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2016-2017 Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Descriptions
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Course Numbering
The College of Wooster uses a five-digit course numbering system. The first three digits indicate the primary course number. The next two digits are the secondary course number and indicate whether there is a special focus for the course. For example:
The first letters are the department or program abbreviation. The next three digits are the primary course number (101 is the primary course number for all Introduction to Historial Study courses). The last two digits are the secondary course number. These two digits indicate that the special focus for this HIST 101 course is The History of Islam. A course with a given three-digit primary course number can only be taken once for credit unless specifically indicated otherwise by the department.
The following policy has been used in assigning primary course numbers:
- 100-level courses are usually introductory courses; some 100-level courses do have prerequisites, and students are advised to consult the description for each course.
- 200-level courses are usually beyond the introductory level, although many 200-level courses are open to first-year students and to majors and non-majors.
- 300-level courses are seminars and courses primarily for majors but open to other students with the consent of the instructor.
- The following numbers are for Independent Study: I.S. 40100 (Junior Independent Study), I.S. 45100 and I.S. 45200 (Senior Independent Study).
In addition to the regular course offerings, many departments offer individual tutorials under the number 40000 and internships under 41000. On occasion, departments will offer a course on a special topic as approved by the Educational Policy Committee, designated 19900, 29900, or 39900.
Abbreviation
In keeping with the general education requirements of the College’s curriculum
(see Degree Requirements ), course listings employ the following abbreviations:
W Writing Intensive (W† indicates that not all sections are Writing Intensive)
C Studies in Cultural Difference
R Religious Perspectives
Q Quantitative Reasoning
AH Learning Across the Disciplines: Arts and Humanities
HSS Learning Across the Disciplines: History and Social Sciences
MNS Learning Across the Disciplines: Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Except where otherwise noted, all courses carry one course credit.
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Education Student Teaching
Student Teaching is required in all three licensure areas. This is the culminating experience in the Teacher Education Program and consists of a full-time, twelve-week supervised teaching experience in a setting appropriate to the areas of licensure. In addition, participation in the Student Teaching Seminar, held one evening a week throughout the entire semester, is required of ALL student teachers. During the Fall semester, Student Teaching placement begins on the first day of the public school’s academic year (usually one week before the College begins) and continues through mid-November. Student teachers are expected to be available during the week prior to placement for orientation activities. The remaining five weeks of the semester are dedicated to Independent Study and Student Teaching Seminar. If completed in the Spring semester, students dedicate the first four weeks of the semester to Independent Study and Student Teaching Seminar, and then begin the Student Teaching placement in early February. If the student is completing Student Teaching as a post-graduate and the Independent Study requirement is fulfilled, the dates for Student Teaching and requirement of Student Teaching Seminar remain the same. The student teacher is responsible for providing his/her own transportation throughout the Student Teaching experience. Enrollment in this course is typically limited to seniors or recent post-graduates. Prerequisite: All professional Education courses and mostto- all content-related coursework. Annually. Fall and Spring.
Global/Urban Student Teaching
Students may also elect to student teach in a global or urban setting through Educators Abroad- a college-endorsed study-abroad program. Students participating in this program must attend Student Teaching Seminar in the semester prior to their student teaching experience and complete all of the College of Wooster student teaching requirements and forms. Students interested in pursuing this placement option should inform the Field Director two-semesters prior to the semester they wish to student teach.
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EDUC 49000 - Early Childhood Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a pre-school, K, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade classroom. Annually.
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EDUC 49100 - Early Childhood Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a pre-school, K, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade classroom. Annually.
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EDUC 49200 - Early Childhood Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a pre-school, K, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade classroom. Annually.
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EDUC 49300 - Adolescent/Young Adult Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a local, approved adolescent and young adult setting (grades 7-12) within the appropriate area of licensure. Annually.
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EDUC 49400 - Adolescent/Young Adult Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a local, approved adolescent and young adult setting (grades 7-12) within the appropriate area of licensure. Annually.
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EDUC 49500 - Adolescent/Young Adult Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a local, approved adolescent and young adult setting (grades 7-12) within the appropriate area of licensure. Annually.
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EDUC 49600 - Multiage Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
(MUED)
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a local, approved multiage music setting (two different levels, divided among the pre-school, K-6, 7-8, and 9-12 environments). Annually.
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EDUC 49700 - Multiage Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
(MUED)
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a local, approved multiage music setting (two different levels, divided among the pre-school, K-6, 7-8, and 9-12 environments). Annually.
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EDUC 49800 - Multiage Student Teaching and Seminar Course Credit: 1
(MUED)
Placement consists of a full-time, 12-week supervised teaching experience in a local, approved multiage music setting (two different levels, divided among the pre-school, K-6, 7-8, and 9-12 environments). Annually.
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English Culture
A culture is a complex set of expressions and structures consisting of beliefs, expectations, actions, and institutions. Among the most important expressions of a culture are the texts that are written and read within it. These texts are deeply embedded in and shaped by the beliefs and practices of the cultures in which they were first written and by the beliefs and practices of later cultures in which they are read and written about.
Text
Texts are integral to and shaped by cultures, but as parts of culture, texts significantly shape and change cultures as well. The courses in this category inquire particularly into how the reading and writing of texts contribute to changing and defining cultures and individuals.
