Fall 2014 Course Offerings

1000.10                The Rise of Youth Subcultures                               Mitchell

                          MW      12:45-2:00 p.m.

This course analyzes the historical development of youth subcultures:  populations defined by loose affiliations of teenagers and individuals in their early twenties sharing interests in the experience of heightened states of affect.  Youth subcultures will be understood as those primarily reflecting the social and economic underpinnings of the place of youth in a highly industrialized, mediatized, and militarized culture such as the U.S. (we will also follow the early beginnings of youth movements in the U.K.).  A group affiliation that yields meaning to some through counter-cultural identity while vexing others with its emphasis on resistance to the established norms of prior generations.  In any of the instances above, the rise of youth cultures brought about new ways of thinking about previously neglected aspects of human experience (relationships to consumerism, racial and ethnic minority communities, drug cultures, work, gender alternatives, urbanization, peripheral forms of embodiment, etc.).  Our goal will be to analyze what such changes reflect and how they are attached to larger shifts in developments that are predominantly associated with U.K. and U.S. contexts.  

1000.11           Writing on Washington                                          Sten

                          TR 12:45-2 p.m.

1000.12           What's New About New Plays                                Schreiber

                          TR 11:10 a.m. -12:45 p.m.

1000.13           The Making of A Poem                                          Chang

                          MW 11:10 a.m. -12:45 p.m.

1000.14           The Austen Phenonomen                                        Wallace

                          TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.

1000.15           Hamlet                                       

                         MW 11:10 a.m. -12:45 p.m.

1210                Introduction to Creative Writing

1315.10           Literature and Financial Imagination                         Dugan

                          MW 12:45-2 p.m.

Whether one is measuring aesthetic or monetary value, the needs of one are often balanced against those of many: incorporation, financing, marketing, regulation, and reform all hinge on balancing the demands of the individual against those of the crowd. We'll begin with the idealized, fictive societies and their economies in early modern utopias such as Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. We'll then juxtapose these texts with modern, dystopic narratives such as Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and postmodern ones like V for Vendetta, Elysium, and The Hunger Games. Students will also write and revise three essays that analyze the links between art and economics in these texts and develop some of the core concepts of studying literary form introduced in the course.

1330W.10            Myths of Britain                                                  Cohen

                          R    12:45-2:00 p.m.  

From Beowulf to Shakespeare, much great English literature turns out not to be so English after all: the action of the epic Beowulf unfolds in Scandinavia; Arthur was a Welsh warlord before he was a legendary English king; Shakespeare's Tempest takes place on an island in the Mediterranean, but the play is also about Africa and the New World. "Myths of Britain" looks at the early island within a global frame. We explore literature as a way to imagine collective and individual identities, and -- as art -- a vehicle for escaping their constraints. Among our recurring keywords: heroism, monstrosity, community, nation, race, travel, enjoyment, beauty, creation, sexuality, death, catastrophe, endurance, thriving. The mission of this course is fourfold:

(1)  to give you the chance to hone your writing through revision, experiment, and the careful analysis of literature within its historical context

(2)  to introduce you to contemporary scholarly methods of studying early England within a transnational frame

(3)  to explore the relation between narrating the past and bringing about a desired future, paying close attention to who is excluded from this emergent community

(4)  to enable you to decelerate and discover the pleasures of close reading, slow looking, and sustained attentiveness

1410-1411            Introduction to English Literature                               

1410W.10            Introduction to English Literature                               Hsy

                          TR    9:45-10:50 a.m.  

1510-1511            Introduction to American Literature                               

1610.10             Intro to Black American Literature                          James

                        TR    12:45-2:00 p.m.

1830W.10             Tragedy                                                                         Carter

                        TR    12:45-2:00 p.m.

2240.80             Play Analysis                                                          Stokes

                        TR    12:45-2:00 p.m.

Play Analysis examines eight theatrical texts from antiquity to present-day, as both literature and theatre.  Via lecture, class discussion, research and student scene work, the course explores each play as history and as contemporary production.  The class asks such questions as: how would the play have been performed in its own day?  What impulse of the historical moment gave rise to each particular text?  How does each speak to present-day concerns?  How can each play be staged to most fully honor it thematically?

