Courses

• CAS EN 519: Drama in Theory and Practice
  May be repeated for credit as topics vary. Two topics are offered Spring 2017. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: Adaptation and the Theatre. A seminar focusing on translation versus adaptation, comparing the two, and culling material from other writing genres. Students write their own stage adaptations as well as read various texts translated from the World Theatre. Section B1: Experiments with Character and Form. Includes reading and analysis of dramatic works, experimentation with full-length monologues and small cast plays with attention to structure and style. Presentation and critique of student work in workshop format. Students attend and write critiques of professional productions.
• CAS EN 520: Drama in Theory and Practice
  May be repeated for credit as topics vary. Topic for Fall 2016: Structure and the Contemporary Script. A comparison and analysis of the design of plays from the last decade, encouraging students to imitate the form, character, and plot from these plays while experimenting with their own narrative structures.
• 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, industrialism, sexuality, the American Dream, the New Woman, race and class, the image of the west. Authors may include Alger, Twain, James, Crane, Wharton, Norris, Wister, Chesnutt, Jewett.
• 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
  Modernist and later twentieth American poetry, including selected long poems and shorter lyrics, with attention to poets' prose, collaborations. Crane, Williams, Stevens, Stein, Loy, O'Hara, Olson, others. Some emphasis on unusual forms and persistence of visionary poetry despite anti-romantic stances.
• CAS EN 538: Teaching American Literature
  This course focuses on teaching American literature at the high school level. Goals include building a knowledge base in American literary history, modeling deep learning with selected texts, addressing theoretical questions in English Language Arts pedagogy, and learning practical classroom skills.
• 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
  Syllabus varies from semester to semester but this course may be taken only once for credit.
• CAS EN 547: Contemporary American Fiction
  Syllabus varies from semester to semester but this course may be taken only once for credit. Topic for Spring 2015: Major American Novels since 1984. Novels by De Lillo, Morrison, O'Brien, Oates, Roth, Lee, Alexie, K. Desai, and Diaz. Course topics include risk, multiculturalism, trauma and memory, cosmopolitanism and bilingualism.
• 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
  Explores John Milton's prose and poetry in the context of both the seventeenth century and our current critical moment. Issues include religious liberty, gender, republicanism, genre, sexuality, slavery, friendship, English civil wars, ecocriticism, career anxiety, and changing ideas of reading.
• CAS EN 568: Studies in British Literature
  Topic for Spring 2015: 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. Previous study of Shakespeare recommended.
• CAS EN 578: Studies in British Writers
  Topic for Fall 2014: Virginia Woolf. A careful examination of one of the most enigmatic, challenging, and consistently astonishing writers of the modern era. Students read a thorough selection of Woolf's fiction and exploratory essays, while contemplating recurrent problems of subjectivity, experimentalism, metaphor, gender, and history.
• CAS EN 579: Studies in American Writers
  Topic for Fall 2014: 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 582: Studies in Modern Literature
  Topic for Fall 2016: Joyce and After. Readings in transatlantic modernism (Irish, British, American) from 1922 forward. Joyce's Ulysses is central. Other readings from authors such as James Baldwin, Allison Bechdel, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Virginia Woolf.
• CAS EN 584: Studies in Literature and Ethnicity
  Topic for Fall 2016: 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.
• CAS EN 588: Studies in African American Literature
  Topic for Spring 2017: Tracking Changes in the Twentieth-Century African American Novel: Negotiations of Genre and Gender. Readings of Slave Narratives and Neo Slave Narratives, and the Urban Novel. Authors include Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Walter Mosley. Also offered as CAS AA 502.
• CAS EN 590: Studies in Comparative Literature
  Topic for Fall 2014: Cultural Crossings with Asia in the US. Explores how the availability of English translations and other formative cultural encounters with Asia shaped the development of American literature. Readings include works by Franklin, Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Whitman, Stein, Pound, Eliot, and Richard Wright.

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