|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
This course constructs a route through placelessness as twentieth and twenty-first century poetry has attempted to map it: in the wake of a perceived homogenization and abstraction of space, the verse we study torques and tortures any stable relation that "speaking" might have to "standpoint." We give traction to abounding discussions surrounding site-specificity and the non-site, non-place, ubiquity, and virtuality within postmodern aesthetics through studies of modernist and postwar poetry of exile, migration, diaspora, and of the wayside. We study the formal and social repercussions of experiments in polylingualism, barbarism, dialect and creole, and thwarted translation, as well as generic innovations in the form of new-media, installation, and otherwise ambient poetics. Poets include T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, Amelia Rosselli, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Edouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Andrea Zanzotto, John Ashbery, Jenny Holzer, C. S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Caroline Bergvall, Kenny Goldsmith, Tan Lin. Readings in geography and aesthetics are by David Harvey, Robert Smithson, Marc Auge, Miwon Kwon, Toni Morrison, and Timothy Mort on. J. Scappettone. Winte
-
3.00 Credits
Students read a variety of texts, ranging chronologically from William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) to Stuart Dybek' s The Coast of Chicago (1990), to discover how the modern sensibility relates to the physical environment, urban or rural, poetic or prosaic . J. Geltner. Autumn.
-
3.00 Credits
This course examines the historical transformation of the issue of addiction in the nineteenth century. We read a variety of responses to drug and alcohol use and analyze the way in which these discourses intersect with issues of race, sexuality, and class central to the American experience. We discuss the emergences of new identities such as the addict, as well as ways in which writing about drugs and alcohol revealed the mechanics of self-control and habit that were becoming increasingly more important in an age of industrialization. H. Scotch. Winter.
-
3.00 Credits
This course explores shifting cultural attitudes toward the American tramp and tramping as represented in literature, film, and popular music. How do these texts help explain the tramp's transformation from outcast to everyman Texts include those by Chaplin, Crane, Dos Passos, Dylan, London, Steinbeck, Toomer, Wharton, and Whitman. P. Durica. Spring.
-
3.00 Credits
The biggest literary news of the early twenty-first century has been the exposure of autobiographical frauds. The discursive debunking of J. T. LeRoy, James Frey, and Margaret Seltzer testifies to our culture's fascination with the potential of autobiography to function as both witness and spectacle, promise and betrayal. This course seeks to investigate the autobiographical form as a narrative tool harnessed wherever social forms demand to be correlated with individual experience. Exploiting autobiography' s claim to authenticity, these texts both create and express socially embedded identities. Student presentations provide the reception histories and background for each individual text. However, we ultimately focus not on evaluating the truth of the claims made in autobiographies and pseudo-autobiographies but rather on how and by what authority these claims are made. A. Gentry. Winter.
-
3.00 Credits
In the nineteenth century, gothic fiction in English is an Anglo-American phenomenon. America's first internationally recognized literary masterpiece, Rip Van Winkle, is written in England and appears the same year as Frankenstein. This course studies the transatlantic aspect of the gothic tradition, while we also give full attention to the particular qualities of individual texts. Close reading is central to our project. Attention to textual intricacies leads to questions about gender and psychology, as well as culture. Authors include Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Poe, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Thomas Hardy. W. Veeder. Autumn.
-
3.00 Credits
This survey examines an often-neglected period in American literary history, after the Civil War but before World War I, when many questions about what America is and who Americans are were being posed and ambiguously resolved. We consider texts by such writers as Chesnutt, Crane, Dickinson, James, Jewett, Norris, Twain, Wharton, and Whitman. P. Durica. Autumn.
-
3.00 Credits
This survey of postwar U.S. literature begins with Arthur Miller's The Crucible and concludes with Tony Kushner' s Angels in America . These works, haunted by the Rosenberg and McCarthy trials, frame a course that considers a variety of genres and formal experiments in poetic language in terms of the political and cultural upheavals of the cold war. In addition to the two plays, we are likely to read prose works by Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison, as well as poetry by Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Lowell, Fran k O'Har a, Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Monett e. D. Nelson. Winter
-
3.00 Credits
K. Warren. Spring.
-
3.00 Credits
This course takes up major nineteenth-century American novelists in conjunction with philosophical and scientific essays that reflect on the project of representing "the real. K. Warren. Winter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|