2250                           Dramatic Writing                                                     

2460                             Fiction Writing                                                       

2470                         Poetry Writing                                                                      

2560.10                Intermediate Fiction Writing                                Mallon

                          TR      9:35-10:50 a.m.

This course is designed to develop your ability to write artful and engaging short stories, as well as to increase your skills as a reader of fiction.  Through the examination of published stories in the anthology that we’ll be using, and through class discussion of stories that you yourself will be writing, you should gain greater awareness of techniques for developing narrative, characterization, setting and theme.  We will also try to build and sharpen a critical vocabulary that allows you to talk about all these elements with useful precision.

2570.10                 Intermediate Poetry Writing                                McAleavey

                          MW      12:45-2 p.m.

This course is a place to continue discovering what each of you wants to do and can do best in poetry. Each week I’ll offer you an assignment or a prompt, and you will produce at least one new poem draft each week to share with the class. Much of the course will be conducted in workshop format, with your draft poems the primary texts for discussion, though we will also talk about poems in the assigned text (the anthology Legitimate Dangers), as well as poems we access online or stuff that I may bring in as handouts.

I believe that undergraduate student poets need to write a lot – and to do writing that opens up new material and investigates new approaches. This semester I’ll be asking you, among other things, to try your hand at nonce forms, and to update some older modes like dramatic monologues and elegies. Undoubtedly some of the assignments/prompts I will give you will grow out of the ways your own work seems to evolve through the semester.

Of course writers can’t produce new work without being exposed to the successful work of others and studying it closely, so I will also ask you to compose brief, casual essays each week, either responding to poets in Legitimate Dangers or reviewing a public poetry reading you’ve attended that week.

Over the course of the semester, you’ll need to attend and review three poetry readings by book-published poets. In the anthology, I’ll assign one poet each week for everyone to read so we can talk about that work in class, and each week on your own you’ll choose a different poet from the anthology to respond to (except for the weeks you attend and review those public readings).

These weekly essays (reviews and responses) are meant to be no more than 300 words each, and I will grade them; please note that I’m asking them to be casual – not sloppy, but not particularly formal, either. (I won’t grade your poem drafts, however.) Collectively these essays will constitute 30% of your earned grade.

You will revise your six best poems from the semester as a final portfolio, accompanying each with a paragraph laying out your sense of the poem’s goals and describing how your sense of the poem may have changed through the revision process. The bulk of your earned grade in the course (70%) will rest on this portfolio.

Because this is a workshop course, attendance is required; I follow a precise policy that could severely lower your earned grade.

2800W.10           Critical Methods                                                    McRuer

                          TR 3:45-5 p.m.

Critical Methodologies will introduce and briefly overview some of the major movements in critical theory—such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, African American and Latina/o cultural theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and disability studies—that have brought us to the contemporary moment in the study of culture and society.  As this list should suggest, a large part of the course will consider the “cultural turn” that literary study has taken over the past few decades.  Some of the questions the class will pose are: what do we mean when we talk about such vexed terms as culture, identity, language, interpretation, meaning, theory, criticism, cultural studies?  What does critical theory offer us as readers and writers, as participants in various cultures, as citizens?  What does knowledge in and as democracy look like?  How have the new social movements transformed knowledge in and out of the academy?  How does power circulate through the production, consumption, and interpretation of culture? 

2800W.11           Critical Methods                                                    Alcorn

                          MW 12:45-2 p.m.

This course will study the major schools and theoretical methods that have influenced the study the literature since 1940.  We will examine formalist claims about literature, French structuralist and post-structuralist claims, and review dominant themes of cultural and historical criticism. 

3360.10             Advanced Fiction                                                    Moskowitz

                        TR    9:35-10:50 a.m.

Through reading literary models and writing prompts and short shorts, we will work our way to writing two new short stories 15-18 pages in length. Also refresher class on definition of literary terms and formatting.

3370.10            Advanced Poetry Section 101                              Pollack

                        MW 12:45-2:00 p.m.

Students are expected to write twelve poems, reports on each of four sections of an anthology of modern/contemporary poetry compiled by me, and a final report analyzing their development during the course. Student discussion of submitted poems.

3380.10            Nonfiction Workshop                              

                        TR 2:20 - 3:35 p.m.

