Courses
Scroll down to see Spring 2012 Literature courses and Fall 2011 courses in creative and expository writing (L13).
Click here to see class days and times
FALL SEMESTER 2011
ENGLISH LITERATURE
LITERATURE SEMINAR FOR FRESHMAN: HOW TO READ A UNIVERSITY (L14 150 E LIT)
Nearly 70% of American high school graduates now study at college for some time. But almost none study college as a formative individual experience and critical social institution while there. "How to Read a University" aims to narrow this gap, encouraging students to reflect on the ground under their feet, the contemporary American university, and the histories, debates, and stories that shape it. What is the purpose of higher education in American democratic life? To protect and defend islands of humanistic contemplation and disinterested scientific inquiry? To equip young citizens for informed social action? To train meritocratic elites for high office--and high salaries? And how has this purpose shifted with the growth of leading U.S. universities from clerical enclaves to worldly research corporations? This course will address such knotty questions with help from three groups of texts: canonical novels and dramas of American campus life by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edward Albee, Richard Farina, Alice Walker, Don DeLillo, and Zadie Smith; some provocative theories and histories of the university in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and a trio of iconic university movies: National Lampoon's Animal House, the law school epic The Paper Chase, and the scenery-chewing Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton rendition of the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? NOTE: This course is open only for freshmen. 3 units.
MW 10:00a-11:30a
Maxwell
LITERATURE SEMINAR FOR FRESHMEN: IMMIGRANTS AND EXILES
(L14 151 E LIT)
Literature has traditionally been a welcoming space for people who, by choice or history, do not fit easily in the mainstream of community life. The widespread changes and upheavals of the last century have vastly expanded the ranks of such people, accelerating the processes of immigration and exile while fundamentally altering traditional notions of home and belonging. This course will examine fiction by writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Albert Camus, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and V.S. Naipaul, who write from and about the position of "outsider," exploring what such texts have to say about living in an unsettled, diasporic modern world - a world in which real belonging seems an increasingly elusive goal. In reading these texts, we will investigate how their authors have portrayed the journeys, hopes, and hardships of dislocation and alienation, as well as the role literature might play in creating a sense of community for immigrants, refugees, and people living in various forms of exile. NOTE: This course is open only for freshmen. 3 units. Same as L16 Comp Lit 151C.
TuTh 10:00a-11:30a
Brown
LITERATURE SEMINAR FOR FRESHMEN: TEXTS AND DETECTION
(L14 154 E LIT)
Detective fiction is a model genre for thinking about literary criticism: the questions of plot, evidence, and character that interest us in the classroom are the professional interests of the detective as well. This course will ask students to consider how the detective's "reading" practices intersect with our own, as well as a range of other topics: the questions of cultural value raised by genre fiction; the relation of crime to national identity and empire; the questions of gender raised by the supposedly hard-boiled masculinity so central to one strain of the genre; and questions of narrative pleasure-why we read-raised by a genre that makes discovery central. We will begin with Edgar Allan Poe's "invention" of the literary detective, before moving on to look briefly at British "golden age" detective fiction. We will spend the bulk of the semester, however, with fiction from the 1930s forward, from the "hard-boiled" writing of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett through to the revisions (feminist, postmodern, and global) of the genre offered by more contemporary writers. NOTE: This course is open only for freshmen. 3 units.
MW 11:30a-1:00p
Grausam
LITERATURE SEMINAR FOR FRESHMAN: LITERATURE AND JUSTICE (L14 159 E LIT)
This seminar explores the problem of justice through a broad range of literary writings. Students will study classic texts from different historical periods and cultural traditions, ranging from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Dostoyevski and Melville to Kafka and Camus. We will pay particular attention to the following questions: How do different cultures determine what is just and what is unjust? What is the relationship between equity and the letter of the law? Is justice a matter of interpretation? What is poetic justice? Aimed at developing the habits of close textual analysis that are central to the study of texts in the humanities, the course will help students cultivate the difficult art of critical judgment. NOTE: This course is open only for freshmen. 3 units. Same as L84 Lw St 1590.
MWF 3:00p-4:00p
Schmidgen
CHIEF ENGLISH WRITERS I
(L14 211 E LIT)
An introduction to major writers: Chaucer through Milton. Emphasis on chief works and critical methods for interpretation. 3 units.
TuTh 11:30a-1:00p
Arch
TuTh 1:00p-2:30p
Ake
INTRO TO LITERARY STUDY: MODERN TEXTS, CONTEXTS, AND CRITICAL METHODS
(L14 215 E LIT)
Intensive introduction to important literary works published since 1700; how literary scholars use cultural, biographical, and generic contexts and apply critical approaches. 3 units.
SECT 01: In this section, we will read British fiction and poetry spanning the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, with primary texts by William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Rudyard Kipling. We will pay attention to how authors often advertise the innovative and experimental nature of their works even as they rely on readers inheriting a set of literary expectations. Our reading of selected criticism will familiarize students with the ways in which contemporary critics use historical knowledge and theoretical formulations to accomplish a range of goals. These goals will include everything from determining an author's meaning to documenting the dissenting voices that internally haunt almost any linguistic enterprise.
MW 11:30a-1:00p
Batten
SECT 02: This class will introduce a wide array of critical questions and approaches for reading and analyzing fiction, drama, and poetry ranging across two centuries. After first placing each text in its cultural and generic context, we will explore how critical conversations about the same text have varied over time. By emphasizing how to question and analyze different genres within diverse historical and critical contexts, this class strives to prepare students to thrive in 300-level English courses.
