Courses

• CAS EN 347: Topics in Contemporary Fiction
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2012: 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.
• 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
  Topic for Fall 2012: Toni Morrison's American Times. Examines four of the Nobel Laureate's novels, using primary and secondary materials to construct historical contexts and critical perspectives. Also offered as CAS AA 305.
• 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 375: Topics in Literature and Film
  Major themes and techniques explored by both writers and filmmakers. May be repeated for credit as topics change. Topic for Fall 2012: On The Road in American Literature and Film. Explores the various motivations for and consequences of taking to the road. Works may include Ford's Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man, Housekeeping, The Wild One, The Fugitive Kind, Catcher in the Rye, Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma and Louise. Topic for Spring 2013: TBA.
• 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 379: American Poetry
  A survey of American poetry, from the Revolutionary era up through the 1930s, that introduces the fundamentals of poetic form and lyric practice, as well as the historical, regional, and cultural contexts surrounding the development of Romanticism and Modernism.
• CAS EN 380: Twentieth Century African American Novel
  Topic for Spring 2012: 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 A1.
• 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 463: Hamlet/Macbeth: Appropriation and Performance
  Analysis of these plays through historical context, performance histories, and contemporary dramatic and prose appropriations. Theoretical considerations of adaptation and appropriation, including such topics as intertextuality, performance as interpretation, cultural politics, canon formation, and the global marketplace of culture.
• 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.
• CAS EN 466: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  2013: Family Trouble: Contesting Kinship in Theory and Literature. Exploration of theories of family, gender, and sexuality from ancient Greece to current gay marriage debates, concluding with the analysis of recent experiments in family narrative, including novels, graphic novels, and film.

Back to full list of College of Arts & Sciences