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ENGL 12000 - Language, Literature and Culture Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course introduces students to fundamental issues of literary language and textual interpretation. Each section focuses on a selected topic in literary studies to consider the ways language functions in the reading process and to explore interrelations among literature, culture, and history. Attention is given to the following goals: 1) practicing the close reading of literary texts; 2) understanding the terminology of literary analysis as well as core concepts; 3) introducing a range of genres and historical periods and discussing literature as an evolving cultural phenomenon; 4) increasing skills in writing about literature. This course is required for the major and strongly recommended as the first course in English for non-majors. Annually. [AH]
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ENGL 12001 - Imagining America Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Many writers of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and theatre are preoccupied with shifting ideas of Americaness and of the American experience as seen by the diverse cultural groups that make up the country. In this introductory English course, we will compare and contrast clever descriptions of America’s landscape and promises related by people of a wide variety of races and ethnicities, socioeconomic classes, and genders. We will ask ourselves questions about the changing nature and form of the American dream, the emergence of a multicultural community, and the role of literature in creating a unified narrative of national identity. Selected texts by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Weldon Johnson, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Murkerjee, Lorraine Hansberry, Sandra Cisneros, or Paule Marshall will be central to our evolving definition of what it means to be American in crucial period of national transformation, including the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the age of Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and post-Civil Rights. Annually. [AH, W]
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ENGL 12005 - Modern Selves Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course focuses on how the self has been represented over time in poetry, fiction, and drama. The course gives special attention to how literary expressions of selfhood and crises of the self have developed in relation to three contexts: first, to historical shifts in understanding and preoccupations, from the early modern to the postmodern world; second, to such cultural positions as are defined by gender, race, ethnicity, class, and national origin; and third, to the shaping influences of literary language and genres. Works studied may include texts by Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Henry James, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Malouf, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Paul Auster. [AH]
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ENGL 12006 - Gods & Monsters Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
If, as some have claimed, society needs its gods, then it seems to need its monsters as well. But why? In this course we’ll examine early manifestations of gods and monsters (Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Mahabharata, Popol Vuh) in order to uncover the origin of the desire for the monstrous and the divine. We’ll conclude with more contemporary examples (Frankenstein, The Golem, cinematic horror) to discover how and why this desire persists. [AH]
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ENGL 12007 - LLC: Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This class will explore moments in which the encounter with another culture, gender, or place unleashes sexual and literary awakenings, along with transformations from youth to adulthood. We will begin with one of the most influential texts on literary transformations, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as we explore the traumatic entry into experiences of dreams, poetry, and sexual passion. Texts will likely include the contemporary Caribbean play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, the sixteenth-century British play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the medieval Arabic collection, The One Thousand and One Nights, and the contemporary transnational novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh. [AH]
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ENGL 12008 - The Gothic Imagination Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
The Gothic is generally linked in people’s imagination to B movies, trashy novels, and mournful teenagers. But the genre has its roots in canonical literature of the late 18th and 19th century: the sublime geographies and alienated individuals of the Romantic era. Today, the Gothic has mutated across a range of media and connects literary and cultural studies. While establishing central tropes of the genre (including the Gothic monster both technological and psychological, dark secrets, mysterious doubles, the nature of evil, and the relationship between human and nature) we will examine the ways these wild stories of death, despair, doubles, degeneration and desire helped readers to forge national identities, negotiate the territory between Self and Other, and conceptualize the relationships among humans, nature, and technology. Readings range from 18th and 19th century literature through contemporary news accounts, advertisements, film, and television; authors will be mostly 19th century British, but will include some Americans and Latin Americans as well (examples: Walpole, Radcliffe, Byron, Mary Shelley, Austen, Stoker, Poe, Garcia Marquez, Benitez Rojo, Ferre and Ocampo). At the end of the course, you will prove your mastery of the genre by creating your own Gothic text. [AH]
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ENGL 12015 - Animals in Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, ENVS)
To determine whether authors “personify” animals, what do readers assume about the differences between humans and other animals? Serving as an introduction to literature and analysis, this course also attempts to identify and transcend literary interpretation’s traditional human-centeredness. Students will learn, for example, how understanding terms like “metaphor” and “allegory” can propel them toward controversial interpretations, especially of how animals function complexly in a wide variety of literary works. Featured texts include Hûeg’s novel The Woman and the Ape; Vaughan and Staples’s Saga comics; poems by Atwood, Neruda, Angelou, and many others; Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Shaffer’s play Equus. [AH]
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ENGL 12016 - Unreal Cities Course Credit: 1
This course investigates fundamental issues of literary language and textual interpretation. This section focuses on the imaginative construction of the urban or city landscape. Texts may include T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” Colson Whitehead’s “Intuitionist,” China Mieville’s “Embassytown,” Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, and works by Borges, Calvino, and Murakami. [AH]
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ENGL 12018 - Writing in the Age of Terror Course Credit: 1
How does literature attempt-or decline-to make sense of violence perpetrated in the pursuit of political aims? How can literature help us navigate a world in which terror has changed the relationship between self and state, self and society? How do states and societies employ the language of terror to produce foreign others and shore up the nation? These questions will give us entry into a wide range of literature-including poetry, fiction, drama, and film-from Shakespeare to Zero Dark Thirty. Annually. [AH]
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ENGL 12019 - The Watery Part of the World Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
This course will consider the ocean as a literary subject, with a special focus on its relation to the economic and political history of empire and globalization, and the ecological crises that have arisen from these historical developments. As an introduction to literary and cultural studies, the course will also explore a wide array of cultural productions from a variety of genres and time periods, including the ancient epic, renaissance drama, the nineteenth-century novel, and contemporary lyric poetry, as well as essays in environmental philosophy, popular journalism, and documentary film. Topics will include: global warming and ocean acidification, animal ethics and the crisis of mass extinction, and the role of the humanities in theorizing our planetary future. [AH]
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ENGL 12020 - Stuff: Lit & Material Objects Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important,” said Rachel Carson, “simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.” In this course, we will explore how literary works reflect-and transform-attitudes toward nature. Our reach will be expansive in time and space, encompassing Old English epics, Romantic poetry and prose, frontier fiction, global environmental justice writing, and contemporary North American science fiction. As we practice the basic skills of literary analysis, we will continue to ask how literary works shape our sense of the nonhuman world. Major texts will include Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!, and Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake. We will also read shorter pieces by Mary Rowlandson, J. Hector St. John de Créveceour, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Derek Walcott, and Juliana Spahr, among others. English majors and minors may take a second English 120xx for credit, but it will not count as one of the required electives for the major or the minor. [AH]
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ENGL 12021 - Hoards & Other Stuff: Lit & Material Obj Course Credit: 1
Tupperware, trinkets, puzzle pieces, and plastic bags. Our world is littered with stuff, accumulations that sometimes devolve into hoards, as reality television has made clear. In this course we will explore our relationship to things-and their longstanding place in literature. We will read objects as vessels for social, affective, and economic investments, but also confront such questions as: What do objects signify, if anything? Why do we accumulate so much, and how has that tendency transferred into the digital age? Readings will include: a hoarder’s memoir and a decluttering handbook; poetry by Alexander Pope, Christina Rossetti, T.S. Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges; novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence; and essays by Donald Winnicott, Susan Stewart, and Teju Cole. English majors and minors may take a second English 120xx for credit, but it will not count as one of the required electives for the major or the minor. [AH]
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ENGL 12022 - Intro Lit. Studies Nature, Text and Body Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
