Courses

• CAS EN 522: Literature of the Middle Ages II
  Topic for Spring 2011: Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. History, legend, tragedy, comedy, poetry, and fiction in the major medieval Latin, French, German, and English Arthurian texts, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Layamon, and Chaucer.
• CAS EN 525: Literature of the Seventeenth Century I
  Topic for Fall 2010: Poetry and Song in Shakespeare's Time. The interactions of some of the greatest poets and song-writers in English during the decades around 1600 (including Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Dowland, Campion). Grounded on texts, scores, and recordings.
• CAS EN 527: Literature of the Eighteenth Century I
  Dryden, Behn, Swift, Pope, Astell, Defoe, Haywood, and others, read in their historical contexts. Literary structures understood in conjunction with social, political, institutional, and intellectual structures of the age.
• 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 532: The Victorian Literature II
  1850-1900: Ruskin, the Rossettis, Arnold, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Wilde, Hopkins, George Eliot, and others.
• 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, Joyce, Rhys, Isherwood, Beckett. Emphasis on prose style; narrative craft; dialogue forms; laughter; the novelistic page of print; the political backgrounds of the first half of the twentieth century.
• CAS EN 545: The Nineteenth Century American Novel
  Development of prose fiction in the United States, with works by Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Stowe, James, Howells, and others. Topics include print culture, realism and romance, the Civil War, and sentimentalism.
• 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 592: Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Spring 2008: Fictions of Empire. British novels of the imperial twilight (1880s to WWI); emphasis on colonial Africa (including Egypt): romance, racism, adventure, exploitation, conquest, discovery, sexism, heroism, horror. Authors include Kipling, Haggard, Henty, Kingsley, and Conrad.
• CAS EN 593: Studies in Literature and the Arts
  Topic for Fall 2011: Film Noir. Intensive study of film noir in both its classic and revisionist periods, informed by readings in hard-boiled detective fiction. Topics include gender divisions, fatal plotting, the death drive, sex and cigarettes. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 594: Studies in Literature and the Arts
  Topic for Spring 2012: Psycho Paths. Depictions of psychotic minds, taking Hitchcock's Psycho as the centerpiece. Works include Psycho's cinematic precursors (Dr. Caligari) and progeny (serial killer movies), as well as fiction (Poe, Melville) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Zizek). 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.

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