English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, at the 12 hour with Professor Travis
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.
Introduction to Literary Study--Poetry. This section addresses poetic language and form. It offers practice in reading poems and skills in interpreting and producing densely figured language. Each section will focus on poetry of three (not necessarily consecutive) centuries, with some contextualization for every period. Reading will include some of the large body of critical work that helps foster analytic and writing skills. Writing for the class will include both critical and creative practices.
English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, at the 10 hour with Professor McKee
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 21, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Other Poems, at the 10 hour with Professor Edmondson
A study of Chaucer’s major works other than the Canterbury Tales, focusing on some of the early dream visions (Book of the Duchess, House of Fame) and Troilus and Criseyde, which many consider to be the greatest love epic in the English language. Some attention will be given to the French and Italian context of these works (in translation). No familiarity with Middle English is required. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genre-narrative.
English 26, English Drama to 1642, at the 10A hour with Professor Boose
A study of commercial theater in London from about 1570 until the closing of the theaters in 1642. Anonymous and collaborative plays will be read as well as those by such playwrights as Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Webster, and Ford. The course will focus on the economic, social, political, intellectual, and theatrical conditions in which the plays were originally produced, on their continuing performance, and on their status as literary texts. Research into the performance history of a play or participation in a scene production is required. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities.
English 36, Victorian Literature and Culture, 1837-1859, at the 10 hour with Professor McCann
This course examines early Victorian 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 Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin. 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 38, The 19th Century English Novel, at the 12 hour with Professor McKee
A study of the nineteenth-century novel focusing on the Victorian novel’s representation of public and private categories of experience. Readings may include Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’s Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 41, American Prose, at the 2 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.
English 42, American Fiction to 1900, at the 12 hour with Professor Pease
A survey of the first century of U.S. fiction, this course focuses on historical contexts as well as social and material conditions of the production of narrative as cultural myth. The course is designed to provide an overview of the literary history of the United States novel from the National Period to the threshold of the Modern (1845-1900). To do justice to the range of works under discussion, the lectures will call attention to the heterogeneous cultural contexts out of which these works have emerged as well as the formal and structural components of the different works under discussion. In keeping with this intention, the lecturers include the so-called classic texts in American literature, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but also the newly canonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Life in the Iron Mills, Hope Leslie in the hope that the configuration of these works will result in an understanding of the remarkable complexity of United States literary culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 46, 20th Century American Fiction: 1900 to World War I, at the 11 hour with Professor Will
A study of major American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Works by Dreiser, Stein, Fitzgerald, Cather, Larsen and Faulkner, and a changing list of others. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative.
English 54, Modern British Drama, at the 10A hour with Professor Gamboa
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, Native American Oral Tradition Literatures, at the 10 hour with Professor Palmer (crosslisted with NAS 34)
Native American oral literatures constitute a little-known but rich and complex dimension of the American literary heritage. This course will examine the range of oral genres in several tribes. Since scholars from around the world are studying oral literatures as sources of information about the nature of human creativity, the course will involve examining major theoretical approaches to oral texts. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. No Course Group designation. CA tag Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 60.2, History of the Book, at the 12 hour with Professor Halasz (crosslisted with COLT 40)
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. Halasz.
