SECTION I: NON-MAJOR COURSE
7. First-Year Seminars in English
Consult special listings
8. Readings in English and American Literature
09S: 11 10S: Arrange
Readings in English and American literature. The course is intended principally for students who are not majoring in English. It does not carry major credit. Writing requirements will be limited to tests and brief exercises. To be offered periodically, but with varying subject matter.
In 09S at 11 (section 1), Journalism: Literature and Practice. This course will explore the role of print journalism in shaping the modern American literary, cultural and political landscape—from Nellie Bly’s late 19th century undercover exposure to Seymour Hersh’s coverage of the Iraq War. Students will also participate in an intensive weekly workshop on reporting and writing, with a short unit on radio commentary. This course does not carry English major credit. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Jetter.
9. Composition: Theory and Practice (Identical to, and described under, Writing 9)
09S: 12
This course does not carry English major credit. Dist: ART. Gocsik.
SECTION II: MAJOR COURSES
12. Introduction to Literary Study
09S: 10 10S: Arrange
This course introduces the student to the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading and the study of literature. This course is designed as an introductory course to the English literature major and other literature and humanities majors. Students must complete Writing 5 before enrolling in English 12. Texts may include theory, history of literature, and will be drawn from at least two genres and historical periods. Dist: LIT. Will.
14. Introduction to Criticism
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
A historical and formal introduction to literary criticism as a 20th-century discipline, with primary emphasis on English and American contributors. Leading critical figures and critical approaches will be considered; some important critical terms will be reviewed; and students will be given practice in close reading and textual interpretation. Selections from the work of some or all of the following may be included: T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, William Wimsatt, Northrop Frye, Wayne Booth, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Harold Bloom, Barbara Johnson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Henry Louis Gates. Complementing English Department courses in particular literary periods, topics, and authors, this course is strongly recommended for majors. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism. Crewe.
15. Introduction to Literary Theory
08F: 12 09W: 10 09S: 12 09F, 10W, 10S: Arrange
The course will introduce students to some of the leading texts, concepts, and practices of what has come to be known as theoretical criticism. Topics to be considered may include some of the following: structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, new historicism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Attention will also be given to historical and institutional contexts of this criticism. Intended to provide a basic, historically informed, knowledge of theoretical terms and practices, this course should enable students to read contemporary criticism with understanding and attempt theoretically informed criticism themselves. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism. Boggs, Edmondson, McKee, Travis, Will.
16. Old and New Media
08F: 2A 09F: Arrange
A survey of the historical, formal, and theoretical issues that arise from the materiality and technology of communication, representation, and textuality. The course will address topics in and between different media, which may include oral, scribal, print, and digital media. Readings and materials will be drawn from appropriate theorists, historians, and practitioners, and students may be asked not only to analyze old and new media, but also create with them. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism. Evens, Halasz.
17. Introduction to New Media
09W: 2A 10W: Arrange
This course introduces the basic ideas, questions, and objects of new media studies, offering accounts of the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of new media, the operation of digital technologies, and the cultural repercussions of new media. A primary emphasis on academic texts will be supplemented by fiction, films, music, journalism, computer games, and digital artworks. Class proceeds by group discussion, debate, student presentations, and peer critique. Typical readings include Alan Turing, Friedrich Kittler, Ray Kurzweil, and Henry Jenkins, plus films such as Blade Runner and eXistenZ. Dist: ART. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism. Evens.
18. A History of the English Language (Identical to Linguistics 18)
09X: Arrange
The development of English as a spoken and written language as a member of the Indo-European language family, from Old English (Beowulf), Middle English (Chaucer), and Early Modern English (Shakespeare), to contemporary American English. Topics will include some or all of the following: the linguistic and cultural reasons for ‘language change,’ the literary possibilities of the language, and the political significance of class and race. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC. Course Group IV. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Otter, Pulju.
19. Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Epic and Saga
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
An introduction to Old English language and literature, this course concentrates on reading, translating and interpreting selected poems understood in terms of their cultural environment—political, historical, artistic, and religious. The major poems studied are ‘The Wanderer,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and Beowulf. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative. Otter, Travis.
20. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
08F: 11 09F: Arrange
An introduction to Chaucer, concentrating on ten of the Canterbury Tales, and studying him as a social critic and literary artist. Special attention will be paid to Chaucer’s language, the sounds of Middle English, and the implications of verse written for the ear. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genre-narrative. Edmondson, Otter, Travis.
21. Chaucer: Troilus and Other Poems
09W: 2A 10W: Arrange
A study of Chaucer’s works other than the Canterbury Tales, focusing on some of the early dream visions (Book of the Duchess, House of Fame) and the courtly love romance Troilus and Criseyde, which many consider Chaucer’s most accomplished work. Some attention will be given to the French and Italian context of these works (in translation). Prior acquaintance with Middle English (English 20, 22, or 18) is helpful but not absolutely required. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities. Edmondson, Otter, Travis.
22. Medieval English Literature
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
An introduction to the literature of the “Middle English” period (ca. 1100- ca. 1500), concentrating on the emergence of English as a literary language in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and on some of the great masterworks of the late fourteenth century. Readings will include early texts on King Arthur, the lais of Marie de France, the satirical poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the romance Sir Orfeo, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Book of Margery Kempe, and the York Cycle. Most readings in modern English translation, with some explorations into the original language. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Edmondson, Otter, Travis.