Nature is not over there in the “wilderness,” but is all around us. It is within us, it is the middle of the largest city, it is the depths of the oceans, it is nuclear waste sites, and it is indigenous lands. This class surveys a range of 19th, 20th, and 21st century novels, poetry, and drama that respond to and ask questions such as: what is the line between the human and the animal?; in what ways is environmental damage unequally distributed over different populations?; how do we represent the centuries-long disasters of nuclear waste or melting ice caps?; and how do we imagine the world after the environmental apocalypse? [AH]
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ENGL 12023 - LLC: Popular Religion in Literature Course Credit: 1
From Beowulf to today’s bestseller lists, literature can give us insights into religious cultures beyond orthodoxy, and less likely to be recorded than official teachings. This course will examine beliefs and believers outside dominant systems, from medieval epics to seventeenth-century satires, and from the rebels of the Romantic movement to award-winning authors such as Toni Morrison. [AH]
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ENGL 12024 - Anti-Fascism: Art & Politics Course Credit: 1
This course will examine anti-fascist social movements, focusing particularly on the histories and literatures of 20th century writers and artists engaged in anti-imperial, anti-fascist activism. We’ll examine the efforts European Surrealists took against French imperialism, the works of Czech writers who fought Nazi rule, the literature of Korean writers who resisted colonialism, and Black feminist poets opposing segregation and antiblack/white supremacist structures. The course will also explore the unsettled relationship between activism and art, looking closely at critical theory that examines the aesthetics of politics, and the politics of aesthetics. English majors and minors may take a second English 120xx for credit, but it will not count as one of the required electives for the major or the minor. [AH]
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ENGL 12025 - LLC: Looking Behind Paradise Course Credit: 1
The Caribbean is commonly viewed as a tourist’s paradise, where the sun, ocean, and rum meet under a perfect sky. As a paradise, it is seen as static, exotic, eternal, yet also a site of temporary escape. This perspective, however, obscures the historical legacies of the region, which include colonialism, plantation economies, slavery, and forced migration. More recently, the region has been defined by political instability, economic underdevelopment, and neocolonialism. Of course, similar blinds are in place in regards to other cultures, exoticizing rather than illuminating the complicated histories of these places. How, then, do Caribbean writers and other writers make sense of these histories, especially when they leave a place imagined by outsiders as heaven on earth? In this course, we will read works by authors, seemingly from paradise, who grapple with and connect the past, the present, the personal, and the political. Using their writings, we will interrogate what it means to be a migratory subject who is anchored in these histories, but who also moves beyond “paradise.” English majors and minors may take a second English 120xx for credit, but it will not count as one of the required electives for the major or the minor. [AH]
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ENGL 12026 - LLC: From Beowulf to Bestsellers Course Credit: 1
From Beowulf to today’s bestseller lists, literature can give us insights into religious cultures beyond orthodoxy, and less likely to be recorded than official teachings. This course will examine beliefs and believers outside dominant systems, from medieval epics to seventeenth-century satires, and from the rebels of the Romantic movement to award-winning authors such as Toni Morrison. [AH]
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ENGL 12027 - LLC: Memory & Gender in Caribbean Lit. Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
Memory is often dictated by the dominant perspectives of history, but is also a site of preserving alternative interpretations of the past’s relationship to the present. As Caribbean history is marked by genocide, rupture, conquest, and migration, writers must find creative methods to reclaim silenced memories. For example, they often produce counter-histories through the body, environment, and dreams. We will investigate how this process is also deeply gendered, as it impacts how Caribbean masculinities, femininities, and queerness are imagined. By reading novels, poetry, essays, and theory, we will examine how language, race, and gender are related to the treatment of memory in decolonizing the Caribbean. [AH]
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ENGL 16000 - Introduction to Non-Fictional Writing Course Credit: 1
This course introduces students to major writers and genres of contemporary and classic non-fictional writing-particularly the genres of memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, editorial writing, critical writing, and film review. The course focuses on answering questions such as “What is non-fiction?” “What are the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction?” and “What is the relationship between reading non-fictional writings and writing about them?” Students write and read non-fiction by comparing and contrasting students’ writings in creative non-fiction, the critical essay, and the review essay with those by contemporary and classic essay writers, and with writings by other students in the class as well. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16002 - Autobiographical Writing (Memoir) Course Credit: 1
This course focuses on analysis, discussion, and practice of autobiographical writing, with an emphasis on memoir. The course explores the aims and conventions of the genre, emphasizing course participants’ own writing. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16003 - Nature and Environmental Writing Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
This course explores the traditions and current practices of writing connected with the natural world. Along with the exploration of already published works in nature and environmental writing, the course may include off-campus field trips and emphasizes course participants’ own writing and peer feedback workshops. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16004 - Critical/Creative Non-Fiction Course Credit: 1
This class introduces students to major writers and genres of contemporary and classic non-fictional writing particularly the genres of memoir, personal essay, literary criticism, and film review. As we consider these texts, we will be answering the questions: ‘What is non-fiction?’ ‘What is the relationship between reading non-fictional writings and writing about them?’ and ‘What are the boundaries between creative and critical non-fictional writing?’ Throughout the semester, students will be writing and reading non-fiction by comparing and contrasting students’ writings with those by contemporary and classic essay writers. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16006 - Non Fiction Writing: Middle Eastern Women’s Memoirs Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
The course will examine the relationships between geopolitical upheavals in the Middle East, postocolonialsms, politics, third world feminisms, and gender and sexuality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We will examine how the genre of the memoir reveals both the possibilities and limitations of Middle Eastern women’s constructions of selves, otherness, femininity, and national identity. Writers include Suheir Hammad, Marjane Satrapi, Azar Nafisi, Nadine Naber & Lucette Langado. This is a writing intensive course and will be primarily critical/literary analysis essays. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16007 - Travel Writing Course Credit: 1
Travel writing shapes our encounters with specific places; conversely the encounter with place inevitably shapes the traveller. This course explores the conventions, strategies, and current practices of travel writing, with the goal of connecting course members’ own travels to course discussions and assignments. Our readings and other texts will reflect the specific locations visited by or of interest to class participants; we may also take field trips as a class. Participants’ own travel writing will be published in an online magazine produced by the class. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16008 - Non-Fiction Wrtg: Creative Nonfiction Course Credit: 1
This course introduces students to the lyric essay, a genre that troubles the lines between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and essay, cultural criticism and imaginative writing, theory and autobiography. We will read, and students will be encouraged to write, on a wide range of topics, which may include the variances of inhabiting gender, media and American selfhood, pretentiousness, and the color blue. [AH, W]
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ENGL 16100 - Introduction to Poetry and Fiction Writing Course Credit: 1
This course is an introduction to writing in a variety of fictional forms, especially short stories and poems. Participants analyze and discuss both published writing and their own writing. Priority given to English majors. Annually. [AH]
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ENGL 19900 - Apprenticeship in Editing A Literary Magazine Course Credit: 0.25
This course provides an opportunity for students to serve as an assistant editor for the Artful Dodge, a nationally-distributed journal of new American writing, graphics, and literature in translation. Students are exposed to the daily operations of editing a professional literary publication, engaging in a number of important activities such as designing and developing the magazine’s web-site, editorial and promotional copy-writing, evaluating manuscripts, typesetting and proofreading, and organizing off-campus literary events. Students read histories of the American literary journal in addition to exploring other currently-published literary magazines. Annually. [AH]
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ENGL 20000 - Investigations in Literary and Research Methods Course Credit: 1
This course is a writing course designed specifically for English majors. The course examines reading, writing, and conducting research as interrelated processes enabling one to investigate literary texts and other cultural work. Students 1) become familiar with several literary theories and understand what it means to ground literary investigation in a set of theoretical principles; 2) engage with ongoing scholarly conversations and become familiar with research methods; and 3) develop their own voices within the conventions of writing in the discipline. Priority given to sophomore majors. Juniors, non-majors, and second-semester first-year students with permission of course instructor. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-120xx Annually. [AH, W]
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ENGL 21000 - Gender, Race, and Ethnicity Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Inquiries into how cultural beliefs and practices about gender, race, and ethnicity are transmitted by and sometimes transformed through texts and their readers. May be repeated.
