English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, at the 10 hour with Professor Chaney
Designed for prospective majors in English and for students interested in a general literature course, English 12 offers an introduction to the critical, historical, and creative study of literature. Each of the sections provides a survey of literature from different historical periods and an overview of the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading, critical analysis and creative practice. The course counts for credit in the major. Dist: LIT. No course group or CA tag designation.
In 11F: English 12: Narrative
Introduction to Literary Study--Narrative. This section introduces narrative literature--works that tell stories often, but not always, in prose. Students will become familiar with close reading practices, critical strategies of analysis, and the formal problemsof creating narrative. In addition to discussing individual texts, broader areas of inquiry may include the history of the novel, the evolution of narrative genres, and the changing politics of identify and representation. Writing for the class will include both critical and creative practices.
English 20, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, at the 11 hour with Professor Otter
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, Genders and Sexualities.
English 24, Shakespeare I, at the 12 hour with Professor Boose
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 29, English Literature 1660-1714, Including Drama, at the 10A hour with Professor Cummings
A survey of English literary culture in the reigns of the later Stuart monarchs. Poetry by Dryden, Marvell, Rochester, Butler, Oldham and Pope; biographical writing by Aubrey, Halifax, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish; the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn; spiritual autobiography and religious fiction by Bunyan; prose satires and analytical prose of Swift and Halifax. Within the survey there will be two areas of special attention: the theater and the literary response to public events. We will read three plays by such authors as Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Lee, Behn, Shadwell, Otway and Farquahar, and study the writing in response to such events as the Great Plague and Fire of 1666, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-drama, Genre-narrative, Genre-poetry.
English 31, Reason and Revolution, at the 10 hour with Professor Garrison
Was there a British Enlightenment? In the age of the American and French Revolutions Britain seemed to hold steady. But in the literature of the period there are many social and literary struggles which took their tolls in the madness and suicide of writers such as Smart and Chatterton, the difficulties of attaining creative freedom, and the emergence of new literary forms such as the Gothic. This course will trace the fortunes of writers such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke as they grapple with the anxieties of their time. We will also consider how women thinkers and novelists such as Charlotte Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft forged new roles for themselves, and we may include studies of the novel of political paranoia such as Caleb Williams, written by Wollstonecraft's husband, William Godwin Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 41, American Prose, at the 12 hour with Professor Boggs
Readings of nonfiction narratives by such American writers as Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 54, Modern British Drama, at the 2A hour with Professor Pfister
Major British plays since the 1890s. The course begins with the comedy of manners as represented by Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. It then considers innovations in and rebellions against standard theatrical fare: the socialist crusading of Bernard Shaw; the angry young men (John Osborne) and workingclass women (Shelagh Delaney) of the 1950s; the minimalists (Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter) and the university wits (Tom Stoppard); the dark comedians of the modern family (Alan Ayckbourn) and the politically inflected playwrights of the age of Prime Minister Thatcher (Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, David Hare). The course deals both with the evolution of dramatic forms and the unusually close way in which modern British theatre has served as a mirror for British life from the heyday of the Empire to the present. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertradition.
English 60.1, Reading and Writing Short Fiction, at the 2A hour with Professor Tudish
As a bridge between creative writing and literary studies, this course considers works of short fiction, as well as discussions of form and craft by those who write fiction. Students are encouraged to explore short-form fiction as both readers and writers, through their own stories and analytical essays. Readings will include Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, along with pairings such as Flannery O'Connor's book of essays Mystery and Manners with her story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge and Charles Baxter's essay collection Burning Down the House with his Believers: A Novella and Stories. Other readings may include the fiction of James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Deborah Eisenberg, James Joyce, Alice Munro, Tim O'Brien, ZZ Packer, and JD Salinger, along with their commentaries on craft to be found in selected interviews and essays. During the term, students will submit critical and fictional works-in-progress for workshop sessions and by the end of the term complete two substantial pieces of work, a critical essay and a short story. Dist: ART, pending faculty approval. CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism, Genre-narrative, Creative Writing.
English 60.3, Dave the Potter: Slavery Between Pots and Poems, at the 11 hour with Professor Chaney (crosslisted with AAAS 90.1)
This experimental course examines the work of Dave the Potter (born, David Drake), a South Carolinian slave who made some of the largest ceramic storage vessels of the 1840s and 1850s, signing them and etching poems onto them as well. Combining creative and analytical types of learning, this course is designed as both an intellectually challenging seminar and as an exciting workshop in creative expression. Students will engage with Drake's poetry-pottery through critical and historical research, interpretive writing, poetry writing, ceramic handicrafts, and typesetting. Part of the course will take place in the ceramics studio, where students will learn to imitate and build upon the pottery models established by Dave the Potter; another component of the course will take place in the letterpress studio, where students will learn, as did Dave the Potter, to set the type for their own creative, lyrical writing. No prior experience with writing poetry or making pottery is necessary. As a culminating assignment, students will contribute chapters to a scholarly book on Drake, which the professor shall edit. These chapters may be creative, critical, historical, or theoretical reflections on students' hands-on experiences of learning about Dave the Potter's multi-faceted work and the enduring challenges of his historical exceptionality as a literate slave. Distributive: ART or LIT, pending faculty approval; Course Group II, CA tags Creative Writing, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies; AAAS culminating experience.
