English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, at the 12 hour with Professor Travis
The course will introduce students to some of the leading texts, concepts, and practices of what has come to be known as theoretical criticism. Topics to be considered may include some of the following: structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, new historicism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Attention will also be given to historical and institutional contexts of this criticism. Intended to provide a basic, historically informed, knowledge of theoretical terms and practices, this course should enable students to read contemporary criticism with understanding and attempt theoretically informed criticism themselves. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV.
English 16, Old and New Media, at the 2A hour with Professor Evens
A survey of the historical, formal, and theoretical issues that arise from the materiality and technology of communication, representation, and textuality. The course will address topics in and between different media, which may include oral, scribal, print, and digital media. Readings and materials will be drawn from appropriate theorists, historians, and practitioners, and students may be asked not only to analyze old and new media, but also create with them. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 20, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, at the 11 hour with Professor Travis
An introduction to Chaucer, concentrating on ten of the Canterbury Tales, and studying him as a social critic and literary artist. Special attention will be paid to Chaucer’s language, the sounds of Middle English, and the implications of verse written for the ear. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genre-narrative.
English 24, Shakespeare I, at the 10 hour with Professor Halasz
A study of about ten plays spanning Shakespeare’s career, including comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s language; to his dramatic practices and theatrical milieu; and to the social, political, and philosophical issues raised by the action of the plays. Videotapes will supplement the reading. Exercises in close reading and interpretative papers. Prerequisite: English 2/3, English 5 or English 5 exemption status. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tag Genre-drama.
English 30, Age of Satire, at the 10 hour with Professor Cosgrove
English literature from 1660 to 1789 is concerned with the problems of regulation and excess. The return to a traditional stability promised by the neoclassical aesthetic veils a threat from new dynamics in art and politics. The role of the imagination in life and art, ideals of political liberty, the emergence of women’s writing, all contribute to the underlying tensions. Readings will be chosen from among John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Mary Astell, Anne Finch, Frances Burney, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper and George Crabbe. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II, CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 37, Victorian Literature and Culture, 1860-1901, at the 10A hour with Professor Jenkins
This course examines later nineteenth-century British poetry, prose and fiction in the context of cultural practices and social institutions of the time. We will locate cultural concerns among, for example, those of capitalism, political reform, scientific knowledge, nation and empire. And we will consider revisions of space, time, gender, sexuality, class, and public and private life that characterized formations of British identity during this period. Texts may include work by George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling. We will also read selections from recent criticism of Victorian culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II, CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 49, Modern Black American Literature, at the 2A hour with Professor Vasquez (crosslisted with AAAS 35)
A study of African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, this course will focus on emerging and diverging traditions of writing by African Americans. We shall also investigate the changing forms and contexts of ‘racial representation’ in the United States. Works may include those by Hurston, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Morrison, Schuyler, West, Murray, Gates, Parks. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Studies.
English 60.1, History of the Book, at the 2 hour with Professor Halasz
This course examines the book as a material and cultural object. We'll consider various practical and theoretical models for understanding the book form and investigating the materials, technologies, institutions, and practices of its production, dissemination, and reception. We'll focus primarily on the printed book in Western Europe and North America, but we'll also spend time talking about the emergence of the codex (book), medieval manuscript books, twentieth and twenty-first century artist's books and the challenges posed by digitality to the book form. The readings for the course will be balanced by frequent use of exemplars drawn from Rauner Library and practical experience in the Book Arts workshop setting type. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group IV. CA tags Literary Criticism and Theory, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 60.2, Writing the Memoir, at the 10A hour with Professor Kreiger
This is a workshop in the art of memoir. Our focus will be student writing, and we will also regularly read and analyze sections of published memoirs as we explore the various ways in which writers approach this craft. Memoir is re-creation, and our discussions will explore what that means and what obligation it places on the writer, especially when using the techniques of fiction. Students will develop their skills by exploring characters, settings, and situations and by bringing to their writing the self-awareness that will enable them meaningfully to shape their narratives. Readings will be chosen from the work of Andre Aciman, Joan Didion, Eva Hoffman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Wallace Stegner, and Eudora Welty. Dist: ART. CA tag Creative Writing.
This course counts toward the Creative Writing concentration within the major in English and will fulfill the culminating experience requirement of the Creative Writing concentration. Permission of instructor or the director of Creative Writing is required to enroll. Preference will be given to those students who have completed English 80, the introductory course in Creative Writing.
English 60.4, Introduction to Asian American Literature, at the 10A hour with Professor Chin
This course studies the literature of some of the diverse groups that make up Asian America, from early immigrant to contemporary times. Among the questions we will address are: What are the sites of identification and contestation? What are the dominant tropes, styles, influences, and continuities? How are we to read this literature? Authors may include Frank Chin, Kip Fulbeck, David Henry Hwang, Garrett Hongo, Suji Kwok Kim, Maxine Hong Kingston, R. Zamora Linmark, Bharatee Mukherjee and Denise Uehara. Dist: LIT, WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 63.1, Digital Game Studies, at the 10A hour with Professor Evens
This course explores digital gaming. Reading academic and popular texts, we will situate digital gaming in relation to new media, visual, and literary studies. Class discussion will focus on outstanding problems in digital game studies: Where do the histories of technology and gaming meet? How do games change players and how do games shape culture? What about designers and programmers? In what ways are digital games playful and what aspects of them are expressive? What is the future of gaming? Of course this class will also study particular games, and, in addition to writing academic essays, students will invent individual and group projects in the game domain. Course Group IV. Dist: TAS, WCult: pending faculty approval.
