2008 Spring Course Listing for English

RYEO...Read Your Eyes Out!

This is a heavy-reading course that gives you a conceptual map of the changing relationship between literature and culture from the medieval era to the present. Students learn to tell the story of changes across the centuries in the rise and fall of particular themes or genres; the changing purposes of art; huge cultural shifts in author/audience relations; the role that literature plays in creating or producing the “self”; literature's response to conflicts or traumatic breaks/shifts in culture; literature's role in renegotiating the boundaries of nation, colony, region, race, gender and sexuality; authors' reshaping of culture by revising or reviving texts and images from the past.

First Half of the Semester

Engl 20B: 19th Century British & American Literature

Wendy Kolmar/Gerry Smith-Wright MWF 10:00-10:50

Don't forget to sign up for a recitation section too!

001 Gerry Smith-Wright W 12:15-1:05

002 Wendy Kolmar M 11:00-11:50

003 Kathryn Inskeep M 1:15-2:20

Second Half of the Semester

Engl 20A: 20th Century British & American Literature

Neil Levi/Merrill Skaggs MWF 10:00-10:50

Don't forget to sign up for a recitation section too!

001 Neil Levi M 11:00-11:50

002 Merrill Skaggs W 12:15-1:05

003 Kathryn Inskeep M 1:15-2:20

Engl 4: Writing in the Discipline of English

001 1 st half: Neil Levi MW 11:00-12:15

002 2 nd half: Gerry Smith-Wright TTH 11:50-1:05

This six-week module will use the texts discussed in ENGL 20 A/B or ENGL 21 A/B as the basis for papers and extended research. Students will study the discourse conventions of English and practice the skills necessary for writing in the discipline of English. The course will include instruction in MLA style, advanced library research, and bibliographic skills.

Engl 9: Literary Analysis

001 Gerry Smith-Wright MW 2:30-3:45

Literary texts record the human experience in its infinite variety. As readers, we not only enter the narrative worlds of “the other” but also come home to ourselves in ways we might not have ever imagined. The goal of this course is to determine how writers construct exciting narrative worlds and how they elicit readers' participation in those worlds. We will focus on what is happening in selected example of fiction, poetry, and drama and how it is happening. What elements of craft do writers use to create specific effects in a literary text? What kinds of interpretive tools can we use to critique a writer's literary performance? To answer these questions, we will practice formalist, historical, feminist, cultural, and other approaches to the study of literature on the journey to becoming more involved and informed readers.

002 Stan Walker MW 4:00-5:15

The course increases the richness, flexibility, and accuracy of your writing about literature. We will work on expanding the range of strategies available to you as an interpreter. We will cover such subjects as over-reading (or overanalyzing); methods for distinguishing between an illegitimate interpretation and one that feels legitimate or authoritative; the role that the community of interpreters plays in establishing the legitimacy of an interpretation; and we will look at some postmodernist theories about the way that cultural codes interact with literary works and literary interpreters. We work on poems, short stories, and one play.

Engl 31: Dante to García Márquez

Bob Ready TTH 10:25-11:40

Reading, or re-reading, whole (mostly) works, medieval to modern: Dante, The Inf erno; Shakespeare, Hamlet ; Cervantes, Don Quixote ; Molière, The Misanthrope ; Austen, Pride and Prejudice ; Kafka, The Penal Colony ; Woolf, A Room of One's Own; García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Engl 34: Caribbean Literature

Tiphanie Yanique TTH 11:50-1:05

This is Caribbean literature 101. We will be taking a Pan-Caribbean approach; addressing the African, Asian and European literary presence in the region. We will read fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction from the Anglophone, Francophone, Spanish speaking and Lusophone experiences. In the course we will address historical, political and personal questions through various rhetorical lenses. We will utilize music and film as texts whenever possible. The course may involve nontraditional assignments, such as museum visits outside of class and in-class art projects.

Engl 39: History of Rhetoric

Erec Smith TTH 2:40-3:55

Offered alternate Spring semesters. No prerequisite.

Engl 40: Modern Arabic Novel and Film

Gretchen Head MW 2:30-3:45

This course will begin with the roots of the modern Arabic novel in Egypt and trace its development through realism to the more experimental forms used by the group of writers that has come to be known as the “jil al-sitinat,” or, the generation of the sixties. We will then move geographically through Lebanon , Palestine , Iraq , Algeria , Morocco , and the North African community in France to explore some of the most prevalent themes found in the cultural production of the Arab world today. Topics will include the relationship of women's literature to the Lebanese civil war, narration of the Palestinian Diaspora, prison literature under totalitarian regimes, and the figure of the Sa‘luk (rebellious outsider). Films with analogous themes will accompany the weekly readings. All novels and films will be accompanied by short historical lectures to help students contextualize the works under discussion.

