Fall 2013 English Course Offerings

Visit the Registrar’s webpage for additional information

PLEASE NOTE THAT COURSE AVAILABILITY AND TIMES CHANGE FREQUENTLY. CHECK BACK OFTEN FOR UPDATES.  IN THE CASE OF DISCREPANCIES, WEBADVISOR ALWAYS TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER SCHEDULES POSTED ON THIS WEBSITE.

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Eng 100-01 Literary Landscapes
Rishona Zimring
TTH 9:40-11:10

Through the study of novels, short stories, poems, travel narratives, and visual art, this course examines various imaginative geographies that have preoccupied writers and artists. We will investigate categories such as cities, gardens, seascapes and shorelines, wilderness, and “the private sphere.” Our reading will reach back to classical antiquity, as we trace the history, for example, of the “pastoral,” and will take us through early modern Europe, the 18^th through 20^th centuries, and up to contemporary art and writing. How do representations of space work through and against the power of “Edenic” symbolism? How and when do cities such as Paris and London magnetically attract artists, and also become the topic of their work? Is the sea viewed from the shore sublime or maternal? These are just some of the questions we will pursue in this course.
Prerequisite: None.

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Eng 100-02 Arthurian Literature
Karen Gross
MWF 9:10-10:10

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Eng 100-03 Literary Representations of Childhood
Andrea Hibbard
MWF 11:30-12:30

This course traces the development of Anglo-American literary conceptions of the child from William Blake to the present. Although much of our focus will be on the years leading up to and including the so-called “golden age” of children’s literature (from about 1860 to 1920), we will begin the semester by considering how and why important Romantic poets idealized childhood. We will go on to explore the significance of Victorian fictional and non-fictional writings about exploited child workers, lonely orphans, and dying invalids. How did Victorian authors use these children to challenge the social and economic status quo and to satisfy the sentimental tastes of adult readers? We will also examine popular child heroes of adventure narratives, ghost stories, and fairytales. What is the allure of texts that figure the child as the uncivilized or wild “other”? How did these fictions both teach and transgress gender roles? The semester will end with a selection of recent works that seek to express the perspective of children caught in the crossfire of adult struggles over race, religion, and land. Authors include William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maurice Sendak, Opal Whiteley, Henry James, Dinah Craik, Toni Morrison, Marjane Satrapi, and Dave Eggers.
Prerequisite: None.

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Eng 100-04 Films Adapting Fictions
Michael Mirabile
TTH 1:50-3:20

This course will concentrate on major novels of the twentieth century and their adaptation or transference to the medium of the cinema. Reading fictions and watching films, moving from page to screen, we will ask the comparative question of how the specific conditions of each art form determine the meanings and cultural resonances of individual adaptations. We will consider how influential theories of literature and film, along with general
frameworks of modernism and postmodernism, offer diverse perspectives on our course materials. Authors will include some of the following: Joseph Conrad, Philip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, William S. Burroughs, Daphne du Maurier,
and James M. Cain.
Prerequisite: None.

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 Eng 200 Intro to the Short Story
Pauls Toutonghi
TTH 8:00-9:30

Elements of fiction such as plot, character development, descriptive language, and voice. Emphasis on craft-based exercise. Extensive reading of short stories, culminating in the writing and revision of a final story.
Prerequisites: None.

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Eng 201 Intro to Poetry/Poetry Writing
Mary Szybist
MW 3:00-4:30

Elements of poetry such as imagery, rhythm, tone. Practice in the craft. Frequent references to earlier poets.
Prerequisite: None.

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Eng 205-01 Major Periods/Issues in English Literature
Lyell Asher
TTH 9:40-11:10

Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of English literature.  Middle Ages to end of 17th century.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or consent of instructor.

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 Eng 205-02 Major Periods/Issues in English Literature
Will Pritchard
MWF 8:00-9:00

Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of English literature.  Middle Ages to end of 17th century.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or consent of instructor.

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Eng 205-03 Major Periods/Issues in English Literature
Karen Gross
MWF 1:50-2:50

Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of English literature.  Middle Ages to end of 17th century.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or consent of instructor.

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Eng 208 Prose Writing: Creative Non-Fiction
Cheston Knapp
MW 4:30-6:00

Writing in the genre known variously as the personal essay or narrative, memoir, autobiography, to introduce students to traditional and contemporary voices in this genre. Daily writing and weekly reading of exemplars such as Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, Hazlitt, Woolf, Soyinka, Baldwin, Walker, Hampl, Dillard, Selzer, Lopez.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing.
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Eng 234 Strange Bedfellows in Poetry: From Donne to Jorie Graham
Mary Szybist
TTH 1:50-3:20

How poets of different eras have worked with similar themes, techniques, traditions. Possible groupings include Poetics of Prophecy (William Blake, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg); Poetry of Meditation (George Hebert, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham); Textual Indeterminacy (Christopher Smart, Emily Dickinson, John Ashbery, Vicissitudes of Aristocracy (Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord George Byron, Robert Lowell); Representations of Race (Phillip Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove); Shifting Personae(William Butler Yeats, John Berryman); Plays of Wit (John Donne, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin).
Prerequisite: None.
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Eng 244 Practicum: Literary Review
Mary Szybist and Pauls Toutonghi

Production of a first-rate literary review. In weekly workshops, students gain
some familiarity with all the processes involved (editorial, layout, printing, business, distribution) and intimate experience with at least one. May be taken four times for credit.
1-2 semester credits 
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Eng 298-01 Literature and History of Ireland
David Campion and John Callahan
M 3:00-4:30/TH 3:30-5:00

