Courses

• CAS EN 530: The Romantic Age
  Studies in British literature from 1789 to 1832. Romanticism considered in light of social, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical issues. Authors may include Blake, Burke, Wollstonecraft, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Cobbett, Scott, Clare, Mary and Percy Shelley, Keats, De Quincey, and Hazlitt.
• CAS EN 533: 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.
• CAS EN 534: American Literature: 1855 to 1918
  American literature from the Civil War to WWI. Realism and naturalism; race, class, and urbanization; marriage and the new woman. Alger, Twain, James, Harper, Howells, Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, Dickinson, Frost.
• CAS EN 535: Twentieth-Century British and Irish 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.
• CAS EN 536: Twentieth-Century American Poetry
  Study of five or six poets from the following: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Ammons, Ashbery, Plath, Ginsberg, Merrill.
• CAS EN 542: 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.
• CAS EN 543: The Nineteenth-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.
• CAS EN 544: The Modern British Novel
  Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford, Forster, Beckett, and other novelists of the period 1895-1956.
• CAS EN 545: The Nineteenth-Century American Novel
  From beginnings through the nineteenth century. Works by Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Howells, and others.
• CAS EN 546: The Modern American Novel
  From 1900 to 1950. Works by Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others.
• CAS EN 547: Contemporary American Fiction
  Syllabus varies from semester to semester but this course may be taken only once for credit. Two topics are offered 2010/2011. Fall 2010: Postwar Truth, Postwar Fiction. A study of both fiction and essays by three post-WWII writers: Ralph Ellison, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace. Topics include comedy, irony, media culture, and the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Spring 2011: Study of major American novels since 1984, by De Lillo, Morrison, O'Brien, Oates, Roth, and others. Course topics include risk, multiculturalism, trauma and memory, postmodern spiritualities.
• CAS EN 551: English 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.
• CAS EN 552: English Drama from 1590 to 1642
  The heritage of Marlowe and Shakespeare: the collapse of a historic world; Jacobean pessimism and decadence in the plays of Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford, and others.
• CAS EN 553: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama
  English drama from the Restoration (1660) to the Licensing Act (1737). Operas, rhymed plays, sex comedies, tragicomedies, ballad operas. Works by Dryden, Behn, Wycherley, Etherege, Otway, Shadwell, Southerne, Lee, Congreve, Farquhar, Addison, Gay, Fielding.
• CAS EN 561: Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
  A reading of some of the Canterbury Tales and several books of Troilus and Criseyde, emphasizing the rhetorical strategies with which Chaucer attempted to turn the linguistic, social, political, religious, and cultural chaos of fourteenth-century England into courtly amusement.
• CAS EN 566: Milton
  Careful exploration of Milton’s powerful poetry (including Paradise Lost) and stunning prose in the revolutionary political and social context of the seventeenth century. Issues include “regicide,” gender, colonialism, religion, political slavery, and the public sphere.
• CAS EN 568: Studies in British Literature
  Two topics are offered for Fall 2010. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: Shakespeare and Film. Study of Shakespeare's tragedies, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, in multiple film versions of each play by such directors as Olivier, Welles, Nunn, Eyre, Branagh, Luhrmann, Taymor, and Kurosawa. Prereq: one semester of Shakespeare or the equivalent. Section B1: Romantic Selves. The engagement of Romantic-era poetry, prose, and theory with the concept and problematic of selfhood. Topics include identity, expression, and representations of both inner life and public selves. Readings include Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Clare, Austen, De Quincey.
• CAS EN 571: Studies in American Literary Movements
  Two topics are offered for 2010/2011. Students may take one or both for credit. Fall 2010: American Crime. The historical and cultural development of the American crime story from colonial times to the present, focusing on the twentieth century. Major authors include Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Chester Himes. Spring 2011: American Renaissance Poetry. Drawing on a transatlantic and comparative perspective, this seminar traces the development of Romanticism in American poetry as a movement shaped by the history of conquest, revolution, slavery, industrialization, and civil war. Readings by Freneau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and others.
• CAS EN 576: Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Spring 2010: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers. Hawthorne’s “damned mob of scribbling women” in historical/cultural context. Gender, genre, authorship, sexuality, class, race, shifts in critical approaches. Foster, Stowe, Warner, Fern, Southworth, Davis, Jewett, Hopkins.
• CAS EN 578: Studies in British Writers
  Two topics are offered for Spring 2011. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: Jane Austen in Context. Investigates the question of tradition and the individual talent in Austen's fiction by reading what she read. Exploration of such writers as Johnson and Burney highlights the distinctive contours of both her masterpieces and her juvenilia. Section B1: Dickens. How did Dickens' life, society, and epoch shape his art? Readings from his first novel, Pickwick Papers, through selected novels of the middle period, to his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. Films and dramatizations included.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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