All novels will be read in translation and films will be subtitled; no knowledge of Arabic is required.

Engl 65 : Writing for and about Business

Ray Zardetto MW 7:00-8:15

Susan Cohen W 1:15-3:45

This course studies genres of business writing, focusing on the production and evaluation of texts in and for multiple contexts. Students will learn to analyze the culture and discourse community of real organizations from close analysis of internal and public documents (from memoranda to Web pages), write reports on the public and private representations of those organizations, and write a variety of business documents that would be appropriate for that specific discourse community. In the process of learning to write for and about business, students will learn to recognize and respond to the often competing demands of multiple audiences, constraints, and purpose.

Eng 104: Non Fiction Writing: Articles

Scott Hightower W 1:15-3:45

Workshops with weekly roundtable editing sessions, offering writing and reading assignments in established and innovative nonfiction forms. Emphasizes the factual article as a literary form, practice in assembling facts (research and interviewing procedures) and in shaping the informative, lively article, editorial, and critical review.

Engl 107: Creative Writing Workshop: Advanced Fiction

Tiphanie Yanique TH 1:15-3:45

This is a workshop course for students wishing to develop a sophisticated fiction writing vocabulary and a vigorous exploration of literature via the study and creation of it. The course will be made up of creation classes on specific issues of craft; such as point of view, character development, dialogue, etc. Students will read full novels and story collections and be expected to use skills gleaned from these texts in their own work. We will be pushing past the “write what you know” paradigm. Key to this course will be developing research and observational skills in order to create and appreciate literature beyond your own experience. Students may only be admitted to the class by application. Pre-rec for the course is any college level creative writing class (in fiction, poetry, nonfiction or playwriting). Please see the English Department for applications or pick-up an application at 307 Sitterly Hall.

ENGL 108: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry - T 1:15-3:45

Patrick Phillips or TH 1:15-3:45

Practice in the craft of writing poems. Emphasizes models from throughout the traditions of English poetry (and other poetries in translation), with the goal of expanding our definition of what, both formally and emotionally, poems can do.  Weekly discussion of poems by members of the workshop.  Graded Pass/Unsatisfactory.

Engl 114: Writing About Africa "Darkness Legible"

Stan Walker T 1:15-3:45

This course will examine the ways in which sub-Saharan Africa has lived for Britons and other Europeans since the late 1700s. For centuries the arena for the European slave trade, this region became the focus of abolitionist and evangelical fervor in Britain in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries, then as the 19 th century wore on it came increasingly to seem Europe's imaginative antithesis, its Other – a place of savagery, madness, disease, death, in short, the “Dark Continent,” a designation that marks Western attitudes to this day. We will follow this trajectory through a series of influential and/or representative primary readings (both literary and non-literary), including early slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and others; some fiery abolitionist-era poetry; travel narratives by Sir Richard Burton (not the actor), Henry Morton Stanley ( “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”), and Mary Kingsley; novels and novellas by H. Rider Haggard (the loopy She ), Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner; tales of atrocities and appalling greed by early human rights crusaders E. D. Morel and Roger Casement; and select mid- and later 20 th -century writings by both British and Anglophone African writers.

Engl 115: Representation of the “East” "Orientalism in the 19th Century"

Stan Walker M 7:00-9:30

In “Orientalism in the 19 th Century,” we will look into the origins and development of the Western attitudes toward the “Orient” that are still strongly in evidence in contemporary American and European discourse about terrorism, the Middle East, etc. Starting in the 18 th century, we will trace the gradual metamorphosis of the comparatively open attitudes of the so-called “Enlightenment” into the predominantly racialist views of the last two centuries, with a focus on the 19 th century. You can expect to encounter Baron de Montesquieu's Enlightenment classic, The Persian Letters ; William Beckford's wild Gothic/Orientalist fantasy, Vathek ; Sir Richard Burton's account of his pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca disguised as a wandering dervish , and selections from his famous translation of the Thousand and One Nights (aka The Arabian Nights ); and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books and Kim . We will also glance at later episodes like Malcolm X's pilgrimage to Mecca , and the appropriation of the “mystic East” by Beat-era writers and the Sixties counterculture.

Engl 118: Willa Cather Short Stories

Merrill Skaggs TTH 9:00-10:15

While Cather has been recognized as a novelist of note for almost a century, readers are now beginning to recognize that she also wrote brilliant short stories. This course will study the stories alone, to give them the attention they deserve. We will especially concentrate on the three masterpieces of her story collection called Obscure Destinies , but will also read from Youth and the Bright Medusa and The Old Beauty.

Engl 121: Comparative Critical Theory and Practice

Neil Levi M 1:15-3:45

This course introduces you to some of the most important thinkers, ideas, and debates in contemporary literary and cultural theory. You'll find out what people such as Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Spivak really said, and you'll become acquainted with such movements as structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, gender studies, post-colonial theory, and Marxist criticism. We'll also try to trace the influence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud throughout. Excellent preparation for graduate school, and for careers in conceptual art.

