Undergraduate Courses




	Department of English Undergraduate Courses in Language and Literature Semester I, 2009-2010 All courses carry four credits, unless otherwise noted. Language and Linguistics CAS EN 513 A1 Modern English Grammar A systematic analysis of English, applied to the reading of literature and the writing of essays. Bizup Mon 3:00-6:00 CAS EN 518 A1 Linguistic Problems in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language Prereq: consent of instructor. Application of linguistic concepts to the teaching of English as a foreign language. Includes description of contemporary English grammatical structures that pose problems for learners and teachers. Saitz Tue 4:00-7:00 Literature CAS EN 120 A1 Theme and Variation, or Literary Re-imagining This course will explore instances of literary borrowing and adaptation by examining networks of explicitly related short stories, novels, and films. We will consider at least two approaches to adaptation: first, politically motivated rewritings of the original story, and second, nostalgic rewritings that incorporate the biography of the original author. As we hone our individual voices in this writing-intensive class, we will consider how variations in writers' styles can create distinct meanings in seemingly identical stories. Authors and filmmakers will include Julian Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cunningham, Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and others. Kent MWF 9:00-10:00 CAS EN 120 B1 American Womanhood From Republican Motherhood to the Cult of Domesticity to the Suffragettes to the birth control movement, women have always figured as important participants in American culture—though often in unexpected or unacknowledged ways. In this course, we will consider historically-specific expectations of American femininity as they range from the Revolutionary period through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. We will explore the political demands made by those of the “fairer sex” as well as the legal, institutional, and personal contexts in which they lived. Drawing upon private letters, manifestos, theoretical essays, and canonical literary works, we will investigate the many ways women have defined, challenged, and re-envisioned their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, and individuals; how they have succeeded and failed as thinkers, writers, and activists; and the means through which they have contributed to American political, cultural, and literary traditions. Readings will include works by Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Roosevelt, Hannah Foster, Fanny Fern, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, Audre Lorde, and others. Holcombe MWF 11:00-12:00 CAS EN 120 C1 Contemporary Multiethnic American Fiction What does it mean to be “ethnic”? To what cultural histories do American minorities look to define themselves? How do different generations interact with the social, natural, and spiritual worlds? What are the effects of living in, and even fighting for, a nation that does not fully claim one? Multiethnic authors of the1960s and 1970s tackled these questions in an explosion of works that has been dubbed a “renaissance.” In this course, we will read fiction by Asian American, Native American, Latino/a, so-called white ethnic, and African American authors from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. As we proceed, we will emphasize narrative form and style while interrogating the categories of race and ethnicity. Probable authors include John Okada, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gloria Naylor. Field MWF 1:00-2:00 CAS EN 120 HP The Question of the Real in Film and Fiction In this course we will explore questions of the "real"--or probable, natural, and familiar--and the "strange"--or unreal, fantastic, and uncanny--in films directed by Wiene, Murnau, De Sica, Schlesinger, and Lynch and fiction by Chekhov, Poe, Tolstoy, and Kafka. Three films will be screened outside of class at 6 p.m. on Oct. 20, Nov. 3, and Nov. 17. Brown MW 1:00-2:30 CAS EN 326 A1 Performing Women: Drama, Dance, Film, and Feminism History of women as performers and representations of gender on stages from antiquity to the present. This section is also offered as CAS WS 305 B1. Preston Tues, Thurs 12:30-2:00 CAS EN 363 A1/B1 Shakespeare I Six plays chosen from the following: Richard II, Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Tale. Some attention to the sonnets. A1: Siemon Mon, Wed, Fri 2:00-3:00 B1: Murphy Tues, Thurs 9:30-11:00 CAS EN 371 A1 African American and Asian American Women Writers Cross-cultural comparison of African American and Asian American women writers. Explores and evaluates the cultural impact of their work, and looks at how these two groups bound together by "otherness" pursue the theme of conflicting cultures. Also offered as CAS AA 504. Boelcskevy Tues 9:30-12:30 CAS EN 377 A1 Literature of the Harlem Renaissance A study of the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Explores how they proclaimed a renewal of racial consciousness and cultural pride, and how they challenged racial and cultural barriers in American society. Also offered as CAS AA 507. Boelcskevy Tues, Thurs 11:00-2:00 CAS EN 404 A1 Literary Criticism I Survey of major philosophical discussions of literature from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century. Works by Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Nietzsche. Themes include art's relation to truth, ethics, and politics; interpretation; aesthetic judgment; the sublime. Patterson Tues, Thurs 11:00-12:00 CAS EN 466 B1 Family Trouble: Contesting Kinship in Theory and Literature Exploration of theories of family, gender and sexuality from ancient Greece to current gay marriage debates, concluding with the analysis of recent experiments in family narrative, including novels, graphic novels and film. Murphy Tues, Thurs 12:30-2:00 CAS EN 466 C1 (Post?)Feminisms, Secularism, and