English

Course Offerings Fall 2013

Course Code	Title/Instructor	Meets
ENGL 101-01	Modern Women Writing War Instructor: Claire Seiler Course Description: Cross-listed with WGST 101-01. This course studies women's writing about global conflict, moving from the Great War through the "war on terror." How have women's changing social and political roles impacted the genre of war writing? How do women's war works challenge conventional assumptions about genre, gender, sexuality, and identity? Throughout, we will attend to how women poets, fiction writers, and filmmakers have used literary form itself to critique both war and war writing. Authors include: Pat Barker, Kathryn Bigelow, Elizabeth Bowen, Jennifer Egan, Elyse Fenton, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Natasha Trethewey.	0930:MWF DENNY 104
ENGL 101-02	Southern Women Writers Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston Course Description: A course in prose written by women of the American South. We will begin with the diary of Mary Chesnut written during the Civil War and continue with notable writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which may include Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Gilchrist, Ellen Douglas, Kaye Gibbons. Some critical and theoretical texts will also be required. Writing assignments will include short explications,longer essays, and an exam. Attendance and participation in class discussion are required.	1230:MWF EASTC 405
ENGL 101-03	Texts and Contexts Instructor: Thomas Reed, ENGL STAFF Course Description:	1330:MR EASTC 405
ENGL 101-04	Shakespeare on Film Instructor: Thomas Reed, Gregory Steirer Course Description: Cross-listed with FLST 210-02. More than one hundred film versions of Shakespeares plays have been released since the early 1900s, and more continue to be filmed or released each year. In this class, students will explore why Shakespeares work has been such an attractive source for modern films and how filmmakers handle the difficult task of adapting his plays for the big screen.	1030:TR EASTC 405
ENGL 101-05	Literature of Exploration Instructor: Leah Orr, Thomas Reed Course Description: This course will examine literature about exploration, from the eighteenth century to the present. From the high seas to the frontier, we will study how writers depict discovery, wanderlust, and the search for knowledge. How have attitudes towards exploration changed? How do writers use literature to interpret discoveries or speculate on the unknown? We will look at how writers use exploration as a way to understand their own cultures while describing new places and peoples. Authors may include Jonathan Swift, Mary Wortley Montagu, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and Jon Krakauer.	1030:MWF DENNY 304
ENGL 212-01	Writing and Wellness Instructor: Noreen Lape Course Description: Cross-listed with WRPG 211-01.	1330:TF ALTHSE 07
ENGL 212-02	Writing About the Horror Film Instructor: Thomas Reed, Gregory Steirer Course Description: Cross-listed with FLST 210-03 and WRPG 211-02. Horror films, though perennially popular with young adult audiences, have rarely been considered works of cinematic art. Why is this? And how might we as critics and scholars approach these films so as to better appreciate their aesthetic dimensions? In this class, we will attempt to answer these questions by examining horror films through the lenses of genre theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Through a variety of formal and informal writing assignments about the horror film, students will also hone their expository and analytical writing skills.	1130:MWF EASTC 406
ENGL 212-03	Writing in & for Digital Env. Instructor: Sarah Kersh, Thomas Reed Course Description: Cross-listed with WRPG 211-03. In this course, students will think about the stakes of writing in a range of digital environmentsblogs, online forums, personal collections (pinterest, tumblr, twitter, facebook, etc), as well as the politics and history of publishing, copyright, and the public domain. In addition, students will examine archives and the responsibility of holdings within a library or other institution. Finally, students will learn the technical skills to create a class website as they consider writing across different environments.	0900:TR EASTC 406
ENGL 212-04	Writing about Visual Arts Instructor: Leah Orr, Thomas Reed Course Description: Cross-listed with WRPG 211-04. In this course, students will learn to write about visual arts, both from a variety of critical perspectives, and in a variety of formats (reviews, catalogues, essays). We will study how to describe and write about art, how to write good analysis, and how to make an interpretive argument. Students will have the opportunity to write about art from a variety of sources, from digital archives to the on-campus gallery.	0830:MWF EASTC 312
ENGL 213-01	The Structure of Engl Grammar Instructor: Robert Ness Course Description: The origin and growth of British and American English, along with a survey of grammatical notions and methodologies from the traditional to the transformational. NOTE: The topic in the fall semester is "The Structure of English Grammar." The topic in the spring semester is "The History of the English Language." This course fulfills the QR graduation requirement.	0900:TR ALTHSE 08
ENGL 216-01	Creative Writ: Screenwriting Instructor: Alex Willemin Course Description: Cross-listed with FLST 310-01. This course will familiarize students with the fundamentals of good screenwriting: structure, theme, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students take part in weekly writing exercises as preparation for their final class project--creating a detailing outline of an original screenplay, and completing the first act. Topics include plot and subplot, character development, and commercial considerations such as format and genre. Students are required to read essential books on scriptwriting and to analyze several films and the screenplays on which they are based.	1330:M DENNY 212
