Fall 2013 Course Offerings
2800.10 Critical Methods
TR 3:45-5 pm
This survey course introduces students to argumentative writings that are commonly grouped under the hybrid heading “literary theory and cultural criticism.” On one level, this is a course in the history of ideas. One can even say that it is a course in the history of one very persistent and knotty philosophical question: what, if any, is the nature of the relationship between “representation” and “reality?” Put another way, what amount of “truth” can be located in the artistic and especially literary representations that we make of individuals, communities, or the world? Some more specific versions of this question include: does language bear any relationship to the reality it purports to describe? Is there some “engine” or “spirit” (cf. Marx and Hegel) at the heart of culture that generates art independent of any one artist’s intentions? Do cultural representations of specific groups of people have any mooring in reality, and if not, what damage do they do? Is the very idea of objective reality a misleading fantasy? We will discuss these and other questions in this class, and students will gain familiarity with trenchant answers as proposed by thinkers from Plato to the Postmodernists. On another level, this is a course in specific methods that are often deployed in advanced literary and cultural criticism. Students will gain fluency in the terminology and conceptual frameworks associated with idealism, materialism, Marxist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, new historicism as well as critical race, sex, gender, and disability studies. By mastering the basic contours of these diverse ways of interpreting artistic and cultural phenomena, students will be equipped to pursue more advanced courses in literature, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and even political theory. In terms of literature, we will also talk at length about advanced conceptions of form, genre, language, and aesthetics.
2800.11 Critical Methods
Staff
MW 12:45-2 pm
Wood
MW 2:20-3:35 pm
Sensing Shakespeare: This class will consider the role of the senses in Shakespeare’s writing. What sounds do we hear in plays like The Tempest? How does smell function in Macbeth or the sonnets? What does it mean when a feast turns to rocks, as it does in Timon of Athens? What happens when the sense of sight is fallible, as in The Comedy of Errors? How can touch turn violent, as it does in Venus and Adonis? This course will investigate the effects and experiences of the senses in Shakespeare’s writing: what they signify, where they overlap, and where they might fail to signify or cause even more confusion. We will also consider how the senses are culturally mediated; our class will explore sensory effects in the context of Shakespeare's first audiences, but also allow us to engage our own eyes, ears, noses, palates, and skins in our study of Shakespeare's multi-sensory texts.
3440W.11 Shakespeare
Keller
TR 11:10-12:25 pm
3440W.12 Shakespeare
Staff
TR 2:20-3:35 pm
3480.10 The Eighteenth Century
TR 12:45-2 pm
The Eighteenth Century I: Satire and Irony as an Approach to Human Experience. The poetry and prose of Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Swift, Gay, Montesquieu and others in the early part of the long Eighteenth Century. Moving toward a spirit of confident neo-classicism and then away from some of the assurances of that critical orthodoxy, the writers of the period from 1660 to 1740 perfected satire as never before or since in any literary tradition and established English prose as a medium for literary expression. Its poetry and poetic practice set a standard which remained potent long after the period.
3510.10 Children's Literature
Goswami
TR 11:10-12:25 pm
The primary objective of this course is to become familiar with the kinds of literature available for children and young adults. We will focus on nineteenth- and early twentieth century classics central to the development of children’s literature as well as more contemporary works. We will read representative works by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, J.K. Rowling, Lois Lowry, Maurice Sendak, Louis Sachar, and others.
3540.10 Victorian Literature
MW 12:45-2 pm
Chapters from Marx’s Capital set a key note of moral passion and indignation at social conditions that we then track through the writings of major prose prophets—Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Ruskin’s Unto this Last, for instance--and of the major novelists—Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’ Great Expectations Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet. The poets’ encounter with the unsettling of traditional certainties we study in Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. The seminal and key work, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) we read as exemplary of the constantly and rapidly speeding up of change—scientific, political, industrial, intellectual—that writers and thinkers of this period had to encounter and attempt to assimilate.
3551.10 The English Novel
TR 11:10-12:25 pm
The nineteenth-century British novel: history and voice
This fast-paced course on the nineteenth-century novel will try to accomplish 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 strive to balance historical context with close literary analysis. Authors will include Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. Please be prepared for a significant amount of reading (3-400 pages per week), frequent short writing assignments, as well as a final research paper. Please also 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).
3560W.10 American Realism
MW 4:45-6 pm
This course looks at texts produced in the U.S. between 1861 and 1935, under the influence of the Realist movement that dominated much U.S. writing during these years. Our primary texts will include work by Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Henry James, C.W. Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Willa Cather, Sui Sin Far, Anzia Yezierska, and others. These books reflect the rapid social changes that occurred in 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" twentieth-century literature. Assignments will include essays, in-class reports, midterm and final exams.
3610.10 British Modernism
TR 12:45-2 pm
The Great War of 1914-18 may often loom in the imagination as a chasm between the Victorian and modern worlds, but in this course we shall see that literary Modernism has strong roots in the pre-war work of such writers as Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. In this course we will propose that Britain’s literary history, as well as the nation’s cultural and political history, helped ready early-twentieth-century readers for Modernism’s demands and difficulties. In our discussions of works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and others, we will focus on the following topics: the idea of “character”; loss; beauty; and urban culture. Our primary emphasis, however, will be on the language, or form, of these works. To that end, writing assignments will be designed to help students think about the poetics of Modernism and, by semester’s end, to articulate the different formal achievement of each writer. Please note: no technology is to be in use during class time, and kindles are not permitted. The assigned texts don’t respond well to speed reading, so please allow plenty of time for class preparation.
