| ENGL 101-01 |
Interactive Media
Instructor: Russell McDermott, Greg Steirer
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 220-03. Much of new media is touted as being distinctly interactive. In this class we will unpack and explore interactivity and the interactive, historically, culturally and aesthetically. We will work through a variety of media, from the obviousvideo games, interactive films, choose your own adventure novelsto the less obviousthe novel, the art gallery, the film. Interactivity, as a concept, will tie together a variety of objects and practices in this survey class. Ultimately, we will ask, what makes something interactive? How do passive and active media differ? What is the future of interactive media? Example works include Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, Skyrim, Hersheypark, House of Leaves, The Under, Pry.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
EASTC 411 |
| ENGL 101-02 |
The Epic: Gods, Devils, Monsters, and Men
Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost
Course Description:
Cross-listed with MEMS 200-01. An introduction to the epic as a genre and to the mythic stories that have shaped Western culture. We will read works by Homer, Virgil, the Beowulf poet, Milton, and Christa Wolf.
|
09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
EASTC 411 |
| ENGL 101-03 |
Shakespeare's Women
Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-02 and MEMS 200-03. Male characters such as Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Prospero, Shylock were the focus of historical Shakespeare criticism until the late twentieth century. Even criticism complicating the reception of Shakespeare's women characters, however, have not erased their neglect. Directors looking to cut long plays and to depict straightforward female characters have limited women's lines, represented them as stereotypes, and cut evidence of their agency. In the context of Shakespeare's (uncut) play texts and in the context of Early Modern English culture, however, Shakespeare's women-Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia, Miranda, Portia- are equally as multifaceted as his male characters. In this course we will study a cross-section of Shakespeare's plays from each genre, considering the representation of women within the play text, as well as within historical and cultural contexts embodying changes in expectations for women's roles. Shakespeare's play texts simultaneously reproduce and subvert the evolving stereotypes of women during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Discussions of representation of women in patriarchal society will inevitably include scrutiny of our own moment in history. In addition to reading the play texts, work for the course will include students' acting out scenes from plays, viewing some films, two brief critical papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
|
10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
EASTC 411 |
| ENGL 101-04 |
Literature and Food
Instructor: Siobhan Phillips
Course Description:
This course looks at how literary texts take on some key questions of food and culture, including the status of the body, the preservation and evolution of tradition, the effects and redress of hunger, the morality of pleasure, and the relationship of humans to the non-human world. We will consider a range of genres-fiction, poetry, memoir, essay, reportage-to understand how elements of artistic form alter potential answers to the questions thatfood presents.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
EASTC 411 |
| ENGL 220-01 |
Introduction to Literary Studies
Instructor: Chelsea Skalak
Course Description:
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
EASTC 108 |
| ENGL 220-02 |
Introduction to Literary Studies
Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost
Course Description:
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
|
10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
EASTC 303 |
| ENGL 220-03 |
Introduction to Literary Studies
Instructor: Claire Seiler
Course Description:
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
|
10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
EASTC 303 |
| ENGL 222-01 |
History of the Book
Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston
Course Description:
Cross-listed with MEMS 220-02. Book history is an interdisciplinary field that began as a study of bibliography but has come to include studying patterns of book production and book consumption over extended periods of time. Book historians study the history of libraries, of publishing, the production of paper, varieties of type, and the history of reading. We will examine the many forms that books have taken in the history of writing in the European tradition. We will also investigate the technology of book production and dissemination, and books as cultural factors--how they were manufactured and sold, used, read, and transmitted. Our study will include looking at the technology of printing, invented by Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, using an adapted wine press with moveable type. We will learn how to read the book as physical object, to understand clues about when and where and by whom texts were produced, and how to read the text more closely once these clues are deciphered. Projects may include "adopting" a rare text from our archive and exploring all its material features and writing a researched paper on one element of book history.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
EASTC 108 |
| ENGL 222-02 |
Tools, Techniques, and Culture of Digital Humanities
Instructor: Chelsea Skalak
Course Description:
Digital technologies have permanently transformed the ways we read, write, and research.They also give us the potential to ask questions and find answers that were previously impossible to imagine. What can we gain if we use digital tools for analysis that only they can do? What if we could instantly read every newspaper headline froman entire decade, map out a novel in physical space, or visually break down the relationship between two poems? Does reading change if it happens only online? In this class, we will learn various tools and techniques of digital humanities, while familiarizing ourselves with the theory of reading and writing in digital environments. This course is designed for beginners and requires no previousexperience with digital tools.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
STERN 11 |
| ENGL 321-01 |
Plague Years
Instructor: Claire Seiler
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-02. This course studies British, Irish, and US literature and culture of two public health crises: the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the polio epidemics that began in the late nineteenth century. How were the flu and polio represented in literary and popular culture? What forms did a range of textsinnovative novels, womens magazines, poems, African American newspapers, filmsadopt to consolidate or challenge the stories that states preferred to tell themselves about the ravages of the influenza pandemic or the vaccine victory over polio? How can the contested literary, political, and cultural legacies of the flu and polio help us to think about both public discourse around COVID-19 and the inequities laid bare by the pandemic? As it pursues these questions, Plague Years introduces students to the interdisciplinary fields of the health humanities and disability studies. The course pursues illuminating readings of literary works by James Baldwin, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others, and concludes with two signal works of the coronavirus pandemic: Ali Smiths Summer (2020) and Zadie Smiths Intimations (2020).