ENGL 218-01	Creative Writ:Poetry & Fiction Instructor: Elise Levine, Adrienne Su Course Description: An introductory creative writing workshop in poetry and fiction.	1330:T EASTC 107 1330:T EASTC 406
ENGL 218-02	Creative Writ:Poetry & Fiction Instructor: Siobhan Phillips, ENGL STAFF Course Description: An introductory creative writing workshop in poetry and fiction.	1330:W EASTC 107 1330:W EASTC 312
ENGL 220-01	Crit Approaches & Lit Methods Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston Course Description: An introduction to the basic questions that one may ask about a literary text, its author, and its audience. Study of a limited selection of literary texts using several critical approaches. The course will also offer instruction in the elements of critical writing.	1330:MR EASTC 406
ENGL 220-02	Crit Approaches & Lit Methods Instructor: Poulomi Saha Course Description: An introduction to the basic questions that one may ask about a literary text, its author, and its audience. Study of a limited selection of literary texts using several critical approaches. The course will also offer instruction in the elements of critical writing.	1030:TR EASTC 406
ENGL 300-01	C.A.L.M. Lab Instructor: Christine Bombaro Course Description: This P/F non-credit research course introduces students to research methodology for advanced literary studies. ENGL 300 is a co-requisite with a student's first 300-level literature course (except ENGL 339).	:
ENGL 317-01	Adv Creative Writing: Fiction Instructor: Elise Levine, Thomas Reed Course Description: Writing and discussion of fiction. Prerequisite: 218 or permission of the instructor.	1330:M EASTC 312
ENGL 319-01	Adv Creative Writing: Poetry Instructor: Adrienne Su Course Description: Writing and discussion of poetry. Prerequisite: 218 or permission of the instructor.	1330:R EASTC 107
ENGL 339-01	Craft of Short Story Instructor: Elise Levine, Thomas Reed Course Description: May include Renaissance tragedy, the romance, development of the novel, 17th-18th century satire and its classical models, or autobiography and memoir. Prerequisite: 220 or permission of the instructor.	1130:MWF DENNY 211
ENGL 349-01	Am Others: Growing Up Funny Instructor: Poulomi Saha Course Description: America, we are told, is a nation of immigrantsof people from other lands who travel here and become American. But what of those who can never quite belongthe misfits, outliers and strangers in this land that claims to welcome them all? What about those who, despite citizenship, resist inclusion? In this course, we will look at novels, short stories, music and art from and about those who insistently remain strangers within America. We will examine the ways in which people who are excluded, whether legally or socially, negotiate relationships to the state and to a sense of Americanness. We will look at how they refuse, transgress, embrace and/or problematize their marginalityhow they write themselves into or out of the nation. Beginning with slave narratives and moving into contemporary literature and art, we will think about how some outsiders are able to move from the margins into the mainstream and how some never do. Authors may include W.E.B. DuBois, Julia Alvarez, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison.	0900:TR EASTC 300
ENGL 358-01	Studies in Early American Lit Instructor: Thomas Reed, ENGL STAFF Course Description:	1500:MR EASTC 405
ENGL 370-01	Am Lit of the 9/11 Decade Instructor: Siobhan Phillips Course Description: September 11, 2001 marks a break in American life that is cultural and sociological as well as political and historical. How does American literature of the last ten years respond to the challenges of its new circumstances? This class will consider exemplary recent work in the light of several themes that are especially pressing for a post-2001 world: the relation of words and images, the effects of globalization and global capitalism, the changes in gender and sexual roles, the problem of realism, and the expression of violence and suffering. Readings will range across poetry, comics, fiction, and nonfiction from authors including Junot Daz, Aleksandar Hemon, Cormac McCarthy, Claudia Rankine, Art Spiegelman, and David Foster Wallace. Our analysis will consider the reception of literary works as well as these texts' relation to specific occasions and ideas of contemporary life.	1330:TF EASTC 300
ENGL 375-01	Africanisms in African America Instructor: Lynn Johnson Course Description: Cross-listed with AFST 320-01. Part of the Atlantic Slave Trade Mosaic. In Narration and Cultural Memory in the African-American Literary Tradition, Henry Louis Gates conveys that the African slavedespite the horrors of the Middle Passagedid not sail to the New World alone. These Africans brought with them their metaphysical systems, their languages, their terms for order, their expressive cultural practices which even the horrendous Middle Passage and brutalitycould not effectively obliterate (16). Students in the course will not only examine the different New World representations of the Atlantic Slave Trade, but they will also analyze the various aspects of African culture (language, cosmology, traditions) which have been preserved through African American literature, film, material culture, and performance studies.	1500:MR ALTHSE 07
ENGL 379-01	Jane Austen in Her Time Instructor: K Wendy Moffat Course Description: This course may count as either a pre-1800 or post-1800 300-level literature class, depending on the student's research. Those students who wish to earn pre-1800 credit must inform me before add/drop is over, and I will inform the registrar and supplement and guide research accordingly. Students must satisfactorily complete the final research paper as a pre-1800 course to receive pre-1800 credit. Here is a rare opportunity to study the whole of a great writer's oeuvre in a single term. We will read all six of Austen's major novels, biographical material, and selected social history with the aim of understanding the cultural conditions described by the novels, and the novels in their cultural context. Students will lead one class discussion, write one research paper, and present an "accomplishment" befitting Austen's milieu: e. g. performing a musical composition, completing a piece of needlework, learning a card game and teaching it to the class, composing a verbal "charade," and the like. In addition, each week, each student will be expected to write and mail one letter (not e mail) to a correspondent of his/her choosing. (The letters may remain private.)	0900:TR EASTC 301