MW 2:30p-4:00p
Finneran
SECT 03: In this version of the course, we will read poetry, fiction, and drama drawn from a range of literary periods, studying the ways in which individual authors satisfy or evade the conventions of genre and the expectations of their readers. Of particular interest to us will be the literary strategies of satire, parody, and imitation, and their relation to the increasingly popular genre of the novel. Each major text read for this course will provide an opportunity for the review of current critical approaches. Texts will include: verse epistles by Pope and Swift; one Jane Austen novel Emma; Sheridan´s comic play The Rivals; and one Gothic novel.
TuTh 10:00a-11:30a
Pawl
THE ART OF POETRY
(L14 257 E LIT)
This course introduces students to the study of literature. It focues on the most intense of literary forms, poetry, to develop a broad range of interpretive abilities. The course aims to give students a critical vocabulary for analysis; an instinct for discovering and evaluating literary problems; and a sense of different historical periods of poetic production. Students will acquire a basic understanding of the line, prosody, and figurative language. Writing and speaking well about poetry is a crucial goal of this class, and students will practice diferent forms of engagement. Questions of evidence and sound argumentation will be important, but the class does not draw an exact line between critical and creative kinds of writing and thinking. Instead, it wishes to cultivate lively exchange between these poles. 3 units.
TuTh 1:00p-2:30p
Pollak
TuTh 2:30p-4:00p
Bailin
THE WRITING OF THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT
(L14 307 E LIT)
The Indian Sub-continent has yielded a number of modern writers, expatriate and otherwise, whose works articulate the postcolonial experience. This course is designed to be a survey, drawing on select Sub-continental writers including: R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri, Micheal Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Kiran Desai. We will discuss representations of the colonial legacy, the event of meaning, extra-territorial identity, and the politics of truth. 3 units. Same as L97 IAS 307.
MW 2:30p-4:00p
Brockmann
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
(L14 3071 E LIT)
Rum! Fun! Beaches! Sun! This is the image of the Caribbean in America today. This course will survey literature and culture from these islands, looking both at and beyond this tourists' paradise. It will aim to introduce students to the region's unmistakably vibrant tradition of multicultural mixture, while keeping an eye on the long history of slavery and rebellion out of which the islands' contemporary situation formed. Along the way we will encounter a wide variety of texts, from the earliest writing focused on life in urban slums, to the first novel ever to have a Rastafarian as its hero, to more contemporary considerations of the region's uncertain place in a U.S.-dominated world. Toward the end of the course, we will also look at important films like The Harder They Come as well as discussing the most globally famous cultural product of the contemporary Caribbean: reggae music. The course will involve readings from multiple genres, and will cover authors such as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, and Caryl Phillips. 3 units. Same as L90 AFAS 3071, L16 Comp Lit 3071.
TuTh 1:00p-2:30p
Brown
TOPICS IN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE: INTERNATIONAL MODERNISM
(L14 311 E LIT)
This course will explore modernism as a traveling culture. We will move between Baudelaire and Kafka, Proust and Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys and Robert Musil. What brings this diverse body of literature together under the umbrella of modernism? What are modernism's formal traits and thematic obsessions? On what trajectories does modernism travel and to what effect? We will watch films like Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Edmond Greville's Princess Tam Tam; and consider modernist literature's dialog with photography, chronophotograhy and cinema. We will think about how these texts have become a tradition through publishing practices, advertising, scholarly and popular interest. 3 units.
TuTh 10:00a-11:30a
Parvulescu
TOPICS IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE: BRITISH LITERATURE AND THE WORLD WARS
(L14 312 E LIT)
The bloodiest century in history saw some of the English language's most innovative writing. It also plunged the language into "perversions," as Orwell called them, of propaganda, espionage, and censorship. This course will study the impact of the First and Second World Wars on British and Irish literature, tracing the ways that war defined both modern experience and literary modernism. We will read novels, stories, and poetry that responded to the world wars, and we will consider the impact of wartime political rhetoric - from World War I posters to Churchill's speeches - on literary language. Writers to be studied will likely include T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett. 3 units.
MW 11:30a-1:00p
Hays
TOPICS IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE: THEORY OF THE NOVEL
(L14 313 E LIT)
The novel is the youngest of the major literary forms, and now arguably the dominant one both inside and outside the academy. But what is the novel, exactly, and where did it come from? This course examines a range of hypotheses about the novel's origins and defining features, and we shall test the supporting evidence against our own readings of the various and fascinating early works that the major theorists of the novel have taken as their exemplary fictions. 3 units. Same as L79 EuSt 313, L97 IAS 3130.
TuTh 11:30a-1:00p
Mackay
TOPICS IN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE: BRITISH FICTION SINCE 1945
(L14 314 E LIT)
This course surveys British fiction from the Second World War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. We shall begin by discussing writers who launched their careers in the aftermath of both modernism and the Second World War, then investigate the postmodernisms of the 1960s and 1970s, consider some of the novelists whose work transformed the "Britishness" of the British novel at the century´s end; and, finally, consider the relationships between the twentieth-century novel and the fiction of our present. One of the pleasures and challenges of studying contemporary fiction is the work-in-progress quality of its canon: with that in mind, you´ll be invited to substitute the final exam with a proposal for the future inclusion on the course of a novel of your own informed choosing. The primary texts are likely to include works by Muriel Spark, Angus Wilson, John Fowles, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Irvine Welsh, Zadie Smith, and Ian McEwan. 3 units. Same as L79 EuSt 3142, L97 IAS 3142.
