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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Portraits of Ladies Full course for one semester. This course is designed as an introduction to the basic concepts of narrative theory as exemplified in 18th- and 19th-century British novels by Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront , George Eliot, and Henry James. We will also focus specifically on the construction of gender, and will analyze how and why ideas of femininity and masculinity change in relation to authorial sensibilities that are by turn gothic, historic, and sentimental. Prerequisites: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2009-10. The American Short Story Full course for one semester. This course will examine the genre of the short story, especially its traditional and innovative narrative techniques, its various ways of constructing authorial point of view, its mode of plot compression and the relation of literary structure to temporality, and its range of styles from realism and naturalism to allegory, and to impressionism. Additionally, we will see how diverse American experience is represented through the form. Readings will be drawn from Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Malamud, Cheever, James Baldwin, Joanne Greenberg, Paley, Carver, Ozick, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Cade Bambara, as well as a collection of Best Short Stories of 2004. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. The Postwar and Contemporary Novel Full course for one semester. This course will introduce students to major North American novelists and their work from the immediate post-World War II years to the 1990s. As we discuss the assigned readings we will consider questions surrounding representations of race and gender, mass culture and consumerism, the Cold War and the nuclear age, civil rights, feminism, technocracy, the counterculture, American regionalisms, suburbia, linguistic experimentation, genre, postmodernism, globalization, and the conditions of urban experience. Novelists may include Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Philip Roth, Ishmael Reed, Cormac McCarthy, and Jonathan Franzen. We will also read selected critical and theoretical texts that define the issues that structure the course and watch selected films-such a s The Manchurian Candidate (1962)-that provide cultural contexts. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.The Basics of the Novel Full course for one semester. This course serves as an introduction to the history of both the idea and the form of the English novel, beginning in the early 18th century and continuing through to the present day. We will look at short critical writings by major narrative scholars in conjunction with examples of the novel's various subgenres, including the gothic, the marriage plot, the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, the detective novel, the modernist novel, and the postmodern novel. The course will cover major novels by Daniel Defoe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, and J.M. Coetzee. There will be numerous short writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-10. The 19th-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Courtship Novel Full course for one semester. This course examines the two dominant forms of the 19th-century novel, the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, and the courtship novel. In examining these two forms we will discuss the nature and history of literary genres; narrators and narrative structure; the function of novelistic character; and the concept of realism. We will read a number of critical texts by major scholars of narrative to illuminate these discussions, along with major works by the following novelists: Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, tone, form, speaker, and audience. We will read texts from a wide historical range and consider the historical development of selected forms and techniques. The course will also examine what some poets and critics have regarded as the nature and function of poetry and what bearing such theories have on the practice of poetry and vice versa. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. In this class we will consider the historical development of selected forms and techniques in the American poetic tradition. Poets will include Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee, Essex Hemphill, and Luci Tapahonso. In addition we will read selections from Aztec Sorrow Songs, Corridos, and the Blues. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, tone, form, speaker, and audience. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
America after the Fall Full course for one semester. This course, a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of American literary history, will focus on epic and lyric poetry. Texts will include Milton's Paradise Lost and the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. In addition, there will be substantial reading in literary theory and an extensive critical bibliography project. We will consider questions about genre, literary authority, tradition and innovation, canon formation, and intertextuality. Primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2009-10. Irony, Allegory, Epic Full course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history using the narrative tradition extending from Chaucer to Fielding. Texts include Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale," Spenser's Faerie Queene, Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Fielding's Tom Jones. There will be substantial reading in literary theory. We will consider questions about representation, figures and tropes, genre, influence, intertextuality, authority, tradition and innovation, and canon formation. Primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing, two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of instructor. ConLyric, Epic, Künstlerroman Full course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history. After some definitional questions, the course will begin with an examination of change and continuity in the English sonnet. We will then focus especially upon Wordsworth's Prelude, considered both as a transformation of the epic tradition and as the main poetic exemplar of what would become the novel of artistic self-discovery and development. Texts to be read include: Spenser, The Fairie Queene (Book I); Milton, Paradise Lost; Thomson, The Seasons; Wordsworth ,The Prelude; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Throughout the semester, we will address problems of canon construction, literary intertextuality, generic transformation, and critical history. Students will develop their own critical history of approaches to a work by a major author. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing, two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man This course will engage in an in-depth study of Ellison's 1952 novel by reading not only the text, but also Ellison's essays and interviews and a substantial amount of the critical history. Additionally, we will read texts alluded to in the novel by Emerson, Twain, Douglass, Washington, Du Bois, Whitman, Garvey, and T.S. Eliot. Students must assemble an annotated bibliography of 25 major essays on and a critical history of one major text covered by the parameters of the course. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year.Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.
