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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Imagine this: a form of art and entertainment that purports to be able to represent everything-intimate, even inaccessible human thoughts and feelings, love, class, the city, shopping, sexuality, bureaucracy, social bonds, industrialization, nationalism, even modernity itself. In this course we will try to understand the scope of the nineteenth-century British novel's jaw-dropping representational aspirations: its claim to comprehend in its pages both the dizzying complexity of new social, political, and economic structures, as well as delineate in finest detail the texture of individual minds and lives. We will pay attention to the fictional modes by which apparently intractable social problems are resolved, through a sleight of hand act we seem never to tire of, in the realm of romantic love. And while we might think of the novel as an Empire of the Little, endlessly occupied with giving significance to the smallest acts of ordinary human life, we will think about the broader historical and social conditions the novel both represents in its pages, and is a crucial not-so-silent partner in promoting and contesting. We will also interest ourselves in the kind of under-the-counter work the Victorian novel does on behalf of British empire, as well as empire's own behind-the-scenes work for the novel. Since so many of these stories of everyday life seem as familiar to us as everyday life, we will work hard to maintain what is strange and specific about the nineteenth century even as we recognize within these works the birth of so much that is modern in our own culture. Likely authors include: Austen, Scott, Bronte,Dickens, Eliot, Braddon, and Forster.
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 or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
The realist novel has a thing for good form: preoccupied with figuring an entire social world in its pages, it also turns a granular-level lens upon the nicer aspects of social life and etiquette. Some literary historians even have pegged the novel's rise to the civilizing process itself. Not just a good read, the novel taught us not to kill each other at the dinner table, and not to use a fish fork to eat our salad. Manners, it turns out, figure some of the most pressing concerns of modernity: the nature of social authority amidst increasingly fluid notions of class, the role of taste in the discourse of aesthetics, and the relation of civilization to its discontents. This course will think about the novel's interest in good form, both within fictional worlds and in the novel's sense of itself as becoming something more refined than mass culture as it enters the 20th century. We will read novels alongside work on style and taste, ranging from etiquette books to philosophical writing on aesthetics, as well as sociological theories of taste as an engine of social distinction. How does something as quaint as good manners becomes a means of registering, and contending with, the vicissitudes of modernity in fiction, from the perfection of social form in Oscar Wilde to the tactful reticence of Henry James? While focused on the 19th century, we also will take up one contemporary heir to the novel of manners, American Psycho, in which the desire to keep up appearances becomes a gothic compulsion. Likely novelists include Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Bret Easton Ellis. Theorists will include Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno, and Erving Goffman, among 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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3.00 Credits
The 1840s and 50s are known as "the American Renaissance," a watershed in American literary history which includes Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby-Dick, Emerson's essays and Hawthorne's fiction. It also includes major abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will read through this essential period of American literature by asking how key authors figure intimacy, emotion, and experience. That inquiry, in turn, will help us explore the formations of literary work and its interventions into the culture of a nation heading toward Civil War and conscious of its fractures. How did these authors imagine the gulf between self and not-self, and the potential to bridge that gulf? Did the written word have the power to make readers "feel right," as Stowe hoped, or to correct them when they felt wrong, as Douglass attempts to do when he tells his audience that slave songs express sorrow, not joy? As we move through a rich variety of texts, we will explore how authors try to move their readers, and how they conceive of emotion's relationship to the individual person and to the culture at large.
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
"Take heed what you read!" Sojourner Truth warned her audiences. Frederick Douglass described the mixed blessing of literacy--facilitating his freedom, but not without first increasing his sense of oppression. Truth and Douglass signal the strong American awareness of both the promises and the dangers of reading, and of the intensely social nature of that seemingly insular world of the reader and the book. While, culturally speaking, we are what we read, it's not always clear how the process of digestion works. How have certain American writers become the writers they are through the books they devour or are denied? How might we account for the mutual relations between reading, consciousness and action, making sense of how reading is at once a function of our social construction, as well as a mode of transforming ourselves and the worlds we inhabit? What happens when we shift our attention from the uses of books to the uses of popular culture, and from readers to fans? Who really authors a text? Using models drawn from literary and cultural theory, social history and theories of literacy, we evaluate the ways Americans have found and lost themselves in their reading. Readings include works by Emerson, Douglass, Melville, Hawthorne, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Roland Barthes, Georges Poulet, Paolo Freire, Carlo Ginzburg, Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, Janice Radway, Constance Penley, as well as Harlequin romance, slash and mashup 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 for English majors; AMST 201 for American Studies majors
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3.00 Credits
Minority artists--writers and visual artists mainly and, to a lesser degree, musicians--face a difficult "double bind" when creating works of art: the expectation is that they, like their racially marked bodies, will exhibit their difference by means of concrete signifiers (details, tropes, narratives, themes) of racial difference. Thus, the work is judged primarily in terms of its embodied sociological content (material, empirical) and not by "abstract" standards of aesthetic subtlety, philosophical sophistication, and so on. At the same time, in the popular and academic imaginary, minority subjects and artists poets occupy a single abstract signifying category--homogeneous, undifferentiated, "other," marginalized, non-universal--while "unmarked" (white) artists occupy the position of being universal and individual at once. The irony, of course, is that, say, an African American poet's being read as an abstract signifier does not mean that the black subject or writer is seen as capable of engaging in abstract ideas. This course will ask questions about the problem of race and abstraction by looking at the work of various writers, visual artists and musicians--including Will Alexander, Cecil Taylor, David Hammons--as well as critics. We will pay particular attention to formally experimental works.