TuTh 2:30p-4:00p
Mackay
Strobl
TOPICS IN AMERICAN LIT: THE SOUND OF THE CENTURY: POPULAR MUSIC AND AMERICAN LIT FROM BLUES TO RAP
(L14 315 E LIT)
This course explores what happens when the expressive energy associated with black-authored genres of American popular music--blues, ragtime, jazz, rock, r&b, and rap--spills over into modern and contemporary American writing. Why does ragtime come to symbolize interracial and international mixture in the early twentieth-century novel, and how did jazz--and the "Jazz Age"--grow to signify American modernity itself? How did rock help to steer the postmodern turn, and why is rap now busy canonizing itself as academic poetry through fat anthologies and glossy artist memoirs? How has American writing's compulsive running commentary on popular music altered that music in turn, and what can this commentary tell us about our own musical compulsions? Writers to be studied may include James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack Kerouac, Eudora Welty, Bob Dylan, Don DeLillo, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Lethem, and Jay-Z. Musical or musicological knowledge is welcome, but not at all required. Satisfies the American requirement. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 315A.
MW 1:00p-2:30p
Maxwell
TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE CONTACT ZONE
(L14 316 E LIT)
This course explores the literary origins of American identity. The first English colonists imagined themselves as fulfilling a providential errand into the wilderness, but that wilderness was not empty and their texts alone did not shape American identity. Reading the texts of European colonialism, we will establish a working definition of "American exceptionalism," and we will consider how other texts-of religious dissent, Native American culture, and slavery-challenge the narrative of exceptionalism. Readings will likely include Cabeza de Vaca's Relation (1542), Roger Williams's A Key into the Language of America (1643), Mary Rowlandson's The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration (1682), Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative (1789), Melville's Benito Cereno (1856), and Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2008). 3 units. Same as L98
TuTh 11:30a-1:00p
Spar
TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE AMERICAN NOVEL 1945-1999
(L14 318 E LIT)
This course is a survey of the American novel from 1945 to 1999. We will consider a range of topics: the impact of America´s growing superpower status during the Cold War; the usefulness of the nation as an organizing principle for studying literature in an increasingly globalized world; the presence of the Second World War and the Holocaust in American culture; the relationship between the social changes of the period (civil rights, feminism, counterculture, and the rise and fall of the new left) and literary history; the impact of technology on models of communication (literary and otherwise); and the relationship between large-scale demographic changes (immigration, the rise of the suburb, the movement towards a post-industrial economy) and literary practice. Satisfies American requirement. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 3182.
MW 2:30p-4:00p
Grausam
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WOMEN POETS
(L14 3191 E LIT)
This course will begin by considering the impact of three poets, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Plath, on contemporary poetry written by American women. We will then take up the work of a number of contemporary poets (Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, to name a few) and examine the various poetic strategies each of these uses, focusing on stylistic and thematic differences. Students will read a different poet each week and in the classroom we will discuss the individual poems and volumes, as well as historical trends in poetry. Satisfies the American requirement. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 3191, L77 WGSS 3191.
MW 2:30p-4:00p
Bang
AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1865
(L14 321 E LIT)
A survey of significant writers, works, and intellectual developments from the early Puritan settlements to the late 19th century. Our goal is the construction of a serviceable narrative of the nation's cultural and literary history. Readings include selections of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose by Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Satisfies both the 1700-1900 and the American requirement. 3 units. Same as U65 ELit 321B.
WF 10:00a-11:30a
Ruland
MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS II: PERSPECTIVES ON MORALITY AND CULTURE
(L14 322E E LIT)
This course will consider the fiction of major canonical writers of the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth century as a window on the issue of our cultural morality. Beginning with each author's questioning of traditional moralities, we will examine the ways in which each work attempts to fashion a more viable model of social interaction to mediate the conflict between its depiction of human nature and provisional models of behavior. In our consideration of this issue, we will engage such characteristic cultural contexts as the tension between American pragmatics and idealism, the role of religious narratives and dogmas, and the American foundational myth of Edenic innocence as it encounters our puritanical sense of guilt and corruption. Writers will be selected from among the following: Crane, James, Anderson, West, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Roth. Satisfies the American Requirement 0 units.
MWF 10:00a-11:00a
Rosenzweig
SELECTED ENGLISH WRITERS: JANE AUSTEN
(L14 324 E LIT)
In this class we will read all of Austen´s novels - Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion -- as well as selections from her juvenilia and minor works, including the uncharacteristically wicked "Lady Susan" and the epistolary burlesque Love and Friendship. Since Austen was one of the earliest women writers to achieve both popular acclaim and canonical status, we will look closely at the evolution of her literary reputation. Was she a "lady novelist" who knew her place and limited her material accordingly? Or was she an uncompromising critic of her society who punctured its pretensions with her satirical pen? Of special interest in our investigations will be: family feuds and domestic relationships; gender and social roles; imitation and parody; sentimentalism and radicalism; Austen and the romance novel; Austen´s humor. We will also view an Austen film adaptation. Satisfies 1700-1900 requirement and single-author requirement. 3 units.
TuTh 1:00p-2:30p
Pawl
TuTh 4:00p-5:30p
Pawl
READING IN THE RENAISSANCE: THE FORMS AND OCCASIONS OF RENAISSANCE POETRY
(L14 3322 E LIT)
Renaissance poets wrote in a dazzling variety of forms: they made songs and sonnets, odes and epigrams, ballads and elegies, epithets and epithalamia, satires and squibs, pastorals and georgics, devotional lyrics, panegyrics, and epics. They wrote these poems on a variety of occasions -- at times, no doubt, as acts of self expression, joyous contemplations of nature, or meditations on the divine; but Renaissance poets were also moved to write by notions of service, by the desire for patronage, by the promptings of officialdom, by the need to honor the births, anniversaries, and deaths of monarchs, and, in this age, by rebellion and revolution. The aim of ´Forms and Occasions of Renaissance Poetry´ is to sample some of the most memorable examples of the art of Renaissance poetry from Shakespeare, Sidney, and Donne through Marvell, Milton, Dryden and Rochester, and as well to consider the ways these poets wrote to and beyond occasion, and to ask how occasion exerted pressure on form and how literary form shaped the poets´ understanding of occasion -- that is, to consider throughout the dialectic between form and occasion. Satisfies the pre-1700 requirement. 3 units.
