Courses

• CAS EN 466: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Spring 2011: Joseph Conrad. Close reading of some of Conrad's major novels, shorter fiction, magazine stories, essays, and letters, with excerpts from the broad history of Conrad criticism. His influence on later twentieth-century writers. Some reference to movies derived from his work.
• 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 471: Crst Am Lit Mvt
  
• CAS EN 474: Critical Studies in Literary Genres
  Topic for Spring 2011: Transatlantic Crossings. Examination of nineteenth century American and European travel narratives, focusing on the questions of American identity, mobility, discovery, and imperialism. Authors include Jefferson, Tocqueville, Stowe, Dickens, Kemble, Twain, James.
• CAS EN 475: Critical Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Fall 2011: 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 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 2012: Pragmatism and 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 482: Critical Studies in Modern Literature
  Topic for Fall 2011: Poets on Poetry. Essays and other prose by early and late twentieth-century poets along with much close reading and some poetic theory. Stevens, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Pessoa, Moore, Crane, Williams, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Auden, Jarrell, Olson, O'Hara, Koch, Hughes, Howe, others.
• 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.
• CAS EN 490: Critical Studies in Comparative Literature
  Topic for Fall 2011: Nietzsche and Modern Drama. The importance of theatre for Nietzsche's philosophy and vice versa. Wagner's influence on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzsche's subsequent influence on theatre artists such as Strindberg, Pirandello, Artaud, and O'Neill.
• CAS EN 491: Independent Study
  Application forms available in CAS Room 105.
• CAS EN 492: Independent Study
  Application forms available in CAS Room 105.
• CAS EN 494: Critical Studies in Literature and the Arts
  Two topics are offered 2009/2010. Students may take one or both for credit. Topic for Fall 2009: Poetry and Visual Arts. 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. Topic for Spring 2010: Music and Poetry. An historical survey of the relations between the two arts from the Greeks to the present. Discussions of poetry in many languages; emphasis on English. Chant, song, madrigal, opera, and other forms. Ability to read music is required.
• CAS EN 495: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Fall 2011: Aestheticism. Is aestheticism a profound philosophy of creativity, a commodification of the artwork, the liberation of alternative sexualities, or the emergence of a new elitism? "Art for art's sake" in Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Poe, James, and Wharton.
• CAS EN 496: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Spring 2012: Animals and Literature Since 1800. Can we cast ourselves into the inner lives of alien creatures, from amoebas to elephants? Animals in literature and film, and theoretical shifts in the category of animal. Authors include Byron, Hardy, Darwin, Woolf, and Kafka.
• CAS EN 513: Modern English Grammar
  A systematic analysis of English, applied to the reading of literature and the writing of essays.
• CAS EN 516: History of the English Language II
  Dryden said that few in England could read Chaucer. How did English change radically in three hundred years, from 1400 to 1700? Social, cultural, and linguistic dynamics of this change.
• CAS EN 518: Linguistic Problems in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language
  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.
• CAS EN 521: Literature of the Middle Ages I
  Topic for Fall 2011: Medieval Romance and Origins of Love. Romantic love in medieval romances; how does love relate to gender, sexuality, marriage, family, empire? Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gottfried of Strassbourg, Havelok the Dane, Floris and Blancheflour, Sir Orfeo, Morte D'Arthur.

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