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ENGL 21002 - Black Women Writers Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT, WGSS)
This course examines the writings of black women from 1746 to the present. Focusing on the major texts in the canon of African American women’s writing, the course considers the distinct cultural possibilities that enabled various forms of literary production throughout black women’s history in America. [AH]
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ENGL 21004 - Empire Boys (pre 1900) Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
This course interrogates the gender models constructed and contested within 19th century literature and popular culture, with a specific but not exclusive focus on masculinity. British culture accommodated very different-and often conflicting-models of “manliness” as a result of industrialization and the rapid rise of the British Empire; these included “muscular Christianity,” the Sahib, the dandy, and the flaneur or aesthete. Seeking to understand the ways that imperial models of masculinity continue to inflect gender roles for both men and women today, we will explore a range of genres, including adventure and sensation novels; poetry and drama; popular culture; and literary and gender theory. We will read authors like Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, Thomas Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Bradden, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, and Joseph Conrad, as well as theorist and critics like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Richard Dellamora, James Eli Adams, and John Tosh. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 21008 - Gender, Sex, and Texts, 350-1500 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
This course explores the cultural configurations of gender and sexuality as represented in various kinds of writings and cultural productions (literature, philosophy, biography, legal documents, medical writings, and the visual arts) from the Middle Ages. By interrogating the assumptions that colored the representations of the feminine in the medieval period, the course sets the stage for exploring what women of the period (such as Marie de France and Heloise) seemed to be saying when they responded to these assumptions. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 21009 - Post/Colonial Literature and Film Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
This course examines questions of identity (with particular emphasis on gender, race, and nation) in colonial and postcolonial novels, poems, and film. While acknowledging the problematic nature of the term “postcolonial,” we will examine paired colonial and postcolonial texts to understand the codes of race, gender, and nation constructed during the imperial era, and echoed, critiqued, and/or subverted in the postcolonial era. Our textual interpretations will be informed by postcolonial and gender theory. [AH, C]
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ENGL 21014 - Religion in Black Film and Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course analyzes the complicated role of religion, particularly Christianity, in black communities during slavery, the Great Migration, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the Post Civil Rights Era. The course considers ways in which religion is shown to empower and/or oppress black people; ways in which the politics of class, gender, and sexuality inflect black religious practices; and strategies by which transcendent, spiritual experiences are represented. Films may include Spencer Williams’ The Blood of Jesus; Stan Lathan’s Go Tell it on the Mountain; Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls; Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust; and T.D. Jakes’ Woman Thou Art Loosed. Texts by Alice Walker, Melba P. Beals, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest Gaines, as well as some visual art, are also considered. [AH, R]
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ENGL 21018 - Sex and Gender in the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
Consider the following scenarios from Restoration and eighteenth-century literature: a man pretends to be impotent so that he can sleep with other men’s wives; two lovers (male and female) compete for the affections of the same male servant; a reformed prostitute writes letters describing her experiences with male and female partners. To interpret such literary representations accurately, we need to recognize that conceptions of sex, gender, and related topics in the Restoration and eighteenth century differed considerably from modern conceptions. For instance, did you know that scholars such as Michel Foucault have dated the concept of sexual orientation to the nineteenth century? How might this realization-that “gay,” “straight,” and “bi” are relatively modern categories-impact interpretations of the literary scenarios described above? In this course, we will consider such questions as we read a variety of literature from the Restoration and eighteenth century alongside modern scholarship about gender and sexuality. As we develop historically aware interpretations of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, we will improve our understanding of sex and gender in both the eighteenth century and the modern period. Featured literary authors will include William Wycherley; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Henry Fielding; Charlotte Clarke; and John Cleland. Featured scholars will include Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 21022 - Global Anglophone Literature After 1900 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course will examine a series of 20th century transnational novelists, essayists, and poets who interrogate questions of home, national belonging, and erotic desire. The writers include: Hisham Matar, Allison Bechdel, Hanif Kureishi, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje, Leila Aboulela, and Marjane Satrapi. [AH]
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ENGL 21023 - Black Modernisms and Global Modernities Course Credit: 1
This class will explore several versions of black modernism through close study of novels, poetry, and criticism. Our study of black modernism means that we will explore writings by African-American, Caribbean, and African authors as modernist texts, but also that we will reflect on how “blackness” is historically produced by and within a certain experience of global modernity. We will think of modernisms in the plural in order to consider different temporal iterations of black modernist experiment, beyond the traditional chronology focusing on the early 20th century. Topics include: the blues as a “counter-culture of modernity,” the “Harlem Renaissance” as a transnational movement, civil rights and Cold War aesthetics, the Black Arts movement, and contemporary critical debates around “Afro-pessimism.” [AH]
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ENGL 21025 - Shakespeare to Wilde (pre-1900) Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
This course surveys literature from approximately 1600-1900 with emphasis on analyzing representations of same-sex friendships, romances, and sexual relationships and on understanding how they were imagined differently than they would later be in the 20th and 21st centuries. Featured texts may include sonnets by Richard Barnfield and William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, poems by Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, erotic fiction by Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 21026 - Lit, Cul & Environment Crisis Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
We live in a world threatened by global warming and mass extinction across the entire web of life. This course, as an introduction to the environmental humanities, will consider a number of ways the arts and humanities might help us understand and respond to this planetary emergency. While the focus of the course will be on what we might think of as “scientific” phenomena, our materials will range across various disciplines, forms, and genres, from novels and poetry to recent popular journalism, documentary films, and scholarly essays in literary and environmental studies. Topics will include: global warming and ocean acidification, animal ethics and mass extinction, and the role of the humanities in theorizing our planetary future under conditions of ecological emergency. [AH]
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ENGL 21027 - Who Runs the World? Girls in Contemp Lit Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
Girls, Beyonce tells us, run the world. A powerful idea, and one worth engaging with. But before we can even begin to consider this claim we have to ask: what is a girl? Like all social concepts “girl” is not a natural category but one that has been created and changes over time. Focusing on late-20th and 21st century literature and culture, this class will explore what it means to be a girl today in relation to issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality. [AH]
