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  • ENGL 231: Literature of the Sea

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Taking advantage of our maritime museum, coastal setting, and three field seminars, we study canonical and lesser-known American novelists, travel writers, and poets who set their works in the watery world, often in the exact places where we travel as a class. We read, for example--depending on fall or spring semester--Hemingway when sailing on the Straits of Florida, Steinbeck when exploring Cannery Row on Monterey Bay, and Twain on a steamboat on the Mississippi. We read Rachel Carson beside the Mystic River estuary, Chopin on the sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Kipling out on Georges Bank, and Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick aboard Mystic Seaport's historic whaleship, the Charles W. Morgan, a vessel nearly identical to the vessel he climbed aboard at age twenty-one. In the classroom we examine these works through a mixture of lecture, small-group discussion, and formal and creative writing. To further appreciation and analysis, this interdisciplinary course uses students' emerging knowledge of maritime history and marine science. Other authors and poets include, depending on fall or spring: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Walt Whitman, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Frederick Douglass, Timothy Egan, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
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  • ENGL 232: The Art of the Long Story

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Long stories (over 35 pages) at their best combine a novel's richness and depth with a story's shapeliness and concision. In this course, intended for students with a serious interest in writing, and in examining fiction from a writer's point of view, we'll study a variety of long stories and examine their craft elements. In addition to Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, we'll read work by James Baldwin, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, David Foster Wallace, and others. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • ENGL 233: Great Big Books

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Some of the greatest novels are really, really long--so long that they are too seldom read and taught. This course takes time to enjoy the special pleasures of novels of epic scope: the opportunity to immerse oneself in a wide and teeming fictional world; to focus sustained attention on the changeable fortunes of characters and societies over a long span of time; to appreciate the detailed grounding of lives in their social environment and historical moment; to experience the leisurely and urgent rhythms, with their elaborate patterning of build-ups and climaxes, that are possible in such works. We will read but two novels, both preoccupied with the disruption and evolution of lives and loves at moments of historic upheaval: War and Peace (1869), Leo Tolstoy's epic of the Napoleonic Wars, and Parade's End (1924-28), Ford Madox Ford's modernist masterpiece about World War I and its traumatic impact on English social life. Set a century apart, the novels are distinguished by vivid and scrupulous representation of their respective wars, by their shrewd accounts of political and social pressures informing the crises, and by their insight into the struggles of those whose lives are engulfed in global crisis. Tolstoy's and Ford's approaches to fictional representation, however, provide intriguing contrasts: one favors the lucidity of classic realism, the other the challenges of modernist innovation; one deploys a single multiplot novel, the other a tetralogy of shorter novels developing a single plot. We will discuss the differing strategies and effects of these two approaches, as well as the more general difficulties of reading and interpreting long fiction. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • ENGL 234: The Modern Theatre: Plays and Performance

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    A survey of major trends in playwriting and performance practice from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. We will read major playwrights from a variety of national traditions, always considering their works in the context of evolutionary and revolutionary transformations of theatre practice. Artists and movements may include Realism and Naturalism (Stanislavsky, Antoine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw), the Epic Theatre (Brecht, Piscator), The Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud), the "Absurd," (Beckett, Genet, Pinter) the collectivist avant-garde (Grotowski, Living Theatre, Open Theatre), and more recent playwriting.
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  • ENGL 237: Gender and Desire 1200-1600

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    The celebration of "courtly love" by medieval and Renaissance writers institutionalized the notion of the desiring male subject and the desired female object that continues to reverberate in contemporary culture. But early writers do not always, or even usually, endorse these positions uncritically, and even works that celebrate heterosexual love devote surprisingly large spaces to other kinds of desire. The Lover in the Romance of the Rose seeks to win the Rose, but it is the male God of Love he kisses on the mouth. Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night end in multiple marriages, but the plots revolve around cross-dressing and gender confusion. We will supplement literary readings with both medieval and contemporary theoretical texts. The aim of the course is to sharpen critical reading and writing skills across a broad range of literary forms and historical, cultural and aesthetic values. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this course focuses on varieties of sexual desire in major pre- and early-modern works, and the challenges they offer to our own contemporary values and assumptions. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • ENGL 241: Introduction to Comparative Literature

