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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Representative poetry and prose of the Southern states, with attention to cultural, social, and political backgrounds. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The South of myth and the South of history have combined to produce a literature fascinating in both its range and conflicting images. Issues of familial and communal heritage, conceptions of place and region, and relations among various racial and ethnic groups are among the most prominent and pressing themes in Southern literature, but since such might be said of any regional American literature, this course asks, what makes this literature particularly "Southern" We can begin to understand some of the oppositions constructed in the Old South and represented in its literature - between blacks and whites, the landed gentry and the yeoman farmer, the strict gender roles of ladies and gentlemen - by examining particularly Southern attitudes toward honor and the land in works by Thomas Nelson Page, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin. To chart the evolution of Southern literature from the romantic rhetorical mode to the modern dialectical mode and subsequent postmodern permutations, the course investigates the effects of changing social conditions and new fictional forms on representations of the South in works by such writers as Dorothy Allison, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Ellen Glasgow, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Jean Toomer, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. The final weeks of the semester focus on the following questions: Is today's South more a matter of social perception than social distinction Is there anything still "Southern" about the contemporary South Does the South now look like the rest of the country, as some, such as John Edgerton in The Americanization of Dixie, claim Or as others, such as Peter Applebome, have suggested, does the United States now look like the South What role do writers play in mythologizing, reconstructing, and/or reinventing the South
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3.00 Credits
Literature by American writers dealing with issues of racial or ethnic identity studied in relation to historical contexts. May be repeated for credit as content changes. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course explores literature by American writers dealing with issues of racial or ethnic identity studied in relation to historical contexts. It approaches this subject by way of various genres, for example, representations of race and ethnicity in modern and contemporary American drama. Studying dramatic texts, critical material and occasional video productions, we analyze how various ethnic minorities have used the stage as a means of analyzing, questioning, subverting, and modifying dominant power structures as well as of defining, and redefining cultural identities. We study some of the most exciting and compelling plays that have emerged since the Harlem Renaissance and have fundamentally reshaped American theater and American identity.
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3.00 Credits
Analysis of representative works by major American poets, with demonstration of modern technical innovations and discussions of thematic concerns. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course combines a survey of representative figures from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century with a focus on selected, prominent poets of the period. Attention to prosody and verse scheme figures importantly in the early part of the course, as we learn to recognize the ways in which poets incorporated formal experimentation into their explorations of themes such as secularism, gender, faith, the burgeoning metropolis, and alternatives to a corporate, white-bourgeois culture and ethos. Major figures and schools include Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Imagism, Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the postwar "confessional" poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Alan Ginsberg.
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3.00 Credits
Attention to new concerns and new forms of fiction in the 20th century. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better or permission of instructor. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course attends to new social, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns in American writing in the mid- to late twentieth century, and to the new forms of fiction that have developed to express them. It examines the work of writers such as John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gass, while developing an understanding of literary postmodernism in relation to the cultural and philosophical movements within which the term first arose and assessing its application and usefulness as a tool for literary analysis.
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3.00 Credits
Representative prose and poetry written by African-American women. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course traces the development of writings by African American women. The class will consider the unique problems faced by these writers, the distinctive features of their literature, the concerns upon which they focus in their works, the milieu that produced them and their works, their triple consciousness, their womanist/feminist perspectives, and the critical reception accorded them.
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3.00 Credits
Close study of important recent texts (fiction, poetry, and/or drama by U.S. authors or other contemporary writers who strongly influenced them) with respect to their special social, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 or American Studies 201 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course examines major trends in American literature of the past fifty years - from the existentialist writing of the immediate postwar period and the development of literary postmodernism to the increasing prominence of ethnic literatures towards the end of the century. The syllabus pairs individual works by prominent late twentieth and early twenty-first century writers such as Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Philip Roth with pertinent theoretical and critical writing. These pairings allow us to consider how these works engaged with some of the central preoccupations of the last half-century: the Cold War, post-American affluence and the problem of conformity, Civil Rights and the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War, the rise of postmodernity, and the omnipresence of technology in American culture.
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3.00 Credits
Examines the filmic adaptation of literary works, with particular consideration given to questions of genre, interpretation, and historical relevance. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the connections and comparisons between literature and narrative film by examining the adaptation of literary works into film texts. Its goals are threefold: first, to explore the historical and generic moment that produced an interest in a particular narrative or filmic genre; second, to isolate the formal properties that define literary and narrative film genres; and third, to consider how historical considerations influence the literary or filmic versions of particular texts. From one semester to the next a different literary or filmic genre is selected for examination. Possible subjects include "Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and Film Noir" and "Shakespearean Adaptations," among others. Among the questions to be considered are: how do literary and filmic texts differ To what extent are those differences historical, formal, or generic What happens when literary texts are adapted cross-culturally into different national and formal traditions What happens when historical genres are updated for new audiences
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3.00 Credits
Survey of works by African-American verbal artists who came of age after the civil-rights movement. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a C or better Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: How are African-American artists who were born or came of age after the civil rights movement responding to this contemporary American culture Today, as a result of the civil rights movement, black creativity isn't produced or viewed solely within the context of the pursuit of freedom for black people, a reality that is reflected in the literature, film, art, and music of .the "Post-Soul" aesthetic. One reason you likely haven't heard of the Post-Soul, among several, is that, while the Post-Soul aesthetic (PSA) is a legitimate "school" of African-American literature and art, many of its practitioners don't want to be labeled, even if the label is one that suggests they believe in unfettered artistic freedom. Although she prefers the term "postblack," art curator Thelma Golden spoke directly to the heart of the PSA artistic dilemma when she wrote: "For me, to approach a conversation about 'black art,' ultimately meant embracing and rejecting the notion of such a thing at the very same time. . . . It was a clarifying term that had ideological and chronological dimensions and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled as 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness." Many Post-Soul writers critique the events or mindset of the civil rights movement in their fictions, and it's important to this sense of African-Americans being "post" that these artists have no lived, adult experience with that movement. Many of the best known younger black artists have a complicated relationship with the PSA, and therefore many of these artists often show up on PSA syllabi: Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Kara Walker, Wynton Marsalis, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Mos-D
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3.00 Credits
British and American drama with attention to European backgrounds. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course analyzes some of the most influential dramatic texts and theories that have shaped Western drama and theater since the late 19th century. We cover a range of theatrical traditions, including Realism/Naturalism, the Art Theater movement, Futurism and Dadaism, Expressionism, Political Theater, the Theater of the Absurd, the Theater of Cruelty, as well as postmodern Performance Art. We look at texts by American, British, Russian, German and French playwrights and theorists.
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3.00 Credits
Developments since World War II. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course surveys late twentieth-century and contemporary British and/or American drama and theater, spotlighting selected playwrights who have shaped the contemporary stage and dramatic literature. We examine not only individual plays, but the ways in which these plays contribute historically, theoretically, and philosophically to a narrative history of the theater. The course makes no claim to be a comprehensive survey of all major - not to mention lesser-known - dramatists whose works have found their way to prominence, but by concentrating on a number of key dramatists, we are able to gauge more critically the aesthetic and cultural power of British and American drama.
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