Spring 2013 Course Offerings
2000-level Courses | 3000-level Courses | 4000-level Courses
1000.10 Dean’s Seminar: Global Shakespeare
T 6:10-8:40 p.m.
Course restricted to freshmen only.
Introduction to the study of Shakespeare from a global perspective; aesthetics and techniques of interpreting Shakespeare; racial, cultural, and linguistic difference in Shakespeare's globe and in our globalized world.
1000.12 Dean’s Seminar: The Assassination of Lincoln
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
Course restricted to freshmen only.
In this seminar, students will examine the immediate historical context of Abraham Lincoln's murder, and use the assassination as a window through which to observe various aspects of 19th-century American culture. These will include theatrical taste, portrait photography, historical painting, and literary elegy. Visits to Ford's Theatre and other sites associated with Lincoln's murder will allow students to see the assassination as a part of local history. In addition, we will work at developing critical perspectives on the long-term effects of the assassination on American political psychology, including ideas about martyrdom and conspiracy. Students will write several short papers and sit for both midterm and final examinations.
1000.13 Dean’s Seminar: The Washington Story: Lit. & Film
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
Course restricted to freshmen only.
1000.14 Dean’s Seminar: Literature and Literacy
MW 4:45-6 p.m.
Course restricted to freshmen only.
For most of human history, the ability to read has been confined to a tiny segment of the population: religious mediums, dynastic chroniclers, and cosmopolitan diplomats.However, beginning with the print revolution in the 15thcentury, and accelerating rapidly during the 18th, 19th, and 20thcenturies, literacy spread so rapidly and widely that it is now generally thought of as a skill learned in childhood which subsequently forms the precondition for all other intellectual achievements.Some—including several nations’ constitutions—have go so far as to frame literacy as an inviolable human right.This course will investigate the massive historical, artistic, and philosophical changes that have tracked the spread of literacy.We will focus particularly on public policies that have gradually made literacy into a cornerstone of modern life while altering older ways of organizing local communities; on educational texts that have centralized literacy and brought standardized national languages into being; and on political and artistic reactions that have accompanied and criticized literacy’s expansion.Readings will mostly derive from oral and written literature, but students can also expect to engage with social science work on how literacy is measured, how literacy’s modern-day ruptures reveal themselves along racial, class and ethnic lines, how multilingualism affects national literacy debates, how World English literacy facilitates globalization, and how new media continue to alter the future of homo legens.
1000.15 Dean’s Seminar: Fourteen Sonnets and a Question
Keller
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
Course restricted to freshmen only.
1000.MV Dean’s Seminar: Hamlet and Modern Culture
TR 10-11:15 a.m.
Course restricted to freshmen only. This course is being taught at the Mount Vernon campus.
1210.10 Introduction to Creative Writing
Page
W 11:10-12:25 p.m., F 12:45-2 p.m.
An exploration of the genres of creative writing (fiction, poetry, and/or playwriting). Basic problems and techniques; examples of modern approaches; weekly writing assignments; workshop and/or conference discussion of student writing.
1210.11 Introduction to Creative Writing
Close
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
1210.12 Introduction to Creative Writing
Trainer
TR 8-9:15 a.m.
1210.13 Introduction to Creative Writing
Page
WF 2:20-3:35 p.m.
1210.14 Introduction to Creative Writing
vanden Berg
M 2:20-3:35 p.m., W 3:45-5 p.m.
1210.15 Introduction to Creative Writing
Staff
MW 4:45-6 p.m.
1210.16 Introduction to Creative Writing
Von Euw
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
1210.17 Introduction to Creative Writing
Payne
TR 11:10-12:25 pm.
1210.18 Introduction to Creative Writing
Pollack
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
1210.19 Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 2:20-03:35 p.m.
1210.20 Introduction to Creative Writing
Saalfeld
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
1210.MV Introduction to Creative Writing
Levine
MW 11:30-12:45 p.m.
This course is being offered on the Mount Vernon campus.
1210.MV1 Introduction to Creative Writing
Martin
TR 1-2:15 p.m.
This course is being offered on the Mount Vernon campus.
