Spring 2013 Courses

At the 11 hour with Professor Jetter

This course will explore the role of print journalism in shaping the modern American literary, cultural and political landscape--from Nellie Bly's late 19th century undercover exposure to Seymour Hersh's coverage of the Iraq War. Students will also participate in an intensive weekly workshop on reporting and writing, with a short unit on radio commentary. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. This course does not carry English major credit except by successful petition to the CDC. 

At the 10 hour with Professor Otter

An introduction to the literature of the "Middle English" period (ca. 1100- ca. 1500), concentrating on the emergence of English as a literary language in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and on some of the great masterworks of the late fourteenth century. Readings will include early texts on King Arthur, the Lais of Marie de France, the satirical poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the romance Sir Orfeo, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of Margery Kempe, and The York Cycle. Most readings in modern English translation, with some explorations into the original language. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. 

At the 9L hour with Professor Luxon

A study of most of Milton's poetry and of important selections from his prose against the background of political and religious crises in seventeenth-century England. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities. 

At the 10A hour with Professor Garrison

A study of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English novel, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen. The course will look at the major sub-genres of the period, including criminal biography, scandalous memoirs, epistolary fiction and the Gothic novel. It will also explore the relationship between narrative fiction and the changing cultural landscape of a period defined by commercial uncertainty, imperial expansion, and the threat of revolution. Finally, and most importantly, the course will ask why the novel became so central to modern conceptions of subjectivity, sexuality, social cohesion and transgression. Readings may include work by Daniel Defoe, John Cleland, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Dist: LIT, WCult. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions. 

At the 10A hour with Professor Chaney

A study of the foundations of Black American literature and thought, from the colonial period through the era of Booker T. Washington. The course will concentrate on the way in which developing Afro-American literature met the challenges posed successively by slavery, abolition, emancipation, and the struggle to determine directions for the twentieth century. Selections will include: Wheatley, Life and Works; Brown, Clotel; Douglass, Narrative; Washington, Up from Slavery; DuBois, Souls of Black Folk; Dunbar, Sport of the Gods; Chestnut, House Behind the Cedars; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; and poems by F. W. Harper, Paul L. Dunbar and Ann Spencer. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Genre-narrative. 

At the 10A hour with Professor Benson (crosslisted with NAS 35)

Published Native American writing has always incorporated a cross-cultural perspective that mediates among traditions. The novels, short stories, and essays that constitute the Native American contribution to the American literary tradition reveal the literary potential of diverse aesthetic traditions. This course will study representative authors with particular emphasis on contemporary writers. Open to all classes. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.  

At the 11 hour with Professor Colbert

A study of major American playwrights of the 19th and 20th centuries including S. Glaspell, O'Neill, Hellman, Wilder, Hansberry, Guare, Williams, Wilson, Mamet, Miller, Albee, Shepard, Wasserstein. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditons and Countertradtions. 

At the 11 hour with Professor Favor

Contemporary American fiction introduces the reader to the unexpected. Instead of conventionally structured stories, stereotypical heroes, traditional value systems, and familiar uses of language, the reader finds new and diverse narrative forms. Such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Ralph Ellison, among others, have produced a body of important, innovative fiction expressive of a modern American literary sensibility. The course requires intensive class reading of this fiction and varied critical writing on postmodernism. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions

At the 12 hour with Professor Silver 

A study of major authors, texts, and literary movements, with an emphasis on literary modernism and its cultural contexts. We will read works by Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, West, Lawrence, Rhys, and Beckett, as well as critical essays. We will explore this literature in the context of the art, dance, and film of the period. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags: Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.

At the 2 hour with Professor Giri (crosslisted with COLT 70/AAAS 66)   

Intended for students who have some familiarity with postcolonial literary texts, this course will combine the reading of postcolonial literature with the study and discussion of the major questions confronting the developing field of postcolonial studies. Issues may include: questions of language and definition; the culture and politics of nationalism and transnationalism, race and representation, ethnicity and identity; the local and the global; tradition and modernity; hybridity and authenticity; colonial history, decolonization and neocolonialism; the role and status of postcolonial studies in the academy. Authors may include: Achebe, Appiah, Bhabha, Chatterjee, Coetzee, Fanon, Gilroy, Gordimer, James, JanMohamed, Minh-ha, Mohanty, Ngugi, Radhakrishnan, Rushdie, Said, Spivak, Sunder Rajan. Prerequisite: English 58, Trinidad FSP, or permission of the instructor. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group IV. CA tags Multicultural/Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Literary Theory and Criticism. 

