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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will look at the literary and filmic production of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cuban Americans in the United States, from the 19th-21st centuries. Through the literature and cinema of these groups we will not only study the socio-cultural situation and history of this heterogeneous Diaspora but will also explore and come to question central themes traditionally used to discuss Latinos in the US: identity, language, culture, community, exile, space, and memory. In examining a literary and cultural production that spans three centuries, we will read texts in translation from the original Spanish, bilingual texts, and texts written in originally English. A reading knowledge of Spanish helpful but not essential. 1.00 units, Lecture
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1.00 Credits
This comparative drama course will focus on the relationships between varied forms of drama that originated in festival or other communally based open-air, urban theater settings, ranging from Ancient Greece to the modern Americas. We will consider basic concepts of social and cultural organization, but the main focus of this course will be "reading" both literary texts and cultural events as if they were texts. We will pay particular attention to epistemologies associated with imagination (as the guiding principle of theater) and logic or reason (as the alternative epistemology). The literature read in the course will include plays by Sophocles and Euripedes, medieval Corpus Christi plays, and German fastnachtspiele or carnival plays, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, contemporary American performance art, and festivals, and play cycles such as carnival or Ramleela that have their origins in the distant past. (Note: English 443 and English 843 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing literature written before 1800, literary theory, or cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing cultural context in the literary studies track, or an elective in the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
Vast and icy oceans, fields of daffodils, dark satanic mills-the Romantic period was fraught with contradictions, including country and city, nature and art, beauty and sublimity, revolution and reaction. Authors of the period used their writing to make sense of these and other seemingly irresolvable splits in their world. Coleridge's Kubla Kahn has constructed an ordered pleasure garden atop a sublime ice cave; William Blake suggested the marriage of heaven and hell. This class will examine some of the major poetry, novels and tracts that shaped the period. Sometimes portraits of hearth and home and sometimes tales of violence and horror, these texts demonstrate a psychological complexity and an understanding of literature and authorship that signals modernity. To better understand its historical conditions, we will supplement our readings with visual art and other cultural productions in an attempt to define and understand the period in a way of thinking and writing which we have come to call Romanticism. Authors will include the major Romantic poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth) as well as Smith, Inchbald, Wollstonecraft, Lewis, Austen, and Burke. Critical readings will accompany the primary texts.(Note: English 444 and English 844 are the same course.) For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirement of a course in British literature or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. 1.00 units, Seminar
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3.00 Credits
From the moment Crevecoeur recorded his impressions of "the American, this new man" in 1782, people within and outside the United States have continued his effort to define what it means to be an American. Over the course of this country's history, Americanidentity has been shaped by complex racial, ethnic, and social tensions and interactions. This course will treat ethnic American literature of the 20th century as a series of engagements with ideas of nation and belonging. We will look at these texts as attempts by Americans-newly arrived immigrants as well as Native and African Americans, the earliest of the United States' marginalized people-to carve out space for themselves within normative ideas of American nationhood while attempting to preserve their cultural pasts. Course texts may include Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, John Okada's No-No Boy, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Fistfight in Heaven, and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
America's fascination with adoption has become a public phenomenon in recent years. From Rosie O'Donnell to the growing number of Chinese baby girls adopted by Americans to the "Internet Twins"--essentially sold by an adoption broker over the Internet--adoption requires us to reconsider cultural attitudes toward family. In addition, adoption in American literature invokes broader questions of alienation, identity conflict, and self-fashioning. In this course, we will examine representations of adoption in a variety of fictional and autobiographical texts spanning the century, including Charles Chesnutt's THE QUARRY, William Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST, Betty Jean Litton's TWICE BORN, and Barbara Kingsolver's PIGS IN HEAVEN. In addition, we will pay close attention to the social and historical contexts out of which these adoptions narratives emerge. 1.00 units, Lecture
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1.00 Credits
Since l970, American poetry--always a rich polyphony of voices--has become even more diverse. We will take a close look at some of the poets who have transformed the formal shape, political vision, and aesthetic consciousness of American verse. Among the writers whose work we will read and discuss: Adrienne Rich, Lyn Henjinian, Audre Lorde, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Andrew Hudgins, Jorie Graham, Gary Soto, Czeslaw Milosz, Donald Justice, and Joy Harjo. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