1340W.10 Shakespeare’s Globe
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
Links between Shakespeare’s geographical and theatrical “Globes.” How did Shakespeare and his company represent racial, cultural, and linguistic difference in the Globe? What place did they imagine for England and Europe in this newly globalized world?
1410W.10 Introduction to English Literature I
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
Representative works by major British authors studied in their historical context; discussion of recurrent themes and introduction to various types and forms of imaginative literature. Middle Ages through the 18th century.
1410W.11 Introduction to English Literature l
Ravy
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
1411W.10 Introduction to English Literature I
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
1411W.11 Introduction to English Literature II
Brister
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
Representative works by major British authors studied in their historical context; discussion of recurrent themes and introduction to various types and forms of imaginative literature. 19th and 20th centuries.
1411W.12 Introduction to English Literature II
Ravy
MW 9:35-10:50 a.m.
1411W.MV Introduction to English Literature II
Vazquez
TR 11:30-12:45 p.m.
This course is offered on the Mount Vernon Campus.
1510W.10 Introduction to American Literature I
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
Historical survey. From early American writing through Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson.
1511W.10 Introduction American Literature II
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
Historical survey. From Twain, James, and Crane to the present.
1511W.11 Introduction to American Literature II
TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.
1511W.12 Introduction to American Literature II
Fawaz
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
1611W.10 Introduction to Black American Literature II
Miller
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
Survey of several genres of African American literature, from the early 20th century to the present day, in such cultural concepts as the “new Negro” Renaissance and the civil rights and Black Power movements.
1711W.10 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature and Film
Staff
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
Introduction to postcolonial literature from the perspectives of colonizer and colonized in Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Anglophone Africa, and the Caribbean region; literature written on the wing, in diaspora.
1840W.10 Comedy
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
Modes of comedy as developed in drama, nondramatic verse, and prose fiction—Chaucer to Borges.
Stokes
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
(Cross-listed with TRDA 2240.80)
2250.80 Dramatic Writing
Calarco
M 3:30-6 p.m.
(Cross-listed with TRDA 2250.80)
2250.81 Dramatic Writing
W 3:30-6 p.m.
(Cross-listed with TRDA 2250.81)
2460.10 Fiction Writing
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
2460.11 Fiction Writing
Close
TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.
2460.12 Fiction Writing
Bayard
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
2470.10 Poetry Writing
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
2470.11 Poetry Writing
Willis
TR 4:45-6 p.m.
2560.10 Intermediate Fiction Writing
Carrillo
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
2570.10 Intermediate Poetry Writing
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
Assuming a solid foundation in poetry writing gained from 2470, this course operates primarily in workshop mode, with its emphasis on students’ own writing. Readings and weekly writing assignments are designed to heighten students’ awareness of a specific crucial aspect of poetry; recently we have focused on the impact of form in relatively brief lyric poems, ranging from traditional or received whole-poem forms like the sonnet to the musically-alert free verse practiced by such poets as Anne Carson and Fanny Howe. Future iterations of this course may similarly focus on image and analogy as tools of discovery and invention, on dramatization and narration, or on the voice of urgent engagement, ranging from the introspective to the political.
2800W.10 Critical Methods
Harris
MW 3:45-5 p.m.
This course introduces students – particularly English majors and minors – to the sometimes challenging, often intellectually exhilarating critical methods that have transformed the discipline of English in the past few decades. Our aim will be to clarify the foundational assumptions of these methods (formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, rhizomatics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, Marxism, historicism, critical race theory, postcolonialism) and assess how they might enrich, complicate and/or problematize the ways in which you read literature and, indeed, how you understand the very notion of the “literary.” The primary objective of this course, then, is to increase your theoretical self-consciousness as readers, i.e. to help you understand how and why you read in the ways you do. In addition, it will provide you with a useful toolbox of new methods for analyzing texts in your other English courses.
2800W.11 Critical Methods
Yip
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
Reading and Writing Critical Theory: Crimes Against Humanity: This course is a reading and writing intensive course that will examine the ways in which literary theory and cultural studies may help us extract meaning from the texts that we will study or that you will later encounter both in your academic careers and your life. These texts will range from various literary genres, films and popular cultural objects from across the globe. We will investigate contemporary conflicts in the world and consider the ways in which these conflicts are, or are not, considered crimes against humanity as the United Nations defines them. We will seek to achieve an understanding of how these conflicts have arisen, their affects and consequences, and what the diverse responses are by the global community. Some critical approaches that we will investigate are feminism, queer and gender studies, postcolonial theory, disability studies, deconstructionism, poststructuralism and postmodernism.