23. The English Renaissance
09S: 2A 10S: Arrange
English verse and prose of the sixteenth century: a study of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Nashe, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others in the cultural context of Tudor England. The course will investigate issues of classical and European influence, publication, and courtly patronage, especially under the auspices of a female ruler (Elizabeth I). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Genre-poetry. Crewe, Halasz.
24. Shakespeare I
08F: 10 09X, 09F: Arrange
A study of about ten plays spanning Shakespeare’s career, including comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s language; to his dramatic practices and theatrical milieu; and to the social, political, and philosophical issues raised by the action of the plays. Videotapes will supplement the reading. Exercises in close reading and interpretative papers. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tag Genre-drama. Boose, Crewe, Halasz, Luxon.
26. English Drama to 1642
09S: 10 10S: Arrange
A study of commercial theater in London from about 1570 until the closing of the theaters in 1642. Anonymous and collaborative plays will be read as well as those by such playwrights as Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Webster, and Ford. The course will focus on the economic, social, political, intellectual, and theatrical conditions in which the plays were originally produced, on their continuing performance, and on their status as literary texts. Research into the performance history of a play or participation in a scene production is required. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities. Boose, Halasz.
27. The Seventeenth Century
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
English poetry and prose from 1603 to 1660. Primary focus on major lyric tradition including poems by John Donne, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and John Milton. Secondary focus on significant prose works of intellectual history (Francis Bacon, Robert Burton) and political controversy (debates about gender and/or political order). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tag Genre-poetry. Crewe, Luxon.
28. Milton
09S: 10 10S: Arrange
A study of most of Milton’s poetry and of important selections from his prose against the background of political and religious crises in seventeenth-century England. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities. Luxon.
29. English Literature 1660-1714, Including Drama
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
A survey of English literary culture in the reigns of the later Stuart monarchs. Poetry by Dryden, Marvell, Rochester, Butler, Oldham and Pope; biographical writing by Aubrey, Halifax, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish; the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn; spiritual autobiography and religious fiction by Bunyan; prose satires and analytical prose of Swift and Halifax. Within the survey there will be two areas of special attention: the theatre and the literary response to public events. We will read three plays by such authors as Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Lee, Behn, Shadwell, Otway and Farquahar, and study the writing in response to such events as the Great Plague and Fire of 1666, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-drama. Cosgrove.
30. Age of Satire
08F: 10 09F: Arrange
Visit the great age of British Satire. In a time when literacy was rapidly expanding, party politics was emerging and women’s rights were being advocated in print for the first time, satire ruled the literary scene. This course will explore the plays, poems, and novels of satirists from the libertine Earl of Rochester to the great satirist, Alexander Pope, not omitting the works of Aphra Behn, the first woman dramatist, and Mary Astell’s sardonic comments on the role of women in marriage. May include: the comedies of Wycherey and Congreve, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and the novels of Daniel Defoe. There will be an opportunity to study the techniques of satire and its role in social and personal criticism. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II, CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions. Cosgrove.
31. Reason and Revolution
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
Was there a British Enlightenment? In the age of the American and French Revolutions Britain seemed to hold steady. But in the literature of the period there are many social and literary struggles which took their tolls in the madness and suicide of writers such as Smart and Chatterton, the difficulties of attaining creative freedom, and the emergence of new literary forms such as the Gothic. This course will trace the fortunes of writers such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke as they grapple with the anxieties of their time. We will also consider how women thinkers and novelists such as Charlotte Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft forge new roles for themselves and we may include studies of the novel of political paranoia as exemplified by Caleb Williams, and by Wollstonecraft’s father, William Godwin. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II, CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions. Cosgrove.
32. The Rise of the Novel
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
A study of the eighteenth-century English novel, with emphasis on formal variations within the genre as well as on interrelations of formal, political, and psychological elements of the narratives. Reading may include works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as twentieth-century criticism. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. Genre-narrative. Cosgrove.
34. Romantic Literature: Writing and English Society, 1780-1832
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions. McCann, Will.
36. Victorian Literature and Culture, 1837-1859
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
This course examines early Victorian poetry, prose and fiction in the context of cultural practices and social institutions of the time. We will locate cultural concerns among, for example, those of capitalism, political reform, scientific knowledge, nation and empire. And we will consider revisions of space, time, gender, sexuality, class, and public and private life that characterized formations of British identity during this period. Texts may include work by Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin. We will also read selections from recent criticism of Victorian culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. McCann, McKee.
37. Victorian Literature and Culture, 1860-1901
08F: 10A 09F: Arrange
This course examines later nineteenth-century British poetry, prose and fiction in the context of cultural practices and social institutions of the time. We will locate cultural concerns among, for example, those of capitalism, political reform, scientific knowledge, nation and empire. And we will consider revisions of space, time, gender, sexuality, class, and public and private life that characterized formations of British identity during this period. Texts may include work by George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling. We will also read selections from recent criticism of Victorian culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Gerzina, McCann, McKee.
38. The Nineteenth-Century English Novel
09W: 12 10W: Arrange
A study of the nineteenth-century novel focusing on the Victorian novel’s representation of public and private categories of experience. Readings may include Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’ Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative. Gerzina, McKee.
