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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
This course examines modernism's fascination with myth and mythmaking. In an age characterized by alienation, urbanization, and war, what was myth's particular appeal? We will consider the ways in which such authors as Eliot, Pound, H.D., Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf used myth to both overthrow cultural forms and restore and remake the world. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. LILE
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1.00 Credits
Envision the coasts of Africa, the villages of the Caribbean, the fields of the South, and the cities of the North. This course explores the literature of exile and migration between and within Africa, Europe, and the Americas to examine how such movement influences individual, familial, national, and diasporic identity. Authors include Delany, McKay, Larsen, Lamming, Toomer, Morrison, Walcott, Marshall, and Danticat. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. DVPS LILE
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1.00 Credits
Though we typically understand monsters as evil enemies of a stable human society, monster texts often blur distinctions between hero and villain, monster and human. This course will examine how and why monsters are producted in various forms of fiction. We will analyze how the construction of social deviants (thieves, prostitutes, murderesses) and monsters (vampires, werewolves, aliens) as "threats" helps to create and maintain a "normal" social body. Texts may include Dracula, Frankenstein, American Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, Alien, and Night of the Living Dead. Course will help students to improve their critical reading and writing skills. Enrollment limited to 30.
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1.00 Credits
How did Shakespeare's drama develop thematically, rhetorically, and historically over the span of his literary career? This course offers students a representative introduction to Shakespeare's work, paying particular attention to how later plays reinvent linguistic, historical, and theatrical materials worked out in earlier plays. Plays include Othello and The Winter's Tale; Romeo and Juliet and Two Gentlemen of Verona; and Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. Requirements include critical essays, an in-class presentation,and a final examination.
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1.00 Credits
In American popular culture, anxieties about ethnic and gender identity are frequently coded as forms of monstrosity, transfiguration, or infection. We will trace this displacement to a seam of "retroviral" imagery running through American literature and examine America's tendency to connect psychopathology to biology. Writers include Poe, O'Connor, Faulkner, Plath, Morrison, Roth, Eugenides, and O'Brien. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. LILE
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1.00 Credits
This course examines 19th-century Romantic, Victorian, and Transcendentalist literary representations of heightened perception, apocalyptic vision, and altered consciousness. It considers the literary, philosophical and political dimensions of prophetic rhetoric and transcendent experience in poetry, novels, short stories, and essays. Reading include Ezekiel, Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Barbauld, Carlyle, Martin Delany, Emerson, and H.G. Wells. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. LILE
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1.00 Credits
Where does America's fascination with violent, volatile males come from? This class will explore the origins of this romantic figure in the nineteenth century, taking Wuthering Heights as a founding text of "intimate conflict." Our focus is on 20th-century U.S. works in which the Heathcliff model is played out in dramas of nationality and identity. Readings include Williams, Wright, Selby, Albee, Allison, Palahniuk. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. LILE
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1.00 Credits
What can we make of literary and visual works that seek to represent failure—or of works that audiences call failures? A survey of work that "doesn't work" and of its aesthetic, ethical, and political implications for contemporary culture. Texts include Melville, Kafka, Stein, Beauvoir, Beckett, Warhol, and North American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. Screening of Synecdoche, New York. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. LILE
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1.00 Credits
Through texts ranging from the society gossip novel to the modern spy thriller, this course examines the causes and consequences of anxiety about the exhibition of one's private affairs in the public eye. We will consider questions of reputation, the presentation of self, and the right to privacy within a surveillance society. Readings include Wharton, Larsen, Chandler, Himes, Nabokov, Dick, Lee, and screenings of Rear Window and The Conversation. Enrollment limited to 17 undergraduate students. LILE
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1.00 Credits
These introductory general topics courses are designed to give students a coherent sense of the literary history and the major critical developments during a substantial portion of the period covered by the department's Area I research field: Medieval and Early Modern Literatures and Cultures. English concentrators are encouraged to take at least one of these courses to apply toward the Area I English concentration requirements.
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