3240.80 Introduction to Dramaturgy
Kanter
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
(Cross-listed with TRDA 3240.80)
3250.80 Intermediate Dramatic Writing
W 3:30-6 p.m.
A playwriting and screenwriting workshop for students familiar with basic dramatic structure. Readings in film structure and history. Students select writing plays or film scripts. Class presentations of student writing.
3390.10 Special Topics: Creative Writing
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
3390.11 The Prose Poem
McAleavey
MW 4:45-6 p.m.
This course focuses on a disputed hybrid or mongrel genre whose definition is certainly no easier than that of “poetry,” the traditional genre with which it shares the most DNA, so to speak. That said, to write prose poems involves becoming familiar with their history and poetics, as well as learning how they work by trying to write them. Each week, students will read specific works for class discussion, and also write original prose poems, which we will examine and discuss together in a workshop environment.
3390.80 Advanced Screenwriting
Stern
W 3:30-6 p.m.
3420.10 Medieval Literature
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
This writing-intensive course examines how medieval Londoners represented their ever-shifting urban landscape. The shapeshifting city means many things to many people, and we will see London depicted as a multiethnic melting pot, a terrifying venue of mob violence, a glorious seat of government, a site of spectacle and entertainment, a commercial hub connecting near and far, and an ideal space for reinventing one's self. Our survey of early London literature will encompass major medieval literary genres, including chronicles, romances, fabliaux, autobiography, and drama. Through a selection of diverse literary authors (Geoffrey Chaucer, Jean Froissart, Margery Kempe, Thomas Malory, and John Mandeville), we will see the Middle Ages as a time of perpetual motion and change: a dynamic world where human identity is constantly in flux. Assignments include close readings, a blog posting, and a comparative essay (which you will write and revise in stages).
3441.10 Shakespeare
Keller
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
Of the forty plays attributed to Shakespeare, fully half are set in areas around the Mediterranean Sea, either in Classical Greece and Rome, in contemporary Italy and Spain, in the Middle East, or on the sea itself. These include some of the best know such as The Merchant of Venice and some of the most problematic such as Timon of Athens. As far as we know, Shakespeare never saw any of these places, yet they played a central role in his imagination and that of his audience by providing a culturally freighted yet oddly neutral setting. How did the imagined Mediterranean come into being for Shakespeare and his contemporaries? How did the imagined cultural landscape mirror or subvert the world outside the theatre? We will read a selection of the plays and the travel narratives and other writings that formed the imagined Mediterranean in the minds of Shakespeare and his audience and examine the ways in which this imagined world was peculiarly adapted for the theater of the times.
3441.11 Shakespeare
Harris
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
This course will examine both desire in Shakespeare and desire for Shakespeare: that is, the ways in which his poems and plays depict love, longing, eroticism and appetite, as well as the extent to which our own desires are unleashed by the very act of reading and interpreting Shakespeare – whether those desires take the form of an unabashed Bardolatry, a more strategic investment in the cultural capital that familiarity with his work supposedly confers, a longing for knowable play-texts that “speak Shakespeare’s mind” and/or “speak the truth,” or other more polymorphous and illicit modes of Shakespeare-related pleasure. Some topics to be considered: the desire for meaning; reproductive vs. non-reproductive love; homoeroticism; male vs. female sexuality; the death drive; venereal disease; policing desire; fashion emergencies; desire in a capitalist society; the relationship between sex and (theatrical) performance; narcissism; cross-cultural desire.
Our classroom work will be discussion-oriented; it will entail intensive close reading of the texts, attention both to Shakespeare’s historical contexts and to the popular & political culture of our own time, and theoretical self-reflexivity. In particular, we will think about how Shakespeare’s language gets to work on our desires, how our desires get to work on Shakespeare’s language, and how language itself is the very medium of desire.
3460.10 Milton
TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.