39. Early American Literatures: Conquest, Captivity, Cannibalism
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
The “invention” of America changed the world forever and precipitated the beginning of the modern era. This course explores that invention, covering the period of about 1500 to 1800 and surveying a wide range of cultural attitudes towards the imagination, exploration, and settlement of the Americas: Native American, Spanish, French, and English. Our reading, including oral tales, letters, diaries, captivity narratives, poetry, personal narratives, political tracts, and secondary criticism, will focus on the themes of conquest, captivity, cannibalism in the shaping of a particularly “American” identity. We will use historical sources and early books and manuscripts to illuminate attitudes towards power, identity, race, gender, and nature prevailing in the multicultural landscape of the early Americas that shaped the emerging literature and culture of British North America. We will also look at recent cinematic representations of this early period in our examination of the shifting and contentious meaning of “America.” Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Schweitzer.
40. American Poetry
09W: 10 10W: Arrange
A survey of American poetry from the colonial period to the early decades of the twentieth century. Readings may include works by Bradstreet, Taylor, Wheatley, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Dunbar. We may also study Native American poetry and schools like the Fireside Poets, 19th-century women poets, and precursors of early Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. We will look at lyric, meditative, religious, comic and political poetry, the long poem and the epic. Some themes we might trace include the transatlantic character of American poetry, its “newness,” its engagement with religion and self-definition, with nature, and with gender and race. Emphasizing close readings as well as historical and cultural contexts, this course examines the complexities of an American poetic vision and serves as an introduction to reading poetry and to American literature. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Schweitzer.
41. American Prose
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
Readings of nonfiction narratives by such American writers as Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Boggs, Chaney, Renza.
42. American Fiction to 1900
09W: 10 10W: Arrange
A survey of the first century of U.S. fiction, this course focuses on historical contexts as well as social and material conditions of the production of narrative as cultural myth. The course is designed to provide an overview of the literary history of the United States novel from the National Period to the threshold of the Modern (1845-1900). To do justice to the range of works under discussion, the lectures will call attention to the heterogeneous cultural contexts out of which these works have emerged as well as the formal and structural components of the different works under discussion. In keeping with this intention, the lectures include the so-called classic texts in American literature The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but also the newly canonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Life in the Iron Mills, Hope Leslie in the hope that the configuration of these works will result in an understanding of the remarkable complexity of United States literary culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Boggs, Pease, Renza.
43. Early Black American Literature (Identical to African and African American Studies 34)
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
A study of the foundations of Black American literature and thought, from the colonial period through the era of Booker T. Washington. The course will concentrate on the way in which developing Afro-American literature met the challenges posed successively by slavery, abolition, emancipation, and the struggle to determine directions for the twentieth century. Selections will include: Wheatley, Life and Works; Brown, Clotel; Douglass, Narrative; Washington, Up from Slavery; DuBois, Souls of Black Folk; Dunbar, Sport of the Gods; Chestnut, House Behind the Cedars; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; and poems by F. W. Harper, Paul L. Dunbar and Ann Spencer. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Chaney, Favor.
45. Native American Literature (Identical to Native American Studies 35)
09S, 10S: 11
Published Native American writing has always incorporated a cross-cultural perspective that mediates among traditions. The novels, short stories, and essays that constitute the Native American contribution to the American literary tradition reveal the literary potential of diverse aesthetic traditions. This course will study representative authors with particular emphasis on contemporary writers. Open to all classes. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/ Postcolonial Studies. Goeman, Palmer, Runnels.
46. Twentieth-Century American Fiction: 1900 to World War II
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
A study of major American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Dreiser, Stein, Fitzgerald, Cather, Larsen and Faulkner, and a changing list of others. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions. Will.
47. American Drama
09S: 10 10S: Arrange
A study of major American playwrights of the 19th and 20th centuries including S. Glaspell, O’Neill, Hellman, Wilder, Hansberry, Guare, Williams, Wilson, Mamet, Miller, Albee, Shepard, Wasserstein. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-drama. Colbert, Pease.
48. Contemporary American Fiction
09S: 10 10S: Arrange
Contemporary American fiction introduces the reader to the unexpected. Instead of conventionally structured stories, stereotypical heroes, traditional value systems, and familiar uses of language, the reader finds new and diverse narrative forms. Such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Ralph Ellison, among others, have produced a body of important, innovative fiction expressive of a modern American literary sensibility. The course requires intensive class reading of this fiction and varied critical writing on postmodernism. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Favor.
49. Modern Black American Literature (Identical to African and African American Studies 35)
08F: 2A 09F: Arrange
A study of African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, this course will focus on emerging and diverging traditions of writing by African Americans. We shall also investigate the changing forms and contexts of ‘racial representation’ in the United States. Works may include those by Hurston, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Morrison, Schuyler, West, Murray, Gates, and Parks. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Favor, Vásquez.
50. American and British Poetry Since 1914
09W: 11 10W: Arrange
A survey of modern American and British poetry since the First World War, with particular emphasis on the aesthetics, philosophy and politics of modernism. The course covers such canonical and non-canonical poets as Yeats, Pound, HD, Lawrence, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams, Crane, Moore, Millay, Auden, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Beats. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Zeiger.