ENGL 389-01	The Generational Instructor: Claire Seiler Course Description: War. Lost. Beat. X. Millennial. Generations are everywhere in popular and academic discourse. In literary study, however, the category itself of the generation is rarely examined. This course takes 20th-century literary generations sites of inquiry. How and why did literary generations define themselves as such? What social and political exclusions are tacitly licensed by generational thinking? New historicism, gender theory, and critical race theory inform our course. Primary reading begins Great War and Lost Generation texts and arrives, in our own time, at the social world of Facebook, Jay-Zs recent generational autobiography, and Lena Dunhams HBO series Girls.	1330:MR EASTC 301
ENGL 392-01	Shakespeare: Politics/Culture Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston Course Description: We will read seven plays representing Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, romances, and histories: Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, MacBeth, Lear, and The Tempest. We will also view and discuss films of several of these plays by such directors as Branaugh, Casson, Greenaway, Kurosawa, and Noble. The secondary - theoretical - reading for the course will primarily draw upon New Historicist and Cultural Materialist criticism, first practiced in the US by Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). Where appropriate, we will also consider contextual and feminist issues. Assignments will include an in-class performance of a scene from one of the plays, a mid-term, a brief close reading essay, and a final research paper.	1030:TR EASTC 300
ENGL 403-01	The Subject of Biography Instructor: K Wendy Moffat Course Description: Life writing--especially critical biography-- is at the forefront of several pressing and central questions in literary study right now: how culture frames and shapes meaning; the relation of the critic to the text; the coherence and stability of subjectivity itself. Well read some biographies that probe these problems (including Taylor Branchs Parting the Waters: America in the King Year, 1954-1963 , Richard Sewalls Life of Emily Dickinson, my own A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster, and Sarah Bakewells How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer). Well also explore questions of subjectivity in literary theory and biographical criticism, in work by Richard Holmes, Lauren Berlant, Ralph Rader, Claire Tomalin, Hermione Lee and Eve Sedgwick. The reading load will be heavy. The content of the course offers an occasion to prepare for thesis writing, and it will demand scouting, reading beyond the syllabus, and collaborative work. Students will direct a class discussion, complete exercises in a variety of research forms, and write in several forms, including a biographical sketch.	1330:W EASTC 406
ENGL 403-02	Thoreau & Am. Nature Writing Instructor: B Ashton Nichols Course Description: Thoreau's Walden is the foundational document of American nature writing. Many earlier American explorers, naturalists, and authors had described the natural wonders of the new continent, but until Thoreau, no author had located "nature" at the center of one vision of the American psyche. We will begin with a careful examination of Walden, its source texts and the texts it influenced. We will then seek to understand connections between Henry David Thoreau and the tradition of environmental writing that he began in America. This focus will allow us to engage important questions confronting students and scholars interested in the tradition of environmental literature in America, the sources of that tradition in a wider American culture, and the impact of that tradition on the current environmental movement, both nationally and internationally. Writers studied may include: Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, and E. O. Wilson. From the preservation of wild lands to debates about global warming, from the desire to conserve and protect animal species to the need to make use of natural resources for the betterment of human life and communities, we will explore the ways that "nature writing" and "environmental literature" have played a crucial role in the development of these ideas. Students will write one short essay (8-10 pp.) of careful textual analysis. They will also produce one long research essay (12-15 pp.) which may or may not form the basis for their senior thesis in English 404.	1330:T KAUF 178
ENGL 403-03	Elizabeth Bishop & the Poetics Instructor: Siobhan Phillips Course Description: Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the most important American artist of the second half of the twentieth century. But she did not seek or find a large audience in her lifetime. Her work took shape among a group of friends and colleagues who influenced her writing at the time and who have shaped its legacy since. In this course, we will examine Bishops career beside other writers whom she knew, including Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, May Swenson, and James Merrill. Through a deeper understanding of Bishops work, we will question some assumptions about lyric poetry as a genre and postwar culture as a period. How do Bishop's friendships affect her relationship to confessionalism, postmodernism, feminism, and globalization?" Our methods will include a variety of theoretical approaches, in preparation for English 404, including archival investigation.	1330:R EASTC 312