At the 10A hour with Professor Coly (crosslisted with AAAS 67/COLT67/WGST 52.1)

In this course, we will develop an understanding of masculinity as a construct which varies in time and space, and is constantly (re)shaped by such factors as race, class, and sexuality. The contexts of the colonial encounter and its postcolonial aftermath will set the stage for our examination of the ways in which social, political, economic, and cultural factors foster the production of specific masculinities. Texts include Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lafferiere's How to Make Love to a Negro, and additional writings by Irish, Indian, and Australian authors. Our study will be organized around the questions of the production of hegemonic and subaltern masculinities, the representation of the colonial and postcolonial male body, the militarization of masculinity, and the relation between masculinity and nationalism. Theoretical material on masculinities will frame our readings. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.  

At the 10A hour with Professor Gerzina

Novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, the artists Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, the economist Maynard Keynes, and biographer Lytton Strachey and their circle were among the most innovative and creative people of their time, producing art, literature and a way of life that both shocked and impressed the cultural establishment of early twentieth-century Britain. Readings include Woolf's To the Lighthouse; E.M. Forster's Howards End; short pieces by Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey; a selection of letters by Carrington; and Aldous Huxley's satirical novel about Bloomsbury, Crome Yellow. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course group III. CA tag Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. 

At the 2A hour with Professor Coly (crosslisted with AAAS 51/COLT 51)

This course is designed to provide students with a specific and global view of the diversity of literatures from the African continent. We will read texts written in English or translated from French, Portuguese, Arabic and African languages. Through novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, we will explore such topics as the colonial encounter, the conflict between tradition and modernity, the negotiation of African identities, post-independence disillusion, gender issues, apartheid and post-apartheid. In discussing this variety of literatures from a comparative context, we will assess the similarities and the differences apparent in the cultures and historical contexts from which they emerge. Readings include Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, Calixthe Beyala's The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me, Camara Laye's The African Child, and Luandino Vieira's Luanda. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies. 

At the 2A hour with Professor Chaney

Although once associated with juvenile literature, narratives of sequential art—or graphic novels—have recently been hailed as a compelling new form of literature, one that offers fresh possibilities of reading which combine visual and literary experiences. With an emphasis on the careful analysis of a wide range of contemporary texts, this course examines the types of "stories" and "readings" that are made possible when normally separate symbol systems like pictures and words converge. Discussion will center on the narrative mechanics as well as the cultural work of graphic novels, as we consider the genre's theoretical and formal preoccupations with autobiography, counterculture, parody, science-fiction, and fantasy. Secondary readings will introduce students to the critical responses that graphic novels have provoked. Some of the authors we'll look at include Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Chris Ware, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes, the Hernandez brothers, Alison Bechdel, and Lynda Barry. In addition to giving a presentation, students will be required to write two formal essays and several short responses. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Genre-narrative, Creative Writing. 

At the 2 hour with Professor Favor (crosslisted with AAAS 91)

This class will examine the literature and social contexts of a period widely knows as the "Harlem Renaissance." Part of our mission in the class will be to deconstruct some of the widely held presuppositions about that era, especially by interrogating questions of class, race, gender and sexuality as social constructs. Although this class will focus mainly on fiction writing, we will also consider some poetry and non-fiction prose as well. Dist: LIT, WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. 

At the 10A hour with Professor McKee

In this course we will read five of Faulkner's novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August, and The Hamlet. Our focus will be on Faulkner's continuing attention to constructions of identity: especially Southern identities, racialized identities, and individual psyches. We will spend considerable time reading criticism, by such writers as Edouard Glissant and Vera Kutzinski. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag Genre-narrative. 

At the 11 hour  with Professor Crewe  

There is a critical saying that "Shakespeare seems so Freudian because Freud is so Shakespearean." The saying reminds us that Hamlet has not only been a persistent object of psychoanalytic interpretation, but is foundational to Freud's thought on such crucial topics as the Oedipus Complex and Melancholia. In this course we will read Hamlet intensively and track the fascinating history of the play in psychoanalytic thinking. Readings will include, in addition to Hamlet, some or all of "The Interpretation of Dreams," "Mourning and Melancholia," and "Pathological Characters On Stage." We will also glance at Freud's readings of The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth. Finally, we will track the post-Freudian story of the play from Ernest Jones's landmark Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) through feminist and poststructuralist permutations, including Jacques Lacan's "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire." The course can count as a senior culminating experience, but is not limited to seniors. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-Drama, Literary Theory and Criticism.

At the 11 hour with Professor Zeiger (cross listed with WGST 47.6)

About Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Exchanging Hats," the younger gay poet James Merrill wrote: "here was a poet addressing herself with open good humor to the forbidden topic of transsexual impulses, simply by having invented a familiar, 'harmless' situation to dramatize them. I was enthralled." Some of Bishop's poetic traits are captured by this reminiscence: her humor; her exploration of twentieth century identities, spaces and boundaries; her willingness on try on the "headgear" of another gender or culture. Yet Bishop's exploratory playfulness is connected to her sense of personal displacement and danger. An orphan, a woman poet, a lesbian, a long-term expatriate in Brazil, Bishop is nowhere definitively at home. Partly for that reason, her work initially resisted feminist and other forms of political categorization. More refined variations on these perspectives have, however, made Bishop's work the focus of an exciting assortment of queer, feminist, and postcolonial criticism. We will read widely in this work and study all of Bishop's poems and some of her drafts and letters in this new critical context. The last part of the course will focus on Bishop's relationship with her own mentor, Marianne Moore, and on the male poets who learned from her: Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Frank Bidart. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.