53. Twentieth-Century British Fiction: 1900 to World War II
09W: 12 10W: Arrange
A study of major authors, texts, and literary movements, with an emphasis on literary modernism and its cultural contexts. We will read works by Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys, and Beckett, as well as writers such as Kipling, Ford, West, Waugh, Bowen, and Lowry. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Silver.
54. Modern British Drama
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
Major British plays since the 1890s. The course begins with the comedy of manners as represented by Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. It then considers innovations in and rebellions against standard theatrical fare: the socialist crusading of Bernard Shaw; the angry young men (John Osborne) and workingclass women (Shelagh Delaney) of the 1950s; the minimalists (Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter) and the university wits (Tom Stoppard); the dark comedians of the modern family (Alan Ayckbourn) and the politically inflected playwrights of the age of Prime Minister Thatcher (Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, David Hare). The course deals both with the evolution of dramatic forms and the unusually close way in which modern British theatre has served a mirror for British life from the hey day of the Empire to the present. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
55. Twentieth-Century British Fiction: World War II to the Present
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
A study of the multiple currents within British fiction in a period characterized by major literary, cultural, and social transitions in Britain, including the emergence of a “post”(-war, -empire, -modern) sensibility. Writers may include Amis, Sillitoe, Greene, Golding, Burgess, Lessing, Wilson, Carter, Swift, Atkinson, MacLaverty, Ishiguro, Barker, Barnes, McKewan, and Smith. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Giri.
58. Introduction to Postcolonial Literature (Identical to African and African American Studies 65)
09W: 11 10W: Arrange
An introduction to the themes and foundational texts of postcolonial literature in English. We will read and discuss novels by writers from former British colonies in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, with attention to the particularities of their diverse cultures and colonial histories. Our study of the literary texts will incorporate critical and theoretical essays, oral presentations, and brief background lectures. Authors may include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, V.S. Naipaul, Merle Hodge, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Paule Marshall, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie, Earl Lovelace, Arundhati Roy. Serves as prerequisite for FSP in Trinidad. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Giri.
59. Critical Issues in Postcolonial Studies
09S: 2A 10S: Arrange
Intended for students who have some familiarity with postcolonial literary texts, this course will combine the reading of postcolonial literature with the study and discussion of the major questions confronting the developing field of postcolonial studies. Issues may include: questions of language and definition; the culture and politics of nationalism and transnationalism, race and representation, ethnicity and identity; the local and the global; tradition and modernity; hybridity and authenticity; colonial history, decolonization and neocolonialism; the role and status of postcolonial studies in the academy. Authors may include: Achebe, Appiah, Bhabha, Chatterjee, Coetzee, Fanon, Gilroy, Gordimer, James, JanMohamed, Minh-ha, Mohanty, Ngugi, Radhakrishnan, Rushdie, Said, Spivak, Sunder Rajan. Prerequisite: English 58, Trinidad FSP, or permission of the instructor. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group IV. CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Literary Theory and Criticism. Giri.
SECTION III: SPECIAL TOPICS COURSES
60-67 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Note: For the class of 2006 and following, one course in the major must be a Special Topics course (60-67).
These courses are offered periodically with varying content: one or more individual writers, a genre, a period, or an approach to literature not otherwise provided in the English curriculum. Requirements will include papers and, at the discretion of the instructor, examinations. Enrollment is limited to 30. Courses numbered 65-67 require prior work in the period (normally a course in the corresponding course group) or permission of the instructor. Dist: LIT; WCult: Varies.
60. Open Topic
08F: 2, 10A 09W: 10 09S: 2A
In 08F at 2 (section 1), History of the Book. This course examines the book as a material and cultural object. We’ll consider various practical and theoretical models for understanding the book form and investigating the materials, technologies, institutions, and practices of its production, dissemination, and reception. We’ll focus primarily on the printed book in Western Europe and North America, but we’ll also spend time talking about the emergence of the codex (book), medieval manuscript books, twentieth and twenty-first century artist’s books and the challenges posed by digitality to the book form. The readings for the course will be balanced by frequent use of exemplars drawn from Rauner Library and practical experience in the Book Arts workshop setting type. Dist: LIT, WCult: W. Course Group IV. CA tags Literary Criticism and Theory, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Halasz.
In 08F at 10A (section 4), Introduction to Asian American Literature. This course studies the literature of some of the diverse groups that make up Asian America, from early immigrant to contemporary times. Among the questions we will address are: What are the sites of identification and contestation? What are the dominant tropes, styles, influences, and continuities? How are we to read this literature? Authors may include Frank Chin, Kip Fulbeck, David Henry Hwang, Garrett Hongo, Suji Kwok Kim, Maxine Hong Kingston, R. Zamora Linmark, Bharatee Mukherjee and Denise Uehara. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Chin.
In 09W at 10 (section 2), Native American Oral Traditional Literature (Identical to Native American Studies 34). Native American oral literatures constitute a little-known but rich and complex dimension of the American literary heritage. This course will examine the range of oral genres in several tribes. Since scholars from around the world are studying oral literatures as sources of information about the nature of human creativity, the course will involve examining major theoretical approaches to oral texts. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Goeman, Palmer, Runnels.
In 09S at 2A (section 3), Profiles of the Dead. How do we tell a vivid story about a stranger who has crumbled into dust? During this seminar in literary nonfiction, each student will write a stylish, suspenseful narrative about a dead person. We will gear up to this final assignment with exercises, individual meetings and “boot camps” on historical research. Readings will include “The Lives They Lived” profiles from The New York Times Magazine, as well as excerpts from Gay Talese, Sarah Vowell and John Hope Franklin. WCult: W. CA tags Creative Writing, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Kennedy.
