Spring 2007 Courses
English 08.2: Journalism: Literature and Practice, Professor Jetter at the 11 hour
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.This course does not carry English major credit.
English 15: Introduction to Literary Theory, Professor Will at the 2A hour
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 28: Milton, Professor Luxon at the 9L hour
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: EU. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-Poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 34: Romantic Literature: Writing and English 1780-1832, Professor McCann at the 10 hour
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars.There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare.Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions.
English 39: Early American Literature, Professor Schweitzer at the 2A hour
The "invention" of America changed the world forever and precipitated the beginning of the modern era. This course explores that invention, covering the period of about 1500 to 1800 and surveying a wide range of cultural attitudes towards the imagination, exploration, and settlement of the Americas: Native American, Spanish, French, and English. Our reading, including oral tales, letters, diaries, captivity narratives, poetry, personal narratives, political tracts, and secondary criticism, will focus on the themes of conquest, captivity, cannibalism in the shaping of a particularly "American" identity. We will use historical sources and early books and manuscripts to illuminate attitudes towards power, identity, race, gender, and nature prevailing in the multicultural landscape of the early Americas that shaped the emerging literature and culture of British North America. We will also look at recent cinematic representations of this early period in our examination of the shifting and contentious meaning of "America." Dist: LIT. WCult: NA. Course Group I. CA tags Multitcultural and Colonial/ Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions.
English 45: Native American Literature, Professor Goeman at the 11 hour
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: NA. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Multicultural and Colonial/ Postcolonial Studies.
English 47: American Drama, Professor Pease at the 10 hour
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: NA. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Genre- Drama.
English 48: Contemporary American Fiction, Professor Favor at the 2 hour
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: NA. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Genre-Narrative.
English 49: Modern Black American Literature, Professor Vasquez at the 2A hour
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 Counter-Traditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 60.2: Asian American Performance, Professor Chin at the 2A hour
This course considers the contribution of Asian American drama and performance to American culture. It looks at performativities of identity and memory derived from the diverse collectivities and political interventions constituting Asian American experience. How is Asian American identity staged in the context of diasporic imaginations, Exclusion Acts, assimilationist imperatives and emerging nationalisms? What are the critical perspectives and sites of contestation? Can we identify an Asian American aesthetics or poetics? We will consider textual and performance strategies and dominant thematics in the works of such artist as Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Wakako Yamauchi, Philip Gotanda, Genny Lim and Jessica Hagedorn. Research and discussion will focus on issues related to race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Selected readings may be staged to gain an understanding of performance issues. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tags Multitcultural and Colonial/ Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 62.3: Animals and Women in Western Literature: Nags, Bitches and Shrews, Professor Boggs at the 2 hour
What do stories about animals tell us about the treatment of women in Western society? What do stories about women tell us about the treatment of animals in Western society? And why are the two so often linked in the first place? In this course, we will examine the philosophical traditions that associate women with animals, and will interrogate women's complex response to those associations. We will ask why women and animals are jointly bracketed from subjectivity and from ethical consideration. Given the advances in areas such as women's rights, we will ask whether there have been corresponding advances in the treatment of animals, and why women feel particularly called upon to work for those advances. Statistics suggest, for example, that the overwhelming majority of vegetarians and humane society members are women. Is the ethical treatment of animals an important feminist cause? We will read literary (Ursula Le Guin, Aesop, Anna Sewell, Virginia Woolf) alongside religious (the Bible) and philosophical (Aristotle, Wollstonecraft, Bentham) texts, and draw on current schools of critical thought such as ecofeminism (Carol Adams) to develop an understanding of these issues. Course Group n/a. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 63.1: The Emotions and Identity in American Literature and Film, Professor Santa Ana at the 10A hour
What do our feelings of shame, anger, grief, and compassion tell us about ourselves and the culture in which we live? By watching films and reading novels, essays, and personal narratives, we will examine the ways in which human feelings express and construct identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Texts may include The Bluest Eye; Bastard Out of Carolina; My Year of Meats; Fixer Chao; Nickel and Dimed; and the films Flower Drum Song and Crash. Course Group IV. CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 63.2: National Allegory: Readings in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Professor Giri at the 11 hour
This course explores current theories of nationalism and postnationalism and how these theories could be productively utilized in making sense of a select number of literary texts and authors from the postcolonial world. The authors include Lu Xun from China; Raja Rao from India; Sembene Ousmane from Senegal; Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya; and Chinua Achebe from Nigeria. Cultural theorists whose work will be discussed include Benedict Anderson, Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Eric Hobsbawm, Franz Fanon, Frederic Jameson, and Ernest Renan, among others. The readings follow a trajectory that began with anti-colonial resistance movements leading to the achievement of freedom, and subsequent recognition that the postcolonial nation-state as a historically realized entity has fallen far short of the idea of the nation as an imagined community and a utopian project, still unfinished and full of promise for some, while a matter of historical anachronism for others. Yet others see it as a site where an individual's desire for freedom co-exists uneasily with the pursuit of collective wellbeing. Dist: LIT. Course Group III. CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism, Multitcultural and Colonial/ Postcolonial Studies.
English 65.2: The Merchant of Venice: Jews and the Protestant Imagination, Professor McKee at the 10A hour
This course will offer a close examination of Shakespeare's construction of "Jewishness," in the context of a larger review of Jewish history in medieval and early modern Europe. Dist: LIT; WCult: EU. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-Drama, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions.