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Comparative literature involves reading and analyzing literature that represents different times, movements, cultures, and media. In this class, we will study English translations of texts from eras spanning the ancient to the contemporary; literary movements including Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism; national traditions arising in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and media including prose fiction, the graphic novel, and film. Throughout the course, we will consider what it means to think about all these different works as literary texts. To help with this, we will also read selections of literary theory that defines literature and its goal in abstract or philosophical terms. Assignments will focus on close reading of relatively short texts by authors such as Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, Kleist, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Satrapi, Wilde, Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and Foucault. All readings will be in English.
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  • ENGL 252: The Borders of Literature: From Shrek to Marcel Proust

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    The aim of this course is to understand literature as a medium intimately related to other media. We shall study contemporary theories of media and intermediality in order to better understand general questions about all art forms and media--but also to be able to specify the medium specific aspects of literature. Theories of intermediality will be the backbone of the course, and a wide variety of examples will be discussed and analyzed. We will begin with the introductory scene of Shrek (Adamson 2001) and move through a handful of example clusters: concrete "visual" poetry, high modernist musical description (short fiction by Mann, Proust, Joyce, Woolf), literary descriptions of visual art (ekphrasis); and Lieder/chansons/rock-lyrics from Schubert to Bob Dylan. We shall also analyze the widespread phenomenon of novel-to-film adaption, exemplified by way of the Beat-poem Howl and the recent film based on the poem and the trial against Allen Ginsberg (Epstein and Friedman 2010). Prerequisite:    All readings will be done in English but students with knowledge of French, Portuguese, Spanish or German may optionally read portions of the reading in the original languages
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  • ENGL 258: Poetry and the City

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this course we will consider poems generated out of the experiences of urban life. The city provides for poets a vivid mental and imaginative landscape in which to consider the relation of vice and squalor to glamour; the nature of anonymity and distinction; and the pressure of myriad bodies on individual consciousness. We will explore ways in which the poet's role in the body politic emerges in representations of the city as a site both of civilized values and/or struggles for power marked by guile and betrayal. Taking into account the ways in which cities have been transformed over time by changing social and economic conditions, we will consider such issues as what the New York of the 1950s has to do with the London of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and why poetry as a genre might be particularly suited to representing the shifting aspects of urban life. Poets will include Dante, Pope, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Baudelaire, Arnold, Yeats, Crane, Moore, Auden, Hughes, Bishop, Ginsberg, Baraka, and Ashbery. We will also draw on essays by Simmel, Benjamin, Williams, and Canetti, photographs by Hines, Weegee, and Abbott; the blues, as sung by Holliday and Vaughan; and films such as Man with a Movie Camera, Rear Window, and Breathless. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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  • ENGL 261: Adultery in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this tutorial, we will read four novels written between 1850 and 1900, all of which focus on the figure of the adulteress: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77), Leopoldo Alas y Ure?a's La Regenta (1884-85), and Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894). For each week of class, students will read one of these primary texts, as well as a selection of secondary literature that will allow us to understand, over the course of the semester, how and why the adulteress played a key role in the cultural imagination of Europe during this time. All works will be read in English translation.
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  • ENGL 265: Topics in American Literature: Freedom and Captivity

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course explores the American obsession with freedom and captivity, as those concepts manifest themselves in works ranging from Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation to Herzog's Grizzly Man. We'll look at novels, films, captivity narratives, works of journalism, and memoirs, framed by additional readings in cultural geography, historiography, and literary history. Throughout, we will attend to the curious persistence of certain stories about freedom, and to the ways those stories continue to structure American ideas about nation, race, and self. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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