English 60.3, Evidence of Things Not Seen: Advanced Creative Nonfiction, at the 2A hour with Professor Sharlet
Through close readings of creative nonfiction and other documentary prose, we’ll investigate not just craft -- character, voice, structure and sequence -- but also archetype, parable, myth, and allusion, the stuff of what “new journalist” Joan Didion describes as “the stories we tell ourselves in order to live” and what St. Paul wrote of as “evidence of things not seen.” We’ll conduct our inquiry through excursions into faith and faithlessness, doubt and conviction, and the vast territory in between. Our goal will be to learn how to inhabit the ideas as well as the experience of “belief,” broadly defined, an essential step in writing nonfiction stories that transcend their journalistic foundations. Most importantly, we’ll be writing to be read -- not just by your classmates and me, but by the public. Through several writing assignments and lots of workshopping, every student will attempt to produce at least one piece of publishable prose that can be shared with the Dartmouth community. Readings will include short excerpts from a century's worth of efforts by journalists, essayists, oral historians, and anthropologists to document the intangible facts of belief and unbelief, including work by Mary Austin, Lafcadio Hearn, Isabelle Eberhardt, H.L. Mencken, Tillie Olsen, James Baldwin, Garry Wills, Barbara Myerhoff, Vivian Gornick, Marshall Frady, Roy Mottahedeh, Michael Muhammad Knight, Norman Mailer, Annie Dillard, James Agee, and Wendy Doniger.Dist: ART. CA tags Creative Writing, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 60.4, The Poetics of Hybrid Forms, at the 2 hour with Professor Finch
Designed as a bridge between creative writing and literary studies, this course considers various forms of hybrid writing and encourages students to explore their own imaginative writing practices in a structured and supportive environment. Here “hybrid” implies writing that crosses borders of one sort or another, perhaps blurring or combining pre-existing genres, in order to seek new ways of creative expression. For inspiration and historical precedent, we will read the haibun travel-writing of Basho, the break-through prose poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the modernist forays of William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, and Gertrude Stein, the borderland poetics of Gloria Anzaldúa and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and the trans-historical investigations of Susan Howe and W.G. Sebald. Selected works of critical theory will allow us to consider the increasingly hybrid nature of some modern theory as well. During the term, students will develop their own creative and critical writing practices, compose annotations of reading selections, submit work-in-process for class workshop, and by the end of the term complete a piece, creative and/or critical, that is informed by the perspective of the course. Literary texts may include: Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, Rimbaud's Illuminations, Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, Emerson's “Experience,” William Carlos Williams' Spring and All, Jean Toomer's Cane, Gertrude Stein's “Melanctha,” John Ashbery's Three Poems, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera, Jack Spicer's After Lorca, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, C.D. Wright's One Big Self, Donna Stonecipher's The Cosmopolitan. Critical theory texts may include: M.M. Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination, Homi Bhaba's The Location of Culture, Roland Barthes' “From Work to Text,” Ron Silliman's “The New Sentence,” Lyn Hejinian's “The Rejection of Closure,” Michel De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, Gerard Genette's The Architext, and Charles Olson's “Projective Verse.” Dist: ART. No Course Group designation. CA tags Creative Writing, Literary Theory and Criticism.
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. Dist: TAS. Course Group IV. CA tag Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 65.1, Shakespeare as an Actor's Script, at the 2A hour with Professor Boose
This course on Shakespeare begins by recognizing that the plays, written specifically to be performed, conceptually exist as scripts for the actors. Patrick Stewart once said that performing even the smallest part in Shakespeare is so hugely rewarding for an actor because, in Shakespeare, even the lowliest messenger has been given an individuated character, a 'personality,' that lies right there in the language, just waiting for the actor to give it life. Using just two plays for the term, the course will place an intense focus on studying each play as an actor's script. Students will be responsible for particular roles in each play; and, working from the myriad cues that exist within the language, they will learn to build a character based on those cues. They will, in addition, learn how to research the acting history that lies behind a play's major roles, and how to understand the editing history that determines the words within a particular text of each play. This course should be attractive both to students who just enjoy drama and to those specifically interested in performing, directing, or writing plays. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-drama.