TuTh 11:30a-1:00p
Zwicker
A HISTORY OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
(L14 334 E LIT)
An examination of some of the major American and English children's books published between 1865 and 1915, including works by Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Oscar Wilde, and Kate Wiggin. We will also read and discuss some important fairy tales that were anthologized during this period. 3 units. Same as L56 CFH 334.
TuTh 1:00p-2:30p
Early
TOPICS IN LITERATURE: THE PREDICAMENT OF DOMESTICITY: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS ON MARRIAGE
(L14 3524 E LIT)
We will read fiction by American women from the late nineteenth-century to the present which depicts the difficulties of women getting into and out of marriage while keeping house, family, and self together in the interim. The various texts raise issues of romance and courtship; maternal models for daughters, affairs, divorce, and other possible modes of compromise and escape. Of primary focus will be the conflicted nature of forging a viable identity within and against larger institutional and cultural forces. The writers to be read will be Edith Wharton; Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, Maxine Hong Kingston, Paula Fox, Carol Shields, Jamaica Kincaid, Louise Erdrich and Alice Munro. Satisfies the American Requirement 3 units. Same as L77 WGSS 3521.
MWF 2:00p-3:00p
Rosenzweig
BANNED BOOKS
(L14 381 E LIT)
Why would anyone want to burn a book? Under what circumstances would you support censorship? Several years ago a Soviet student was exiled to Siberia for possessing a copy of Emerson's Essays; today, parents and school boards in the United States regularly call for the removal of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye from classrooms and library shelves. Actions like these dramatize the complex interconnections of literature and society, and they raise questions about what we read and the way we read. We will explore these issues by looking closely at several American and translated European texts that have been challenged on moral, socio-political or religious grounds; we will try to determine what some readers have found so threatening about these texts and why they have worked so furiously to suppress them. Possible authors: Goethe, Voltaire, Defoe, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Twain, Salinger, Morrison, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, D.H Lawrence. For a strong start in the term, read Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley, Brave New World before classes begin. Enrollment limited to juniors and seniors. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 379, L56 CFH 381.
MW 1:00p-2:30p
Ruland
THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY
(L14 392W E LIT)
This course will provide an introduction to major American fiction writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century though their short fiction. Beyond our engagement with individual writers and authorial influence, we will explore the particular American configuration of the form-its Puritanical underpinnings, its engagement with fantasy, horror, and the grotesque, and its decidedly modern deconstruction of the darker recesses of the psyche and of both individual and cultural identity. The focus will be on a select few major writers -Hawthorne, Crane, Poe, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Katherine Ann Porter. Satisfies 1700-1900 Requirement (Writing Intensive) Satisfies the American Requirement 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 3921.
MWF 12:00p-1:00p
Rosenzweig
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS: FRAMING THE SEQUENCE
(L14 3951 E LIT)
Same as home course L93 IPH 3951.
SHAKESPEARE
(L14 395C E LIT)
This is an introductory course on Shakespeare. We will read seven or eight plays and, perhaps, some non-dramatic poems, studying the abiding concerns of his career, considering the social and cultural functions of his theater, and examining his interventions in dramatic traditions, political thinking, sexual politics, and literary history. Some short written exercises, two or three papers of moderate length, and a final exam will be required. Satisfies single-author and pre-1700 requirement. 3 units. Same as L15 Drama 395C, U65 ELit 395C, L95 Med-Ren 395C.
MW 1:00p-2:30p
Lawton
TuTh 10:00a-11:30a
[TBA]
SENIOR RESEARCH SEMINAR I
(L14 3991 E LIT)
This course is tailored to the needs of students who are pursuing honors in English in their senior year. It will develop students´ ability to gauge how different approaches affect the research and the outcome of a project in literary studies. It will guide them in their research by analyzing and discussing research design, the construction of an archive, and the assessment and use of sources. Assignments will include annotated bibliographies, summaries of the critical debate on student topics, abstract writing, research presentations, as well as drafts and final versions of chapters or essays. We will workshop many of these assignments in the classroom and practice peer review. The seminar will stretch over two semesters, ending before spring break, when honors work is due in the college. It is required for students who pursue honors by coursework and by thesis. 3 units.
M 4:00p-6:30p
Batten
TOPICS IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE SAVAGE AND THE CIVILIZED
(L14 420 E LIT)
From the polite salons of enlightenment France to the untamed spaces of America, from Indian tribes to urban crowds, from native virtue to the corruptions of luxury: this course maps a wide-ranging debate that began with the colonization of America and shaped the ways in which we think about modern society. Drawing on literary texts, travel narratives, anthropological accounts, and political treatises, we will examine how representations of the 'savage' and of the 'civilized' shaped our ideas of what it means to be modern. Emphasizing the conversations between different texts, we will examine how European and American authors used the 'primitive' to talk about the 'cultivated' and vice versa. Satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 4201.
MW 10:00a-11:30a
Miller
Schmidgen
TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE HAWTHORNE TRADITION
(L14 423 E LIT)
Readers of Hawthorne in his own time and later often spoke of the 'spell' his writing cast on them. Hawthorne has been read, responded to, and imaginatively reworked by late 19th century realists, by turn of the century naturalists, and by moderns. The course will begin with three Hawthorne romances (The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun) and explore the transformations of genre and theme (sex and religion, gender, history, America and Europe, art and the artist) as they appear in the work of Henry James (Roderick Hudson, The Bostonians, stories), Rebecca Harding Davis (Life in the Iron Mills), William Dean Howells (essays), Harold Frederic (The Damnation of Theron Ware), Flannery O'Connor (stories), and John Updike (Roger's Version). We will also read James's Hawthorne and Richard H. Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne as well as commentaries by each of the writers of his or her relationship to Hawthorne. Satisfies the American and 1700-1900 requirements. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 423.