The literature and history of Ireland from the late nineteenth century to the present. Literary study will focus on the Irish literary renaissance, including the works of Yeats, Joyce, Synge, Kavanagh, and O’Casey. Contemporary authors will include Seamus Heaney and Roddy Doyle. Historical topics will include the Home Rule movement, emigration and diasporic identities, Republicanism and Unionism, the war for independence and the Irish Civil War, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, religion and civil society, and the role of women in Modern Ireland.
Prerequisite: None.
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Eng 298-02 The Bröntes: Legends and Legacies
Andrea Hibbard
MWF 1:50-2:50

This course offers students the opportunity to read major novels and excerpts from letters, journal entries, and juvenilia by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, as well as representative poems by Emily Brontë.  We will explore the mythology that has attached itself to the Brontë sisters — covertly penning works of Gothic genius, passionate romance, and feminist revolt in a secluded moorland parsonage dominated by their strict father — even as we historicize their literary creations.  How did the Brontës simultaneously contribute to and distance themselves from mid-Victorian literary culture.  We will investigate the vexed critical reception the novels and their authors inspired and continue to inspire.  Along the way, we will grapple with the afterlives of two of the most celebrated novels.  We will read The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s brilliant twentieth-century literary rejoinder to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and we will consider the significance of Hollywood’s gloriously futile efforts to translate the Byronic characters and tangled plot lines of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to screen. 
Prerequisite: None.

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Eng 300 Fiction Writing
Pauls Toutonghi
TTH 9:40-11:10

Discussion and small-group workshop. Required reading aloud from an anthology, with student-led discussion of authors’ texts. Daily exercises in various elements of short fiction, graduating to full-length stories; emphasis on revision. All students write evaluations of peers’ work and participate in oral critique.
Prerequisite: English 200 and junior standing or consent of instructor.

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Eng 301 Poetry Writing
Jerry Harp
M 3:00-4:30/TH 3:30-5:00

Discussion of student work with occasional reference to work by earlier poets. Students develop skills as writers and readers of poetry.
Prerequisite: English 201 and junior standing or consent of instructor.
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Eng 322 Post-Civil War American Literature
John Callahan
TTH 11:30-1:00

American literature as it reflects cultural and historical events such as reconstruction, industrialization, Western expansion, the women’s rights movement. Aesthetic issues such as the rise of realism and naturalism. Cather, Chesnutt, Chopin, Crane, Douglass, Dreiser, DuBois, James, Jewett, Melville, Norris, Twain, Wharton.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
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Eng 324 Modern American Literature: Post WWII
Kristin Fujie
MWF 11:30-12:30

American literature in the second half of the 20th century as writers respond to such historical and cultural forces as the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Vietnam War. Aesthetics of postmodernism and the breakdown and mingling of traditional literary genes. Baldwin, Barth, Bellow, Doctorow, Ellison, Erdich, Lowell, Mailer, Morrison, O’Connor, Olsen, Plath, Salinger, Silko, Walker.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.

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Eng 330 Chaucer
Karen Gross
MW 3:00-4:30

The poetry of Chaucer in its literary, historical, social, and religious contexts. Topics may include the relationship between the sacred and the profane, the representations of men and women in 14th-century English society, the rise of the vernacular in the later Middle Ages, medieval attitudes towards poetry and authorship, the influence of continental European literary forms on English traditions, manuscript culture and ways of reading and writing before the advent of printing, the characteristics of different medieval literary genres, and the critical reception of Chaucer. Readings, predominantly from The Canterbury Tales, are in Middle English.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
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Eng 332 Shakespeare: Later Works
Lyell Asher
TTH 11:30-1:00

Critical reading of plays representative of the development of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, romances. Usually covers six or seven plays and selected poetry from 1604 to 1611, typically including Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
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Eng 333 Major Figures in English Literature
Rishona Zimring
M 3:00/TH 3:30-5:00

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Thus are introduced two of the most famous characters in 20^th-century literature, captured forever in snapshot glimpses going about the business of everyday life. Modernist texts, and these two notoriously difficult writers, can be surprisingly accessible. After all, both Joyce and Woolf revolutionized fiction in part by resisting the habitual decorum of the novels of their time, and by giving to “realism” a new twist: a more direct and daring representation of experience, a new language for expressing and appreciating the mundane.

This course introduces students to in-depth study of two of the greatest, most famous, and most influential writers of the 20^th century. Through close study of major works by each author, we will savor their exhilarating experiments with language, and come to understand the social, philosophical, literary, and political purposes of their experimentation. The survey of major works will include Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, which we will read in its entirety over the course of several weeks. Study of Woolf’s works will include the major experimental novels, typically Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Focus will be on understanding as well as delighting in these major works, while supplementary readings and lectures will offer background on the lives of the writers, their historical context, their influence on subsequent writers, and the questions about literary form and literary history raised by their works.

A mix of formal and informal essay assignments, some creative and experimental, will provide the basis for a continuous practice of written analysis, interpretation, and appreciation of the works being studied. In addition, a final exam will assess the grasp of texts, concepts, and background as well as provide an ultimate in-class essay. Departures from the norm will occasionally divert the class: staged readings, for example, of the notoriously upside-down, surreal world of Ulysses’ “Nighttown” section (which alludes to the seduction by Circe in Homer’s Odyssey), and of the dinner party, with its interplay of spoken and interior monologues, in To the Lighthouse.
Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.

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Please click on the Senior Seminar tab under the Courses section of this website to view Eng 450 registration information and course descriptions.