Upper-Level Literature Classes Fall 2012
2800W.10 Critical Methods DeWispelare
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
This course addresses the philosophical underpinnings and practical applications of influential approaches to the study of literature and culture. Through readings that tackle vexed problems of representation, signification, interpretation, and translation, students will gain a firm grounding in the practice of literary study as an academic discipline. Classic readings by Plato, Marx, Descartes, Freud, Saussure, and Foucault will equip us engage with cutting-edge work by contemporary theorists like Žižek, Badiou, Butler, Spivak, and Agamben. By applying literary critical techniques to fiction, poetry, and film, students will learn first-hand the value of methodologies as diverse as structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, feminism, African American and Latina/o cultural theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and disability studies. In addition, students will hone their argumentative and analytical writing skills, as this is a writing-intensive course and fulfills a WID requirement.
2800W.11 Critical Methods Lopez
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
This course introduces students to major ideas in the methods and assumptions of literary and cultural analysis—i.e., literary and cultural theory—including formalism, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, plus work on race, sexuality, diaspora, and disability. By the end, students will be able to identify key literary and cultural theorists and movements and use theoretical insights in writing to analyze a literary or cultural text.
3410.10 Chaucer Hsy
TR 3:45-5 p.m.
In this course, we will learn to read and understand Chaucer's work in the original Middle English. Not only will we enjoy the beauty and humor of his poetry, but we will also explore some of his lesser-known prose writings (including legal and scientific treatises). Requirements: active class participation, translation exercises, close reading, analytical essay, and one oral performance. No previous knowledge of Middle English is required.
3440W.10 Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Uncanny Globe Harris
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
This course offers an introduction to six plays by that most uncanny of playwrights: Shakespeare. His plays are uncanny inasmuch as they often feature seemingly supernatural apparitions such as the ghost of Gower in Pericles and the shape-shifting sprite Ariel in The Tempest, mysterious outsiders such as the Moors in Titus Andronicus and Othello, or characters who are simultaneously opposite AND eerily identical such as the twins in Comedy of Errors and the Christian & Jewish adversaries in The Merchant of Venice. But, as we will also see, the uncanniness of Shakespeare’s plays is also very much tied up with their relentless confusion of geography as much as language. Titus Andronicus and Othello feature Moors, i.e. Africans, who are simultaneously Europeans; Comedy of Errors and Pericles present us with families who are made unfamiliar to each other by being dispersed across different nations or continents; and The Tempest and The
Merchant of Venice similarly move their characters across borders, bringing Italians to the New World and the commodities of Asia, Africa and America to Venice. Written in an age of unprecedented transnational movement and migration, Shakespeare’s plays – many of which were first staged in a theatre called “The Globe” – suggest how the experience of the uncanny is not just about strange supernatural occurrences but also about the confusions endemic to a globalizing world not unlike our own.
3440W.11 Shakespeare Cook
TR 11:10-12:15 p.m.
This course will begin with an intensive and extensive study of one play. It will then proceed to survey Shakespeare’s works from the beginning to the end of his career, with close attention to the continuing development of his techniques as a dramatist and poet. There will be regular quizzes, two mid-term exams and a term paper.
3450.10 Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Film Cook
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
Shakespeare on Film will explore the processes through which the works of a great Renaissance dramatist are transformed into powerful modern films. We will play close attention to the radical difference between the two media in an attempt to increase our understanding not only of a limited sub-genre of film, but also of the interpretive potentials programmed into Shakespeare’s play-texts and of the highly constructed nature of a medium that attempts to conceal its constructive procedures. There will be regular quizzes and two major writing projects. Students will be required to watch a number of films through Blackboard.
3510.10 Children’s Literature Goswami
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
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 as a means to explore themes and narrative patterns that are particular to children’s texts. In addition, we will watch cinematic adaptations of popular classics in order to facilitate a discussion on new and emerging trends in children’s literature.
3530.10 The Romantic Movement DeWispelare
MW 4:45-6 p.m.
This course introduces British Romantic Literature (roughly 1776-1832) from a global perspective. We will study Great Britain and all its constituent parts: Ireland, Wales, Scotland, India, the Caribbean, as well as England. We will track the literary repercussions of this period’s tremendous socio-political dynamism. For example, we will note the development of a booming publishing industry, an increasingly literate population, dramatic urbanization, robust colonial expansion, sustained warfare, and complex networks of international cultural exchange. Against this increasingly global background, we will ask how and why culture turned to literary tropes that seemed to counter globality. Studying authors like William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott, we will inquire about phenomena like the sudden popularity of “provincial” and “rustic” themes, the widespread excitement for dialect and cultural localism, the worried recognition of the individual’s isolation and alienation, and the intense interest in solitary inspiration from nature’s sublimity. In addition, we will look forward to the Victorian period and think about how Romantic literature influences the formation of national and imperial identities.
3540.10 Victorian Literature Carter
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
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.