At the 2A hour with Professor Garrison

This course will serve as a thorough introduction to the darkly comic, often bleak, frequently maddening, yet strangely uplifting world of Samuel Beckett, one of the towering figures of twentieth century modernism. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, Beckett "transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation" (the Swedish Academy) through increasingly spare prose that gave voice to the inarticulate, the decrepit, and the maimed. Reading the arc of Beckett's major works, we will sketch Beckett's tangled relationship to modernists such as Proust and Joyce; his ambivalent relationship to nationalisms in Ireland and France; his transnational political attachments during World War II and after, including his work in the French Resistance; and his astonishing range of influence on writers and philosophers, from J.M. Coetzee to Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou. Texts will cover Beckett's early, mature and late career and will include his prose, plays, selected letters, essays and other writings. We will also watch some of Beckett's plays in Beckett on Film, read a novel in the Beckettian tradition, read philosophy produced "after Beckett," and listen to musical compositions inspired by Beckett. Dist: LIT, WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions.  

At the 10A hour with Professor O'Malley

This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5 (or its equivalents WRIT 2-3 or HUM 1). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office.  English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.  

At the 2A hour with Professor Finch

This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5 (or its equivalents WRIT 2-3 or HUM 1). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office.  English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.  

At the 12 hour with Professor Huntington

Continued work in the writing of poetry, focusing on the development of craft, image, and voice, as well as the process of revision. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of poems by contemporary writers. Dist: ART. 

At the 2A hour with Professor O'Malley

Continued work in the writing of fiction, focusing on short stories, although students may experiment with the novel. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of short stories by contemporary writers. Constant revision is required Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART. 

This course offers students an overview of the conventions, genres and techniques of narrative-nonfiction writing. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of classic works of literary nonfiction. Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the form titled "How To Apply for English 81, 82 or 83" from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-to-eight-page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART. CA tag Creative Writing. No Course Group designation.

This term, English 83 will be offered as "Whose Story Is it" at the 10A hour with Professor Sharlet

"Creative nonfiction"—AKA "literary journalism" or "the lyric essay"—is a hybrid genre of techniques borrowed from fiction, poetry, and visual mediums to tell factual stories. In one way or another, literary journalists are always writing about other people, even when they're writing about their own lives. But what does it mean for one to write "about" another? Whose story is really being told? In the Spring '13 offering of 83.1, Intermediate Creative Writing, that's the question you'll ask yourself as you write and workshop stories rooted in your own experiences and that of others. The answers you arrive at will shape your experiments in form and fieldwork, as will close readings of old and new masters including Joan Didion, Joseph Mitchell, Jane Kramer, John Edgar Wideman, Michael Herr, Harvey Pekar, and Wendy Ewald, writers working in traditional narrative, comics journalism, oral history, and documentary photography.

These courses are offered periodically with varying content: examinations of craft and form, reading and writing in specific areas, such as the prose poem, short story, memoir, biography, hybrid forms, or approaches to creative writing not otherwise provided in the workshop format. Course requirements will typically include a mix of creative and critical work. Enrollment is limited to 18. Dist: ART, pending faculty approval.  CA tag Creative Writing.

This term, English 89 will be offered as "Raising the Dead" at the 2A hour with Professor Sharlet

How can we practice "immersion journalism," as creative nonfiction is sometimes described, when writing about people and events of the past? In this creative nonfiction writing course, we'll immerse ourselves in the kind of research that will allow us to recreate moments and moods for which we couldn't be present. We'll become witnesses at a remove; and, through careful attention to our own roles in the construction of our stories, participant-observers, as well. We'll learn how to use archives; make creative use of documents and artifacts; engage with scholarly historical writing as a source for creative writing; and interrogate our assumptions about research and representation, all in the service of character-driven narratives as vivid, nuanced, and dramatic as writing based on contemporary fieldwork. This course is an attempt to raise the dead, to resurrect truths from dormant facts, to find stories of the present within the past. You'll write two short nonfiction stories, of a person and a place, based on secondary sources, and one long narrative based on original research. The texts we'll be reading, by Lauren Redniss, John D'Agata, Svetlana Alexievitch, Joe Sacco, Maggie Nelson, and Michael Lesy, among others, varies radically in form and medium, as may your own experimental nonfictions. Instructor permission required.  DIST: ART, pending faculty approval.  CA tag Creative Writing.