English 66.1, Black Atlantic, at the 12 hour with Professor Cosgrove (crosslisted with AAAS 63)
“Black London” and “Black Atlantic” denote African and Slave presence in Europe and the Caribbean Islands. From Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko about a kidnapped African prince in the 17th century to John Stedman’s account of a slave rebellion in Surinam in the late 18th century, literature is rich with accounts of the British African population and the Caribbean middle passage. This course offers a new intimate view of these events and areas of conflict. Among other readings The Two Princes of Calabar is a history of two African princes who traveled through Europe in the 18th century, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative tells the life of a slave who bought his freedom and became a sailor. The course will also use the films Burn, with Marlon Brando, about a slave rebellion in the Caribbean, and Middle Passage, an unusual French view of the slave trade. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.2, Faulkner, at the 2A 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.
English 67.3, Toni Morrison, at the 10A hour with Professor Vasquez (crosslisted with AAAS 26)
This course is an intensive study of Toni Morrison's major fictional works. We will also read critical responses by and about the author. Required texts may include Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Playing in the Dark, and critical contributions by writers such as Barbara Smith and Paul Gilroy. Some of the central issues we will examine include, alternative constructions of female community and genealogy, and representations of race, class, nationhood and identity. Dist: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative.
English 67.4, Contemporary American Poetry, at the 12 hour with Professor Mathis
This course concentrates on American poetry since 1960. We will consider the influence of the "schools" of poetry which evolved in the second half of the twentieth century, including the Beats, the New York poets, the Confessional poets, the Black Mountain School, the New Romantics, and the New Formalists. Our primary focus will be to examine a variety of poets through close readings of individual poems. Paying close attention to the crafting of the poem, we will discuss key aspects such as voice, tone, image, metaphor, and the nature of the line. Poets we will study include Ginsberg, Lowell, O'Hara, Bishop, Plath, Kunitz, Hayden, James Wright, Brooks, Levine, Levertov, and Rich. Creative Writing majors are encouraged to take this course. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag Genre-poetry.
English 70.1, Romance in Medieval England, at the 10 hour with Professor Otter
Arthurian quest romances; seafaring stories; the semi-historical "matter of England": this seminar will consider the diverse and elusive genre we now call "romance," try to understand its special role and development in medieval England, and see if we can find a satisfactory definition for a term that covers anything from chivalric adventure and love stories to quasi-hagiographic and pseudo-historical narratives. We will also seek to place romance in larger contexts, such as the literature and ideology of "courtly love"; gender issues; political and propagandistic uses of literature; its relationship to adjacent genres such as saints' lives and sea voyage tales, and traditional Celtic narrative. Readings--in translation where necessary-- may include selections from the earliest Arthurian narratives in Latin, French, and English; Middle English romances such as Havelock, Athelstan, Sir Gowther, Ysumbras, Yvain and Gawain, Morte d'Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; seminal Continental texts such as Chretien de Troyes's Yvain and Andreas Capellanus's De Amore; Anglo-Norman narratives such as Thomas of Britain's and Beroul's Tristan romances; Marie de France's Lais; The Life of St. Alexis, and the life of one of its real-life readers, the 12th-century recluse Christina of Markyate; the fantastic seafaring yarn The Voyage of St. Brendan, an ancestor of both Dante's Divine Comedy and Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym; the outlaw tale and "ancestral romance" Fouke le Fitz Warin; Latin narratives such as De Ortu Walwanii ("The Origin of Gawain"), Meriadoc, and selections from Walter Map's Trifles of the Courtiers; and traditional Celtic tales such as the Mabinogi and the Irish Dairmaid and Grainne. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities.
English 71.1, The Civil War in Literature, at the 2 hour with Professor Boggs
Although Walt Whitman famously claimed that “the real war will never get into the books,” the American Civil War did in fact call forth a vast range of literary responses, in genres as diverse as poetry, popular song, novels and other prose genres. In this course, we will examine how literature depicts the war, and especially how it grapples with Whitman’s claim that there is something unrepresentable about the war’s carnage. Readings may include Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps (1872), Herman Melville’s Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War(1866),Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry, Louisa May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches” (1869) and excerpts from Little Women (1869), Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895). Dist: LIT, WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 72.2, Bob Dylan, at the 3A hour with Professor Renza
In this course, we will do close, critical readings of certain Dylan lyrics spanning his entire career, also taking into consideration their social, historical, and biographical circumstances. Oral reports as well as a long final paper will be required. Note: some attention will be given to the performance aspect of Dylan's songs, but we will not listen to them in class. All of the songs assigned and discussed will be available for your listening in the Paddock Music Library beforehand. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 72.3, Quarrelling with Yeats: Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry in English, at the 10A hour with Professor Coleman
Beginning with an examination of some of W.B. Yeats‚s late poetry, this course examines the responses of four key Irish poets to Yeats's legacy, Austin Clarke (1896-1974), Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), Louis MacNeice (1907-63), and Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928). Seminars will involve close reading and detailed discussion of selected poems by each poet in an attempt to gauge the extent to which they respond to Yeats in their work, but the strategies by which Clarke, Kavanagh, Kinsella and MacNeice created their own unique poetic styles and developed their individual thematic concerns will also be considered. The course will conclude with a brief consideration of some of the methods and preoccupations of a later generation of Irish poets including Michael Hartnett (1941-1999), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (b. 1942), Eavan Boland (b. 1944), and Paul Durcan (b. 1944). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, M/W 7 - 9pm, with Professor Hebert
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 have exemption status). English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 85.1, Senior Workshop in Poetry and Prose, at the 3A hour with Professor O'Malley
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction.
English 85.2, Senior Workshop in Poetry and Prose, at the 3A hour with Professor Mathis
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction.
English 85.3, Senior Workshop in Poetry and Prose, at the 2A hour with Professor Beatty
This course is to be taken by Creative Writing majors in the fall of their senior year. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, short fiction, or literary non-fiction.
Also see English 60.2, Memoir Writing above