3630.10 American Drama
TR 2:20-3:35 pm
American Drama and Theatre from its beginnings to the 1960s. This course covers an early comedy of manners, several melodramas of the nineteenth century, the growth of realism in the twentieth century, including agitprop drama of the 1930s, and major works by O'Neill, Wilder, Williams, and Miller. Film clips with be shown so that styles of theatrical presentation and acting can be discussed, along with social and political issues of the times.
3640W.10 The American Novel
TR 12:45-2 pm
3660.10 20th-Century Irish Literature
Griffin
W 11:10-12:25 pm
F 12:45-2 pm
ISH 3660 studies 20th-Century Irish Literature with the emphasis on drama and poetry. Four Irish writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, and Heaney. As well as these great writers, there have also been many good poets admired by readers and theatre-goers as well as imitated by other international writers. With Lady Gregory, Yeats founded the Irish National Theatre and provided a space and institution at the Abbey where playwrights like themselves, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, and Hugh Leonard could celebrate and criticize the human condition in Ireland. Yeats was also the giants of Irish poetry and was followed by fine poets like Clarke, Kavanagh, McNeice, Montague, Heaney, the Longleys, Boland, Ni Dhomhaill, and Clifton. 3660 will explore the world-renowned and not-so-famous writers from a small country with a high degree of quality.
3720W.10 Contemporary American Literature
TR 4:45-6 pm
3730.10 Topics in Postcolonial Literature
M 3:30-6 pm
This course explores the colonial and postcolonial experience of travel and how it shapes cultural and gendered identity in postcolonial literature and cinema. From Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and E. M. Forster's classic A Passage to India (1924) to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's That Thing Around Your Neck (2009) and Kiran Desai's Booker prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss (2006) our literary texts have historically represented travel and cross-cultural encounter variously: as complex, ambivalent, terrifying and exhilarating. These texts present subjects who travel for several different reasons: as representatives of colonizing empires, as tourists wishing to encounter a different culture, as ethnic immigrants to better prospects, as emotional refugees seeking self-discovery, as wives who wish to join a spouse overseas, among other reasons. This course explores travel literature, fiction about travel, as well as films that represent travel, to debate a range of questions: what happens to the search for home and intimacy in travel? How do we represent the encounter with other cultural modernities? How does travel shape and reshape our identities, around gender, race, sexuality, culture, diaspora and class? How do narratives of travel shape politics, shape stories about nations and nationalisms? We will look at representations of Jewish and English people who migrate to India, Nigerians who travel to America, Indians who immigrate to Britain and Frenchwomen who travel to Tibet, among others. In the process, we will explore the historically changing forms of thinking subjectivity, intimacy and community – racial, gendered, cultural, national - in fiction and films about travel, and theories of empire, gender and globalization. Films we will consider include "Bend it Like Beckham", "Persepolis", "Syriana" and "Outsourced"; acclaimed authors we will consider include E. M. Forster, V. S. Naipaul, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexandra David-Neel, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Esther David, Arundhati Roy, among others.
3810.10 Freud, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky
TR 9:35-10:50 am
This course deals Freud’s transformative vision of human nature in his masterpieces, The Interpretation of Dreams, the Dora, Ratman and Wolfman case histories and Civilization and its Discontents. We read these in conjunction with works by his major precursor, Shakespeare—Hamlet, Measure for Measure and King Lear—and a major near contemporary, Dostoyevsky—Notes from Underground and Brothers Karamazov. These works read together illuminate one another and the workings of the unconscious in ways that we will explore.
3810.10 James Joyce
WF 2:20-3:35 pm
James Joyce's Ulysses is generally considered the greatest novel of the twentieth century. This course will not only be a close reading of most of that novel; it will also examine Joyce's earlier work ("The Dead," Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, selections from Finnegans Wake) in an effort to account for Joyce's remarkable literary achievement. What were his influences? How did growing up Irish, and then living an expatriate life, shape him? In what way was Joyce a "modernist"? How has his achievement - and his continued cultural centrality - affected contemporary writers? What do we make of the obscenity controversy that raged around Ulysses? And why is Ulysses so difficult? We'll consider these and other questions as we take on the fascinating and challenging task of understanding the artistic genius of James Joyce.
3910.10 Disability Studies
Staff
MW 12:45-2 pm
3920.10 US Latino/a Literature and Culture
Carrillo
WF 9:35-10:50 am
3970.10 Jewish American Literature
TR 12:45-2 pm
Survey of significant Jewish American Literature from 1654-present. Authors include Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick and many others. Mid-term and response papers.
3980.10 Queer Studies: Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures
TR 11:10-12:25 pm
The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or transgendered people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other, complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized around identity?
This film studies course will consider how questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer globalization(s). For a week in November, 2013, we will travel to Prague, Czech Republic to attend Mezipatra: Queer Film Festival along with students in Professor Kateřina Kolářová’s class. For this reason, official registration for this course will take place through study abroad. Contact the professor at rmcruer
gwu [dot] edu for information.
Werner, S.
TBA
Students interested in registering for the course should contact Kathleen Lynch at the Folger Library (202-675-0346).
4040.10 Honors Seminar
W 3:30-6 pm
The seminar will survey a variety of literary and cultural theories as a means to enable and enrich the writing of students' honors theses. You will be asked to participate in introducing theoretical readings, and you will begin your thesis through a series of proposals and outlines that begin small and grow in length during the course of the semester, allowing you to proceed into the spring semester with a writing of approximately 20 pages that you will then enlarge under advisement of your director and reader to a completed thesis of approximately 50 pages. Our theoretical textbook will be the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. We will also read Shakespeare's Hamlet and Toni Morrison's Beloved to facilitate application of theoretical concepts to shared texts.