Courses

• 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
  Topic for Fall 2013: Transnational American Studies. Drawing on examples from literature, history, art, photography, and architecture, this course explores the global origins of American culture. Topics include the immigrant experience; tourism; internationalism; and cultural crossings between Japan and the US in the late nineteenth century. Also offered as CAS AM 501.
• 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 2013: 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 2013: An examination of the country house as a literary, social, and architectural phenomenon in English culture through literature and the lens of art history and film. Authors include Jonson, Pope, Austen, Ishiguro, Wilde, and Stoppard.
• CAS EN 579: Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Fall 2013: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. Whitman and Dickinson as unruly eccentrics and as wholly representative nineteenth-century American writers, in the context of Emerson's call for a literature that embraces "the common." A course in cultural history and in close reading.
• 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.
• CAS EN 582: St Mod Lit
  This course description is currently under construction.
• CAS EN 584: Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
  Two topics are offered 2013/2014. Students may register for one or both for credit. Topic for Fall 2013: Literature of the Migrant. A reading of eleven novels that all bear on human migrations. Besides examining major issues, the focus is on how these books were made. Some of the texts are translations, but most of them are written by American authors. Topic for Spring 2014: 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 585: Contemporary American Poetry
  Tradition and innovation among post-WWII poets. Focus on individual volumes; may include: Plath, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Lowell, Bishop, Ashbery, Merrill, Simic, Hass, Glück, Komunyakaa.
• CAS EN 586: Studies in Anglophone Literature
  Topic for Fall 2011: Caribbean Poetry. Study of twentieth-century Caribbean poetry written in English(es), surveying anthologies and concentrating on major figures (Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Eric Roach). Emphases: the function of poets in small societies, and their choices concerning linguistic and aesthetic traditions. Also offered as CAS AA 538.
• CAS EN 587: Studies in African American Literature
  Topic for Spring 2013: Literacy in African American Literature. Examines literacy in African American literature and in constructions and negotiations of racial identity and social contact. Historical topics include slavery, freedom, higher education, migration, gender, sexuality, and politics. Authors include Douglass, Jacobs, Washington, Du Bois, Wright, Lorde. Also offered as CAS AA 502 B1.
• CAS EN 588: Studies in African American Literature
  Two topics are offered Spring 2014. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: African American Drama. A study of African American and Afro-Caribbean dramatic literature. Focuses on the work of August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott in the context of Western drama. Also offered as CAS AA 510 A1. Section B1: Transformations of Genre in the Twentieth-Century African American Novel. Major works drawn from the Harlem Renaissance, Realism, Modernism, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary period. Authors may include Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright, Anne Petry, Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, John Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison. Also offered as CAS AA 502 A1.
• CAS EN 593: Studies in Literature and the Arts
  Topic for Fall 2013: Forms of Fear: the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Intensive study of Hitchcock's films from the British silent period to his American masterworks, focusing on their formalist achievements and affective response (fear, dread, comic relief, "aesthetic bliss") they elicit. Readings: feminist and psychoanalytic film theory, some fiction. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 594: Studies in Literature and the Arts
  Two topics are offered 2013/2014. Students may register for one or both for credit. Topic for Fall 2013: Modernism: Text and Screen. Examines the multiple relays between the experiments of modernist literature and the (then) new art of film. Considers texts and films in which styles of writing are confused by, and bound up with, the act of seeing. Topic for Spring 2014: Dark Dreams: The Cinema of David Lynch. Intensive study of David Lynch's films, informed by readings in literature and Freudian psychoanalysis. Topics include: the logic of dreams, forms of evil, the death drive, and small-town America. Weekly screenings.
• CAS EN 595: Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Fall 2012: Language and Literature. Theories of language, meaning, signs, speech, and writing in relation to literary forms. What is language--and what is literary expression? Readings in theory include Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Derrida; and literary texts include works by Rousseau, Shelley, Woolf, and Beckett.
• CAS EN 596: Studies in Literary Topics
  Topic for Spring 2013: Science Fiction, Race, and Gender. Focuses on the contributions of writers of color and women to science fiction. Studies the features of the genre and asks how these texts articulate a social and political critique. Authors: Butler, Delany, Gibson, Hopkinson, LeGuin.
• CAS ES 101: The Dynamic Earth
  Introduction to the dynamic Earth, including plate tectonics, earthquake hazards and volcanic hazards, mountain-building processes; igneous, and metamorphic processes; surface processes, erosion, soil, and sediment formation; and hydrogeology. Interactions among the lithospheric, hydrospheric, atmospheric, and biospheric systems are emphasized. Three hours lecture, two hours lab, including field trips. Carries natural science divisional credit (with lab) in CAS.
• CAS ES 105: Environmental Earth Sciences
  Geological processes in environmental science; groundwater quantity and quality; geological resource supply and recovery; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural hazards; landforms, climate, desertification, glaciation, and ocean circulation patterns. Three hours lecture, two hours lab, including field trips. Carries natural science divisional credit (with lab) in CAS.

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