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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
The decades following the death of Elizabeth I was period of scandal, schism, dissent and decadence, culminating in a bloody civil war and the beheading of a king. It was, in other words, a world turned upside down by every kind of upheaval: in civics, philosophy, politics, religion, and science. It also produced writers of some of England s finest lyric and satiric poetry, and its greatest epic poet. How the century s poets successfully dramatized the critical events and feelings in this time of turmoil will be the focus of the course. While primarily a course in close reading, we will nevertheless try to reconstruct the lives and contexts of the writers, and examine some of the critical and theoretical issues involved in contextualizing the poems. Authors will include Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Herbert, Herrick, the Cavalier Poets, Milton, Marvell, Cavendish, Dryden, and Rochester.
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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3.00 Credits
For complex reasons, Shakespeare has always revealed as much about those who speculate on him as the speculators have revealed about him. In this course, we will engage a few plays in considerable depth: Merchant of Venice, King Lear or Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. But we will also use these works as a means to engage some of the most compelling trends in recent critical thought, including cultural theory and post-Marxist analysis, political theology, deconstruction and rhetorical theory, psychoanalytic thought and theories of gender and sexuality. In some instances, we will look at applied criticism, in others we will simply place a theoretical work along side a play and see what they have to say to each other--what, for instance, would a Shakespearean reading of Jacques Lacan look like?
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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3.00 Credits
In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies.
Prerequisite:
Some coursework in WGSS, AFR, ENGL or COMP
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3.00 Credits
English drama began as a communal religious event only to be reinvented as a peculiarly lurid--and profitable--form of popular entertainment. In this course we will study plays and masques written between the opening of the first commercial theater in London in 1576 and the official closing of the theaters by parliamentary decree in 1642. We will focus on the sensational aspects of these works--their preoccupation with revenge, black magic, sexual ambiguity and grotesque violence--and also on their technical virtuosity. Authors will include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster and Cyril Tourneur.
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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3.00 Credits
The premise of this course is that Milton is the greatest of the English poets and Paradise Lost the greatest of English poems. The purpose of the course is to persuade you that the premise is correct, by immersing students in his densely organized language, his imagined worlds of an earthly paradise, heaven, hell, and the dark world after the fall, and the philosophical and theological problems that challenge the best readers. To prepare for our 6 weeks on Paradise Lost, we will read some of Milton's early poems and prose, including Areopagitica, his ringing defense of freedom of expression, some of his political writings (to situate him in the strenuous politics of church and state during the English Civil War), and his tract defending divorce (which reflects not only on his own life, but also on the "marriage" of Adam and Eve). And we will conclude the course with three weeks on his other two great long poems, the magnificent and austere Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, which continue Milton's radical redefinition of the classical ideas of heroism and constitute his parting words on the apparent failure of the Puritan Revolution.
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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3.00 Credits
One of the most problematic and controversial as well as amazing Shakespearean plays is Othello. This sensational tragedy, full of breathtakingly beautiful poetry, dramatizes disturbing forces of race, gender, and class, and still disturbs and terrifies audiences. Besides generating much valuable critical commentary, some of which we will read, Othello has inspired memorable theatrical productions and remarkable films, featuring Laurence Olivier, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburn, and Kenneth Branagh. We will consider the play in very close detail, scene by scene, contemplate theatrical and dramatic possibilities, discuss critical and theoretical analyses, and debate interpretations. The course will be run as a seminar, and requires a substantial term paper, to be developed in conferences with the instructor.
Prerequisite:
English 201 or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
Johnson has been exceptionally influential not only because he was a distinguished writer of poems, essays, criticism, and biographies, but also because he was the first true historian of English literature, the first who sought to define its "tradition." We will read Johnson's own works and Boswell's Life of Johnson to discover Johnson's talents, tastes, and standards as an artist, as a moral and literary critic, and as a man. We next will use Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare and Lives of the Poets to examine how this great intelligence assessed writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. While reading his commentary on Shakespeare and his critical biographies of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Gray, we will analyze selected works by these writers so as to evaluate Johnson's views and to sharpen our understanding of the relationships between his standards and our own.
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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3.00 Credits
In this course we will trace artificial intelligence (A.I.) in literature and film from the industrial revolution to the "hive mind" of rave music and the age of the internet. We will consider the fear of A.I. as well as the optimistic view of it as an enhancement or amplification of the human. The image of the female and/or racialized robot is especially prominent, as is the notion that manufactured internet identities are variations on the theme of A.I. Readings will include E. T. A. Hoffmann's short stories about automata, Karel Capek Rossum's Universal Robots, Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, Thomas Berger's Adventure of the Artificial Woman, Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," and selections from Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Jean Baudrillard and contemporary cyberpunk and steampunk fiction. Films will include Metropolis, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Sleep Dealers and selections from the series Battlestar Galactica.
Prerequisite:
A 100 level English course, or a score of 5 on the AP Exam in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
At roughly fifty-year intervals, Britain produced three brilliant female novelists-- Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf-- who would each become renowned, in her own way, for her ability to combine minutely detailed social observation with a rich depiction of the inner lives of her characters. This course will examine some of their major fiction-- with an emphasis on Austen and Eliot-- in the context of recent critical debate about the nature and implications of their narrative methods for representing the consciousnesses of characters, and of the authorial narrative voices that mediate among them. Questions to be considered: how is our understanding of novelistic characters and consciousness shaped by our real-life experience in interpreting the thoughts and character of others, and vice versa? Do "omniscient" narrators lay claim to a privileged kind of knowing presumed to be unavailable either to their character or to readers, or are they modelling humanly available interpretive stances toward a world of others? Why does "free indirect discourse"-- which blurs the distinction between the consciousness of narrator and character-- feature so prominently in the work of all three? Possible texts include Austen's Emma and Persuasion, Eliot''s Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Lifted Veil, and Woolf's The Waves.
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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3.00 Credits
"Nature" is a central concern of British Romantic-era writing, which engages and celebrates sublime prospects, tucked-away violets and field mice, bird song, stinging frosts and glorious morns. Indeed, "nature" could be said to have been invented, or at least constructed anew, in this period, partly in response to the ecological crises brought on by the rapid industrialization and imperial expansion occurring at the same time. This course will examine Romantic-era constructions of nature and the natural world; we will also attend to how these constructions have shaped our current environmental and ecological concerns and discourses. Primary readings will include texts by Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, John Clare, and at least some contemporary environmental writing; we will also read philosophical and theoretical essays by Edmund Burke, Friedrich Schiller, Michel Serres, Lawrence Buell, Timothy Morton 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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