3390.80            Screenwriting                                                            Sten

                        T 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.

3390.81            Screenwriting                                                            Sten

                        M 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.

3410.10             Chaucer                                                                     Cohen

                        TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.

This course examines Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in all their complexity, perversity, and artfulness. We will be especially attentive to Chaucer's explorations of identity and the ways in which his texts envision various kinds of community. This course stresses the importance of language work to comprehension and explores the scholarly modes through which Chaucer may be analyzed. All primary readings are in Middle English. The mission of this course is threefold:

(1)   to enable you to read Middle English fluently and with enjoyment

(2)   to hone your critical, linguistic and persuasive skills through careful, text-based analysis of literature within its historical context

(3)   to introduce you to contemporary scholarly methods of studying Chaucer and the medieval period

3420.10            Medieval Literature                                                   Hsy

                        TR 12:45 - 2:00 p.m.

3430.10            The English Renaissance                                          Dugan

                        MW 2:20 - 3:35 p.m.

3440W.10            Shakespeare                                                           Keller

                        MW 9:35 - 10:50 a.m.

3440W.11            Shakespeare                                                            Wood

                        TR 9:35 - 10:50 a.m.

3480.10            The Eighteenth Century                                              Seavey

                        MW 3:35 - 5:00 p.m.

3540.10            Victorian Literature                                                     Carter

                        MW 12:45 - 2:00 p.m.

3551.10                The Ninteenth-Century British Novel                 Green-Lewis

                          TR      12:45-2 p.m.

This fast-paced course on the nineteenth-century novel has two goals: first, to give students a sense of the breadth and range of novels written in Britain during the nineteenth century; and second, to help students develop a finer ear for the different sounds of these authors—in other words, to examine some of the stylistic peculiarities that differentiate each author from the rest. The course will balance historical context with close literary analysis. Authors include Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. Be prepared for a significant amount of reading (3-400 pages per week), frequent short writing assignments, and a final research paper. Please note that no technology will be permitted during class sessions and that kindles may not be used in place of the assigned editions. All students should come to class the first day having read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (any paper edition will do; be sure to bring it with you).

3560.10                American Realism                                                   Romines

                          MW      2:20-3:35 p.m.

This course looks at texts produced in the U.S. between 1861 and 1920, under the influence of the Realist movement that dominated much U.S. writing during those years.  We will read books that reflect the rapid social changes that occurred during the decades after the Civil War:  immigration, urbanization, changes in gender construction, distribution of wealth, attitudes toward ethnicity and race.  The energies of American Realist writing reflect both the accelerating pace of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of “modern” American literature.  (Readings  include short fiction and novels by Rebecca Harding Davis, C.W. Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Zitkala-Sa, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Sui Sin Far, Willa Cather,  Anzia Yezierska and others.)

3630.10                American Drama I                                                    Combs

                           TR    2:20-3:35 p.m.

American Drama I introduces students to the development of American drama and theatre from its beginnings until the mid 1960s. Types of drama include an 18th-century comedy of manners, 19th-century melodramas, early realism of the 20th century, and the great plays of American Drama's high period, the 40s and 50s:  works by O'Neill, Miller, and Williams. Film clips will expose students to various acting styles and memorable performances.  Students will turn in a one-page homework essay at the beginning of  each class meeting, do two in-class presentations (with accompanying 2 1/2-page essays) in the course of the semester, take an in-class midterm exam, attend one live production and write a review, and write a 5-6 page essay at the end of class in lieu of a final exam.

3640W.10                Nineteenth-Century American Novel                      Sten

                           TR    3:45-5:00 p.m.

This course focuses on the development of the novel in the U.S., and the challenges of writing and producing fiction in a new country.  We will look at the historical context and reception of each novel and explore the cultural “work” it might be said to accomplish while examining matters of race and class, gender, marriage, and the family.  Readings include Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,  Melville’s Moby-Dick, Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.  Requirements include 2 or 3 short essays, an 8-10 page research paper, and a take-home final exam.

3720W.10            Contemporary American Lit                                        Moreland

                        TR 4:45 - 6:00 p.m.

