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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
How do you tell a story that is supposed to be unspeakable? In this course, we will investigate the ways in which gay, bisexual, and lesbian writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with the short fiction of Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the contemporary period, we will look at gay, bisexual and lesbian British, Irish and American writers whose work engaged with or dramatically departed from the dominant conventions that typically shaped fictions of identity formation, of love and marriage, of sexual experience, of political protest, and of death and loss. We will also investigate the public responses to some of these fictions, and the changing discourses about gender identity, homosexuality, and sexual orientation that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of gay, bisexual, and lesbian writers over the past century. Students will write three papers and be responsible for one in-class presentation.
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3.00 Credits
Ancient Greek and Latin literature - history, epic, tragedy, novels, oratory - has a second life in English literature as it is reproduced, echoed, or recalled. Pairing important works in Greek and Roman literature (in translation) with works of English literature, this course will look at some of the ways that writers in English have used the traditions of western antiquity. Shakespeare uses Julius Caesar and Ovid, Milton reanimates Hesiod and Vergil, Alexander Pope and James Joyce share a Homeric inspiration but little else, and Victorian novelists plunder their classical educations to raise up and to tear down the social pretentions of their time. Students will study the ancient texts in their own right and will develop skills in interpreting the remarkable range of uses to which they are put by their modern translations, borrowings, and adaptations.
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3.00 Credits
Salman Rushdie, in a controversial introduction to an anthology of Indian writing, argues that the best writing to emerge from India, or from writers of Indian descent, is now undeniably written in English, the language of British colonization. This course will trace the recent development of Indian writing in English, or Indo-Anglian fiction, as Rushdie and others have called it. We will, however, begin with two old, canonical novels of India written by English writers: Rudyard Kipling's Kim and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Other texts to be read include: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Arundathi Roy, The God of Small Things; Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake; Vikas Swarup, Slumdog Millionaire; Monica Ali, Brick Lane; Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient; David Davidar, The House of Blue Mangoes. We will be learning about the complex cultural and political history of India, as well as studying the literary debates that have fired such an efflorescence of great fiction. Along the way, we will familiarize ourselves with aspects of post-colonial theory, and also of the enormous impact of imperialism on India. There will also be a film element to this class.
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3.00 Credits
What is political poetry, and what has it been? In what ways does political poetry interact with the "real?" What shape has political poetry taken in the past? What shape might it take in the future? This course is designed to provide multiple, competing answers to these questions. Course texts will include plays, manifestoes, broadsides and websites. Coursework will include brief responses, creative and collaborative projects, performances, presentations, and formal papers.
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3.00 Credits
Fantasy. Humor. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Wit. Word play. Satire. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to enjoy a good laugh, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, and think about the politics of humor. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, and Flann O'Brien. No knowledge of Irish is assumed or necessary.
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3.00 Credits
The evolution of modern literary criticism.
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3.00 Credits
Performance art is anti-art. Performance art is art that contradicts tradition, that aims to shock. This class will equip the student with an overview of its offenses. Class content may include: - Dada's early 20th-century assaults on the audience - Absurdist experimental performance works by Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark, John Cage, and Nam June Paik from the 1960s - Performance art addressing racism by Adrian Piper and William Pope L. from the 1980s - and Current performance works by Internet artists and others Discussions will focus on the aesthetics and politics of marginality. In other words: Why shock? Why experiment? Is there any market for such work today? We will also look at critical and theoretical texts about performance, modernism, and the avant-garde and consider their relation to the works themselves. These may include: - Manifestos by performers and artists - Debates about the autonomy of art - Poststructuralist writings on art and aesthetics - and Theories of performativity. Finally, students will be expected to create one or more performance art pieces themselves. Students should expect to be asked to participate in other students' pieces as well as in their own.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of several histories of education, with particular emphasis on English studies, and how these histories have helped to shape culture.
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3.00 Credits
What it means to be "literate" and the conditions that enable literacy to flourish.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of both the technical aspects of linguistics (phonetic transcription, morphology, syntax, etc.) as they relate to the development of the English language and the applications of linguistics to the study of literature.
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