing, both analytical and creative. I will e-mail the students registered for the course the final book list over the summer.
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ENG 0050-01
Shakespeare I
Dunn, K

A study of eight Shakespeare plays: Titus Andronicus, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will engage the plays in a variety of critical, historical and literary historical contexts.
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ENG 0077-01
The Modern Mind
Cantor, J

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.
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ENG 0085-01
Horror Stories
Litvak, J

What makes horror fiction and horror films horrifying? In this course, we will consider certain recurrent anxieties and fantasies about gender, sexuality, race, and the body, thinking about how these anxieties and fantasies produce a repertoire of "horror effects." We will read literary works such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, E.T.A. Hoffman's "The Sandman," Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream, and Stephen King's Carrie. Films to be studied may include Psycho, The Shining, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Saw, and such examples of "foreign horror" as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Devil's Backbone, Blood and Black Lace, and Benny's Video. Students should expect to read extensively in critical and theoretical texts.
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ENG 0091-01
Theater After Film
Harries, M

What did film do to theater? Histories tend to map a one-way street: Stage to Screen and Theatre to Cinema are titles of two important scholarly works that treat this problem. But what if we turn these titles around, and think about a process moving from screen to stage, from cinema to theater? To think this way goes against some standard narratives, but not against history: historically and formally, nothing had a more powerful impact on the development of theater in the twentieth-century than film. Just as art historians have traced a dynamic between photography and painting – a dynamic involving problems of technological change, of formal constraints, and of shifting media and audiences – so histories of modern theater need to acknowledge the centrality of film in the development of theater. This course will trace the historical and aesthetic problem of the relationship between theater and film by looking closely at plays that respond to the new forms of cinematic entertainment that became dominant in the first part of the twentieth century. We will read plays dramatists including Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Peter Handke, Adrienne Kennedy, and theoretical and historical essays by Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Peggy Phelan, and others. There will be occasional screenings.
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ENG 0091-02
Writing in the Beat Generation
Johnson, R

The Beat Fifties were "cool," "hot," and "mad"– but what did hipsters mean by that and what meanings did it carry in Life magazine and for its Eisenhower era readers? Was "beat" really radical and, if so, for whom? How does it reprise and revise 19th-century American individualism and romanticism? Was "beat" an anticipation of the postmodern present? We consider the impact of the bombing of Japan and the Nazi Holocaust, jazz, the McCarthy HUAC trials, Abstract Expressionism, cross-cultural racial influences, and the nascent civil rights movement in the writings of authors associated with the Beat Generation – not only the ersatz canonical trinity of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, but also writers who have been usually marginalized in commentary on Beat writing, such as Joyce (Glassman) Johnson, Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Janine Pommy Vega, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman and others.

The course examines how cultural meanings given to the category "beat" function as strategies for the marginalization or dismissal of the writers and texts of this movement. Through study of the literature, painting, and music of the Beat generation, we will consider rhetorical figures and discourses used to effect social and political dissent in the beat subculture and in mainstream U.S. communities, in particular those of addiction and madness, which slide and vary according to the race, gender, class, and sexual orientation of the trope's user, as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka has framed it. We will focus on ways in which these elements played out to bring into being the politics and countercultural liberations of the 1960s.

We will read the writers through their own statements about writing, and juxtaposed with each other, with a view to assessing their formation of an identifiable school of writing. The course will attend to anticipations of the postmodern evident in the texts and in their contemporary reception. Topics will include: gender and race politics of the era and of the writing; canon formations; literary and sexual censorship; autobiography as impediment to and constitutive of fictive discourses and their interpretation, and the transformation of memoirs, journals, and letters in the production of literary texts. There is a substantial body of film and audio recordings, and even music, produced by these writers, and we will sample that too.
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ENG 0091-03
Asian American Culture and Literature
Takayoshi, I

This course introduces you to the major themes and topics in twentieth-century Asian American literature and culture. Through a detailed critical reading of representative prose narratives, poetry, and plays, we will pursue the following paths of investigation.

• The question of language and power. What does it mean to be a "minority" writer building a literary work using a language owned by the dominant culture, with which he or she stands in a fraught relation?
• Economic, social, and legal contexts. How do these literary works represent the relationship among racism, class, and gender, U.S.-Asian relations, and the experience of transpacific migration?
• The Asian American form? How do these authors appropriate familiar literary conventions and styles in order to figure the ambiguous national basis of their personality?

Readings will include the works by Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Okada, Jessica Hagedorn, Ha Jin, and Cheng-rae Lee. You are expected to read these texts with enough attentiveness to remember details. To help you cultivate a habit of close reading, there will be one or two unannounced ten-minutes quizzes during the semester.
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