In this course, we will examine female and male stereotypes in selected novels form the beginning of the 18th through the middle of the 20th centuries. Novels to be studied include MOLL FLANDERS, TOM JONES, PAMELA, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, BLEAK HOUSE, NORTH AND SOUTH, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, SISTER CARRIE, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, and GONE WITH THE WIND. The final novel will be chosen by the students in the course from a selection of novels written within the last decade. The course will emphasize the relationship of fictional representations to a variety of cultural contexts. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
This course will explore the flourishing of black literary and cultural production from the 1920s until late-1930s known as the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement. We will look at the aesthetic, social, psychological and political objectives of the period and how these goals are addressed through essays, literature, music and visual art. We will also interrogate the construction of a "New Negro" identity. How is such an identity defined What artists are deemed acceptable models of this identity What artists or modes of cultural expression are excluded or silenced How do issues of gender, class and sexuality factor into the construction of a New Negro identity In addressing these questions, we will examine the Harlem Renaissance as a precedent for other black aesthetic movements in the later part of the 20th century. 1.00 units, Seminar
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1.00 Credits
Interrogating American identity in the national or individual sense requires that we grapple with the places that so often define what we consider to be American experience. As 19th-century American authors wrestled with the difficulty of fully representing what it means to be American they frequently depicted and revised our ideas of quintessentially American places-the frontier, the home, the city, the factory, the countryside, and the contrasting idea of "abroad." For example, reading Upton Sinclair, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' various portrayals of the factory helps us understand not only how the factory functions as a symbolic site in American consciousness, but also how diverse authors build and challenge the meaning of labor, class, race, and nation. Reading widely across the 19th century and into the 20th, we will trace the literary conversations that construct and constantly rewrite our understandings of these American spaces and ask how they contribute to our ideas about American identity. We will consider the impact of race, class, and gender on these literary conversations and read a diverse group of authors that may include: Washington Irving, Thomas Detter, Zitkala- a, Frank Webb, Stephen Crane, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Upton Sinclair, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Charles Chestnutt, Henry James, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, and Henry David Thoreau. (Note: English 453 and English 853 are the same course.) For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature written after 1800, or a course emphasizing cultural context. For the English graduate program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course in American literature, or a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. 1.00 units, Seminar
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4.00 Credits
What is gender, or what do we imagine gender to be Is there any difference between these two questions In what specific ways is gender socially constructed How and by whom are these constructs instilled and maintained, and how do competing forces of history, politics, economics, race, class, region, sexuality, and nationality influence and complicate each person's experience of gender This course will chase some answers to these and other questions, exploring 20th-century literature, playwriting, and cinema for the different and often unstable notions of gender that these works "project" for us. As a seminar in literature, the course aims to highlight how various projections of gender are inseparable from such seemingly formal considerations as voice, genre, style, and point of view. Also, because gender itself constitutes such a dense network of social relations, we will assess the ways in which literature and art generate their own social relations, with important implications not only for gender but for countless other concepts and ideologies. Thus, in each of the seminar's four units-loosely focused around Anglo-American, African American, Latin American, and expatriate American literature-we will read and analyze texts in order to detect their particular concepts of gender, or the questions they raise about gender. Throughout the course, we will think critically about how differences in form, era, or cultural context affect the varying conclusions or implications related to gender in these works. Primary texts shall include Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Memory Mambo, Lolita, the films American Beauty and Butterflies on a Scaffold, as well as important essays in gender theory, feminist and gay/lesbian studies, psychoanalysis, critical memoir, and other branches of scholarship. (Note: English 455 and English 855 are the same course.)For English majors, this course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing cultural contexts. For the English Graduate Program, this course satisfies the requirements of a course emphasizing cultural contexts for the literary studies track; it counts as an elective for the writing, rhetoric, and media arts track. 1.00 units, Seminar
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