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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. A course that uses ethnicity, race, and culture to develop readings of literature. Politics and history play a large role in this critical approach; students should be prepared to explore their own ethnic awareness as it intersects with other, often conflicting, perspectives. Focus will vary with the professor’s interests and expertise, but may include one or more literatures of the English-speaking world: Chicano and Latino, Native American, African-American, Asian-American, Caribbean, African, sub-continental (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), and others. Staff.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. A study of three novels, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and Pride and Prejudice, through the lens of Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. The course examines the basic tenets of Islam, the history of Iran and its Islamic revolution, and surveys experiences of Muslim women throughout the Middle East, using Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire. Includes interviews with fellow W&L students and Muslims in the local community, to learn about the variety of experiences of Islam throughout the world, and the attitudes toward Islam among W&L students. Brodie.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Completion of FW requirement. This course studies a group of works related by theme, by culture, by topic, by genre, or by the critical approach taken to the works. Some recent topics have been the Southern Short Story; Gender and Passion in the 19th-Century Novel; Chivalry, Honor, and the Romance; and Appalachian Literature. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.
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3.00 - 4.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Studies in British literature, supported by attention to historical contexts. Versions of this course may survey several periods or concentrate on a group of works from a short span of time. Students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.
Topics for Winter 2011:
ENGL 292A: Topics in British Literature: Modern British Poetry (3). This course concentrates on poetry from 1870 through 1950, asking how British poets have pushed the limits of traditional verse. British poets are known for being less innovative than their American and Continental peers. We sample poems by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams before asking: what did “experimentation” mean to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy? And how did Yeats experiment with history in his poems, as opposed to Ezra Pound? We also see how female poets, such as Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, developed highly original voices, and we end by sampling the works of more recent poets, including an influx of immigrant writers. (HL) Brodie.
ENGL 292B: Topics in British Literature: Law and Literature (3). We examine how Early British narratives and plays explore crucial cultural issues posed by English law in the formative stages of the Anglo-American legal system. What are the purposes and functions of law? What does each kind of law - folklaw, common law, Roman law, statute law, ecclesiastical - offer society and what are its drawbacks? What are the limits of law in governing human actions? In what circumstances is trust-based honor preferable to law? Are laws always binding? How should society deal with conflicts between the letter of the law and the intention of the lawgiver? What social forces are likely to corrupt legal processes and how should resulting injustices be righted? (HL) Craun.
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3.00 - 4.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Studies in American literature, supported by attention to historical contexts. Versions of this course may survey several periods or concentrate on a group of works from a short span of time. Students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.
Topic for Winter 2011:
ENGL 293: Topics in American Literature: Wilderness in American Literature (3). “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” This course investigates ideas of wilderness in selected writings by American writers from a variety of periods and perspectives. We read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by writers like Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Cormac McCarthy, and Terry Tempest Williams. Writing assignments include examinations and analytical papers. (HL) Warren.
Topic for Fall 2010:
ENGL 293A: Topics in American Literature: The Birth, Development and Prematurely- reported Death of the American Short Story (3). Since Poe “invented” it less than 200 years ago, the short story has become one of the leading literary genres. It lends itself to one-session readings and offers fiction writers the opportunity to work in detail on a small scale. The form interweaves and crossbreeds with genres like the poem, the tale, the myth, the job application, the joke, the dream and many more. With almost 900 colleges teaching short story writing, why are some pundits declaring the imminent demise of the genre? To discover how the American story evolved and why it’s not going away, we read work by Poe, Melville, James, Baldwin, O’Connor, Faulkner, Updike, Oates, King and other standards, as well as recent voices - Ha Jin, Makkai, Proulx, Mark Richard, Z. Z. Packer. Students develop their writing skills in a series of short papers and develop a creative project. (HL) Smith
ENGL 293B: Topics in American Literature: Toward ‘Edge City’: American Literature and Film in the 1960s (3). Ken Kesey coined the phrase ‘Edge City’ to describe his quest to break through conventional boundaries on his way toward a new consciousness—spontaneous, visionary, communal. Edge City seems an appropriate way of describing the trend of the sixties both historically and artistically. It is a time of extremities, a series of cataclysms, each outdoing, in shock value, the one before it. Readings include non-fiction by Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Michael Herr, and Hunter Thompson; novels such as Percy’s The Moviegoer, Updike’s Couples, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; short fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Denis Johnson; as well as three films: The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and “Tet, 1968” (from the PBS documentary series on Vietnam). (HL) Oliver
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Studies in the literature of natural history, exploration, and science pertaining to the fundamental relationships between nature and human culture. Versions of this course focus on particular periods and national literatures, or they concentrate on a specific theme or problem. Students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different. Staff.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. Students in this course study a group of works related by theme, by culture, by topic, by genre, or by the critical approach taken to the texts. Involves field trips, film screenings, service learning, and/or other special projects, as appropriate, in addition to 8-10 hours per week of class meetings. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different. Staff.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Completion of FW composition requirement, at least one course chosen from English courses numbered from 230 to 291 and sophomore standing. A study of a topic in literature issuing in a research process and sustained critical writing. Some recent topics have been Justice in Late Medieval Literature; Tragedy and Comedy; Western American Literature; Emily Dickinson; and Thomas Hardy: Novelist and Poet.