MWF 1:00p-2:00p
Milder
AESTHETIC NEGATIVITY: ADORNO, BENJAMIN, AND KRACAUER ON LITERATURE, ART, AND MEDIA
(L14 4381 E LIT)
Same as home course L16 Comp Lit 438.
JOYCE'S ULYSSES
(L14 440 E LIT)
James Joyce's Ulysses is probably the most important novel of the twentieth century, arguably of English literary history. It is also the funniest, but perhaps also-at least initially-the most difficult. As such, it lends itself to the sustained single focus of a 400-level English course. We will read the book first of all for its intrinsic interest, examining the use of the Homeric parallel as well as of the various organizational schemes Joyce devised in writing the novel. We will also examine the work in a number of extrinsic contexts: as an example of the emergent project of literary Modernism; as an imaginative remaking of the Irish political and religious culture in which Joyce grew up; as a bold experiment in unmaking and remaking conventional models of identity and gender; and as a uniquely inventive extension of tendencies in modern linguistic thought. These considerations will be supplemented and enriched by various critical accounts of the novel, ranging from helpful expositions to understandings of the novel's impact on subsequent literary history. 3 units.
TuTh 2:30p-4:00p
Sherry
TOPICS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE: MEDIEVAL DRAMA: MIRACLE, MYSTERY, MORALITY, AND MARLOWE
(L14 4621 E LIT)
This course will examine pre-Shakespearean theatre in England and its antecedents in European drama between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. It will look at rhetoric, and genres such as debate and disputation; at medieval courtly interludes and popular mummings; at the drama of the medieval Church, including plays about saints' lives (miracles) and the great gild cycles of the fifteenth century (mysteries); and at the morality drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is sometimes religious and sometimes popular (Everyman,Mankind). It will also look at drama in Latin and French, such as the work of Hrosvitha, dramas written in a mixture of Latin and Provencal, and the farces of Arras. We will read plays by Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), especailly Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, as a way of framing, and directing, our inquiry. Satisfies the pre 1700 requirement. 3 units.
MW 10:00a-11:30a
Lawton
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
(L14 472 E LIT)
The course will examine the history of the English language as we can learn it from facsimiles of medieval English manuscripts and early modern printed books. We will look at seventeenth-century dictionaries as well as those of Johnson, Webster, and Merriam-Webster. As well, we'll look at books on "correct" English through the centuries; we'll consider the development of punctuation over time; and we'll hear arguments on the benefits and drawbacks spelling reform. 3 units. Same as U08 Educ 4701, L95 Med-Ren 472.
TuTh 4:00p-5:30p
Arch
SEMINAR: THE 19TH-CENTURY EUROPEAN NOVEL: AMBITION & DESIRE
(L14 4951 E LIT)
Same as home course L16 Comp Lit 495.
SEMINAR: THE RENAISSANCE OF DOUBT
(L14 513 E LIT)
The seminar will address one of the most vigorous and unsettling Early Modern revivals of antiquity, the renaissance of skepticism. Early in the term we'll consider the recovery of Ciceronian and Pyrrhonian skepticism so that we can later track its influence on Montaigne, Bacon, and Descartes. We'lll also attend to the skeptical strain in philological and religious thought, giving special attention to Valla and Erasmus. But we'll also attend to non-erudite (or anti-erudite) contributions to the efflorescence of doubt, to the imaginative but undisciplined activities of mockery and exposure. Above all, we'll consider the theater -- and especially Shakespeare's theater -- as a laboratory of doubt. Besides those authors already mentioned, we'll read Rabelais, Harsnett, Dekker, Middleton, and Donne, We may also make time for Cervantes, Davies, and Milton. 3 units. Same as L16 Comp Lit 513C, L95 Med-Ren 513.
M 4:00p-6:30p
Loewenstein
SEMINAR: WALT WHITMAN IN HIS TIME AND OURS
(L14 522 E LIT)
We will start illogically, with Walt Whitman's Civil War. The poet always claimed that it was the defining event of his life and career, but if so, why? Criticism has it that most of his great work was over by the time he became a volunteer nurse in the hospitals in Washington D. C., and that his later writings no longer had the experimental daring of his original breakthrough books. There are of course exceptions, such as his Lincoln elegy "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd." But in general, Whitman's account of his development and normative critical accounts seem far apart. Is there a deeper logic to his narrative? After exploring this issue, we will think about the conflicts mobilized by his pre-war personae. These include the sex studs of the 1855 and 1856 Leaves of Grass and the "Calamus" lover of 1860, the lover of men. How does Whitmanian homoeroticism contribute to his vision of American democracy? And what is the role of women in his utopian imagination of a politics of "affection"? To answer these and other questions, we will read most of Whitman's important works, including some of his short stories of the 1840s and his 1842 temperance novel, Franklin Evans Or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times. Our consistent focus will be on the interplay between self-fashioning and critical reception. When, for example, did Whitman emerge as a gay icon and what was his response to same? Students will present oral reports and there will be papers of varying lengths. We will also have "theory days," in which students will summarize articles in preparation for their papers. The exponent of an international free verse style, Whitman, both in English and in translation, is the American poet who is most widely anthologized, taught, and discussed in other countries. In this course, we will be asking questions about his influence on experimental poets of the future such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg who claimed him as a precursor. For the papers and oral reports, there will be opportunities for comparative work. 3 units. Same as L98 AMCS 5211, L77 WGSS 523.