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ENGL 21028 - Cyborgs and A.I.: Asian American-Lit. Course Credit: 1
Asian immigration, labor, and the formation of Asian American communities occupy a particular aesthetic in the U.S. imagination. All of the familiar tropes, from model minority, to suspicious foreigner, to the emotionless, situate the composited machinery of this imaging of the Asian American exterior. This course will examine Asian American literature, art, and film that address Asian American politics and subjectivities through speculative poetry, cyborg dramas, and machine learning, and will also take up the racialized and gendered contours of artificial intelligence. [AH]
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ENGL 21029 - Asian-American Literature Course Credit: 1
Within the context of European and American expansionism, a scholar writes, “Asians did not go to America; Americans went to Asia.” Asian diasporic literatures in the United States thus reflect ethnic resistance against legal, economic, social, and cultural practices of white nationalism and imperialism. Reading 19th-21st century texts by East, South, Southeast and West Asians in America, students will explore the perspectives of immigrants, second generation Americans, transnational adoptees, survivors of war, and activists. [AH]
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ENGL 22000 - Writers Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Inquiries into how individual writers’ works are shaped in interaction with life experiences and cultural contexts. Each course will give close attention to texts by an individual writer or small group of related writers and will examine the relationship between those texts and significant issues in a writer’s life and social environment. May be repeated.
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ENGL 22001 - Shakespeare Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This class considers the following questions: How did Shakespeare’s plays come out of the literary, cultural, and political ideas and controversies of his time? How did his plays change and develop over his twenty-year period of writing? How did the major genres he wrote in-Comedy, History, Tragedy, and Romance-reflect his explorations of issues of gender, race, and aesthetics? [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 22002 - William Faulkner Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course explores the novels and short fiction of the American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962) within the context of the social history and literary culture of his time. It gives special attention to his innovations in form. [AH]
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ENGL 22011 - James Baldwin and Toni Morrison Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT, WGSS)
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison are certainly two of the most significant authors of the 20th century. This course allows an intense study of their major works, including novels, theatre, short stories, essays, and literary critics’ responses to them all. We’ll explore answers to questions such as the following: What constitutes African American community, as well as larger U.S. and global communities? How are race, class, gender, and sexuality intersecting in our variety of selected texts? In what ways are Baldwin and Morrison using jazz and the blues, critiquing whiteness, and otherwise unraveling societal politics? And, in sum, how are Baldwin and Morrison speaking to or against one another? Texts may include Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; If Beale Street Could Talk; Just Above My Head; Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone; or, Giovanni’s Room, and, Morrison’s Love; Beloved; Playing in the Dark; Tar Baby; or, Song of Solomon, among others. Interviews and documentary films will be analyzed, and some visual art may be considered. [AH]
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ENGL 22013 - Chaucer Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
While we will focus primarily on The Canterbury Tales, we will also examine a number of cultural documents from the period. Our purpose will be to reconstruct a portrait of the poet and his milieu that will enable us to come to terms with the work which has more or less constituted Chaucer’s legacy. In evaluating this legacy we will consider whether (in the absence of an ‘authorized’ text) we can talk in terms of a single text of The Canterbury Tales, or whether we should see the extant versions of the work as a multitude of texts which responded to various socio-historical and textual pressures even as they shaped the culture which produced them. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 22014 - Shakespeare (pre 1800) Course Credit: 1
[AH]
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ENGL 23000 - Special Topics: History Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT)
disruption, and change over time in the emergence, significance, and influence of texts. Special attention will be given to definitions of history and periods, the development and change of canons, and the role of authority, society, and institutions in the study of texts. May be repeated. [AH]
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ENGL 23002 - Survey of African American Literature Course Credit: 1
(AFST, CMLT)
This course is a historical study of the development and change of black themes and consciousness as manifested in poetry, fiction, autobiography, and essays, and of their correspondence with the literature produced by other ethnic groups in America. [AH]
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ENGL 23004 - Literature of the Cold War Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
This course explores various English-language texts (including fiction, poetry, film, and drama) produced within the Cold War period and the ways in which the historical concerns of the era were represented in these texts. Special attention will be paid to the concept of “the other,” examining its function as a dramatic device as well as the numerous metaphorical representations of such a perception of dualities in conflict: east vs. west, left vs. right, patriot vs. subversive, hawk vs. dove, eagle vs. bear, and so on. [AH]
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ENGL 23007 - Revolution and Reform: Nineteenth-Century British Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
With its anxieties about shifting views of gender, race, and class and its failing imperial adventures, British culture of the nineteenth century uncannily resembles Anglo-American culture of the twenty-first. The nineteenth century ushered in an age of transformation; people struggled to absorb astonishing scientific and technological change, terrifying though exhilarating social experiments, and rapid globalization. This course will focus on four of the central transitions of the nineteenth century - industrialization, escalating class conflicts, shifting views of gender, and the growth of Empire - and explore some of the major authors of the period, including Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23011 - Literature of the Beat Generation Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course explores the historical, literary, and social contexts giving rise to the generation of writers commonly referred to as Beats, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, and Hettie Jones. Special attention is paid to the study of Buddhism and jazz, both powerful influences on Beat writing. Issues of race, gender, and sexuality are also explored. [AH]
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ENGL 23012 - Poetry Since World War Ii Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
During his acceptance speech for the 1970 National Book Award for Poetry, Robert Lowell characterized the state of American poetry as involving a schism between “the raw and the cooked,” a division between poets (and readers of poetry) who expected new poetry to follow the fixed forms of the past, and those who thought this new poetry should be “free.” A major focus of this course on American, British and other English-speaking poetries in the years after World War II will be to consider this tension, looking at the early fractures between the New Critics and the Beats, the rise of “organic verse” in the 1960s, the Neo-formalist poetry of the 1980s, and the rise of rap-connected poetry in the 1990s. We will also explore how these spats within poetry might reflect wider cultural dynamics, be they ones influenced by the Cold War, by mass media, or by changing perspectives on what constitutes artistic tradition and authority. We will also explore the boundaries of the genre, looking at prose-poetry, spoken word poetry, song and rap lyrics as well as the presence of poetry in advertising and film. [AH]
