Courses

• CAS EN 363: 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.
• CAS EN 364: Shakespeare II
  Six or seven plays chosen from the following: Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.
• CAS EN 368: Seminar in Shakespeare Studies
  General background on Shakespeare's drama and focus on various thematic, structural, and historical issues. Close critical readings of five plays.
• CAS EN 370: Introduction to African American Women Writers
  Surveys the writings of African American women writers from slavery to the present and explores the African American female literary tradition in the context of black history and culture. Topic for Fall 2010: Toni Morrison’s American Times. Examines four of the Nobel Laureate's novels, using primary and secondary materials to construct historical contexts and critical perspectives. Also offered as CAS AA 304.
• CAS EN 371: 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.
• CAS EN 373: Detective Fiction
  A study of the major writers in the history of literary crime and detection, mainly British and American, with attention to the genre's cultural contexts and development from the eighteenth century to the present.
• CAS EN 377: 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.
• CAS EN 383: Writing in Australia
  A critical introduction to the literature of Australia, surveying an indicative selection of texts written in English since the arrival of the country's first non-Aboriginal inhabitants in 1788. Addresses the critical examination of that literature in terms of Australia's history, views of Australia as a physical entity, and perspectives on Australia's people.
• CAS EN 392: Modern Irish Literature
  Survey of Irish literature from the late nineteenth-century literary revival to the present. Authors include Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, J.M. Synge, Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Roddy Doyle. Emphasis on literature's role in fashioning national identities; the writer as social critic.
• CAS EN 401: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS EN 402: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS EN 404: Literary Criticism I
  Survey of major philosophical discussions of literature from ancient Greece to the late nineteenth century. Figures include Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche. Themes include art’s relation to truth, ethics, and politics; interpretation; aesthetic judgment; the sublime.
• CAS EN 405: Advanced Writing of Fiction
  The writing of short stories and perhaps longer fiction. Manuscripts read and discussed in class. Individual conferences.
• CAS EN 406: Literary Criticism II
  Survey of literary critical perspectives and trends in humanistic theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, gender studies, new historicism, and post-colonial studies. Frequent writing assignments of varying length.
• CAS EN 466: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Spring 2011: Population and Literature.
• CAS EN 468: Critical Studies in British Literature
  Two topics are offered for 2010/2011. Students may take one or both for credit. Topic for Fall 2010: Literature and Science. While literature and science turn different lenses on the world, both disciplines identify patterns and construct narratives of change over time. This course explores microscopic worlds, vast cosmoses, evolution and ecology; writers include Swift, Tennyson, Darwin, Twain, and Pynchon. Topic for Spring 2011: Time and Literature, 1800-1930. Examines models of time (pace, narrative, scale) in Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist texts during major transformations in science and technology (geology, dinosaurs, Darwin, railways, film, and Einstein). Authors include Byron, Tennyson, Hardy, Wells, Proust, and Woolf.
• CAS EN 476: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Fall 2010: Representing Gender in American Literature and Film. Gender representations in American literature, film, graphic novels—1950's through present. Emphasis on cultures of consumption, class and social mobility, critique of gender, and backlash. Works: Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, A Streetcar Named Desire, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Paris Is Burning.
• CAS EN 478: Critical Studies in British Writers
  Topic for Fall 2010: Home and World. How do novelists and filmmakers imagine the home in relation to nation and world? How do they portray homelessness? Considers novelists from Defoe to contemporary authors like Sebald. Films include Reed's "The Third Man" and Ray's "The Stranger.”
• CAS EN 480: Critical Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Spring 2011: Pragmatism and American Literature. Major American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Henry James, Crane, Du Bois, and Frost) read in relation to classical pragmatist philosophers such as William James, Peirce, Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• CAS EN 486: Critical Studies in Anglophone Literature
  Topic for Fall 2010: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature. Examines how postcolonial writers have explored the themes of historical upheaval and modernization. Focuses on the fictional and non-fictional works of V.S. Naipaul and compares them with works of Wole Soyinka, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, J.M. Coetzee.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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