Courses

• CAS EN 348: Topics in Modern Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for fall 2017: Modern Irish Writers. Poetry, plays, and fiction by Irish authors from 1890s to present. Writers may include Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, Muldoon, Boland.
• CAS EN 355: Drama and Performance, 1840?1945
  Theatre and performance history from 1840 to 1945: melodrama to modern drama, including dramatic realism, expressionism, symbolism, minstrelsy, suffrage, folk theater. Plays by Boucicault, Ibsen, Robins, Strindberg, Chekhov, Hurston, Wilde, Treadwell, O'Neill. Birth of modern techniques of acting, design, directing.
• CAS EN 356: Drama and Performance, 1945?Present
  Theater history and performance art from 1945 to the present. Playwrights may include Beckett, Miller, Williams, Churchill, Soyinka, Deveare Smith, Kushner, Parks. Modern and postmodern techniques of acting, design, directing, installation, and happenings.
• 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
  Examines the African American female literary tradition through selected texts by African American women, written from slavery to the present. Topic for Fall 2016: 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 372: Politics and Culture in Britain, 1660-1759
  Introduction to British politics, philosophy, religion, society, and literature, 1660-1759. Many modern ideas, including democracy and individual liberty, had their origins in these years; literary works include slashing satire, sparkling comedy, wicked obscenity, and profound meditations on human nature. Also offered as CAS HI 357.
• 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. Two topics are offered Fall 2017. Section A1: Hollywood 1939. Intensive study of films, and literary works adapted into films, made in the greatest year in Hollywood history, including Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Weekly screenings. Also offered as CAS CI 390 A1. Section B1: On The Road in U.S. Literature and Film. Course "puts the geography of the United States in motion" (Nabokov, Lolita) exploring why characters take to the road and what happens when they do. Novels by Hemingway, Salinger, Ellison, Nabokov, Robinson. Films by Ford, Benedek, Lumet, Scott, Dayton & Faris.
• CAS EN 377: Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
  This study of the Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935) focuses on literature with overviews of the stage, the music, and the visual arts. Authors include Du Bois, Locke, Garvey, Schuyler, Hurston, McKay, Larsen, Fisher, Hughes, Cullen. Also offered as CAS AA 507.
• CAS EN 379: American Poetry
  A survey of American poetry, from the Revolutionary era up through the post-WWII period, introducing the fundamentals of poetic form and lyric practice, as well as the historical and cultural contexts surrounding the development of Romanticism, Modernism, and beyond.
• CAS EN 386: Topics in Anglophone Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Topic for Fall 2016: Postcolonial Theater. Study of 20th-century Irish, Nigerian, Caribbean, and South African theater; questions of national styles, language and dialect, relations with metropolitan centers of power.
• CAS EN 389: Fictional Forms
  Topic for Fall 2017: The Gothic: Monsters, Myths, History. Survey of Gothic as a narrative form (by contrast with the realistic novel) with attention to history (as a Gothic narrative) and modern myths (Frankenstein's monster, vampire, zombie, cyborg). Nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction primarily, with an eye on today throughout.
• CAS EN 390: Topics in Comparative Literature
  May be repeated for credit as topics change each semester. Two topics are offered Spring 2017. Students may take one or both for credit. Section A1: Murakami and His American Sources. Examines elements of postmodernism and intertextuality in the work of the world's best-selling Japanese writer. Readings in Murakami and his literary, cultural, and cinematic influences: Poe, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Vonnegut, Carver, Irving, and others. Also offered as CAS LJ 451 B1 and CAS XL 470 B1. Section B1: Lolita in the World. Lolita as a masterpiece of world literature and as a global pop-culture phenomenon. In-depth study of the novel, followed by analysis of film adaptations. Middle- Eastern and Asian Lolitas also under review. Taught in English. Also offered as CAS LR 456 B1 and CAS XL 470 C1.
• CAS EN 401: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS EN 402: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS EN 404: Literary Criticism I
  A historical survey of western literary-critical standards from the earliest surviving formulations in classical Athens to the dawn of the twentieth century. Writers include Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Johnson, Hegel, Nietzsche, Du Bois, Freud; questions of truth, rhetoric, pleasure, selfhood, politics.
• 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 465: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Fall 2017: Hamlet/Lear/Macbeth: Appropriation and Performance. Historical context, performance histories, and appropriations and transformations of Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. Films, novels, plays from England, France, Germany, Russia, Australia, Japan, and the US. Theoretical analysis of intertextuality, cultural politics, canon formation, globalization of culture.

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