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ENGL 23026 - The Early American Novel Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This is a survey of the novel in the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War. The course will focus equally on text and context, attending to matters of aesthetics and literary form, as well as the ways in which these novels affirm or resist the prevailing ideas and political conditions of their time. Reading in this way, we will consider the relation of literature to history, the ways literary texts are shaped by their historical circumstances, and how they shape our understanding of the world in which they were produced. The course thus examines literary history as both an effect and an agent in the period’s social and political histories, which include national expansion, the rise and consolidation of U.S. capitalism, and increasing tensions between North and South over the critical issue of slavery, which culminated in the Civil War. Readings may include: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple; Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive; James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers; Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter; Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall; and Martin Delany’s Blake, or, the Huts of America. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23028 - Contemporary Autobiographical Fiction Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
Do we long for the feeling of something real now more than ever? In recent years, autobiographical fiction, or autofiction, has bloomed as a genre, earning accolades and even a manifesto, David Shields’ Reality Hunger, an “ars poetica” for artists “who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.” From Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? to Percival Everett’s Erasure and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, we will explore the space autofiction makes for exploring the limits of our genders and our sexualities, masculinities and femininities, race and class, our lusts and our hang-ups-the world as it is, just a little different. Will we find, where realism meets artifice, a realer real? Students will write weekly close reading assignments, a midterm essay, and a final research essay. [AH]
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ENGL 23029 - American Literature to 1865 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course surveys American literature through the Civil War. Readings span a range of genres and cover the major movements that shaped U.S. literary history: the culture of colonial settlers, Puritan and evangelical religiosity, Enlightenment epistemology, the Haitian and American revolutions, nationalism, reformist literature, the rise of the black public intellectual, and Transcendentalism. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23030 - Modern British Fiction and Poetry Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
As a survey of modernist British fiction and poetry, this course will address questions such as: What is modernism? Is modernism over? If not, what applicability and possibility does modernism have in relation to current sociopolitical and cultural trends? We will investigate the phenomenon of modernism (engaging its literary, artistic, philosophical, and historical development) and pay close attention to its techniques. In exploring fiction and short stories by such authors as Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Vita Sackville-West, and D. H. Lawrence we will see how these works speak to each other. We’ll also be reading a collection of modern poetry by poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. Literary and cultural criticism will guide our readings. [AH]
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ENGL 23035 - American Literature As World Literature 1990-Present
In the era of globalization, mass migrations, and geopolitical upheaval, this class will examine American literature’s relationship to and in the world. Thinking about American literature as world literature will help us interrogate questions of race, sexuality, nationality, identity, multiculturalism, and dislocation. The class will examine texts primarily from first-generation and immigrant American writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, and Mohsin Hamid as well as films. We will interrogate questions of what it means to be an American within and beyond the borders of the United States of America in the post Cold War and post 9/11 era. We will examine the ways in which these seeming ‘outsiders’ or writers from the margins illuminate debates at the center of American life and literature.
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ENGL 23036 - The Global and the Intimate: Heartbreak and Masculinity in World Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, WGSS)
The course will examine the varying ways in which sexuality, masculinity, and desire (and their relationship to normativity) permeate and penetrate in differing and similar ways globally, particularly in contemporary literature. We will be specifically interested in the ways in which empire, power, nationalism, race, and class converge in realms of the domestic, the intimate, and the erotic. Selections tentatively include: James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, Hisham Matar, Anatomy of A Disappearance, Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums, Allison Bechdel, Fun Home, and Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table. [AH]
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ENGL 23038 - Narratives of the African Diaspora Course Credit: 1
This course will focus on 20th and 21st century Anglophone African literature. The course will examine themes of globalization and migration in the age of neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and African diasporic consciousness. We will supplement primary readings with critical essays on necropolitics, neocolonialisms, and the white savior complex of neoliberalism. Writers include: Achebe, Cole, Wainaina, Adiche, and Coetzee. [AH]
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ENGL 23039 - Renaissance Bromance Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
This course considers why so much of Renaissance literature and culture is structured around a culture of aggressive male rivalry and bonding. As such we will discuss how this structure affects the representation of women-including women as the objects of male desire and as characters who masquerade as male knights. We will also look at how the genres and aesthetic programs of the works (plays, romances, prose fiction) change and influence representations of male rivalrous friendships. Readings will be focused not only on moments of rivalry within literary works, like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, but also on moments of rivalry between male writers of the period, such as the rivalry between William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 23041 - Modernist Literatures Course Credit: 1
This course addresses the history of prose fiction and poetry roughly at the point at which the novel and poetics start to become a self-conscious and problematic literary form. We begin with an overview of the literary philosophies with which and against which modernist writers worked (Romanticism, Social Realism, Naturalism) and then proceed to more radical and complex formal experiments of great “high modernists,” such as Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Hemingway, Toomer, Hesse, and others. We consider the question of what is now called “postmodernism,” particularly through reading excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses and in important recent theorizing about problems of narrative and representation. Throughout, the course pays close attention to the social and political meanings of both experimental narrative techniques and theories of fiction, exploring the multi- and transnational aspects of this movement alongside other modernist endeavors, such as painting, drama, and photography. [AH]
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ENGL 23042 - British Literature to 1800 Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
The course introduces students to British literature from its beginnings (“Caedmon’s Hymn,” Beowulf) to the late eighteenth century. Proceeding chronologically, units of the course will cover the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 17th century (sometimes overlooked in English literary history and periodization), and the Enlightenment. Students can expect to leave the class with deeper understandings of each period’s characteristic styles and genres and of historical contexts shaping literary production, such as the rise of colonialism and the English Civil War. Providing a foundation for further reading, this course is ideal for both majors and non-majors who wish to learn more about the early periods of British literary history and their enduring influence on global literatures. [Before 1800] Prerequisite(s): ENGL-120xx; or Sophomore standing [AH]