Prerequisite:
At least one previous literature or art or music class would be helpful
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3.00 Credits
As Gertrude Stein once remarked, "The hardest thing is to know one's present moment." What is going on it today's theatre? What are the hot topics? Who are the writers and directors of our recent past and present moment? This seminar course will consider both experimental and mainstream drama and performance from the past twenty years, focusing on topics such as: auteur-directors, new realism, identity theatre, environmental theatre, performance art, cyber-plays, and the "virtuosic theatre" of the new century. Artists to be considered may include: The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Rachel Rosenthal, Caryl Churchill, Mac Wellman, Tony Kushner, David Henry-Hwang, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Kane, Richard Maxwell, Annie Baker, and others.
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will study the work of Ford Madox Ford, arguably the most versatile and representative, and perhaps the most entertaining, among modernist novelists. An important editor as well as prolific writer, Ford lived at the heart of both pre-War English and post-War Parisian literary life, and his work brilliantly reflects the development of literature from the early modernism of the fin-de-siecle and Edwardian eras to the post-War high modernism of writers such as Woolf and Joyce. Ford's novels offer a panoramic view of the enormous shift from the Victorian world of the late 19th century to the startlingly modern social landscape of the 1920s. He writes of the decline of a still powerful European aristocracy; of Anglo-American cultural relations; of sexuality, adultery, strange fidelity, and shifting gender relations; of competing forms of religious belief in an increasingly secularized society, and of a new Bohemian intellectual class; of women's suffrage and class ferment; of international betrayals, trench warfare, and the transformed England that World War I left in its wake. We will study his short novel The Good Soldier, whose literary impressionism led to its being called "the finest French novel in the English language"; The Fifth Queen, a trilogy of innovative historical novels concerning Henry VIII's ill-fated wife Katherine Howard; and his epic World War I tetralogy, Parade's End, which has been described as the greatest war novel in English.
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
Eighteenth-- and nineteenth-century writers of literature and political philosophy repudiate fanaticism--over and over again. Whether as a religious, political or amorous posture, fanaticism is universally decried and never avowed. But what is fanaticism, and why should it be considered such a threat, particularly during a period that for the most part embraced an enlightened secular rationalism? In this course, we will explore these questions by considering literary texts that dramatize fanaticism in light of accounts by such philosophers and historians as Voltaire, Kant, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Burke, Tocqueville, Carlyle, Mill, William James, and Adorno. Literary readings will be drawn from works by Swift, Wordsworth, Hogge, Dickens, Eliot, Hawthorne, Conrad, and Henry James. We will also look at drawings and engravings by Hogarth and Goya. While some of these works oppose fanaticism to enlightenment values, others see it as an effect of those values, which include sympathy, self?examination, and political flexibility. Since fanaticism has recently had considerable political currency, we will also consider some contemporary accounts, by Walter Laqueur and others, which reanimate the debates and concerns of the course.
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
This course explores how the graphic novel has been an effective, provocative and at times controversial medium for representing racialized histories. Drawing on graphic novels such as Jeremy Love's Bayou and Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comic Biography, this course illustrates and critiques multiple ways the graphic novel commingles word and image to create more sensorial access into ethnic traumas, challenges and interventions in critical moments of resistance throughout history. Students will practice analyzing graphic novels and comic strips, with the help of critical essays, reviews and film; the chosen texts will center on Africana cultures, prompting students to consider how the graphic novel may act as a useful alternate history for marginalized peoples. During the course, students will keep a journal with images, themes and reflections and will use Comic Life software to create their own graphic short stories based on historical and/or autobiographical narratives. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore in depth the demanding and exhilarating work widely regarded as the most important novel of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses, which both dismantled the traditional novel and revitalized the genre by opening up new possibilities for fiction. We will discuss the ways in which compelling issues of character and theme (e.g., questions of heroism and betrayal, oedipal dynamics, sexuality and the politics of gender, civic engagement and artistic isolation, British imperialism and Irish nationalism) are placed in counterpoint with patterns drawn from myth, theology, philosophy, and other literature, and will consider the convergence of such themes in an unorthodox form of comedy. In assessing Ulysses as the outstanding paradigm of modernist fiction, we will be equally attentive to its radical and often funny innovations of structure, style, and narrative perspective. In addition to Joyce's novel, readings will include its epic precursor, Homer's Odyssey, as well as biographical and critical essays. Students unfamiliar with Joyce's short novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which introduces characters later followed in Ulysses, are urged to read it in advance of the course.
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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