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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Analysis of selected plays and poems from variety of critical perspectives. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course investigates a selection from Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Special emphasis is placed on close reading and on genre analysis. Both comedy and tragedy are complex literary modes that have been invested with a variety of meanings and functions in the Western tradition. We explore what these roles have been, and in particular how Shakespeare adopted and manipulated generic conventions to serve his own purposes. This course also engages a variety of recurring issues that emerge in these works, including questions about the nature of the individual subject, gender roles, communities, history, political institutions, art, and questions about the relations among all of these. We also explore what theater is and how it works, making use of film clips of various performances of the plays as one way of approaching this issue. The most important goal of this course is for students to reach a good level of familiarity with and understanding of Shakespeare's language and imagery. Students also examine how interpretations of these plays may be affected or influenced by our own involvement in the Shakespeare "myth," and we will consider ways in which the playwright himself seems to offer his readers hints for approaching his own texts.
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3.00 Credits
Analysis of literature of personal growth and human development, from autobiography and biography to various forms of fiction: bildungsroman, novels of education, fictionalized biography, autobiography in verse, etc. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course examines novels and short fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present and from a variety of national traditions - works by writers as diverse as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jamaica Kincaid, Milan Kundera, and Joyce Carol Oates - all of which recount stories of personal growth and development. The German word Bildung: the formation, education, cultivation of a person, has come to be used in English to identify such narratives. The course explores the formal and thematic elements of the Bildung narrative, some of its classic representatives in which characters develop through incorporation into larger social frameworks, more recent examples in which characters learn about themselves through resistance to larger social forces, and still others in which elements of the Bildung narrative are combined with more experimental methods of storytelling.
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3.00 Credits
Analysis of literary works from the Caribbean representing various periods, areas, and groups. Focus mainly on English-speaking Caribbean, but occasional focus on Spanish, Dutch, or French works in translation. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course is designed to introduce students to a body of literature from the Caribbean. Using a variety of interpretive frameworks, we do close, critical readings of selected writings representing varied periods, areas, and groups. Specific emphasis may change from term to term; the focus is generally on the English-speaking Caribbean, but works in translation from the Spanish-, Dutch-, and French-speaking islands may be included from time to time. We consider the process by which Caribbean texts have been created and received, the historical and cultural contexts in which they have developed, and their relationship to each other and to other bodies of American, European, and world literature.
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3.00 Credits
Focuses on the ways in which particular literary genres and modes arise and are adapted to new purposes over time. Taught in two modules with two different professors, this course with a grade of C (2.0) or better is a prerequisite to all 300-level literature courses, and thus is designed for those who think they might want to major or minor in English or take upper-level literature courses. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course focuses on the way particular genres and modes arise and are adapted to new purposes over time. The course is divided into two modules taught by different professors. Each part concentrates on a single genre or mode in its longer historical contexts. The titles of recent courses include "Shapes of Desire: the Lyric and the Novel" and "The Romance and Film Noir. For Fall 2009 the focus of English 297 is "The Western in Fiction and Film." The American Western has its roots in earlier frontier fiction, which in turn has roots in European romance, Judeo-Christian determinism, and classical mythology, to name a few. How, then, do scholars separate the Western as a genre from the more diverse frontier tradition of which it is a part And where does the Western find its terminus, blending into other literary forms that engage similar themes or issues The fiction module will begin with an overview of the frontier tradition in American writing, starting with the fiction of Cooper and progressing through the 1890s, where the cultural forces giving rise to the Western arguably become most acute. Students will read two seminal Westerns-Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)-exploring how the genre deals with matters of masculinity, domesticity, race, religion, and violence. The course will then examine two anti-Westerns-Walter van Tillburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) and George Bowering's Caprice (1988)-to determine how Western themes and tropes have been adopted, adapted, or undone by later writers. Full-length works will be supplemented with shorter selections from Twain, Harte, Crane, Remington, and L'Amour, as well as relevant criticism from scholars like John Cawelti and Richard Slotkin. The module will conclude with a discussion of "western writing" and other literary categories into which the Western blends. The film module begins in 1903, the year of the genre's inception with The Great Train Robbery and continues with its development through the silent western and the studio period, revival in the 1940s and 1950s, internationalization of the genre in the 1960s, its decline in the 1970s and yet another revival in the late 20th and early 21st century. We will study different iterations of the genre and consider how changing technology, such as introduction of location shooting, sound, color, television, and digital imaging, transformed it over time. We will examine how the Western was appropriated outside of the United States through examples of Mexican comedia rancheria, Italian spaghetti westerns, Eastern European Indianerfilme, and westerns from Australia and Asia. We will consider the Western as cinema (both genre and institution) and as an ideological discourse variously inflected depending on its particular historical junctions and locations. For example, we will study the different ideological functions of the Western during the Cold War period in the United States and in Europe and the functions of the revisionist and border westerns in the late 20th and early 21s
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3.00 Credits
Focuses on the ways in which literary traditions are perceived and/or constructed, and for what purposes. Taught in two modules with two different professors, this course with a grade of C (2.0) or better is a prerequisite to all 300-level literature courses, and thus is designed for those who think they might want to major or minor in English or take upper-level literature courses. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course focuses on how a particular literary tradition arises in particular historical circumstances. The course is divided into two modules taught by different professors about two different literary time periods. The titles of recent courses include "The Rise of Theater and the Emergence of the Gothic" and "Literature and Revolution: 1848 and the Rise of Women's Writing, 1968 and the Emergence of Ethnic Literature.?or fall 2009 the focus of English 298 is "Literature and War." The American Civil War and World War I were two of the most destructive conflicts of their times, and both wars spawned a distinctive literature and marked a shift in literary content and style. This course examines the literature of each war, culminating in a community based learning project on veterans and memorials in Richmond. Writers considered may include Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Nelson Page, T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others.
