Courses

• CAS EN 326: Voices of Women
  Topic for Fall 2010: Performing Gender: Drama, Dance, Film, and Feminisms. Representations of gender on diverse stages, in high and low genres, from antiquity to the present. Considers theatrical and feminist movements and the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Readings include dramatic texts and gender and performance theory. Also offered as CAS WS 305 B1.
• CAS EN 327: Topics in American Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2011: South in History and Literature. Explores the experience and culture of the U.S. South by focusing on its history and literature to understand how and why the South continues to be seen as a unique component of the larger American experience.
• CAS EN 341: History of the Novel in English
  Evolution of the novel. Themes may include the genre's relation to romance and epic; links to history of journalism, gender, print culture, science; development of realism; the experiments of Modernism and Postmodernism. Authors may include Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Joyce, Morrison.
• CAS EN 347: Topics in Contemporary Fiction
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2011: Overview of fiction written in English from the end of WWII to the present. Topics include "postmodernism," cultural identity, historical trauma, and responses to modern technological change. Authors may include Bellow, Updike, Pynchon, Morrison, Atwood, Rushdie.
• CAS EN 355: Modern Drama I
  Theatre history from 1870 to 1920. Plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Wilde, Shaw. The birth of modern techniques of acting, design, and directing. Students stage short scenes; no experience required. Also offered as CAS XL 470 D1.
• CAS EN 356: Modern Drama II
  Modern drama and theatre history from roughly 1920 to the present. Playwrights may include Pirandello, Beckett, Ionesco, Brecht, O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Albee, Pinter, and Churchill. The development of modern techniques of acting, stage design, and directing.
• 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 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 2011: Toni Morrison's American Times. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is one of America's most important authors. This course examines four of her 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 380: Twentieth-Century African American Novel
  Topic for Spring 2011: Twentieth-Century African American Novel. Major works from the Harlem Renaissance, Realism, Modernism, the Black Arts Movement, and the contemporary period. Authors include Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, John Wideman, and Toni Morrison. Also offered as CAS AA 502.
• CAS EN 389: Fictional Forms: Stories Versus Novels
  Is it just a question of length? How do we define short stories as a genre and how should we distinguish between different types of stories? Readings by Poe, Chekhov, O'Connor, Carver, Cortázar, and others. Also offered as CAS XL 470 C1.
• 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 465: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Fall 2011: Enlightenment in America. A literary introduction to some varieties of Enlightenment in the Americas. Reading essays, sermons, novels, poems, and objects produced between 1690 and 1845, course traces the ideologies and technologies of "Progress" in Britain's Colonies, the Caribbean, and the United States.

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