English 67.7: Mixed-Race Experience in Contemporary American Literature, Professor Santa Ana at the 2A hour
Growing numbers of interracial relationships and the multiracial children of these relations have contributed to America's increasing diversity. Asian Americans, in particular, are ever more claiming biracial parentage and identifying themselves as mixed race. In this course, we will explore the multiracial experience in Asian American novels memoirs, films, and criticism. Text may include My Year of Meats, Fixer Chaos, Paper Bullets, The Unwanted, and the films Danang and First Person Rural. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions.
English 67.8: Native Land, Literatures, and Identity, Professor Goeman at the 10A hour
In the course of ten weeks, the class will address various issues of geography and sovereignty of particular importance to indigenous communities as it is reflected in twentieth-century creative works. In class we will focus our examination on Native conceptions of space and settler-colonialism's organizing of space by learning to read Native Cultural Production. The relationship between race, gender, and nation will be explicated through an examination of films, visual work, short stories, poems, and novels. We will begin with Native literature at the turn of the century, which addresses the trope of the frontier and the push westward, and end with current indigenous work that comments on global restructuring and the indigenous hemispheric movement in the Americas. Though our trajectory is linear, the class will address how early concepts of space appear and are rewritten into current narratives. By using literary analytical tools in exploring metaphor, poetic structures, and genres, we will engage with the methods Native writers employ in their work to map out spaces of their own making. The links between different periods of spatial restructuring and spatial othering will be explored in these textual moments. Dist: LIT. WCult: NW
English 71.1: Charles Dickens: Allegory, Capitalism, and the Grotesque, Professor McCann at the 12 hour
The novels of Charles Dickens embody a complex formal response to the pressures of industrial capitalism and their apparently corrosive effects on Victorian social life. By foregrounding the concepts of allegory and the grotesque, this course will explore Dickens's development of a critical idiom that tried to reveal the distortions of both laissez-faire economics and state bureaucracy, while also preserving Victorian society from the revolutionary potential of popular political mobilization. We will discuss Dickens in relationship to his radical imitators and rivals (such as George Reynolds), to a developing literature of labor (embodied in the work of Carlyle and Marx), and to anxieties about colonial expansion and dislocation. We will also draw on the work of critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to develop a sense of how Dickens's work embodies the tense relationship between print-culture, populism and a developing culture industry increasingly oriented to visual technologies. Reading will include The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend.
English 72.3: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Professor Zeiger at the 12 hour
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: NA. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
English 72.4: Postmodern Fiction: Boxes, Labyrinths, and Webs, Professor Silver at the 2A hour
This seminar will explore that strand of postmodern fiction that has led to the recent genre of electronic hyperfiction. Non-sequential, multilinear, interactive, hyperfiction is an extension of the theories and practice underlying much of postmodern thought and literature, including its challenge to traditional narrative structures. We will read print fictions by writers whose novels anticipate or parallel the experiments in non-sequential narrative made possible by the computer, as well as a wide variety of electronic hyperfictions. We will also read a number of critical and theoretical essays on the topics examined in the course. Readings will include print fiction by writers such as Borges, Coover, Pynchon, Stein, Winterson, Coetzee, and Pavic, as well as hyperfictions by Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, Stuart Moulthrop, Shelley Jackson, Mark Amerika, and others. We will also explore the vibrant world of multi-media web fiction/art. Preference will be given to students who have taken courses in 20th century fiction and/or literary theory. Dist: LIT
English 72.5: American Writers between the World Wars, Professor Will at the 10A hour
This course will examine the work of American authors writing between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. We will consider such topics as: "post-war" and "pre-war" writing, interwar nativism, black internationalism, and the afterlife of artistic modernism. The course will combine a strong historical focus with close readings of texts by Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Baldwin, Hemingway, Cather, Stein, and Dorothy West.
English 72.6: Asian American Poetry, Professor Chin at the 10A hour
How do Asian Americans articulate the world? This course traces the development of their poetry from early anonymous efforts to contemporary experiments. Among the issues covered are: dominant modes, forms and thematics; evolving traditions and intertextualities; activist and post-activist aesthetics; cultural nationalisms; global and diasporic perspectives. Poets studied may include: Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Linh Dinh, Jessica Hagedorn, Garrett Hongo, Lawson Inada, Li-Young Lee, Janice Mirikitani, Yone Noguchi and Cathy Song. Dist: LIT; WCult: NA.
English 75.3: Theory of the Digital, Professor Evens at the 10A hour
This advanced seminar focuses on the underlying principles and implications of digital technology,culture, and art. Readings include diverse commentary on the digital as well as theoretical sources that have influenced thinking about digitality: Hayles, Lévy, Hansen, Shannon, Deleuze, Baudrillard, ZiZek, Heidegger, Virilio, Kittler, Manovich, and others. Themes include the aesthetics and ethics of digital technology, technological determinism, and the future of the digital. Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval.
English 80.1: Creative Writing, Professor TBA at the 10A hour
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week plus individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed their seminar. Students will be admitted on a competitive basis. Please pick up the "How To Apply To English 80" 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 poetry and/or 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. It does not carry major or minor credit. Starting with Academic Year 2001-2002, this class will be graded. Dist: ART.
English 80.2: Creative Writing, Professor TBA at the 2A hour
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week plus individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed their seminar. Students will be admitted on a competitive basis. Please pick up the "How To Apply To English 80" 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 poetry and/or 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. It does not carry major or minor credit. Starting with Academic Year 2001-2002, this class will be graded. Dist: ART.
English 81: Advanced Creative Writing-Poetry, Professor Huntington at the 2A hour
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.
English 82: Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction, Professor TBA at the 2A hour
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.