W 4:00p-6:30p
Pollak
SPRING SEMESTER 2012
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Please note that the courses listed below are provisional at this point, and times for the following have not been decided.
100 Level Courses:
Literature of Post-Adolescence (Brockman)
Laughter (Parvelescu)
Frankenstein to Dracula (McKelvy)
200 Level Courses:
Intro. To Lit. Studies (Brown, Mackay, Walker, Pawl)
Art of Poetry (Wiltenberg, Pollak)
Chief English Writers (Arch, Rosenfeld)
300 Level Courses:
Victorian Survey (Bailin)
Senior Research Seminar (Batten)
Cold War Culture (Grausam)
16th Century Survey (TBA)
African-American Lit. Since Harlem (Maxwell)
Whitman (Pollak)
Girls’ Fiction (Pawl)
American Novel 1945 – 1999 (Grausam)
Medieval Drama (Lawton)
Contemporary American Literature (Rosenzweig)
Masterpieces of European Fiction (Rosenzweig)
Banned Books (Ruland)
Selected American Writers (Ruland)
Harlem Renaissance (Zafar)
Blacks and Jews in American Literature (Zafar)
Reading Sex (Rosenfeld)
British Novel Before Austen (Schmidgen)
Shakespeare (Loewenstein)
British Fiction 1900 – 1945 (Mackay/co-teach Maher)
400 Level Courses:
Romantic Narratives (Batten)
Re-writing British Lit. (Brown)
Contemporary Fiction (Grausam)
English 19th Century Novel (McKelvy)
White American Masculinity (Pollak)
Chaucer (Lawton)
American Renaissance (Milder)
Milton (Zwicker)
500 Level Courses:
Reading in the 19th Century (Bailin)
Joyce (Sherry)
ENGLISH COMPOSITION
WRITING 1 (L13 100 E COMP)
This course explores writing both as a process and a medium of intellectual inquiry. It asks students to build on their existing skills, imagining more complex relationships with their readers and more nuanced approaches to their subject matter. Students will engage critically with cultural texts and scholarly research, as well as with their own writing, and present their analytical arguments in mature, effective prose. Writing 1 satisfies the University's first-year Writing Requirement, and must be taken for a letter grade. A C+ or better fulfills the requirement; students who get below a C+ will have another semester of writing coursework (usually a retake of Writing 1). Sections limited to 14 students. See online course listings for current class times. 3 units.
FUNDAMENTALS OF ACADEMIC WRITING (L13 1001 E COMP)
This course may be required of some students before they take Writing 1 (L13 100) (placement to be determined by the department). In 1001, students explore the writing process while working on fundamentals of written communication, including grammar and structure. Particular attention is paid to reading comprehension, critical thinking, and organization of ideas. The course does not by itself satisfy the University Writing Requirement, and must be taken for a letter grade. (Note: Some students also may be required to enroll in U15 499.) Credit 3 units. 3 units.
WRITING WORKSHOP: ENGAGING RESEARCH (L13 201 E COMP)
This workshop focuses on engaging research, with all of the multiple meanings implied in the phrase's wordplay: engaging as interesting and interested; as active, responsive to and engaged with others. Just what we mean by engaging - and by research, for that matter - will be our topic of conversation all semester, and you should come prepared to contribute your views on that topic and to complicate your current understanding. Where possible, we will focus on practical, applied work with sources, which should provide a good foundation for advanced research and writing in your discipline, and we'll give some thought to the different methods by which different audiences and scholarly disciplines select, analyze, evaluate, incorporate, and document the works of others. Along the way, we will attend to the relationship between different kinds of research projects and the types of sources that suit them, and we'll practice techniques for drawing on the ideas and writings of others in responsible and engaged ways. Finally, we will grapple with the subtleties and complexities of Academic Integrity, attempting to understand not only the principles that govern responsible research but also the assumptions that underlie them. Ultimately, this course should enhance your ability to produce scholarly writing that not only draws on the voices and views of others responsibly, but that also speaks with its own distinct, engaging voice, that builds its own original arguments. May be taken for 1 hour of credit or 3; must be taken for a grade. PREREQ: Writing 1 or its equivalent (as determined by the department). NOTE: Check online course listings to find out which sections are 1-credit and which are 3-credit. 1 unit.
PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC (L13 212 E COMP)
The study of rhetoric, one of the original seven Liberal Arts, is perhaps more relevant today, in a world where diverse opinions reverberate 24/7 from television and the internet, than in ancient times when rhetors invented arguments to help people choose the best course of action when they disagreed about important political, religious, or social issues. How do we make our voices heard? How can we invent and present compelling written discourse. This course will introduce students to common rhetorical principles and to the disciplinary history of rhetoric and compositional studies. Assignments in this class include rhetorical exercise in invention and craft, imitations, and varied compositions, ranging from the personal to critical, from the biographical to argumentative. We will examine rhetorical principles (audience, context, kairos, exigency, ethos, pathos, logos, and so forth) that are employed, for example, not only in literary analysis but in law, politics, education, and science. We will aim for a mastery of craft and a refinement of thought. 3 units.
CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITING 1 (L13 220 E COMP)
A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing creative nonfiction with attention paid to both literary journalism and personal narrative. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.
FICTION WRITING 1 (L13 221 E COMP)
A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing fiction. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.
POETRY WRITING 1 (L13 222 E COMP)
A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing poetry. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.
PLAYWRITING L13 (224 E COMP)
An introductory course in playwriting. Limited to 8 students. Prereq: Writing 1 and permission of the instructor. Note: This course counts as a production course for FMS majors. 3 units. Same as L15 Drama 227.
JOURNALISM: COMMUNICATIONS INTERNSHIP (L13 298 E COMP)
For students undertaking projects in newspaper or magazine journalism, in radio or television, or in business, government, foundations, and the arts. The student must secure permission of the Chair of the Undergraduate Committee, file a description of his or her project with the Department and, at the end of the semester, submit a significant portfolio of writing together with an evaluation by the internship supervisor. Up to three units acceptable toward the Writing Minor, but cannot be counted toward the English Major or Literature Minor. Prereq: Writing 1 or the equivalent. Must be taken pass/fail. 3 units.
Batten
WRITING THE NATURAL WORLD (L13 309 E COMP)
For students interested in the environment and natural sciences. This course brings together essays from a wide range of communities including biology, physics, medicine, environmental studies, creative writing and more. Readings and assignments are intended to enhance students' understanding of the relationship between writing and their experience/knowledge of the natural world. Major assignments allow students to follow, explore, and write about their own unique interest in a related subject, and include a personal essay, an expository essay, and a researched argumentative essay, as well as peer review workshops, oral presentations, and revision. Students will record and explore their own experiences of nature in short creative assignments that prepare them for the major papers. Prereqs: Writing 1 and junior standing. 3 units.
GUIDED RESEARCH IN COMPOSITION: THEORY AND PEDAGOGY OF ONE-TO-ONE WRITING INSTRUCTION (L13 310 E COMP)
This course teaches theoretical and practical approaches to the tutoring of writing, specifically focusing on tutoring writing within the context of undergraduate courses. Students will learn collaborative methods of tutoring writing, explore different approaches to writing comments on student work in various content areas, and examine the connections between writing and thinking. Students in this course will analyze their own writing processes and learn how to help others through the writing and revision process. Readings and discussions will focus on writing theory and pedagogy, and students will practice one-to-one methods in mock conferences and with sample essays. Assignments: two short essays, a longer research paper and presentation, and a journal. Credit variable, max 3 units.
Patterson
EXPOSITION (L13 311 E COMP)
This advanced composition course considers style in relationship to audience and purpose, asking the writer to engage more consciously with writing conventions, and to explore strategies appropriate to various writing situations, from the more experimental and performative to the more formal and scholarly. The course will involve frequent practice in analyzing and critiquing, with special attention to techniques of organization, argument, and emphasis. Prereqs: Writing 1 and junior standing. 3 units.
ARGUMENTATION ( L13 312 E COMP)
This advanced composition course examines the strategies of argumentation, exploring such elements of argument as the enthymeme, the three appeals, claim types, and fallacies. Students will learn to evaluate a wide range of arguments (including their own), considering the rhetorical strategies that make for effective argumentative performance in a given situation. The course will involve regular practice in both written and oral argument. Prereqs: Writing 1 and junior standing. 3 units. Same as L84 Lw St 312.
CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITING 2: LITERARY JOURNALISM (L13 320 E COMP)
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Non-Fiction Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as writers and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Non-Fiction Writing 1. 3 units.
Reding
FICTION WRITING 2 (L13 321 E COMP)
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as writers and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction Writing 1. 3 units.
MELLON UNDERGRADUATE FELLOWS SEMINAR (L13 321W E COMP)
Parikh
Thompson
POETRY WRITING 2 (L13 322 E COMP)
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Poetry Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as poets and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Poetry Writing 1. 3 units.
01 MW 2:30p-4:00p Kronovet
02 TuTh 11:30a-1:00p [TBA]
KLING UNDERGRADUATE HONORS FELLOWSHIP SEMINAR (L13 322W E COMP)
3 units.
01 Th 4:00p-6:30p XXXI Early
FICTION WRITING: THE SHORT-SHORT, SUDDEN FICTION, AND
MICROFICTION (L13 323 E COMP)
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 or Poetry Writing 1 and wish to further explore the craft of fiction through the medium of the short-short story-a story contained in as few as 25 words (or even fewer!), and no longer than 1500 words, in which plot, character, tone and style are boiled down to bare necessity. This popular (some would say problematic) form has gained a lot of fans in this age of packaged, sometimes frantic blips of information: news scrolls, emails, color-coded threat level warnings, etc. but it also has a tradition and a history in prose poems, jokes, and anecdotes. The short-short forces us as writers to focus on questions and concerns that are applicable to much longer works: how much information is enough? How can negative space be used to tell a story "between the lines"? How can a writer quickly and efficiently get to the heart of a conflict/character/theme? We'll explore strategies for all of the above. The course will focus on reading, writing, and thinking critically about short-shorts. 3 units.
01 MW 11:30a-1:00p Schuman
02 MW 1:00p-2:30p Schuman
FICTION WRITING: STORIES IN THE SUBURBS (L13 326 E COMP)
In the fifties, the suburbs were still somewhat of a novelty in American culture-most people still lived in cities and small towns, or on the farm. Back then, Levitowns and the like were embraced with either gee-whiz optimism, or seen as sinister dystopias where youth, ideals, and romance went to fester and die. But now that the American mainstream is stucco McMansions, strip malls, and big box stores; now that the suburbs have become more ethnically diverse; now that literature is being generated from these places instead of just about them, how have stories set in the 'burbs changed? We'll read short stories written from the fifties until the present day exploring this particular setting, and, through a series of exercises, workshops, and our own short fiction, we'll explore the milieu as writers (whether we happen to be from the suburbs or not), always on the lookout for the unexpected in these familiar places. 3 units.