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3.00 Credits
Essentials of close textual analysis with special attention to theory, critical vocabulary, and methodology of literary interpretation. The focus will vary from one section or semester to the next. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course focuses on the essentials of close textual analysis, with special attention to the theoretical and critical vocabulary and methodology of literary interpretation. It pursues these goals by way of different topics each semester. Some recent course descriptions include:
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3.00 Credits
Studies in literature and cultural traditions of 16th- and early 17th-century Great Britain. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course is designed to introduce students to sixteenth and early seventeenth century English literature. Students read a variety of texts in roughly chronological order, focusing primarily on lyric poems, narrative verse, and plays, paying close attention to the cultural assumptions that governed the way literary texts were written, read, and performed in the period. The course also helps students develop the special analytical skills needed to read this literature carefully and to write about it effectively. Students learn to identify genres and make sense of archaic language, while developing a familiarity with historical contexts and the relationship between these contexts and the majorstylistic and thematic concerns that not only characterized the age, but set up the template for much later literary production in the English language.
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3.00 Credits
Selected early works, "Troilus and Criseyde" and "The Canterbury Tales," with attention to Chaucer's life in context of late 14th-century culture and ideology. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course explores the range of Chaucer's work. We pay particular attention to the social, economic, and political currents that inform Chaucer's poetry and analyze his aesthetic response to them. Our discussions are informed by methodologies of the new historicism, emphasizing some of the mediations through which modern readers are able to apprehend texts from the past as objects of study. We also pay particular attention to the performance of Middle English.
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3.00 Credits
Selected plays by Shakespeare grouped according to genre. The course will alternate between investigating the histories and tragedies and the comedies and romances. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: In this course we read a selection from Shakespeare's plays, organized according to their genre. The primary goal is to achieve an in-depth knowledge of these works through close reading and structural analysis. While investigating the specific concerns articulated in each of these plays, we pay particular attention to Shakespeare's use of generic conventions to create his meanings. This requires us to investigate various approaches to the nature and function of comedy and of tragedy. What are some of the recurring characteristics of these genres, and how have they been approached from the perspectives of literary history, of anthropology, of philosophy, of cultural materialism, and of gender studies As we become familiar with some of the major concerns linked to particular genres, and with some of the principal characteristics of generic conventions, it becomes easier to understand how Shakespeare appropriates and manipulates those conventions for his own purposes. In particular, we trace his tendency to combine genres within his works, particularly in the histories and romances. By focusing on questions of genre, we are also able to trace some of the principal thematic connections among the plays. In what ways, for example, is The Merchant of Venice tragic, or Othello comedic How does Shakespeare's presentation and/or understanding of love, theatricality, virtue, or history - to name just a few concepts - seem to develop as he moves from the comedies to the tragedies to the romances Throughout, we are concerned with the plays' cultural and historical contexts. How do Shakespeare's texts implicitly and explicitly respond to or comment upon contemporary social structures, political and religious ideologies, and cultural values and traditions Perhaps the highest achievement of the English Renaissance, and certainly the most popular at the time, is its rich dramatic tradition. In this class, therefore, we also seek for clues in Shakespeare's plays that may explain why this form of representation struck such a responsive chord in Renaissance society. We see that drama perhaps most compellingly engaged a society in which the self's relation to others and to reality was increasingly understood as dynamically flexible and uncertain rather than fixed and predictable. Drama vividly displayed the problematic relationships between fact and fiction, skepticism and idealism, politics and ideology, magic and science, which were of central concern to thinkers in the Renaissance. Finally, we also consider the question of Shakespeare's hallowed status in the literary tradition. What factors contributed to his literary "canonization" Indeed, how are judgments about aesthetic value made, and what purposes might they serve
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3.00 Credits
Selected plays, with attention to different modes of critical analysis. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course incorporates much the same content and concerns as English 304 Shakespeare (see description above). It differs in its emphasis on examination of a variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare's work, which essentially span the history of critical theory of the past fifty years or so. It should be easier to understand some of the basic moments and concepts in this history by tracing its development in relationship to a single author.
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