Topics for Winter 2011:
ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Dream Visions (3). A study of the major visionary narratives of the later Middle Ages, composed by the period’s most celebrated poets: Dante, Chaucer, Langland, and Jean de Meun (author of the influential Roman de la rose). In this popular poetic mode, the narrator customarily falls asleep and then imagines strange encounters in other worlds which he then relates upon awakening. Our study of the genre commences with its origins in Plato and Cicero before transitioning to some of the medieval period’s most celebrated poems and the social, literary, and religious concerns that they foreground. In the course of exploring these poems, we also familiarize ourselves with scholarship on dream allegories and medieval theories of dreaming. There is some work with the Middle English language, though no prior exposure is necessary. Ultimately the course aims to develop students’ research skills and guide them through the process of planning and writing a literary research paper. (HL) Jirsa.
ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: The Poetics of Telepathy and the Victorian Afterlife (3). In this class we study the late-Victorian intersection of poetry, early psychological theories of consciousness, and the search for scientific evidence of telepathy and “life after death.” Among the poets who offered their own complex theories of the human mind and communication between minds (even dead ones), we examine William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others. We also read works by innovative early psychologists (such as William James) and documents from the Society of Psychical Research, founded in 1882 to study claims of apparitions, “thought-transference,” and other phenomena associated with séances. The class’ working premise is that these three approaches to the human mind—poetry, psychology, and “ghost hunting,” for lack of a pithier term—frequently intersect in Victorian texts. As a gateway to the major, this seminar is designed to train students in the reading, writing, and research skills necessary for English majors; to this end, students engage with critical and theoretical readings to develop a sophisticated approach to literary scholarship, and each student develops a major seminar paper on a topic relevant to the course. (HL) Matthews.
Topics for Fall 2010:
ENGL 299A: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Becoming Jane (3). This course examines Jane Austen’s early novels in the context of other writers who influenced her development. We sample large excerpts from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela, before examining Austen’s use of the epistolary form in Lady Susan. Next, we read parts of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to appreciate Austen’s comic use of that novel in Northanger Abbey. Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling shows the culture of sensibility behind Sense and Sensibility, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman outlines ideas about women’s education that Austen explores in Pride and Prejudice. The course ends by jumping forward to Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion, to conclude an ongoing discussion of the influence of Romanticism on her work. The final goal is a 12-page research paper that combines critical sources with readings of Austen and one of her precursors. (HL) Brodie
ENGL 299B: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Bloomsbury (3). A study of early 20th-century Modernism with particular attention to its contentious relation to 19th-century Victorian culture through a focus upon the colorful group of novelists, essayists, poets, critics, historians, painters, and economists known as Bloomsbury. This course further concentrates on two of Bloomsbury’s most prominent literary members—Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey—but attends to the wide range of talent within which they worked from Woolf’s husband, the critic and publisher Leonard, to Strachey’s brother, the pioneering Freudian psychoanalyst James, to John Maynard Keynes, the leading economist of the 20th century. (HL) Adams
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Three credits in 200-level English and permission of the instructor. Students must submit writing samples to qualify for admission. ENGL 203 and/or 204 recommended. Limited enrollment. A workshop in writing poems, requiring regular writing and outside reading. Miranda.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Three credits in 200-level English and permission of the instructor. Students must submit writing samples to qualify for admission. ENGL 203 and/or 204 recommended. A workshop in writing fiction, requiring regular writing and outside reading. Staff.
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