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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
This course focuses on the wide variety of English literature composed between roughly 600 and 1500 as a form of entertainment for churches, courts, or town squares. It explores a variety of texts that were read for both edification and pleasure in monastic settings; songs, romances, and assorted vernacular poems that were performed at court; and plays that were enacted during city festivals. While most of the texts studied in this course were written as original compositions, some were recorded after generations of oral performance. Students will investigate the meanings and permeable boundaries of orality, aurality, and literacy in medieval cultures where only a minority were "literate" as understood today. In addition to theories of literary invention, perpetuation, and reception, students will learn effective strategies for close reading of Middle English writings and research methods for learning the contexts in which they became entertainments. The course associates the canon of medieval English literature with the popular culture of the past and today. This course fulfills the Periods and Movements (pre-1800) or the Theory requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
Survey of a broad range of works concerning the American environment and parallel historical and cultural trends. Works are selected from poetry, fiction, and such nonfiction genres as nature essays, autobiography, travel narrative, and political writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 220.
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4.00 Credits
This class will grapple with the problem of Modernity (beginning in the late 16th century) by studying the works of William Shakespeare and other English authors of the time period, such as Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Edmund Spenser. How do these writers engage with and participate in the momentous cultural shift away from medieval hierarchy and an agrarian economy to the emergent modern world of individual rights and a free market? This course fulfills the Periods and Movements (pre-1800) requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
This class will explore the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of rebelling against the cosmos, the order of the universe. We will begin with Satan's rebellion against God and his temptation of Eve and Adam in Milton's Paradise Lost, examining the political, theological, ethical, and gender implications of rejecting divine law, and then ask ourselves how attacks on divine law in literature reflect attitudes about human laws. What justifies political hierarchy in different times and places? How can rejecting and attempting to change a given hierarchy be justified? We will then trace the theme of cosmic rebellion from Milton through the western literary and cinematic traditions, including works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Carol Reed's The Third Man, and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Thiscourse fulfills the Periods and Movements (pre-1800)requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
Each iteration of this course examines genre through an historical and and cultural lens, concentrating on points of blur, change, and hybridity. For example, the novel is a genre developed from the other genres of autobiography, letters, travel writing, and journalism. In France and in England, readers and writers of early novels were primarily women. Some male writers even took female pseudonyms to publish potboilers. Yet in the next century female novelists took male pseudonyms in order to be taken seriously. What happened? A course on the novel as genre examines social and historical changes between 1700 and 1900. Other versions of this course might focus on the lyric poem, the epic, or the prose poem. In each course, we ask how genres are culturally created and how they are reinvented. By reading both typical and exceptional examples, students gain an understanding of how "the law of genre" (to use Derrida's term) is enforced or broken. This course fulfills the Periods & Movements or the Theory requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
During the Romantic Century, 1767-1867, capitalism industrialized the production of literature. Instead of relying on aristocratic patrons, writers harnessed new publication technologies and economies to begin selling books and magazines by the tens of thousands. This course will explore the vibrant culture of Romanticism that blossomed in an international literary marketplace in which professional literary artists both served and created the tastes of a vast new public that was hungry for poems, plays, stories, and ideas. We will encounter texts by a diverse range of writers, including such figures as Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, George Copway(Kagagahgebowh), Jane Austen, Henry Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. This course fulfills the Periods and Movements or the Language and Media requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
This course will survey literary texts in English that were published since 1900 by writers of the African Diaspora, including such figures as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aim Csaire, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Jackie Kay, Zadie Smith, Jamaica Kincaid, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and others associated with such movements as the Harlem Renaissance, la poesa negra, la Ngritude, and Black Arts. We will immerse ourselves in an international black literary conversation in which distinctive styles and techniques were used to explore urgent questions of identity and exile, authenticity and double-consciousness, the burdens of racism and history, and hope for the future. This course fulfills the Periods and Movements requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
This course offers an in-depth study of modern U.S. minority literature, focusing on African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American writers. As we consider different literary genres and cultural contexts, we will examine marginality, minority, and hybridity as dynamic aesthetic and sociopolitical concepts. The intersecting categories of class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality will provide another important lens of critical inquiry. To complement class readings, we will also watch several videos and films that portray minority experiences from various perspectives. This course fulfills the Periods and Movements or the Theory requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
This course examines life writing (autobiography, memoir and biography)across time. Texts might include translated works by St. Augustine, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Marjane Satrapi; slave narratives and other classic texts (for example Boswell's Life of Johnson); and memoirs by contemporary writers. We'll question formal aspects: the narrator as a character, inclusions and omissions, structure, etc. But we'll also attempt to place each book in an historical and geographical context. This course fulfills the Periods & Movements or the Theory requirement for English majors.
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4.00 Credits
Through the lens of postcolonial theory, this course will explore the relationship between language and power. We will read literary, film, and interactive texts by Anglophone postcolonial writers, from Ben Okri to Kiran Desai, and analyze the enduring legacy of the colonial language on, as Gaurav Desai puts it, "the institutions of imagination." By refashioning the English language, how do postcolonial writers rupture conventions of a language they inherited, and how does that imply a mode of resistance? By investigating the politics of language within a postcolonial framework, students will question their own assumptions and approaches to the English language, and in the process, explore themes such as "hybridity," "accent," and even "arranged marriage." This course fulfills the Periods and Movements or the Theory requirement for English majors.
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