62. Gender/Literature/Culture
09W: 2A, 10A
In 09W at 2A (section 1), War and Gender (Identical to Women’s and Gender Studies 42). Throughout history, war has been constructed into a powerfully gendered binary. From The Iliad onward, battle is posed as a sacred domain for initiating young men into the masculine gender and the male bond, and the feminine as that which both instigates male-male conflict and that which wars are fought to protect. With a special concentration on U.S. culture of the past century, this course will examine the way our modern myths and narratives instantiate this cultural polarity through film, fiction, non-fiction and various media material. Dist: SOC; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Boose.
In 09W at 10A (section 2), Middle Eastern Memoirs/Autobiographies and the Construction of Collective Memory: Arabs and Jews Narrate Life-Stories. (Identical to Comparative Literature 54, and Jewish Studies 81. Described under Jewish Studies 81). Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Bardenstein.
63. Topics in Theory and Criticism
08F: 10A 09W: 2 09S: 11
In 08F at 10A (section 1), Digital Game Studies. This course explores digital gaming. Reading academic and popular texts, we will situate digital gaming in relation to new media, visual, and literary studies. Class discussion will focus on outstanding problems in digital game studies: Where do the histories of technology and gaming meet? How do games change players and how do games shape culture? What about designers and programmers? In what ways are digital games playful and what aspects of them are expressive? What is the future of gaming? Of course this class will also study particular games, and, in addition to writing academic essays, students will invent individual and group projects in the game domain. Course Group IV. Evens.
In 09W at 2 (section 3), Cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism has been described as a way of thinking and working outside the boundaries of the local and the national, a way of living ethically “in a world of strangers.” In recent years, in the work of writers as diverse as Jacques Derrida and Anthony Appiah, “cosmopolitanism” has emerged as a way of pushing forward, or even transcending, some of the theoretical impasses of postmodernism and some of the political impasses of multiculturalism. This course will focus on the idea of cosmopolitanism as it has been used (and perhaps abused) in contemporary theory, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Will.
In 09S at 11 (section 2), National Allegory: Readings in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (Identical to Comparative Literature 49). This course explores current theories of nationalism and postnationalism and how these theories could be productively utilized in making sense of literary texts from the postcolonial world. Authors include Lu Xun from China; Raja Rao from India; Sembene Ousmane from Senegal; Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya; and Chinua Achebe from Nigeria. Cultural theorists whose work will be discussed include Ernest Renan, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Franz Fanon, and Frederic Jameson, among others. LIT: W; WCult: NW. Course Group IV, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Giri.
65. Literature Before the Mid-Seventeenth Century
09W: 10
In 09W at 10 (section 1), Plays, Playing, Playhouses. Works to be read will be plays by Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, possibly including Kyd, Marlowe, Anonymous, Marston, Jonson, Cary, Middleton, Webster, and Ford. For once, Shakespeare will not be singled out and treated separately, but read alongside some of his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. The course will investigate the conditions of performance in the public outdoor and indoor theaters, as well as in informal venues, for which these works were written. More broadly, the course will consider what has been called the theatrical culture of early modern England. Some attention will be given to the acting companies, to the printing and subsequent editing of play scripts, and to the dramatic models and conventions exploited by early modern playwrights. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course group I, CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Crewe.
66. Literature from the Mid-Seventeenth Century to the End of the Nineteenth Century
08F: 12
In 08F at 12 (section 1), Black Atlantic (Identical to African and African American Studies 63). “Black London” and “Black Atlantic” denote African and Slave presence in Europe and the Caribbean Islands. From Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko about a kidnapped African prince in the 17th century to John Stedman’s account of a slave rebellion in Surinam in the late 18th century, literature is rich with accounts of the British African population and the Caribbean middle passage. This course offers a new intimate view of these events and areas of conflict. Among other readings The Two Princes of Calabar is a history of two African princes who traveled through Europe in the 18th century, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative tells the life of a slave who bought his freedom and became a sailor. The course will also use the films Burn, with Marlon Brando, about a slave rebellion in the Caribbean, and Middle Passage, an unusual French view of the slave trade. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Cosgrove.
67. Literature from the Start of the Twentieth Century to the Present
08F: 2A, 10A, 12 09W: 3B, 10A 09S: 12, 10 10S: 2A
In 08F at 2A (section 2), Faulkner. In this course we will read five of Faulkner’s novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August, and The Hamlet. Our focus will be on Faulkner’s continuing attention to constructions of identity: especially Southern identities, racialized identities, and individual psyches. We will spend considerable time reading criticism, by such writers as Edouard Glissant and Vera Kutzinski. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag Genre-narrative. McKee.
In 08F at 10A (section 3), Toni Morrison (Identical to African and African American Studies 26). This course is an intensive study of Toni Morrison’s major fictional works. We will also read critical responses by and about the author. Required texts may include Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Playing in the Dark, and critical contributions by writers such as Barbara Smith and Paul Gilroy. Some of the central issues we will examine include alternative constructions of female community and genealogy, and representations of race, class, nationhood and identity. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative. Vásquez.