In this course, we will explore the “howling” literature of 1950s and 1960s America.  Post-World War II America was intent on a return to “normalcy,” which was inevitably defined narrowly.  Those that deviated from the norm—whether in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, psychological state, or public and/or private behavior—were ejected from the “normal” center into the margins of society.  Rendered invisible by society, those who were marginalized gave themselves voice in the literature of the time, saying “No! in thunder” (in Melville’s prescient words) to the strictures of 1950s and 1960s American society.

Required Texts: Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind;  Ginsberg’s Howl;  Kerouac’s On the Road; Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ariel; Updike’s Rabbit, Run; MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7^th ed.

3810.10            Service Learning: Pen Faulkner                                       Henry

                        TR 9:45 - 10:50 a.m.

3820.10                Thomas Pynchon                                                       Lopez

                           TR    12:45-2:00 p.m.

This course showcases the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, one of the greatest writers in the history of the country.  We will read V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Mason and Dixon (1997), plus another novel chosen from among Vineland (1990), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013).  (Alas, no Against the Day [2006].)  Students will also screen and listen to film and music texts that resonate in Pynchon’s writing—German expressionism and musical comedies, for example, and jazz and rock.  Readings will also include criticism on the novel genre, plus a selection of Pynchon criticism.  Among the topics to explore: colonialism, imperialism, and globalization; literary experimentation from modernism and postmodernism to the edge of the contemporary moment; race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, disability and the posthuman; media and technology; comedy and satire; spirituality and drugs; and more.  Work will include papers and a multimedia project.

3820.11            Hemingway                                                                    Moreland

                        TR 12:45 - 2:00 p.m.

Ernest Hemingway is among the most important of the literary modernists, an illustrious group of post-World War I writers who rejected the tenets of pre-war authority, choosing instead to experiment with ways to craft a new literature. Their goal was to give voice to the new age, that is, “to make it new” in Ezra Pound’s resonant phrase, and to represent the new modernist world, notably identified as a Waste Land in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous poem.

Not an anti-intellectual “dumb ox” as Wyndham Lewis infamously described him, Ernest Hemingway wrote in accordance with a personal aesthetic theory that he frequently referenced. The impact of his “Iceberg Theory”—an aesthetics of omission---is discernible throughout his fiction. One of its most important manifestations is in his extremely influential prose style—spare, pared down, including only a few serviceable adjectives and little interpretation or judgment.

In this course we will read fiction by Hemingway written from the 1920s through the 1950s and also several posthumously published texts.

We will chart the commonalities among these texts—those aspects that clearly mark them as part of the Hemingway canon. And we will also note changes and developments in Hemingway’s texts, ways in which he continued to experiment in the context of new realities—historical, social, autobiographical, and psychological.

Required Texts, all by Hemingway 

In Our Time (1925); The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); Death in the Afternoon (1932); The Fifth Column (1938); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); The Old Man and the Sea (1952); A Moveable Feast (1964); Islands in the Stream (1970); The Garden of Eden (1986).

AND

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7^th ed.

3840.10            Gender & U.S. Texts                                                         Romines

                        MW 12:45 - 2:00 p.m.

3850.10                Hail to the R-Words: Ethnicity, Race, and the Cultures of Sports “Mascots,”    Lopez

                           TR 11:10 a.m. -12:45 p.m.

The name in the University Bulletin for English 3850 is Ethnicity and Place in American literature.  Our version of the course takes up place by focusing on GWU’s location in the District of Columbia, and it attends to ethnicity (and race) by focusing on the mascot and name of the city’s professional football team, a name whose racist meaning the dictionary signals with the phrase “usually offensive.”  Our version of 3850 guides students into conversations with Native American, U.S. Latino, Asian American, and African American literature, history, and criticism to explore and, indeed, challenge the ethnic and racial complex of sports mascots in the United States.  The course foregrounds the creativity and resistance of disparate Native American cultures and histories, and it maps the power dynamics, often hard to discern, between concepts and symbols, on the one hand, and the material lives of Native Americans, on the other.  We will read Native American literary texts by writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, LeAnne Howe, James Welch, Sherman Alexie, and Qwo-Li Driskill and, in tension with them, trace a story of Anglo-white representations from the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper and the painting of George Catlin to the mascot image you see stitched on the burgundy and gold gear of so many folks in this town today.  We will engage work on mascots and team names by the National Congress of American Indians and the National Museum of the American Indian, and we will read accounts offered by the Washington football team itself, all in addition to assessing the many media reports and commentaries on the subject appearing by the minute.  This course ushers students into the work of public intellectuals using the methods of literary and cultural analysis.  Assignments will include papers and a multimedia project.