We will read Milton’s major poetry, with special attention to Paradise Lost, to which half of the course will be devoted. We will also read a number of texts, including several books of the Bible and Vergil’s epic The Aeneid, as essential background to understanding Milton’s reworking of story materials and generic conventions. There will be two exams and a term paper. Required texts: Milton, The Complete Poems (ed. John Leonard, Penguin); Vergil, The Aeneid (trans. Sarah Ruden, Yale); and a complete Bible (Old and New Testament) in your choice of translation.
3481W.10 The Eighteenth Century
MW 4:45-6 p.m.
As the assured certainties of Classicism yield to the corrosive influences of sentiment and religious questioning, eighteenth-century writers like Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Boswell, and Voltaire scrambled to erect structures of signification that preserved the Old values while accommodating to incoming political and cultural developments. Even seduction and romance come to have larger political and cultural meanings. Employing a comparative literature approach, this course focuses on British eighteenth-century figures with some attention to French and Austrian figures.
3490W.10 Early American Literature and Culture
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
A brave new world separated by the ocean from other regions, early America posed considerable interpretive challenges for writers between the early seventeenth century and 1800. It might serve as a refuge for Puritans and other adventurers. The indigenous inhabitants of this multicultural gumbo of a place greeted those who arrived with a mixture of diplomatic caution, acceptance, and hostility. The physical world of the new world offered a level of variety and novelty unfamiliar to European settlers. Eventually the advent of political independence for part of British America required adaptation into new social practices which would both derive from and depart from English practice. Writers treated include Shakespeare, Montaigne, Hakluyt, Las Casas, Bradford, Winthrop, Sewall, Saffin, Pain, Franklin, Crevecoeur, Wheatley, Bartram, and Jefferson.
3520.10 American Romanticism
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
This course focuses on the “first flowering” of America’s literature in the period 1825-1865. At this time U.S. authors had to compete with English and European authors, while attempting to establish a separate literary tradition, one with “American” roots and expressive of “American” issues and experiences. We will examine what is distinctive about a representative group of writings—fiction, non-fiction, poetry—from this period, and see what their authors contributed to the literary and cultural controversies of the day. And we explore how these writings reflect important historical and cultural developments, from the rise of Jacksonian democracy and efforts at reform (in education, social theory, spiritual life) to the deeply divisive controversies over race and slavery and the outbreak of the Civil War.
3530.10 The Romantic Period
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
Among other things, the Romantic period in British Literature (roughly 1775-1832) featured a booming publishing industry, an increasingly literate population, dramatic urbanization, robust colonial expansion, sustained warfare, and evolving definitions of the English nation and British empire. Our survey of texts will take a global view and try to cover examples of anglophone literature as it was produced under these social conditions and in all of Great Britain’s constituent parts: Ireland, Wales, Scotland, India, the Caribbean, as well as provincial and metropolitan England. We will notice that writers of this period pioneered literary developments that, when put into historical context, feel decidedly contemporary to a reader in 2012. Indeed, the course’s implicit argument is that not only does the contemporary world help us understand the Romantic period, the Romantic period helps us understand the globalized present.
3541.10 Victorian Literature
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
This course on the period 1865-1910 tracks the development of modernism and the critique of “Victorianism” from deep in the Victorian period. We study not only major British writers—Swinburne, Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy—but also powerful continental figures—Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Proust--whose achievements intersect with and complement those of their British counterparts. The death of God and the development of aestheticism are two themes among others that we trace.
3570.10 19th-Century Black Literature
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
African American Women Writers and Activists of19th Century. This course is a literary study of African American women who were at the forefront of the social changes sweeping the country in the 19th century, including abolition, women's rights, educational reform, voting rights, and the campaign against lynching. We will examine how these extraordinary black women usedthe written word--novels, autobiographies, and political essays--to dismantle fixed ideas about race and femininity and create empowered identities. Writers might include Harriet Wilson (the first recognized black woman novelist); Harriet Jacobs (anti-slavery activist); Elizabeth Keckley (autobiographer who worked in the Lincoln White House); Ida B. Wells (investigative journalist who spearheaded the anti-lynching campaign); Pauline Hopkins (magazine editor and novelist);andAnna Julia Cooper (educator and feminist).