In 08F at 12 (section 4), Contemporary American Poetry. This course concentrates on American poetry since 1960. We will consider the influence of the “schools” of poetry which evolved in the second half of the twentieth century, including the Beats, the New York poets, the Confessional poets, the Black Mountain School, the New Romantics, and the New Formalists. Our primary focus will be to examine a variety of poets through close readings of individual poems. Paying close attention to the crafting of the poem, we will discuss key aspects such as voice, tone, image, metaphor, and the nature of the line. Poets we will study include Ginsberg, Lowell, O’Hara, Bishop, Plath, Kunitz, Hayden, James Wright, Brooks, Levine, Levertov, and Rich. Creative Writing majors are encouraged to take this course. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag Genre-poetry. Mathis.
In 09W at 3B (section 5), Contemporary Playwrights of Color (Identical to African and African American Studies 82 and Theater 10. Described under Theater 10). WCult: CI. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Colbert.
In 09W at 10A (section 6) and 10S at 2A (section 12), Jewish American Literature: From its Inception to the Present (Identical to and described under Jewish Studies 21). Dist: LIT. WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Milich.
In 09W at 10A (section 7), Caribbean Literature (Identical to African and African American Studies 80 and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies 66). This course will examine the work of various Caribbean writers from former British colonies. We will explore several issues including notions of exile, the significance of particular socio-historic events, the importance of language and music, and the complex concerns involving articulations of identity. The class will move from early twentieth century writers like Claude McKay to later authors such as Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Olive Senior and Derek Walcott. Dist: LIT: WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Vásquez.
In 09S at 12 (section 9), Modern Jewish American Women Writers (Identical to Women’s and Gender Studies 51.5 and Jewish Studies 21.2). Described under Jewish Studies 21.2). Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Zeiger.
In 09S at 12 (section 10), Black Movements (Identical to African and African American Studies 26.1). Accounting for the multiple meanings of “movement,” this course will explore representations of migration, community activism, and embodied performance in black literary and cultural productions. We will examine how black people’s ambiguous relationship to space and place informs modes of representation. We will read such works as Toomer’s Cane, Cesaire’s A Tempest, and Morrison’s Song of Solomon; watch Princess Tam Tam and The Wiz and listen to music by Billie Holiday and Kanye West. Dist: LIT. Course Group III. CA tags, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Colbert.
In 09S at 12, James Joyce (section 11). This seminar will be devoted to the study of Joyce’s Ulysses. After some discussion of Joyce’s Portrait and Dubliners both of which students are urged to read before the course begins we will focus on the text of Joyce’s Ulysses, with an emphasis on close reading and an examination of Joyce’s experiments in prose and his place in modern literature. Each student will be asked to write two papers. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. Cosgrove.
In 09S at 10 (section 13), Contemporary Native American Poetry (Identical to and described under Native American Studies 47, pending faculty approval). Course Group III. CA tags, Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
SECTION IV: ADVANCED SEMINARS
Seminars are designed as small courses, limited to twelve students, primarily seniors; qualified juniors may enroll. These courses emphasize discussion, and allow the student to develop his or her thinking about a subject throughout the term. Though assignments vary according to the nature of the material being studied, seminars usually involve class presentations and a term paper. They fulfill the “Culminating Experience” requirement. Prerequisite: at least four completed major courses, of which one must be in the same course group as the seminar. Students who successfully complete a seminar may sometimes be allowed to follow it with a one-term Honors project (see the section on Honors, above). Dist: LIT; WCult: Varies.
70. Literature Before the Mid-Seventeenth Century
08F: 10 09S: 12
In 08F at 10 (section 1), Romance in Medieval England. A consideration of the diverse and elusive genre we now call “romance,” which covers anything from chivalric adventures and love stories to quasi-hagiographic and pseudo-historical narratives, from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives. Readings may include selections from the earliest Arthurian narratives; Middle English and Anglo-Normal romances such as Tristan, Havelock, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and traditional Celtic tales such as the Mabinogi. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities. Otter.
In 09S at 12 (section 2), Love, Gender and Marriage in Shakespeare (Identical to Women’s and Gender Studies 48.3, pending faculty approval). In Shakespeare, issues so seemingly “domestic” as love, sexuality and family are problems of such colossal significance that they could be said to constitute the focal center of the canon itself. Hamlet and King Lear, for instance, are plays more truly “about” the politics of family than they are about the politics of kingdom. Focusing on seven plays, this course will interrogate the knotty issues of love, sexuality, and family. As part of the course, students will be required to participate in at least one scene production. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities. Boose.
71. Literature from the Mid-Seventeenth Century to the End of the Nineteenth Century
08F: 2 09W: 12 09S: 2A
In 08F at 2 (section 1), The Civil War in Literature. Although Walt Whitman famously claimed that “the real war will never get into the books,” the American Civil War did in fact call forth a vast range of literary responses, in genres as diverse as poetry, popular song, novels and other prose genres. In this course, we will examine how literature depicts the war, and especially how it grapples with Whitman’s claim that there is something unrepresentable about the war’s carnage. Dist: LIT, WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Boggs.
