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Course Criteria
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3.00 - 4.00 Credits
This course will familiarize undergraduate and graduate students with Dante's poetry, available to English readers in many different old and new translations. In fact, much attention is devoted to Dante's Comedy as rendered in English by other poets who have toiled to bring the Italian text to us. Students read the entirety of the Inferno, a substantial selection of the Canti from Purgatory, and a smaller sample from Paradise. Graduate students, as well as advanced English majors who desire to do so, will also read some carefully chosen critical essays on the theory of translation. Since our working definition of translation will be broad, students who wish to work on translations of the Divine Comedy are welcome also to consider different / non-literary media, of which there are several. All students are expected to participate in discussion forums and group pages, to give group presentations (individual presentations in the case of graduate students), to do in-class writing of various kinds (including critical responses), and to write and workshop a longer term project (even more expansive for graduate students) on a topic identified early in the quarter.
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3.00 Credits
Starting with an ample overview of the topos of exile in the modern period, this course explores this theme in literature written in the aftermath of World War II, colonialism, and socialism. The focus is primarily on writers whose literary identity was formed around the fracture of exile or dislocation. Students read fiction but also nonfiction and autobiographical works and essays by writers such as K. Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, B. Mukherjee, S. Rushdie, E. Said, W.G. Sebald and Lawrence Weschler. The focus is on primary texts, but graduate students will also read theory as well. Students give one presentation and write daily responses, one short essay, and one longer essay presented to the class in draft form for critique and then revised. Graduate students give a second presentation, sharing with the class their additional critical readings.
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3.00 Credits
The Ropes course explores some of the wealth of texts, ideas, and trends that can be considered as contexts for the study of modern literature. With a new topic selected each year, the course studies a selection of primary, secondary, and theoretical texts focusing on some significant issue in contemporary culture from the perspective of English Studies. The course will highlight the urgency of some question, body of material, or methodology, prompted by questions raised by the humanities or creative arts about the culture surrounding us all. The course typically includes seminar meetings and lectures by guest speakers. Participants in the Ropes course end up producing a significant project exploring some topic relevant to the central concerns of the course that year.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores some of the ways that graduate study, graduate school, and graduate culture are distinct from other academic activities. Students will get a sense of the range of conversations--on paper, in person, and electronic--appropriate to graduate school as an intellectual community. We'll be learning some of the rules of advanced literary discourse, and also be exploring how to push its borders. The reading will include a range of literary works with appropriate literary scholarship, criticism, and theory, plus readings about the nature and history of our discipline and profession.
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3.00 Credits
This course provides an introduction to the many literary and critical theories that have shaped central and contemporary conversations about the study of literature and culture. The primary focus is on modern and contemporary schools and movements, including the following: cultural studies, deconstruction and poststructuralism, feminist, gender, and queer studies, formalism, Marxism, New Historicism, hermeneutics and reader response, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and race and ethnicity studies. The course also introduces the topics raised by these theories, including the institutionalization of literary study, canonization, and authorship, gender, anti-theory and the defense of theory, sexuality, and the body, ideology and hegemony, literary history and modernity, the modern and the postmodern.
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3.00 Credits
This course provides an introduction to many of the literary and critical theories that have shaped contemporary and central intellectual conversations about interpreting literature and culture. No prior knowledge of theory is required; however, enthusiasm for the challenge and, correspondingly, discipline and diligence in performing all course assignments (reading, writing, and discussion) are definite musts. In following the structure of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, we focus on structuralism and poststructuralism, Marxist and cultural studies, feminist, gender, and queer theory, and race and postcolonial studies. Along the way, we attempt to hone skills of argument, critical analysis, and interpretation.
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3.00 Credits
This course surveys basic genres of folklore study as informed by primary and secondary readings in folkloristics and anthropology. The course will also introduce student to proverbs and folk speech, children's lore and games, riddles, magic, charms and incantations, witchcraft, ritual, seasonal festivals, folk drama, myth, oral epic and ballads. There will be exams and a collection assignment.
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3.00 Credits
An introduction to the oral folktale from around the world. Through both hearing as well as reading performances of folktales, students will learn the history and methods of folktale scholarship, how folktales were collected, and how performances might be represented in print. Students will learn the theories regarding folktale origins, the methods of collecting, and the proposals for classification, with emphasis on folktale hermeneutics -- that is, the theories of interpreting the folktale.
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3.00 Credits
Legends are narratives that have traditional subject matter -- ghosts, horrors, hauntings, uncanny happenings, vampires, werewolves, and the like -- but that are also accounts of culture heroes and villains. This course will introduce students to the scholarship around legends and will lead to a term project, perhaps involving original research such as a collection of legends.
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3.00 Credits
This course is a writing workshop focused on conceptualizing, planning, drafting, and formalizing a critical essay appropriate for publication and/or presentation in a scholarly venue.
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