01 TuTh 11:30a-1:00p Schuman
CREATIVE NONFICTION: PERSONAL ESSAY AND MEMOIR (L13 327 E COMP)
This is an intermediate course in writing creative nonfiction, with a concentration on personal essay and memoir. It wil build on elements of craft that were introduced in Creative Nonfiction Writing 1. Through directed reading and writing, we will examine fundamental questions and challenges of writing personal narrative. 3 units.
01 MW 4:00p-5:30p Finneran
SEMINAR ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TUTORING WRITING (L13 328 E COMP)
This course teaches the art of one-to-one writing instruction. Students will discuss several theoretical models of writing instruction and learn how to use these models in their own tutoring practice. While exploring their own writing processes, students will learn how to help other writers strengthen and clarify their ideas through the process of revision. The course emphasizes interpersonal dynamics, audience adaptation, and collaborative learning. Students will practice tutoring each other in class and eventually lead some tutoring sessions of their own, whether in other classes, The Writing Center, or the St. Louis community. Assignments: five essays and a journal. Prereqs: Recommendation of an instructor, a writing sample, and instructor's permission. NOTE: Students must apply to be considered. 3 units.
01 TuTh 1:00p-2:30p Salli
INTRO TO SCREENWRITING (L13 352 E COMP)
Same as home course L53 Film 352.
CRAFT OF FICTION: HISTORICAL FICTION (L13 431 E COMP)
A literature/creative writing hybrid course, students will read a number of contemporary historical fictions and then write one of their own. We'll consider the ways in which these fictions inhabit, depart from, and reflect upon the historiography and history they're built from--upon the indeterminacy of the historical record, and the limits of its reach--but we'll also discuss fiction's reponsibility to historical "facts" and documents, and the relevance of fictions among non-fictions in approaching an event or figure. Texts are likely to include novels by Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward P. Jones and E.L. Doctorow, and short stories by a range of contemporary authors. Since this will be a craft class rather than a traditional literature course, assignments will include both a critical paper and a researched short story with a historical setting, and we'll workshop students' fiction. Pre-reqs for undergrads: Fiction Writing 1 plus a 300-level fiction workshop (either Fiction 2 or a craft class). IMPORTANT: To be considered for this course, undergraduates must also submit a writing sample of up to 15 pages of their own fiction (it need not be historical fiction) to the instructor by one week after they register. On the first page of the writing sample please include your name and the instructors' names and semesters for which you took the two pre-requisites. 3 units.
01 M 2:30p-5:30p Klimasewiski
THE CRAFT OF POETRY: POETRY AND PLACE (L13 432 E COMP)
How do the places you reside in change you? How did the city or fields you grew up in shape the way you speak, the pattern of your thoughts, your sense of the space between people and ideas? How can travel disrupt and shift your understanding of what the world is? How can we capture the depth and dimension of a place in language--its physicality, politics, communities? Poets have always been intent on grappling with these questions in ways that open up our sense of how we live in places. In this class, we will look at the work of poets who illuminate these questions, poets who engage place, who enact its intricate and deep influence on all things. Such poets will include Jennifer Chang, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Idra Novey, Evie Shokley, Ed Roberson, Gary Snyder, and CD Wright. Throughout the semester, students will also write poems that are rooted in places and receive feedback on their work. In addition, we will visit places important to the city of St. Louis and see how we might figure a relationship to our city through these places. PREREQ: Poetry 1 (L13-222). Undergraduate students interested in enrolling in this course must submit a writing sample (3 pages of poetry) to the instructor by April 22, 2011. Please include the following information with your submission: Name, Year and semester you took Poetry 1 and the name of your Poetry 1 instructor. Submissions should be placed in the instructor's mailbox in Duncker Hall. 3 units.
01 MW 11:30a-1:00p Kronovet
INDEPENDENT STUDY ( L13 500 E COMP)
Independent study in creative or expository writing. PREREQ, JUNIOR STANDING AND PERMISSION OF THE DEPARTMENT. Students proposing a project in fiction or poetry must submit writing samples for the approval of the faculty member directing the work. Projects in expository writing must be described in a detailed prospectus and approved by the faculty member directing the work and by the Director of Undergraduate or Graduate Studies. Credit variable, max 6 units.
PRACTICUM IN TEACHING WRITING (L13 502 E COMP)
This course will be taught in small sections so that graduate students new to the classroom will have the benefit of close attention to their progress. The course will focus on the practical aspects of teaching: graduate students will review their assignments, produce handouts and other material for class, discuss approaches to teaching specific texts, and refine the consistency of their grading of student work. Concepts from L13 501 will be reviewed and extended as necessary. Course may be repeated in the spring for 1 credit. 3 units.
01 TBA Sweetman
FICTION WORKSHOP (L13 521 E COMP)
Open only to students in The Writing Program and to other graduate students in English upon submission and approval of writing samples. 6 units.
01 Tu 2:30p-5:30p Dutton
POETRY WORKSHOP ( L13 522 E COMP)
Open only to students in The Writing Program, and to graduate students in English upon submission and approval of writing samples. 6 units.
01 Tu 2:30p-5:30p Bang
CRAFT OF POETRY: THE POETRY OF LITERARY HISTORY (L13 541 E COMP)
Poetry is always indebted to what's come before it, but some poets very consciously decide to write in conversation with a particular text or author from the past. In this course we will examine such projects as Louise Gluck's dialogue with Homer's Oddysey, Kathleen Peirce's engagement with Augustine's Confessions, Dan Beachy-Quick's response to Moby Dick, Frank Bidart's conversation with Ovid's Metamorphoses, along with writers who respond to particular historic events, as Robert Hayden does, with respect to African-American history, and as Jorie Graham does, with respect to WWII. In the course of our investigations, students will choose a particular text and/or historic event, and write a suite of poems--or a single long poem--in response. 3 units.
01 W 2:00p-5:00p Phillips