English 67.2, South African Literature in English, at the 10 hour with Professor Crewe (crosslisted with AAAS 85.1)
This course will examine works by South African men and women of various ethnicities who have chosen to write in English since the publication of Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm in 1883. This richly diverse literature will be tracked through the cultural and political history of South Africa with primary emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries before and after the fall of Apartheid. Confrontation between black militancy and white oppression characterizes much writing and social interaction in South Africa before the fall of Apartheid, but complex forms of multi-ethnic coexistence and interchange have also been evident since the first white settlement of the country in 1652. Recent work by J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda among others explores the difficult, unmapped terrain of post-Apartheid South Africa. Works by the following writers may be included in the course: Olive Schreiner, Solomon Plaatje, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zoe Wicomb, Alan Paton, J.M Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Athol Fugard, Nelson Mandela. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.3, Caribbean Women Writers, at the 10A hour with Professor Morgan (crosslisted with AAAS 80.2, LALACS 65, WGST 52.2)
This course analyses the women's writings from various Caribbean territories. The exploration of novels, short fiction, poetry and personal narratives will be complemented by essays by and about Caribbean women. The literary texts will be studied with reference to their varied historical, social, ethnic and cultural contexts. The course will require close textual reading of the primary material, as well as comparative thematic and stylistic analyses. It will explore what these texts reveal about how diverse Caribbean women are defining and taking agency for themselves in and through their writing. Students will be encouraged to locate these expressions within the broader categories of Caribbean writing, postcolonial/ postmodernist writing, and women's writing in general. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Studies, Genders and Sexualities.
English 71.2, Henry James, at the 10A hour with Professor McKee
The seminar will study the fiction of Henry James, beginning with The American and including The Portrait of a Lady, The Spoils of Poynton, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. We will be concerned with the technical and theoretical innovations that led to James being celebrated internationally as the "master" of the art of the novel. We will also examine his legendary status in works such as "The Master" by Colm Toibin and "Monopolizing the Master" by Michael Anesko. DIST: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 72.1, Elizabeth Bishop, at the 10A hour with Professor Mathis
Some of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic traits are captured by her humor; her exploration of twentieth century identities, spaces and boundaries; her willingness to explore gender and culture. Yet Bishop's explorations are 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.
Although Bishop was far less prolific than most poets of her generation, she is one of the few poets whose every publication was an “event.” Perhaps this was because she was far less predictable than other poets; her stunning perceptions and reconstruction of details of physical reality have, as another poet said, “the shine of the world,” where poetry and vision are rooted. We will study the crafting of this extraordinary work and examine why she has become with each passing decade a tremendous influence on the art of much younger writers. We will read all of Bishop's poems, as well as many of her letters and the work of other writers she taught Dist: LIT, WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 75.1, Form and Theory of Poetry, at the 2 hour with Professor Huntington
How do poets think about poetry? What goals, tools, strategies, and forms have been employed by modern and contemporary poets in their own writing and criticism? Topics will include questions of form, revision, inspiration, voice, and the role of the author as both maker and speaker in much contemporary poetry. Readings will include theory and craft texts by poets, along with examples of their own and others' poetry. Readings will be supplemented by visits and interviews with local and visiting poets. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Genre-poetry, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, 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 have exemption status). To gain admission to English 80, you must fill out an application, available on-line or in the English Department office, and submit it to the English office no later than the last day of classes of the term preceding the one in which you wish to enroll. Please answer all questions and make sure your name is legible. Be sure to indicate clearly on your application which sections(s) of 80 you are applying for. If you do not indicate which sections work with your schedule, we will place you in whatever section is available. Changing sections after enrollment is highly discouraged and will not be possible except in extenuating circumstances. 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 82, Intermediate Creative Writing-Fiction, at the 10A 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.
English 85.1, Senior Workshop in Poetry, at the 2A hour with Professor Mathis
This course is offered in the senior year for English majors and minors concentrating in Creative Writing. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, fiction, or literary nonfiction. All students who wish to enroll must submit an 8 to 12 page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of classes in the term preceding the term in which the course is to be taken. Please also read the "How to Apply to English 85" document, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter.
English 85.2, Senior Workshop in Prose Fiction, at the 2A hour with Professor O'Malley
This course is offered in the senior year for English majors and minors concentrating in Creative Writing. Each student will undertake a manuscript of poems, fiction, or literary nonfiction. All students who wish to enroll must submit an 8 to 12 page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of classes in the term preceding the term in which the course is to be taken. Please also read the "How to Apply to English 85" document, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter.