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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Three credits in 200-level English. A focused engagement with the African-American literary tradition, from its beginnings in the late 18th century through its powerful assertions in the late 20th. Such major forms and periods as the slave narrative, the autobiography, the Harlem Renaissance, naturalism and existentialism, the Black Arts Movement, and the contemporary novel are emphasized. Standard authors include Douglass, Jacobs, DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and Walker. Conner.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Three credits in 200-level English. A reading of major American novelists, focusing especially on Hawthorne, Melville, and James. We also consider the relationship between the novel and social reform, especially in the domestic novels of mid-century (Stowe and Fanny Fern, for example) and in fictions at century’s end by Crane, Jewett, and Chopin. Warren.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Three credits in 200-level English. An examination of the American novel in the first half of the 20th century, from the late Realist and Naturalist writers through World War II. The heart of the course focuses on the major figures of American Modernism-Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner-but may also consider various early and late Modernist writers (Anderson, Toomer, Wharton, Hurston, West). Major concerns include the motif of exile, the figure of the artist, the Lost Generation, the rise of the city and decline of the village or pastoral ideal, conflicts of race and gender, existentialism and religious crisis, and the meanings and impact of Modernism itself. Conner.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Three credits in 200-level English. An exploration of the formal, thematic, and cultural discontinuities which have reshaped the postmodern novel in America.
Topic for Fall 2010:
ENGL 369: Contemporary American Fiction (3). A study of contemporary fiction, mostly novels but also some short stories, published in the United States over the last decade. Reading the work of such writers as Junot Diaz, Nathan Englander, Claire Messud, and Dave Eggers, we consider innovations of form and language, the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary literature, and the ways in which race, ethnicity, and gender continue to shape stories of American life. (HL) Darznik
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Three credits in 200-level English. An introduction to literary theory, focusing on classic texts in literary criticism and on contemporary developments such as Formalism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Marxism, New Historicism and Cultural Studies, Feminism and Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. Warren.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Junior or senior majors, or sophomores with ENGL 299. An intensive survey of the films of Alfred Hitchcock: this course covers all of his major and many of his less well-known films. It supplements that central work by introducing students to several approaches to film analysis that are particularly appropriate for studying Hitchcock. These include biographical, auteur, and genre-based interpretation, psychological analyses, and dominant form theory through the study of novel-to-film adaptations. Adams.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisite: Junior or senior majors, or sophomores with ENGL 299. A seminar course on a topic, genre, figure, or school (e.g. African-American women’s literature, epic film, Leslie Marmon Silko, feminist literary theory) with special emphasis on research and discussion. The topic will be limited in scope to permit study in depth. Student suggestions for topics are welcome. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.
Topic for Spring 2011:
ENGL 380: Spring Term Seminar in Literary Studies: Gravity’s Rainbow (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW composition requirement. An in-depth exploration of the preeminent example of literary postmodernism, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a critically acclaimed cult classic that combines the plot of a psychedelic spy thriller with the stylistic experimentation of James Joyce. Pynchon’s classic meditation on paranoia has fascinated readers every bit as much as its author’s well-known reclusiveness. Encyclopedic in scope, this story of the closing months of World War II ranges from the sublime to the absurd, exploring rocketry, sexual fetishism, free will, organic chemistry, the beginnings of the 1960s counterculture, and much more. Students examine the novel from a variety of perspectives: biographical, literary, and cultural as well as scientific and economic. Guest speakers shed light on some of the many areas of knowledge the novel explores (behavioral psychology, the Holocaust, the occult, Gödel’s theorem, sadomasochism … ). We also consider related texts by Pynchon and works by several of the figures that influenced him. Students produce analytical and creative multimedia responses, present research to the class, and lead discussion on selected topics. The course includes a day trip to Washington, DC. (HL) Crowley.
Topics for Winter 2011:
ENGL 380A: Advanced Seminar: Chicana/o Literature (3). Chicana/o or Mexican-American writing includes those works in which a writer’s sense of ethnic identity (chicanismo) animates his or her work manifestly and fundamentally, often through the presentation of Chicano characters, cultural situations, and patterns of speech. This course explores a broad spectrum of the forms and genres of Chicana/o literature produced over the last 30 years, including the political treatise, novel, short story, and poem. Readings, videos and guest speakers discuss the historical and literary contexts of Chicana/o literature, bringing to light the multiple intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The scope of the course covers the foundational texts of Chicana/o literature beginning with Movement-inspired concepts and moving through a sampling of the new terrain being explored by feminists, cultural critics, and queer writers at the beginning of the 21st century. Typical authors featured include Rivera, Rodriguez, Cisneros, Anzaldua, Trujillo, Anaya, Viramontes. (HL) Miranda.
ENGL 380B: Advanced Seminar: Travel and Adventure in the Middle Ages (3). Although moderns think of medieval people as tied to the land or shut inside walled towns, people of all classes, male and female, travelled, sometimes extensively, both in the West and in the Islamic world. This seminar explores the medieval literature of travel and adventure: reasons for travelling, the journey, the unexpected, challenges and tests, descriptions of divergent cultural practices, life-changing effects. Major types: chivalric adventure (Sir Thomas Malory’s Book of Gareth and Book of Sir Tristram), exile and restoration (Aladdin, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale), trade on land and sea (Sinbad stories from The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron), entry into the realm of Fairie and the discovery of love (The Lais of Marie de France, Sir Orfeo, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale), pilgrimage and biography (The Book of Margery Kempe), journeys in the afterlife (Dante’s Purgatory). (HL) Craun.
ENGL 380C: Advanced Seminar: Southern Fiction Then and Now (3). In this class, we read multiple works by four leading fiction writers to study changes in the American South and its literary achievements from the Southern Renaissance to the present day. The authors are William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Cormac McCarthy, and Lee Smith. Their work allows us to focus on such topics as race, class, gender, family, honor, violence, and history. We ask if the South can or should remain a distinctive region and life experience in the global village and the post-modern world. (HL) Smout.
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1.00 Credits
Pass/Fail only. Seminar in reading preliminary to study abroad. Staff.
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3.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Six credits in English at the 200 level or higher, and approval of the International Education Committee. Corequisite: ENGL 403. Offered subject to sufficient enrollment. An advanced seminar in British literature carried on in Great Britain, with emphasis on independent research and intensive exposure to British culture. Changing topics, rotated yearly from instructor to instructor as in home seminars, will be limited in scope to permit study in depth. Staff.
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6.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Six credits in English at the 200 level or higher, and permission of the instructor. An intensive engagement with the literature, landscape, and culture of Ireland, carried out over six weeks in Ireland. Readings are coordinated with site visits, which range from prehistoric and Celtic sites to early and medieval Christian sites to modern Irish life. Authors include early Gaelic poets, medieval Irish poetry, the Blasket Island storytellers, major modernists such as Yeats, Joyce, Synge, Gregory, Heaney, and others. Note: This is a six-week spring term course. Conner.
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