3631.10 American Drama
TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.
This course acquaints students with the history of American theatre and drama from 1960 to the present, focusing on prize-winning plays by major playwrights. The course also exposes students to films based on these plays, allowing for discussion of acting styles, conventions of staging, and performance issues of stage and screen.
3641W.10 The American Novel
TR 4:45-6 p.m.
In this course, we will explore literary modernism in the context of the development and transformation of the American novel during the 20th century. Taking a psychological approach, we will examine the ways in which the psychobiographical concerns of various American writers shape their novels; we will also engage trauma theory as a particularly useful means of interrogating many of the novels. Also taking a sociological approach, we will explore the ways in which the novels, and indeed the writers themselves, are "written" or encoded by American culture.
Texts:
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms;Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Heller, Catch-22; Baldwin, Giovanni's Room; Walker, The Color Purple; O'Brien, The Things They Carried;MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed.
Requirements:
Several film reviews and other short response papers, an annotated bibliography, a long paper,an objectivefinal exam, and participation in class
3650.10 The Short Story
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
This course acquaints students with the history of American short fiction from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to today. It also places the American stories in the contexts of changing writing styles generally and is supplemented by essays about the short stories by authors and critics.
3661.10 20th Century Irish Fiction, James Joyce and After
Griffin
WF 11:10-12:25 p.m.
English 3661 includes James Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and parts of Ulysses, and selections of other fictionwriters such as George Moore, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Liam O’Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Brian Friel, William Trevor, Deirdre Madden, Joseph O’Connor, and others.
3710W.80 Contemporary Drama
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
A study of current and contemporary drama. Students read and discuss plays, attend performances, write essays on two dramas and make an artistic presentation havingto do with a chosen drama.
(Cross-listed with TRDA 3710.80)
3721.10 Contemporary American Literature
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
American literature – poetry, fiction, drama – since 1945 constitutes a remarkably varied and impressive body of work. We’ll look in turn at each of the three genres, noting recurrent themes, conflicting techniques and theories of art, political and seemingly apolitical writing, and much more. Running through a good deal of this literature is anxiety about the possibility of continuing to make art in a world which, in its violence and confusion, undermines the aesthetic project itself. We’ll discuss this, and we’ll discuss the extent to which this work can confidently be labeled American. What makes a piece of writing American? Please note: This is a no-tech class. No laptops, no nuthin'.
3730W.10 Love and Longing in Asian Pacific Culture
W 12:45-3:15 p.m.
This course explores the representation of love, longing, and desire in twentieth century literature and film from diasporic Asian and Pacific contexts. In the process, we will explore the aesthetics and politics of modern discourses of love, family, coupledom, labor, and nation in their complex diversity. We may consider race and sexual desire, cities and nations, queer love and disability, gender and the the rhetorics of family; adoption and intergenerational desire; capitalism and alienation, and the longing for home. Selected texts may include: Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Caro's Whale Rider, Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Wu's Saving Face, and Ozeki's My Year of Meats.
3810.10 Art & Twentieth Century US Black Freedom Movements
Pittman
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
In this course we will examine the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, or African American Liberation Struggle, through historical contexts and the lens of the artistic productions that narrated the collective struggle for freedom. The course will begin with Nikhil Pak Singh’s recent book, Black is a Country to frame our discussion of the time period and defining characteristics of the Civil Rights Movement. We will read a combination of primary texts, including songs, periodicals, memoir, and poetry. Students will become familiar with primary organizations and literary figures. The course will examine the relationship between the arts and political visibility. We will also study secondary scholarship, including histories of the period such as Peniel E. Joseph’s Waiting Till the Midnight Hour. This class will pose the question “What does art do?” while also interrogating dominant paradigms of U.S. citizenship and national identity.
3810.11 Epic and Romance: When Worlds Collide
Hsy
TR 4:45-6 p.m.