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
EASTC 314 |
| ENGL 331-01 |
Where Do Novels Come From
Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost
Course Description:
The word "novel" means something new. In this course we will focus on what is new about the novel as a literary genre by reading founding works of the British novel tradition. Authors will likely include Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Edgeworth, and Austen. We will also read critical and theoretical texts, including formalist, historicist, feminist, and digital humanities approaches.
|
12:30 PM-01:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 203 |
| ENGL 331-02 |
Media and Empathy
Instructor: Greg Steirer, Russell McDermott
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 320-01. This class asks us to interrogate the role of emotion and empathy in our engagements with media objects. Together we will construct working definitions of empathy, sympathy, and pity and apply these definitions to a variety of media. We will touch on the moral qualities of empathy, and the role of art in doing good or citizen making. Theoretically, the class will draw from a diverse set of readingsfrom philosophy to literary studies to neuroscienceand will task students with thinking across disciplines. Concepts drawn from these readings will be applied to a variety of objects: from autofiction and memoir, to video games and virtual reality. The course will culminate in a final critical or creative project which will extend or address key concepts from the class. Example readings/objects include What Remains of Edith Finch, Queers in Love at the End of Time, Up, Blackfish, and Kenneth Goldsmiths Fidget
|
09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
EASTC 301 |
| ENGL 341-01 |
Family and U.S. Fiction Since 1945
Instructor: Siobhan Phillips
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-03. This course looks at fiction from the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries next to contemporaneous and otherwise relevant ideas about the family from legal, political, psychological, and social thought. Focusing on the tension between individuality and belonging, we will consider how fiction reflects and complicates different models for familial relationships. Authors studied may include James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, and Justin Torres.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
EASTC 301 |
| ENGL 341-02 |
Shakespeare: Politics/Culture
Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston
Course Description:
Shakespeare: Politics and Culture is a course most often guided by class discussion. Lectures on historical, literary, and critical matters will occur when useful. We will read and discuss seven plays representing Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, and romances: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Where appropriate, we will also view and discuss scenes from films of the plays by directors Branagh, Taymor, Radford, Kurzel, Kurosawa, Goold, Olivier, and Reinhardt. The secondary-theoretical-reading for the course will draw upon New Historicist and Cultural Materialist criticism, first practiced in the U.S. by Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and in the U.K. in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), edited by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore. Where helpful, we will further consider colonial, race, and feminist theory. We will also read primary documents from the period that converse with the play texts. Assignments will include an in-class performance of a scene from one of the plays, a word-study essay, a paper based upon the performance, and a final historicist essay.
|
10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
EASTC 301 |
| ENGL 403-01 |
Questions and Methods of Literary Scholarship
Instructor: Sarah Kersh
Course Description:
Permission of Instructor Required. This class will prepare students for writing a senior thesis by exploring some central questions of literary scholarship. Our class will begin with various analyses of a single novel, using this focus to exemplify possibilities in framing and investigating a scholarly question. Meanwhile, students will pursue a series of independent projects that test different parts of the research process for other primary texts of their own choosing.
|
01:30 PM-04:30 PM, T
EASTC 303 |
| ENGL 403-02 |
Questions and Methods of Literary Scholarship
Instructor: Siobhan Phillips
Course Description:
Permission of Instructor Required. This class will prepare students for writing a senior thesis by exploring some central questions of literary scholarship. Our class will begin with various analyses of a single novel, using this focus to exemplify possibilities in framing and investigating a scholarly question. Meanwhile, students will pursue a series of independent projects that test different parts of the research process for other primary texts of their own choosing.
|
01:30 PM-04:30 PM, W
BOSLER 222 |
| ENGL 500-01 |
Disability and Disease in 20th Century American Literature
Instructor: Cotten Seiler
Course Description:
|
|