3560W.10 American Realism Romines
MW 4:45-6 p.m.
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 Modernism Soltan
TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.
The word "modernism" designates a radical cultural as well as artistic shift in the early twentieth century, with shocking works by artists like Stravinsky, Picasso, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Alfred Jarry, and by architects like Le Corbusier, conveying to audiences a new "modern" sensibility. We'll read many examples of literary modernism in this course, but we'll also consider the political, philosophical, and theological background to this radical, experimental movement.
3630.10 American Drama Combs
TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.
American Drama, Part One, covering nineteenth-century melodrama, early twentieth-century realism, and major works by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. There will be an in-class mid-term exam, a take-home final, two oral reports (handed in at the time of presentation in essay form), and one theatre-attendance project. We will view excerpts from films based on a number of the plays. The class will be limited to 35 participants.
3640W.10 The American Novel Moreland
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
3650.10 The Short Story Soltan
TR 11:20-12:25 p.m.
Through a close reading of many short stories - American, British, and European; 20th and 21st century - we'll try to get a good sense of this genre of writing. What are the formal qualities of the short story? How do short stories convey meaning? Why, as a writer, choose the concision of the short story over the length of the novel? The course will have a strongly evaluative orientation; we will ask what makes a great short story, and we will also ask how some short stories fail.
3660.10 20th Century Irish Literature Griffin
W 11:10-12:25 p.m., F 12:45-2 p.m.
ENGLISH 3660 studies Twentieth-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 and dramatists (including poets of the theatre) who have been 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 (such as 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 giant of Irish poetry and was followed by fine poets like Clarke, Kavanagh, McNeice, Montague, Heaney, the Longleys, Boland, Ni Dhomhaill, and Clifton. ENG 3660 will explore the world-renowned and not-so-famous writers from a small country with a high degree of quality. In class we will read aloud and discuss sections from plays and poems.
3720W.10 Contemporary American Literature Moreland
TR 4:45-6 p.m.
3810.10 Selected Topics: Freud, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky Carter
TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
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.
3810.11 Selected Topics: Renaissance Drama Keller
TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.
One runs around the stage with his sister’s heart on the point of his sword; another stabs her lover’s murderer and herself while taking part in a masque before the king and court; a group of con artists squat in a London townhouse and scam unwary strangers; a country lady hires contract killers to remove an inconvenient husband. No one was safe on the London stage in the 16th and 17th centuries. The audience loved it and Shakespeare learned from it. We will read eight or ten of these extraordinary works and examine them through the lens of our time and their own. If there are appropriate performances we will attend as a group. Assignments will include papers and essay exams, and, if class size permits, some group work.
3810.12 Selected Topics: Adolescence and Old Age Romines
MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.
In the twentieth century, concepts of adolescence and old age (often inflected by gender) were invented and reinvented in American cultures. In this class, we will explore how these concepts are reflected, and often juxtaposed, in U.S. fiction and memoir. Our primary texts will include novels, short fiction, and memoir by Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, J.D. Salinger, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others, as well as occasional related critical, theoretical, and historical readings. Assignments will include essays, in-class reports, midterm and final exams.
3830W.10 Topics in Theory/Cultural Studies: Transnational
Film and LGBTQ Cultures McRuer
MW 12”:45-2 p.m.
Study abroad component to this course. Instructor’s permission required. 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).
3920.80 US Latino/a Literature and Culture Carrillo
(Honors 2175.80)
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
Imagining latino/a: “From the “Five Vessels” of the Navárez Expedition to Sofía Vergara in a Red Dress”
The Federal Office of Management and Budget and United States Census Bureau shifted the cultural imaginary of “latino/a” when in 1997 a Federal Registrar, revising standards for the classification of federal data on race and ethnicity in order to provide "consistent data on race and ethnicity throughout the Federal Government. The development of the data standards stem in large measure from new responsibilities to enforce civil rights laws." Race and Ethnicity have since been recognized as two separate categories on the US census with a request that residents choose the race(s) they most closely associate with which they most closely identify, and to indicate whether they are of “Hispanic” or “Latino” in origin. This interdisciplinary survey analysis the reorganization of the literary images representative of the latino/a US against those presented in current visual culture, art, television, film, and advertisement.
3960.10 Asian American Literature Chu
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
The course introduces Asian American literature as a tradition that questions mainstream constructions of Asian American race and ethnicity and provides alternative accounts of Asian American experiences. We’ll discuss East-West encounters; Chinese immigration and exclusion; Japanese American internment narratives; feminist, national and postcolonial influences; adoption, transnational migration; theories of narrative, genre, mourning, and loss. Readings generally include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South Asian North American writers, such as: Kiran Desai, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai. Typical assignments: Oral presentation; a short midterm paper; a final paper. Fulfills the minority and 20th century requirements for majors.
3970.10 Jewish American Literature Moskowitz
TR 12:45-2 p.m.
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.