This writing-intensive course encompasses great works of literature from the heroic masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf, to Shakespeare’s Henry V, a complex exploration of international conflict and courtly love. In our exploration of medieval and early modern texts, we will counter shifting perspectives on politics, erotic desire, ethnic identity, and cultural exchange, and we will investigate the dynamic relationship between genre and history. Moreover, we will trace happens when different ways of life come into conflict: Christian and non-Christian, human and animal, urban and rural, European and non-European. Readings include selections from The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Le Morte Darthur (Malory), and the Lais of Marie de France. We will conclude by examining modern takes on the epic and romance traditions through J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. NOTE: We will read our texts alongside literary criticism and genre theory. Assignments include response papers, midterm essay, blog posting, and an analytical essay (which you will write and revise in stages).
3810.12 Jewish Literature Live
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
Jewish Lit Live is a course unique to GW in which students will read 6 works of fiction; after reading and discussion of each work, the author will visit the class to engage in dialogue with students. Authors include Tony Kushner, David Bezmozgis, Nathan Englander, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Response papers and attendance at evening readings.
3820W.10 Faulkner and Morrison
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
"Race, Memory, and Aesthetics": This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.
Texts include: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Playing in the Dark.
3830.10 Aesthetics
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
From ancient to contemporary works of philosophy and works of art, we'll ask throughout the semester what beauty is, and why its effects are so powerful. We'll consider not only artistic beauty, but the beauty of the natural world. Students will be encouraged throughout this discussion class to think about and share their own aesthetic experiences. Please note: This is a no-tech class. No laptops, no nuthin'.
3830.11 Literature and Madness
MW 3:45-5 p.m.
This course will explore narratives of suffering with particular attention given to the disconnects between cultural demands and their unruly resistances. We will begin by with three texts expressing women’s resistance to state demands, Antigone, The Yellow Wallpaper, and Breuer’s Anna O. Subsequently we will explore trauma as a response to cultural insanity, and end by reading texts variously termed psychotic, Schreber’s Memoirs of My Mental Illness and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Course readings will link medical discourse to discourses of theory and literature. Theoretical material will focus on an understanding of the biology and psychology of suffering. Requirements are one presentation, a two page paper proposal and a final paper 16-20 pages.
3840.10 Gender and Western Texts
MW 3:45-5 p.m.
Many of the most controversial and influential ideas about gender in U.S. culture have been generated in the West--both as a geographical region and as a powerful myth. In this course we will read and discuss a variety of twentieth-century Western texts, considering the versions of "masculinity" and "femininity" that they propose, and how these constructions of gender arise from a variety of Western cultures and ethnic and racial communities. Texts will include Native American texts by Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie, several "classic Western" narratives by Jack Shaefer, Owen Wister, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx, narratives of immigrant Americans including Oregon Trail diaries and fiction by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, and Maxine Hong Kingston, and several "Western" films.
3840.11 Women, Place and Time
Kentoff
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
This course considers modern American women’s lived experiences via the "everyday life" sociopolitical contexts and constructs of space, place, location, history, memory, and time. Readings will include personal/political narratives spanning the 20th century, including fictional and autobiographical works by Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Mary Antin, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Julia Alvarez, Julie Otsuka, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as a brief selection of essayists, short story writers, and poets. Through the lens of feminist theory, and related poststructural, postcolonial, and psychological criticism, we will explore how these authors depict the complex ways in which gender and other identity markers intersect with the abstract and material concepts of geography and temporality. Assignments will include an oral presentation, mid-point essay, final paper, and brief Blackboard postings prior to each class.
3965.10 Asian American Cultural Studies
TR 3:45-5 p.m.
This course examines the cultural legacies of Asian North Americans from China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines. We’ll discuss race, identity, and gender formation; Orientalism and neocolonialism in the U.S.; adopted, queer, and colonial subjects; trauma, memory, and racial melancholy; real and imaginary homelands; and the ongoing project of inventing Asian American literature. Representative texts: The Inheritance of Loss, M. Butterfly, The Namesake, Native Speaker, and one French-Iranian graphic novel, Persepolis. Fulfills the theory/culture studies or the minority/postcolonial requirement for the English major. Please contact Prof. Chu, [email protected], for additional information.
4220.10 Creative Writing Senior Thesis
4250W.10 Honors Thesis
4360.10 Independent Study
Registration restricted to undergraduate English majors. Departmental approval required.
4470.10 Internship
Departmental approval required to register.