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3.00 Credits
The Composition of a Novel Full course for one semester. This course will explore the critical methods and a sampling of texts in English literary history by analyzing the composition of Charlotte Bront 's Shirley ( 1849) in a variety of ways. These will include: close readings of the dialogue between this still noncanonical novel with its canonical precursors in drama and epic (e.g., Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Milton's Paradise Lost); questions about the role of Bront 's biography, the influence of her contemporary reviewers, and her recourse to newspaper accounts of the Luddite rebellions and the Napoleonic Wars; and Bront 's relations to the intellectual history of her day, especially on matters of national identity, labor economy, and sexual equality (Wollstonecraft, Marx, Engels). We will consider questions of genre, tradition and innovation, canon formation, critical history and gender. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Epic and Novel Full course for one semester. This course offers a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history focusing on epic and novel, with texts that may include Ovid's Metamorphoses, Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," Milt on's Paradise Lost, Ste rne's Tristram S handy, and a novel by Toni Morrison. In addition, there will be substantial reading in literary theory. We will consider questions about genre, literary authority, tradition and innovation, canon formation, intertextuality, and the role of gender in epic and novel. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 200
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Early Americans viewed their history as an epic struggle against Satan; yet today, Americans' sense of evil is weaker and more uncertain. How and why did Americans lose their sense of evil This course offers an introduction to the methods of American studies: we will look at literature in the context of American history and material culture. We will cover major American authors from the colonial period through postmodernism, including works by Rowlandson, Mather, Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Wharton, James, Lowell, and Morrison. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, at least one course in either American history or American religion, or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Autobiography Full course for one semester. This course will introduce problems of narrative through the study of autobiography and memoir. We will examine various strategies writers employ to describe the self, whether in isolation or in relationship to family and the surrounding culture. We will focus on the language of self-representation; the function and expression of memory; problems of truth, fiction, and lying in autobiography; the nature of the confessional act; parental secrecy and the older child's revelation as avenues to self-discovery; the relation of performativity to identity; the ways autobiographers give symbolic meaning and form to their experience; and the relation of gender to self-representation. We'll look at ways writers experiment with diverse forms, challenging conventional or traditional modes of life-writing, such as graphic autobiographies. And we will discuss whether this kind of writing serves anything like a therapeutic purpose. There will also be readings in autobiographical theory. Some possible texts include Nabokov ? Speak, Memor y; De Quincey 's Confessions of an English Opium-Eat er, Gertrude Stei n's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman War rior, Georges Pe rec 's W, Michel Le iris' Ma nhood, Kathryn Harr ison's Th e Kiss, Mary G ordon's Th e Shadow Man, Wilko mirski's F ragments, and Art Spi egelma n's Maus. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses. CoThe English Enlightenment and the Modern Intellectual Full course for one semester. In this course we will read a variety of major 18th-century authors whose work opens the modern debate on what it means to be a literary intellectual. Major authors will include Joseph Addison, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, with some contemporary contributions from writers including Susan Sontag. We will also read critical work attempting to define what enlightenment means, from Immanuel Kant, Horkheimer and Adorno, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course develops an advanced understanding of film as a complex cultural medium through a survey of the principal theories of cinema from the silent era to the present. Some of the key theoretical approaches this course introduces include realist theory, genre criticism, auteur theory, structuralism, psychoanalytic film theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial film theory. Prerequisites: junior standing and English courses at the 200 level or above, including an introductory film course. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course looks at ways film directors have adapted significant novels for the screen. We will focus on narrative in fiction as it has been transformed into narrative for films; the different techniques for storytelling each medium employs; and various criteria for assessing the success or failure of such adaptations, along the way examining the notion of "fidelity" as a valid criterion for assessing film adaptations. We will also regard how point of view is established in each genre. Some attention will be given to cinematic codes and to ways of discussing how literary language is rendered in visual terms. Novels and the films adopted from them will include such classics as Nabokov ? Lolit a, Mann 's Death in Veni ce, Graham Green e's The Third Man, Conr ad's Heart of Darkness (Apocalypse Now), John Fo wles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Henry James' Washington Square (The H eiress), and Julio Co rtazar' s Blowup. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses. Con
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3.00 Credits
A study of voyaging, exile, and homecoming in a range of narratives, from epic, drama, fiction, and travel writing. These are "liminal" texts, with figures who cross borders, and who may transgress against the familiar and fantasize a freedom otherwise denied to them. There are twin interests here: on the new land to be explored and its people, and on the consciousness of the explorer. We will engage such questions as: why does the protagonist voyage Why does he or she write or tell stories What shape or plot does the narrator give to the journey What is the nature of "the exotic" and what ethnocentric assumptions and valorizations are implicit in designating an "other" defined against the normalized "self " do such texts emphasize universalism or relativism What is the relation of the new place to "home" The texts may include Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Flaubert's Letters from Egypt, Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia, Greene's Journey without Maps, Canetti's Voices of Marrakech, Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, and Barthes' Empire of Signs. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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