the Sacred How does feminist thought and art engage secularity, religion, and faith? Current debates on religious fundamentalism, transnationalism, imperialism, and movements for gender justice around the globe. Readings include feminist theories and creative engagements with the Bible, Koran, other sacred texts. Preston Tues, Thurs 9:30-11:00 CAS EN 486 A1 Introduction to the Postcolonial Novel A survey of novels written in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia in the twentieth century. Writers we are likely to read include Rushdie, Kincaid, Naipaul, Rhys, Achebe, Farah, Toer, Coetzee. Krishnan Tues, Thurs 11:00-12:30 CAS EN 494 A1 Poetry and Visual Arts Junior/Senior Seminar Shared movements, theories and techniques; international modernism and the New York avant-garde; collaborations and exchanges; poems and poets on painting; word/image rivalries and distinctions; Williams, Moore, Stevens, Steins, O’Hara, Ashbery, Graham, others; lots of slides. Costello Tues 12:30-3:00 CAS EN 533 A1 American Literature: Beginnings to 1855 American literature from the beginning to the brink of the Civil War. Puritan origins, print culture, American poetic taste, entertainment, and the debate over slavery. Works by Bradstreet, Jefferson, Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Jacobs, and Melville. Howell Tues, Thurs 2:00-3:30 CAS EN 535 A1 Twentieth-Century British Poetry Close reading of balladic, lyric, and longer poems by Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Auden, Rosenberg, Mew, Loy, MacDiarmid, Gurney, Douglas, Larkin, Hill, Harrison, Prynne, others. Poets' essays and opposed schools and approaches. Reference to other arts, and times of political tragedy. Fogel Tues, Thurs 9:30-11:00 CAS EN 542 A1 The Rise of the Novel The development of prose fiction in England through the eighteenth century. Major themes and genres in works by Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, Lennox, Austen, and Sterne. Prince Tues, Thurs 2:00-3:30 CAS EN 543 A1 19th Century British Novel The development of the novel form in its social-historical context. Authors may include Austen, Thackeray, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, and others. Brown Mon, Wed 3:00-4:30 CAS EN 545 A1 19th Century American Novel From beginnings through the nineteenth century. Works by Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Howells, and others. Van Anglen Tues, Thurs 3:30-5:00 CAS EN 546 A1 Modern American Novel From 1900 to 1950. Works by Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others. Mizruchi Mon, Wed, Fri 11:00-12:00 CAS EN 547 A1 Contemporary American Fiction Syllabus varies from semester to semester but this course may be taken only once for credit. Topic for Spring 2010: Examination of a range of American fiction (stories, novellas, novels) written since WW II. Authors include Bellow, Roth, Ozick, Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison. Topics include modern disenchantment, faith and science, “world-making,” and the fate of character. Chodat Tues, Thurs 9:30-11:00 CAS EN 551 A1 Drama to 1590 Mystery, Morality, Interludes, and the first rollicking public-stage plays. Piety, blasphemy, scatological humor, horrific violence, trans-gendering, black magic, bad verse, and politically-incorrect fun, from Anonymous to early Shakespeare, including the bad-boy playwrights of London’s first mass-entertainment industry. Appleford Mon, Wed, Fri 12:00-1:00 CAS EN 561 A1 Chaucer Studied as literary exploration of old hierarchies and new economies. Chaucer's poetic sense of personal engagements, social disruptions, and spiritual challenges. Levine Mon, Wed, Fri 11:00-12:00 CAS EN 571 A1 American Renaissance Poetry Poetry by Emerson, Poe, Sigourney, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and others. Patterson Tues, Thurs 3:30-5:00 CAS EN 574 A1 Eccentric Moderns An examination of six 20th century poets (David Jones, Laura Riding, Hart Crane, Auden, Hill, and Anne Carson) in the light of ideas about Modernism. A pluralist model of Modernisms emerges. The course combines practical criticism with literary and cultural history, integrating formal analysis and historical context. Warren Mon, Wed, Fri 9:00-10:00 CAS EN 579 A1 Moore, Bishop, and Plath Through analysis of these major 20c. women poets we will explore a shift from modernism to postmodernism. Topics will include : literary friendship and influence; gender and sexuality; relations between the arts; theory and practice of lyric; poets' prose. Costello Tues, Thurs 9:30-11:00 CAS EN 579 B1 Faulkner Faulkner’s major novels and short stories, studied in the contexts of Southern literature and history, American and transatlantic modernism, and his global influence. Matthews Tues, Thurs 12:30-2:00 CAS EN 582 A1 Joyce and After Junior/Senior Seminar Readings in transatlantic modernism (Irish, British, American) from 1922 forward. Joyce’s Ulysses will be central. Other readings from authors such as Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. Riquelme Mon 3:00-5:30 CAS EN 584 A1 Migrant Literature Primary focus on the experiences of immigration and exile, with reading also of fiction on other kinds of human migrations. Works by Willa Cather, O.E. Rölvaag, Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, Shusaku Endo, and contemporary authors. Ha Jin Wed 12:00-3:00 CAS EN 595 A1 American Dream The powerful narratives that construct, and challenge, the myth that every American can achieve material success and self-realization unobstructed by class, race, ethnicity and gender. Crevecoeur, Douglass, Alger, Crane, Norris, Cather, Fitzgerald. Korobkin Mon, Wed, Fri 10:00-11:00 CAS EN 596 A1 Cinema of David Lynch Intensive study of Lynch’s films, informed by readings in literature and Freudian psychoanalysis. Topics include: the logic of dreams, forms of evil, the death drive, and small-town America. Weekly screenings. Monk Mon, Wed 2:00-4:00 Back to Top • Creative Writing • Language and Linguistics • Literature