Courses

• 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 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
  Survey of major US novels published between 1900 and 1950. Writers include Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hurston, Ellison. Attention to literary movements, social and historical contexts, cultural developments in other media such as film.
• CAS EN 547: Contemp Am Fict
  This course description is currently under construction.
• 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 561: Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
  A reading of some of the Canterbury Tales and several books of Troilus and Criseyde, emphasizing the rhetorical strategies with which Chaucer attempted to turn the linguistic, social, political, religious, and cultural chaos of fourteenth-century England into courtly amusement.
• CAS EN 566: Milton
  Careful exploration of Milton?s powerful poetry (including Paradise Lost) and stunning prose in the revolutionary political and social context of the seventeenth century. Issues include ?regicide,? gender, colonialism, religion, political slavery, and the public sphere.
• CAS EN 568: Studies in British Literature
  Two topics are offered for Fall 2010. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: Shakespeare and Film. Study of Shakespeare's tragedies, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, in multiple film versions of each play by such directors as Olivier, Welles, Nunn, Eyre, Branagh, Luhrmann, Taymor, and Kurosawa. Prereq: one semester of Shakespeare or the equivalent. Section B1: Romantic Selves. The engagement of Romantic-era poetry, prose, and theory with the concept and problematic of selfhood. Topics include identity, expression, and representations of both inner life and public selves. Readings include Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Clare, Austen, De Quincey.
• CAS EN 571: Special Topics in American Literature
  Topic for Fall 2012: American Poetry to 1860. An in-depth exploration of American poetry from its beginnings to the Civil War, unfolding according to historical principles and paying special attention to the cultural impacts of verse. Authors studied include Bradstreet, Taylor, Wheatley, Emerson, Poe, Harper, Whitman, and others.
• CAS EN 572: Studies in American Literary Movements: Slavery and American Literature
  Literary works from 1776 to 1865 that were entangled in the American slave crisis. Authors include Equiano, Douglass, Stowe, Poe, Crafts, Melville, along with political, scientific, and religious writings detailing the national and international context.
• CAS EN 575: Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Fall 2012: Queer Literature and Film. An overview of same-sex attraction in literature from the Greeks to the present. Readings: Whitman, Dickinson, Radclyffe Hall, Wilde, Forster, Winterson, Hollinghurst, others. Queer identities in film from the silent period to the twenty-first century. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 576: Studies in Literature and Gender
  Topic for Spring 2012: Seventeenth Century English Women Writers. Explores the fascinating world of war, sex, revolution, slavery and religion that was the English seventeenth century through the writings of women, including Halkett, Cavendish, Hutchinson, Philips, Behn, and others. Readings include exquisite poetry, hilarious plays, quirky romances and awe-inspiring pamphlets.
• CAS EN 578: Studies in British Writers
  Topic for Fall 2012: Jane Austen in Context. Investigates the question of tradition and the individual talent in Austen's fiction by reading what she read. Exploration of such writers as Samuel Johnson and Fanny Burney highlights the distinctive contours of both her masterpieces and her juvenilia.
• CAS EN 579: Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Fall 2012: Native American Literature. How the Native American presence figures in the historical development of canonical literature in the United States; and, in turn, how American literature, and especially the advent of modernism, influences twentieth century Native American poetry and prose.
• CAS EN 580: Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Fall 2011: Faulkner. Principal novels and short fiction, including The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet. Considerations of biographical, social, cultural contexts. Relations to regionalism, Southern Renaissance, modernism. Influence and status as world writer.
• 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.

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