In 09W at 12 (section 2), Charles Dickens: Allegory, Capitalism and the Grotesque. The novels of Charles Dickens embody a complex formal response to the pressures of industrial capitalism and their apparently corrosive effects on Victorian social life. By foregrounding the concepts of allegory and the grotesque, this course will explore Dickens’s development of a critical idiom that tried to reveal the distortions of both laissez-faire economics and state bureaucracy, while also preserving Victorian society from the revolutionary potential of popular political mobilization. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II, CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions. McCann.
In 09S at 2A (section 3), The Brontës. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë are perhaps the most mythologized and analyzed family of writers in Britain. Their childhood in Haworth, the intensity of their novels, the relationship with their father and brother—all have been fodder for literary and biographical analysis, and spawned an entire industry of memorabilia, imitation and criticism. In the seminar we will do close readings of four Brontë novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), and critical articles, look at some of their juvenilia, and read Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth. We’ll end with Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights and Jasper Fforde’s imaginative novel, The Eyre Affair. We will also view 2-3 film adaptations of their novels. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative. Gerzina.
72. Literature from the Start of the Twentieth Century to the Present
08F: 3A, 10A 09W: 2 09S: 12
In 08F at 3A (section 2), Bob Dylan. In this course, we will do close, critical readings of certain Dylan lyrics spanning his entire career, also taking into consideration their social, historical, and biographical circumstances. Oral reports as well as a long final paper will be required. Note: some attention will be given to the performance aspect of Dylan’s songs, but we will not listen to them in class. All of the songs assigned and discussed will be available for your listening in the Paddock Music Library beforehand. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Renza.
In 08F at 10A (section 3), Quarrelling with Yeats: Twentieth-century Irish Poetry in English. This course will explore the ways that four major twentieth-century Irish poets, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, and Thomas Kinsella, engage with W.B. Yeats in their work. The strategies by which they created their own poetic styles and thematic concerns will also be considered, and the course will conclude with a brief consideration of a later generation of Irish poets including Michael Hartnett, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland, and Paul Durcan. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions. Coleman.
In 09S at 12 (section 4), Harlem Renaissance. (Identical to African and African American Studies 91). This class will examine the literature and social contexts of a period widely knows as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Part of our mission in the class will be to deconstruct some of the widely held presuppositions about that era, especially by interrogating questions of class, race, gender and sexuality as social constructs. Although this class will focus mainly on fiction writing, we will also consider some poetry and non-fiction prose as well. Dist: LIT. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. Favor.
74. Open Topic
Not offered in 2008-2009, may be offered in 2009-2010
75. Seminar in Criticism and Theory
09S: 2A
In 09S at 2A (section 1), Form and Theory of Fiction. How do fiction writers think about fiction? What aesthetics, goals, tools, strategies, and theories have been explored and employed by fiction writers as they write their own works, read the works of other fiction writers, and postulate on the role of fiction in literature and among a general readership? Topics will include the ways that writers consider and work with point of view, dramaturgy, narrative sequence, character, voice, psychic distance, and authorial presence. In addition to examples of the novel, novella, and short story, readings will include theory and craft texts by such fiction writers as James, Poe, Forster, Calvino, Atwood, Gordimer, Ecco, Macauley, Lanning, Cixous, and others. Dist: LIT, CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism. Tudish.
SECTION V: CREATIVE WRITING
Introductory Creative Writing Course
80. Creative Writing
All terms: Arrange
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week plus individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5 (or have exemption status).
Procedures for enrolling in English 80: Beginning in 2008 summer, written application for admission into English 80, Creative Writing, is no longer required. Enrollment will now be by registration via Banner, like most other courses at Dartmouth. Students interested in enrolling in English 80, will submit English 80 with their preferred classes list at registration. No writing sample or application form is required. The department will maintain a waitlist of those students who are not admitted, and will have a record of students who attempted to enroll but were denied admission due to space limitations. Enrollment in all other Creative Writing classes will continue to be by written application and writing sample.
English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. It carries major or minor credit. Dist: ART. Hebert, Huntington, Mathis, Tudish, Lenhart, O’Malley.
Intermediate Creative Writing Courses
Students who wish to enroll in an intermediate Creative Writing Course must pick up the appropriate “How to Apply to English 81, 82 or 83” form from the English Department and answer all the questions asked in a cover letter. They should also submit a five-eight page writing sample, as stated in each of the course descriptions below. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Students should then register for three other courses, not including the Creative Writing course. Students accepted into Creative Writing 81, 82 and 83 will be notified before the first day of class. To secure their spot in the class, students must be present at the first meeting. At that time students will be given a permission card and can then drop one of their other courses and enroll for the Creative Writing course. The intermediate courses in Creative Writing may each be taken a second time for credit.
81. Creative Writing: Poetry
09W, 09S, 10W, 10S: Arrange
Continued work in the writing of poetry, focusing on the development of craft, image, and voice, as well as the process of revision. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of poems by contemporary writers.
Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the “How To Apply To English 81, 82 or 83” form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their poetry to the administrative assistant of the English Department. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Dist: ART. Huntington, Mathis.
82. Creative Writing: Fiction
09W, 09S, 10W, 10S: Arrange
Continued work in the writing of fiction, focusing on short stories, although students may experiment with the novel. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of short stories by contemporary writers. Constant revision is required.
Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the “How To Apply To English 81, 82 or 83” form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Dist: ART. Hebert, O’Malley, Tudish.
83. Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction
09W, 10W: Arrange
This course offers students training in the writing of literary nonfiction. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of work by contemporary writers.
Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the “How To Apply To English 81, 82 or 83” form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their non-fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Dist: ART. Kennedy, Tudish.
Advanced Creative Writing Courses
85. Senior Workshop in Poetry and Prose Fiction
08F, 09F: Arrange
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors or minors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction. While all Creative Writing majors are guaranteed a spot in English 85, they must nonetheless submit an eight-to-ten page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. Please also pick up the “How To Apply To English 85” form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter.
Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83. Students who are not Creative Writing majors or minors may be admitted by permission of the Creative Writing staff. Dist: ART. Hebert, Huntington, Kennedy, Mathis, O’Malley, Tudish.
97. Creative Writing Project
09W, 09S, 10W, 10S: Arrange
A tutorial course to be designed by the student with the assistance of a member of the Creative Writing Faculty willing to supervise it. This course is intended for the purpose of producing a significant manuscript of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. It carries major credit only for creative writing majors. Creative Writing majors must request permission to take English 97 (one or two terms) during fall of senior year when they are enrolled in English 85. Decisions regarding admission to English 97 will not be made before fall term of senior year. Prerequisite: English 85 and permission of the Director of Creative Writing.
98. Honors Course in Creative Writing
09W, 09S, 10W, 10S: Arrange
To be arranged in fall term of senior year. Independent study under the direction of a faculty adviser. Honors majors will elect this course in each term in which they are pursuing Honors projects. For more information, see “English Honors Program,” above, and consult the “Guide to Honors” booklet available in the English Department.
SECTION VI: FOREIGN STUDY COURSES
90. English Study Abroad I
08F: D.F.S.P. (Glasgow, Trinidad) 09F: D.F.S.P. (Glasgow, Dublin)
Major credit for this course is awarded to students who satisfactorily complete a course of study elected as part of one of the Department’s three Foreign Study Programs (FSPs). On the Glasgow FSP, this will be a course of study in literature at the University of Glasgow. On the Trinidad FSP, this will be a course of study in literature at the University of the West Indies. On the Dublin FSP, this will be a course of study in the English Department at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Of the three courses at TCD at least one must be in Irish literature. Students are also required to do an independent study project on some aspect of Irish literature or culture, culminating in a long essay; the grade for the independent study is factored into the grade for the Irish literature course.
Glasgow and Dublin Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Trinidad Dist: LIT; WCult: NW.
91. English Study Abroad II
08F: D.F.S.P. (Glasgow, Trinidad) 09F: D.F.S.P. (Glasgow, Dublin)
Major credit for this course is awarded to students who satisfactorily complete a course of study elected as part of one of the Department’s three Foreign Study Programs (FSPs). On the Glasgow FSP, this will be a course of study in literature at the University of Glasgow. On the Trinidad FSP, this will be a course of study in literature at the University of the West Indies. On the Dublin FSP, this will be a course of study in the English Department at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Of the three courses at TCD at least one must be in Irish literature. Students are also required to do an independent study project on some aspect of Irish literature or culture, culminating in a long essay; the grade for the independent study is factored into the grade for the Irish literature course.
Glasgow and Dublin Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Trinidad Dist: LIT; WCult: NW.
92. English Study Abroad III
08F: D.F.S.P. (Glasgow, Trinidad) 09F: D.F.S.P. (Glasgow, Dublin)
One college credit (not major or minor credit) for this course is awarded to students who satisfactorily complete a course of study elected as part of one of the Department’s three Foreign Study Programs (FSPs). The purpose of English 92, when taken in Glasgow, is to enhance the experience of studying English and Scottish literature in a global, and more specifically British, context. The requirement may be fulfilled in one of three ways: by taking a course devoted to the study of European literature or the history of the English language; by taking a course in a field clearly relevant to the study of literature in English (e.g., history, art history, philosophy, media studies); by taking a course that immerses the student in some aspect of Scottish, British, or Celtic language, literature, culture or history. This course must be approved by the program director. On the Trinidad FSP, this will be a course of study in West Indian history and culture. On the Dublin FSP, this will be a course of study in the English Department at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Of the three courses at TCD at least one must be in Irish literature. Students are also required to do an independent study project on some aspect of Irish literature or culture, culminating in a long essay; the grade for the independent study is factored into the grade for the Irish literature course.
Glasgow Dist: Varies; Trinidad Dist: INT or SOC; Dublin Dist: LIT.
SECTION VII: INDEPENDENT STUDY AND HONORS
96. Reading Course
All terms: Arrange
A tutorial course to be designed by the student with the assistance of a member of the English Department willing to supervise it. This course is available, as an occasional privilege, to upperclassmen who have demonstrated their ability to do independent work. During the term prior to taking the course, applicants must consult the Department Vice Chair to make arrangements for approval of the project.
(Note: English 96 does not normally count towards the English major or minor, though in special circumstances the C.D.C. may approve occasional exceptions to that rule. Students seeking such an exception are asked to petition the C.D.C. before taking English 96. English 96 may not be used to satisfy course group requirements.)
98. Honors Course in Critical Studies
All terms: Arrange
Independent study under the direction of a faculty adviser. Honors majors will elect this course in each term in which they are pursuing Honors projects. For more information, see “English Honors Program,” above, and consult the “Guide to Honors” booklet available in the English Department.