Engl 123: Intensive Reading of Beowulfs

Jim Hala TTH 9:00-10:15

“Just don't take anything where they make you read Beowulf,” Woody Allen advised Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in 1977. But then mirabile dictu, or more appropriately wuldorlice secgan, in 2000 a new edition of Beowulf graced the front page of the New York Times Book Review . Seamus Heaney nearly succeeded in turning Beowulf into a best-seller! In this course, we will look at the Beowulf -phenomenon, considering first the text in its original setting, and then examining John Gardner's retelling of the tale from Grendel's point of view, Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead , John McTiernan's The Thirteenth Warrior , and other (and campier) modernizations. What does the 21 st century need to see in this early medieval text?

Engl 126: Approaches to Literature: Intertextual, Bible as Literature

Peggy Samuels MW 11:00-12:15

Why do writers continue to go back to the Bible? The first rewritings of the Bible occur inside the Bible itself (the biblical writer “P” rewrites “J,” later Hebrew books rewrite earlier ones, and Christian gospels rewrite Exodus). Following the thread of these rewritings will give you some familiarity with the Bible. We'll then look at ancient rewritings of the Bible after the canon was closed (2 nd -6 th C midrash). Finally, we'll look at short medieval, Renaissance, and 20thC texts that respond to the Bible.

Engl 127: Approaches to Literature: Cultural

Wendy Kolmar (2nd Half Semester) TTH 10:25-11:40

This courses examines the variety of cultural approaches to literature that have developed in 20th-21st century Anglo-American criticism, particularly British Cultural Studies and New Historicism.  We will examine these approaches particularly as they are practiced by critics in relation to particular nineteenth century texts. _Jane Eyre_ and _Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde_.  Students will try out these cultural approaches in class by putting nineteenth-century historical, social and cultural material in conversation with particular texts.

Engl 132: Women's Literary Tradition, Early Modern Women Writer's

Nicky Ollman TTH 11:50-1:05

Women at the beginning of the 18th century began to venture into print—some of them tentatively (and often in “code”), some of them assertively (and often in trouble). All of them, from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, saw their writing as a place where they might speak for themselves and their experiences, express their nightmares and their utopian hopes, and experiment with forms of “authority.” Our readings will trace the variety of these early women's voices (called by some critics the “Mothers of the Novel”) as they helped to develop the shape of modern prose fiction.

Engl 143: Shakespeare

Frank Occhiogrosso TTH 10:25-11:40

Designed for the general student as well as for the English major; focuses on the development of Shakespeare as a dramatist through the study of about seven plays—comedies, histories, and tragedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew , Richard II , Henry IV, Part One , Twelfth Night , Othello , King Lear , and The Tempest .

Engl 172: Studies in Fiction, Austen and Film

Nicky Ollman W 1:15-3:45

The forceful irony and wit of Jane Austen's novels, the powerful emotion of the fictions of the Bronte sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne. The two groups of works so different; and yet women's fiction (and, some say, the novel form in general) took shape between them in the early 19 th century. We'll read these authors in their contemporary historical, political, and literary contexts, and in the light of recent class, gender, and post-colonial criticism.

Engl 173: Studies in Poetry or Drama, Elizabethan Drama

Frank Occhiogrosso M 1:15-3:45

Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (the actual rubric is Renaissance Studies)--the study of a dozen plays from the great golden age of English Renaissance drama, exclusive of Shakespeare. Plays read include: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish tragedy, Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus,

Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, Ben Jonson, Volpone, John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy, John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, John Ford, Tis Pity She's a Whore. The approach is both textual and historical, the goal being to introduce the student to some of the finest and most powerful drama ever written in English by Shakespeare's contemporaries, to give them some feel for the historical and theatrical milieu of those plays. Two papers, one short and one research, plus an oral presentation made in class.

Engl 175 Major Author, American Novels

Bob Weisbuch T 1:15-3:45

Why do American writers seem interested in anything but telling a simple, well-made tale? Why do they make novel-writing such a problem? Why is American fiction at once deliberately pop-vulgar and philosophically obsessed? Why do its characters seem more like natural forces or personified ideas than like ordinary personalities? Why, in all, is American fiction so haunted, wild, experimental, and downright strange?

We'll try for some partial answers via stories and novels by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Chopin, FitzGerald, Faulkner, O'Connor, Ellison, Barth, and Morrison--and just possibly Poe.

Two essays, of six and ten pages. Final exam. No absences, no excuses.

Ling 10: Language, Communication and Culture

Martha Butler MW 11:00-12:15

An introduction to the structure and uses of language as communicative, expressive, social and cultural behavior. Topics include language and identity, language and power, language and gender, language and performance