3910.10                Introduction to Disability Studies                            Mitchell

                           MW    3:45-5:00 p.m.

The field of Disability Studies approaches disability as a social and cultural process resulting in the exclusion of some bodily variations as opposed to a body gone wrong.  Disability, therefore, exists at the fraught intersection of environments, bodies, and beliefs. This course neither explores medical etiologies (the pathologization of bodies) nor does it approach disability as undesirable difference in need of repair, cure, or rehabilitation (although all of these may be part of disability experiences we investigate).  Rather we will analyze disability as aesthetics (the ways that some bodies make other bodies feel when sharing space), politics (social forces that threaten to devalue some bodies on behalf of other bodies), and systemic alternatives (how do disabled lives differ and, therefore, offer glimpses into other ways of being human).  All these considerations involve us in wrestling with historically variable concepts of what and who counts as normal.

3940.10            20th C. African American Lit                                          Miller

                        MW 4:45 - 6:00 p.m.

4040.10            Honors Seminar                                                             Cook

                        W 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.

4135.80            Folger Seminar                                                             Mitchell                  

4220.10            Creative Writing Senior Thesis                                      Page 

4250.10            Honors Thesis                                                              Cook

4360.10            Independent Study                                                        McRuer

4470.10            Internship                                                                     Seavey

6100.10            Intro to Literary Theory                                                 Cook

                        R 6:10 - 8:40 p.m.

6260.10            Seminar: Medieval & Early Modern Studies                   Thompson

                        R 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.

6350.10            Nineteenth Century                                                     

6450.10                Twentieth Century                                                     Wald

                           M    3:30-6:00 p.m.

Post-Soul Literature and Culture: This course will offer students  an overview of "post-soul" (sometimes "post-civil rights") African American literature and culture, circa 1980-2014. We will engage in a critical inquiry of the tricky notion of the "post" in post-soul, read scholarly debates about "post-soul" culture, and, especially, immerse ourselves in various literary works--primarily of fiction, but including poetry and drama. Authors might include: Danzy Senna (Caucasia), Suzan-Lori Parks (The America Play), Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor or Zone One), Junot Díaz (Drown orThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Stew and Heidi Roedwald (Passing Strange), James McBride (The Good Lord Bird) and Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father. Where possible, we'll also consider the expression and exploration of "post-soul" identities and sensibilities in popular musical culture (e.g. Janelle Monae, Kanye West, Beyonce, Odd Future, the writings of Mark Anthony Neal, Kodwo Eshun) and, if time allows, film and online culture (Azie Dungy's "Ask a Slave"). We will be especially interested in the relation of post-soul to post-race discourse, to ongoing debates about modernity/post-modernity, and to questions of satire in relation to African American history and memory. Students with no previous experience in African American literary studies should consult the professor for a brief list of recommended summer reading. 

6452.10            Twentieth Century: Woolf and the Movement of Modernism  

                        T 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.                                                     Green-Lewis

While modernism represents movement of all kinds, including spatial, mnemonic, and temporal, ambivalence about movement is also one of its constants. In fact, some of the most memorable scenes in modernist works are those in which movement ceases completely. In this course we will focus on the representation of both movement and stasis during the early decades of the twentieth century, and we will consider how Virginia Woolf and others make use of each to conceptualize and make visible the experiences of memory and the passage of time. For the first class, please read, and bring, James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” 

6630.10            Literature and Medicine                                              Alcorn

                        M 6:10 - 8:40 p.m.

6720.10            Independent Research                                                Mitchell

6720.11            Independent Research                                                 Mitchell

6810.10            Folger Seminar                                                            Werner

6998.10            Thesis Research                                                          Mitchell

6999.10            Thesis Research                                                          Mitchell

8998.10            Advanced Writing and Research                                  Mitchell

8999.10            Dissertation Research                                                 Mitchell