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ENGL 23044 - the Novel and Its Secrets Course Credit: 1
The novel abounds with secrets. Blackmail plots, illicit love affairs, and stolen inheritances. In this course we will peek into the guilty heart of the nineteenth century, learn about the formation of the modern concept of privacy, and discuss how suspense, misdirection and revelation shape the unfolding of narrative. We will read detective stories, ghost stories, and spy novels, but we will also examine how even the realist novel collects, encodes, and circulates information-novels like Austen’s Mansfield Park, Dickens’s Great Expectations; and Charlotte Brontës Villette. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23045 - American Literature Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
What do we mean when we say “America”? In this course, as we consider significant works of post-1900 American literature, we will explore how literary works approach the notion of the nation. How do authors negotiate the multiple worlds within America? How does America fit into larger worlds? You’ll practice analyzing texts on their own, as part of larger cultural trends, and as part of American history. By the end of the semester, you’ll be familiar with the field of twentieth century American literature and the methods of literary analysis and argumentation. You’ll also be able to discuss how literature and history shaped each other as America’s place in the world transformed in the context of the “American century.” [After 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 23046 - Shakespeare to Milton
Focusing on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, this course considers the seventeenth-century preoccupation with the question: Is fiction inescapably immoral because it seduces audiences with beautiful lies? We will explore how the writers explore this central question in light of larger political/cultural crises of the period, as well as within larger debates about gender, genre, and morality of the period. [Before 1800]
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ENGL 23047 - Paper Trail in Victorian Lit (pre-1900) Course Credit: 1
Before we went “paperless,” paper was the substance of our letters, our laws, and our literature. The Victorian period in particular saw a sudden outpouring of paper (and of paper litter), as innovations in paper production coincided with the expansion of print media, advertising, and a nationalized postal service. These ubiquitous bits of paper make their way into Victorian literature as well-from the torn clue to the well-timed love note. In this course, we will explore paper as a material, a medium, and a metaphor. We will examine the literary function of paper objects: the letters that ricochet through the long narrative poem; the crucial piece of paperwork that drives plots of blackmail, detection, and inheritance; and the multiplying documents of late-Victorian Gothic fiction. The paper object will provide us with an entry point into broader questions about social ties, authorship, law, the archive, and communication technology. Toward the close of the semester, we will also consider the lingering place of paper in the digital world. Readings will include: Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Steven Moffat’s Sherlock paired with Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories; and contemporary works of literature and art such as Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself and Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 24002 - Narrative and the Real World Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
This course is an inquiry into narrative, both fictional and nonfictional, as a way of knowing. The course focuses on how we tell stories to make sense of our lives, our pasts, and our perceptions of the world and on how the conventions of storytelling shape our knowledge. Historical texts, fiction, and film will be used to investigate these issues. Students should be prepared to attend 8-10 evening film screenings. [AH]
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ENGL 24003 - the Odyssey of James Joyce’s Ulysses Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course explores the formation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, focusing on Joyce’s composing process, identifying and analyzing historical, cultural, social, literary, and personal contexts that he used in his artistic decision-making processes. Students will read the entirety of Ulysses as well as related secondary and primary sources and excerpts from Finnegans Wake. [AH]
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ENGL 24017 - the American Film Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM)
The course samples the range of American film history from the silent film to the rise of Hollywood to postmodern and independent filmmaking. The course introduces basic strategies for the interpretation of visual style, narrative, and ideological coding in the cinema and is organized around the study of such genres and concepts as comedy, the musical, the western, the hard-boiled detective, film noir, the auteur, and the reflexive film. Students should be prepared to attend evening screenings each week. [AH]
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ENGL 24018 - Fidelity and Betrayal: the 19th Century British Novel On Film Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, FILM, WGSS)
In this course, we will investigate 19th century fictions and their contemporary film adaptations, debating the cultural work performed by both genres: what purposes did these novels serve for their first readers, what drives our own culture’s obsession with an imagined Victorian past, and how do discourses of nostalgia and of fidelity to the “original” shape adaptations of canonical novels? Readings will include 5-6 novels by authors like Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, as well as literary and film theory; students should also be prepared to attend 8-10 evening screenings. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 24019 - Medieval Literature: the Place of the Premodern Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course reads the imaginative literature of the later Middle Ages. In addition to experiencing the pleasures of such genres as romance, dream vision, and drama, students explore how these genres shaped medieval ideas of time and place. The course considers how the “middle age” came to be, what it was, and how it relates to modernity. Texts and films to be studied may include Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (film and novel), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Lais of Marie de France, The Second Shepherd’s Play, A Knight’s Tale, and Braveheart. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 24021 - Before the Novel
This course explores forms of writing that pre-dated and influenced the novel. Genres include the sonnet sequence as the origin of the idea of the conflicted self, Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing) as significant influences on the structure of the novel, the emergence of satirical works in the seventeenth century, and non-novelistic sixteenth and seventeenth- century prose fictions such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1580). Students consider how these works emerge from earlier, manuscript notions of fiction as well as the developing cultures of theater and print. [Before 1800]
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ENGL 24022 - Green Romanticism Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, ENVS)
This course interrogates the relationship between the Romantic poets and the early nineteenth-century landscape, both “natural” and industrial. The course examines the problematic notion of a unified “Romantic” ethos and establishes the divergent sub-groups within the Romantic movement in addition to raising questions about the Romantics’ relationship to the environment. Students will explore how Romantic poetry shaped the history of Western environmentalism, whether contemporary ecocriticism builds on Romantic tropes and themes, and how the relationship between people and the landscape has been structured by the institutions of class, economics, politics, gender, science, and law. [Before 1900] [AH]
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ENGL 24023 - Black Women Writers
This course examines the writings of black women from the 18th century to the present. Focusing on major texts in the canon of African American women’s writing and newer, more experimental works, the course considers the distinct cultural possibilities that enabled various forms of literary production throughout black women’s history in America.
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ENGL 24027 - Mimic Forms: Imitative Literature in the Eighteenth Century Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
In the eighteenth century, it was common for writers to compose literature by imitating or mocking the forms of other works, including ancient as well as recent models. For instance, Pope’s Rape of the Lock adapts conventions of epic poetry; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels poses as an authentic travelogue; and Fielding’s Shamela parodies Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela. Are such mimic works inauthentic, derivative, or otherwise inferior to their originals, or might it be possible to understand mimicry as an innovative mode of literary production? In addition to exploring such questions in class discussions and analytical essays, you will also deepen your understanding of imitative literature by composing your own creative piece mimicking the form of another work. [Before 1800] [AH]
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ENGL 24030 - Experimental Fiction After World War Ii Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
In medieval France, an army’s avant-garde unit took the lead, striking ahead into unfamiliar territory. It was dangerous but important work. Today’s avant-garde writers also take risks that deviate from familiar territory. Such writers may hazard alienation from the literary establishment, but the rewards of their experiments can open new possibilities for narrative. This course examines avant-garde novels, short stories, and hybrid texts produced after the end of World War II. Authors studied may include Julio Cortázar, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Michael Ondaatje, Aimee Bender, and Laurent Binet. [AH]
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ENGL 24033 - Women Writing Science Fiction Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
Science fiction has frequently been referred to as a “boy’s club,” but groundbreaking works by prominent women writers have shaped the genre toward its current form, from Margaret Cavendish’s protoscience fiction novel The Blazing World to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This course considers the following questions: How has sci-fi written by women addressed issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class difference? Why has sci-fi written by women often been overlooked or marginalized? How have women sci-fi writers envisioned dystopia and utopia? Authors studied may include Mary Shelley, Angelic Gorodischer, Margaret Atwood, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Angela Carter, and Emily St. John Mandel. [AH]
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ENGL 24034 - Science Fiction and American Culture Course Credit: 1
(FILM)
Science fiction isn’t about the real world-or is it? From the Cold War to climate change, from technology to social injustice, science fiction has reflected and refracted the cultural concerns of its time. In this class, we’ll explore how twentieth century American science fiction-short stories, novels, and films help us see the world in new ways. We’ll read and watch utopias and dystopias, stories of invasion and exploration, robots and aliens. Along the way, we’ll consider how literary form and style influence the reader or viewer. By the end of the semester, you will have acquired familiarity with the literary and cinematic history of science fiction; you will also have gained the ability to analyze works of literature and film in their cultural and historical contexts. Prerequisite(s): ENGL-120xx [AH]
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ENGL 25003 - Children As Readers: the Texts of Childhood and Adolescence Course Credit: 1
(CMLT, COMM, COMS, EDUC)
This course introduces students to a variety of works frequently read by children and adolescents. It focuses on the responses of children and adolescents to these texts and inquires into the reasons for various individual responses. The course considers both literary and non-literary texts. [AH]
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ENGL 25005 - Eighteenth-Century Texts: Readers and Meanings
This course studies selected novels, plays, and poems from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, focusing on the transaction between texts and their readers. The course inquires into the ways in which readers participate in the construction of textual meanings and the role of texts in the experience of readers. Works studied will include texts by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, William Congreve, Laurence Sterne, Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell. [Before 1800]
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ENGL 26001 - News Writing and Editing Course Credit: 1
This course familiarizes students with the strategies and conventions of journalistic writing, specifically news stories, editorials, reviews, and feature articles. Students participate in the publication of their own writing. [AH, W]
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ENGL 26002 - The Magazine: Writing, Editing, Design Course Credit: 1
This course provides students with the opportunity to explore all facets of magazine production. The major emphasis is on writing of proposals, editorial policies, solicitations of material, market studies, and magazine content. Readings includes histories of magazines such as Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker. The course emphasizes writing in the context of a fully conceived magazine. [AH, W]
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ENGL 26100 - Advanced Fiction and Poetry Writing Course Credit: 1
Analysis, discussion, and practice of writing in one or more fictional forms, such as short stories, poems, or plays. Courses explore the aims and conventions of the specified written discourse and emphasize participants’ writing. May be repeated. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 16100 [AH]
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ENGL 26101 - Advanced Fiction and Poetry Writing Course Credit: 1
This is a multi-genre course that focuses on the analysis, discussion, and practice of writing in various fictional forms, such as short stories, poems, or plays. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 16100 ; or permission of instructor
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ENGL 26102 - Advanced Fiction Writing: the Story Cycle Course Credit: 1
This course focuses on studying collections of linked short stories. Participants analyze several complete story cycles and discuss the techniques authors use to connect the stories in each collection in order to create cohesive book-length narratives. The emphasis during the first half of the semester is on studying published story collections. The class then shifts into writing and workshopping during the second half of the semester. As a class, students write and revise one complete story cycle, with each student contributing one story to the collection. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 16100 [AH]
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ENGL 26103 - Advanced Poetry Writing Course Credit: 1
This course looks at a number of different contemporary poets and approaches to poetry. Students explore (and experiment within their own poetry) a number of traditional and contemporary techniques as well as consider prose-poetry, spoken word poetry, and other artistic threads prominent in the contemporary poetry landscape. Along with the reading of published works of poetry, students explore aspects of craft and style in their own writing as well as provide constructive feedback for their fellow writers in weekly workshops. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 16100 or permission of the instructor [AH]
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ENGL 26104 - Flash Fiction
In this course, students will read and write stories of 1,000 words or fewer. Questions we’ll work to answer include the following: How short can a story be so short and still be a story? How does flash fiction differ from longer stories in terms of form and content? How much complexity can be achieved in a very short story? We will study the development of the form of flash fiction and examine the venues in which very short stories have historically appeared. We will also examine and research contemporary venues for publishing flash fiction, focusing both on print and online journals. We will discuss the process of preparing work for submission, and each student will submit at least one piece of flash fiction to a literary journal. Students will participate in weekly workshopping sessions of their work and the work of their peers. Each student will create a chapbook of flash fiction as the final course project.
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ENGL 26105 - Advanced Poetry Writing in Fixed and Open Forms
This course emphasizes the exploration of poetry-writing in fixed as well as open forms of poetry as well as considers the rather lively discussion taking place recently in the poetry world about the social/political function of concerns about form. Along with the reading of published works of poetry, including those in fixed form, students will explore such aspects of craft and style in their own writing as well as provide constructive feedback for their fellow writers in weekly workshops.
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ENGL 26106 - Writing the Novel Course Credit: 1
In this course, students study the fundamentals of conceiving, planning, and writing a novel. The course begins with close study of the structure of three novels and of the novel form. Students then write and workshop an outline and first chapter of a novel. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 16100 or permission of the instructor [AH]
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