Courses

• CAS EN 579: Studies in American Writers
  Two topics are offered Fall 2009. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: Moore, Bishop, and Plath. Through analysis of these major 20th century women poets, a shift from modernism to postmodernism is explored. Topics include: literary friendship and influence; gender and sexuality; relations between the arts; theory and practice of lyric; poets’ prose. Section 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.
• CAS EN 581: Charles 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.
• CAS EN 582: Studies in Modern Literature
  Two topics are offered 2009/2010. Students may take one or both for credit. Topic for Fall 2009: Joyce and After. Readings in transatlantic modernism (Irish, British, American) from 1922 forward. Joyce’s Ulysses is 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. Topic for Spring 2010: Fictions of the Fifties. Exploration of major fiction written between the end of WWII and the death of JFK. Topics include reactions to literary Modernism, the Cold War, Existentialism, the “lonely crowd.” Authors include Ellison, Bellow, O’Connor, Kerouac, Mailer, Baldwin.
• CAS EN 584: Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
  Two topics are offered 2010/2011. Students may take one or both for credit. Fall 2010: Literature of the Migrant. Eleven novels that all bear on human migrations. Besides examining major issues, focuses on how these books were made. Some texts are translations, but most are written by American authors. Topic for Spring 2011: Ethnic American Women Writers.
• CAS EN 585: Contemporary American Poetry
  Tradition and innovation among post-WWII poets. Focus on individual volumes; may include: Plath, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Lowell, Bishop, Ashbery, Merrill, Simic, Hass, Glück, Komunyakaa.
• CAS EN 586: Studies in Anglophone Literature
  Topic for Spring 2011: Caribbean Poetry. Study of twentieth-century Caribbean poetry written in English(es), surveying anthologies and concentrating on major figures (Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Eric Roach). Emphases: the function of poets in small societies, and their choices concerning linguistic and aesthetic traditions.
• CAS EN 591: Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Fall 2010: The Civil War in Black and White. Explores race, justice, violence, and nationhood in American Civil War literature. Authors include Stowe, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Lincoln, Harper, Chesnutt, and Crane. Visual and historical documents are studied. A substantial research paper is required.
• CAS EN 594: Studies in Literature and the Arts
  Topic for Fall 2010: Proust/Ophuls. Intensive and comparatist study of two brilliant artists, the filmmaker Max Ophuls and Marcel Proust (read in translation). Topics include the anatomy of love, ravishing beauty, the limits of sophistication, and the ravages of time. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 595: Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Fall 2009: 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.
• CAS EN 598: Studies in Contemporary Literature
  Topic for Fall 2005: Contemporary American Poetry. What do the poems of our time look like? What new themes and techniques have emerged and what older forms and genres have been renewed? We will consider the state of contemporary lyric, with close study of selected poets.
• CAS ES 101: The Dynamic Earth
  Introduction to the dynamic Earth, including plate tectonics, earthquake hazards and volcanic hazards, mountain-building processes; igneous, and metamorphic processes; surface processes, erosion, soil, and sediment formation; and hydrogeology. Interactions among the lithospheric, hydrospheric, atmospheric, and biospheric systems are emphasized. Three hours lecture, two hours lab, including field trips.
• CAS ES 105: Environmental Earth Sciences
  Geological processes in environmental science; groundwater quantity and quality; geological resource supply and recovery; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural hazards; landforms, climate, desertification, glaciation, and ocean circulation patterns. Three hours lecture, two hours lab, including field trips.
• CAS ES 140: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Other Natural Disasters
  Explores the large natural events that affect us; examines their geologic causes, as well as their natural and human consequences. Topics include earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, impacts of extraterrestrial objects, andother near-surface disasters, with an emphasis on destructive solid-earth phenomena.
• CAS ES 142: Introduction to Beach and Shoreline Processes
  Coastal processes including tidal currents, wave action, longshore transport, and estuarine circulation; barrier island and spit formation; study of beaches, dunes, and marshes; effects of tectonics, glaciers, and rivers on beaches and coastal morphology. Cape Cod field trip.
• CAS ES 144: Oceanography
  Examines the physical, chemical, and biological processes by which the oceans serve as an agent to accelerate or moderate the pace of global change. Dynamic nature of the oceans on both a short- and a long-term scale is emphasized.
• CAS ES 222: Mineralogy
  Introduction to mineral properties, chemistry, structure, and petrographic microscope. Minerals in Earth systems including the dynamic interior, surface, environment, and societal uses. Minerals as recorders of past Earth processes and conditions. Three hours lecture, three hours lab, field trip.
• CAS ES 301: Structural Analysis of Rocks
  Deformation of rocks and minerals, stress, strain; kinetic and dynamic analysis of folds, faults, joints, rock fabrics; regional settings of rock structures; interpretation of geological maps. Three hours lecture, three hours lab, and occasional field trips.
• CAS ES 302: History of Earth
  Introduction to earth history; origin of the earth and solar system; origin and evolution of life; mass extinctions; interpretation of the geological record of earth history; measurement of geological time; plate tectonics and the formation of mountains; continents and ocean basins. Three hours lecture, two hours lab, with occasional field trips.
• CAS ES 317: Introduction to Hydrology
  Introduction to the science of hydrology and to the role of water as a resource, a hazard, and an integral component of the Earth's climatic, biological, and geological systems.
• CAS ES 331: Sedimentology
  Properties and classification of clastic and carbonate sediments and sedimentary rock; processes that form, transport, and deposit sediments; environments of deposition; diagenesis; methods of analysis. Three hours lecture, three hours lab, and occasional field trips.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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