English 67.3, Indian Killers: Murder and Mystery in Native Literature and Film, at the 11 hour with Professor Benson (crosslisted with NAS 32)
This course explores the abundance of crime fiction and murder mysteries created by Native American artists in recent decades. For some, the genre provides an imaginative space for avenging the offenses of colonization. For others, it offers a democratized landscape where all are equal, where American law is malleable, and where intelligence and subversion triumph. While most critics applaud these decolonizing efforts, we will examine their darker implications as well: do these narratives do real cultural work, or do they simply cash in on a thrill-seeking, stereotype-infested, pop-cultural industry? Do such works reveal that colonial violence will beget only more-and bloodier-violence? And in the end, who are its true victims? Dist: LIT; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 70.1, Media in the Metropolis: London, 1611, at the 3A hour with Professor Halasz
A seminar on oral, scribal and printed discourse in 1611, using three plays of 1611 as proxies to enter the media space and cultural concerns of London: William Shakespeare's The Tempest (closely linked to the fragile Jamestown settlement effort), Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, (figuring the emerging capitalist market), and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl (featuring a transvestite heroine modeled on a woman arrested for indecency in 1611 because she appeared on stage dressed in men's clothing). Class will meet once a week on Mondays from 3-6; additional tutorial meetings for research (Rauner and online databases) and for seminar paper planning will be scheduled as needed. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-Poetry, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 70.2, Medieval Animals, at the 2A hour with Professor Travis
From bestiary collections to theological tracts, from scholastic debates between birds to trickster heroes such as Reynard the fox, from Aesopian beast fables to the heraldic creatures of courtly romance, medieval literature is full of meaningful animals. This course will examine the significance of a variety “animal” texts, ranging from The Book of Beasts, the Physiologus, and The Voyage of Brendan, to Marie de France’s Fables, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Weaving together recent theoretical studies of the role of the animal in the human imaginary, and considering briefly corollary American critters such as Coyote and the Signifying Monkey, our critical focus is nevertheless preeminently medieval. Non-literary texts--manuscript illustrations, hunting manuals, tapestries, animal “court trials,” and theories of animal speech—will round out our study of animals in the medieval world. Student reports, a short paper, and a long research paper. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 72.3, James Joyce, at the 2 hour with Professor Huntington
This seminar will be devoted to the study of Joyce's Ulysses. After some discussion of Joyce's Portrait and Dubliners -- both of which students are urged to read before the course begins--we will focus on the text of Joyce's Ulysses, with an emphasis on close reading and an examination of Joyce's experiments in prose and his place in modern literature. Each student will be asked to write two papers. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, at the 10A 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). Procedure for enrolling in English 80: To gain admission to English 80, students 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 they wish to enroll. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Please answer all questions on the application and make sure your name is legible. Be sure to indicate clearly on your application the sections(s) of 80 for which you are applying. If you do not indicate which sections work with your schedule, we will place you in whatever section is available. Students should then enroll in three other courses. If admitted to English 80, students can then drop one of the other courses. Changing sections after enrollment is highly discouraged and will not be possible except in extenuating circumstances. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.2, Creative Writing, at the 2A hour with Professor Lea
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).Procedures for enrolling in English 80: To gain admission to English 80, students 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 they wish to enroll. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Please answer all questions on the application and make sure your name is legible. Be sure to indicate clearly on your application the sections(s) of 80 for which you are applying. If you do not indicate which sections work with your schedule, we will place you in whatever section is available. Students should then enroll in three other courses. If admitted to English 80, students can then drop one of the other courses. Changing sections after enrollment is highly discouraged and will not be possible except in extenuating circumstances.English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 82.1, Intermediate Creative Writing-Fiction, at the 10A hour with Professor Tudish
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 read the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample to the English Department. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Dist: ART.
English 83.1, Intermediate Creative Writing-Literary Nonfiction at the 10A hour with Professor Sharlet
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 read the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form, available on-line and from the English Department, and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample to the English Department. Deadline for equal consideration for admittance is the last day of classes in the term preceding the course. Late applications will be accepted, but held until the add/drop period and reviewed if vacancies occur. Dist: ART.
English 85.1, Senior Workshop in Poetry, Prose Fiction and Nonfiction, at the 2A hour with Professor Tudish
This course is offered in the fall of senior year for English majors and minors concen-trating 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 writ-ing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by May 15 of the spring term preceding their senior year. 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. Prerequisite: English 80 and 81, 82, or 83.