2022-2023 Academic Year

Fall 2022

ENGL 101 Southern Women Writers
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-03.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.

WGSS 101 Southern Women Writers
Cross-listed with ENGL 101-04.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.

ENGL 341 Early Modern Lyric
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England generally are recognized as the Golden Age of the lyric—the short—poem. We will begin our reading of the sixteenth-century poem with adaptations of Petrarchan sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey, and move to the mastery of the form by Sidney and Spencer. The seventeenth century begins with the revival of the sonnet by Shakespeare, and includes brilliant passionate poems declaiming the love of God and the love of women and men by Herbert, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and others. In addition to learning the techniques of describing and analyzing these poems aesthetically, we will also discuss the cultural contexts in which our poets lived. Our objective will be to interrogate T.S. Eliot’s assertion, early in the twentieth century, that a lyric poem is “the voice of the poet speaking to himself or nobody.” As we read and discuss we will ask ourselves, both consciously and unconsciously, how private or how porous brief poems might be. Can artists write in a vacuum, as Eliot implies, alienated from political and financial directives, keeping their work “pure and unsullied?” Instead, if great art is to some extent driven by cultural concerns, such as religious controversy, struggles to define and defend the monarchy, and incipient women's rights, then how do we know where these outside issues enter into the art?

ENGL 403 Eudora Welty
The liveliness of Eudora Welty scholarship at her 2009 centennial shows Welty to be among the pantheon of American writers, one of the masters of the short story. Known from the beginning of her career in the late 1930s for its humorous and poignant depictions of life in rural Mississippi during the depression, Welty's work recently has been examined under the lenses of political and cultural criticism, and has been read compellingly as a part of the feminist canon. We will consider Welty's formal mastery as a writer of fiction, as well as reading her from post-structuralist critical points of view. We will also become familiar with the culture of the rural south, using as our starting point the fabulous photographs that Welty took during the depression.

Spring 2023

ENGL 222 History of the Book
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.

ENGL 404 Senior Thesis Workshop
A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor.Prerequisites: 403.