English 8, Narrative Journalism: Literature and Practice, 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.
English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, at the 10 hour with Professor Will
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--Methods. This section focuses on the interpretive methods, critical modes and creative practices of English literature as a disciplinary study. Texts will be drawn from at least two genres and historical periods as well as the history of criticism and theory. Writing for the class will include both critical and creative practices.
English 17, Introduction to New Media, at the 10A hour with Professor Evens
This course introduces the basic ideas, questions, and objects of new media studies, offering accounts of the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of new media, the operation of digital technologies, and the cultural repercussions of new media. A primary emphasis on academic texts will be supplemented by fiction, films, music, journalism, computer games, and digital artworks. Class proceeds by group discussion, debate, student presentations, and peer critique. Typical readings include Alan Turing, Friedrich Kittler, Ray Kurzweil, and Henry Jenkins, plus films such as Blade Runner and eXistenZ.. Dist: ART. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 22, Medieval English Literature, at the 11 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.
English 27, The Seventeenth Century, at the 10A hour with Professor Crewe
English poetry and prose from 1603 to 1660. Primary focus on major lyric tradition including poems by John Donne, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and John Milton. Secondary focus on significant prose works of intellectual history (Francis Bacon, Robert Burton) and political controversy (debates about gender and/or political order). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tag Genre-poetry.
English 28, John Milton, at the 10 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.
English 45, Native American Literature, at the 11 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.
English 47, American Drama, at the 12 hour with Professor Pease
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.
English 55, Twentieth Century British Fiction: World War II to the Present, at the 10A hour with Professor Giri
A study of the multiple currents within British fiction in a period characterized by major literary, cultural, and social transitions in Britain, including the emergence of a “post” (-war, -empire, -modern) sensibility. Writers may include Amis, Sillitoe, Greene, Golding, Burgess, Lessing, Wilson, Carter, Swift, Atkinson, MacLaverty, Ishiguro, Barker, Barnes, McKewan, Smith. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 60.6, Writers at Work, with Professor Crumbine at the 10A hour
What exactly do writers do? Simply put, they stop and record what the rest of us run past. To give meaning to their memory, they weave the data into form, writing stories about characters, history, biology, the psyche, mathematical properties, etc. They connect what most of us experience as disparate. Whether poets or physicists, screenwriters or biologists, writers are listeners and storytellers. They are born, however, neither from nor into a vacuum. Varying cultural histories and complicated identities lie behind every text that writers construct. This course will explore how cultural stories shape the identities of writers and inform their work. We will read writers on their writing process, how they develop their craft, how their contexts inform and shape their stories. A critical reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved, and other shorter texts, will focus on questions of cultural identities. Issues of gender, sexuality, religion, race and class swirl within the texts and throughout the context in which they were written. We will read and discuss the writing process and techniques of other writers including but not limited to: J.D. Salinger, T. Olsen, W. Faulkner, S. Hawking, O. Sacks, C. Sagan, and T.T. Williams. The overarching goal of the course will be to help students to develop a concrete writing process, gaining voice and self-consciousness within their own cultural stories. Students will be encouraged to write not only about other writers' writing process but about their own. Dist: ART. CA tag Creative Writing. No Course Group designation.
English 60.7, The Poem in Context, at the 10A hour with Professor Lenhart
A noted American writer allegedly boasted, “I don't read books; I write them.” This course is for another kind of writer, the kind who ponders questions such as: what happens in a poem? why do some move us so intensely that we learn them by heart? how do they change the way we think? As we write and read 20th century poems, we will reflect on the assumptions that shape them and will examine their historical and social contexts. As we write and read theory and criticism, we will try to make the practical and theoretical aspects of the art cohere. For example, we will consider how the correspondence between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov about how poets should respond to the Vietnam War changed their poems (and ended their friendship); discuss how the poems of Rae Armantrout and Ron Silliman relate to Language school theories; read John Ashbery and Alice Notley in the light of Maggie Nelson's Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions; and listen to Spoken Word performers while reading essays by Lorenzo Thomas and Bob Perelman on “Poetry and the Performed Word.” Dist: ART. CA tag Creative Writing. No course group designation.
English 62.1, Animals and Women in Western Literature: Nags, Bitches and Shrews, at the 12 hour with Professor Boggs (crosslisted with WGST 51.3)
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 Western cultural traditions that associate women with animals, and will interrogate women’s complex response to those associations. We will ask how, when and why women and animals are jointly excluded 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 works (Ovid, Marie de France, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, “Michael Field,” Ursula Le Guin, J.M. Coetzee) and autobiographical writings (Virginia Wolf, J. R. Ackerly, Temple Grandin) alongside religious (the Bible) and philosophical (Aristotle, Descartes, Wollstonecraft, Levinas) texts, and draw on current schools of critical thought such as ecofeminism (Carol Adams) and postmodern theory (Marin, Lippit, Wolfe and Elmer) to develop an understanding of these issues.s. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. No Course Group assignment. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 63.2, National Allegory: Readings in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, at the 2A hour with Professor Giri (crosslisted with COLT 49)
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. WCult: NW. Course Group IV. CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 66.1, The Brontes, at the 2A hour with Professor Gerzina
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë are perhaps the most mythologized and analyzed family of writers in Britain. Their childhood in Haworth, the intensity of their novels, the relationship with their father and brother—all have been fodder for literary and biographical analysis, and spawned an entire industry of memorabilia, imitation and criticism. In this course we will do close readings of four Brontë novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), their juvenilia, some biographical selections, and a number of critical articles. No prerequisites. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 67.4, Woolfenstein, at the 11 hour with Professor Silver and Will
In her well known passage from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf stated that "we think back through our mothers if we are women"; twenty years later, Gertrude Stein would obliquely refer to herself as "the mother of us all." These two women occupy a central place in European and American modernism, their work having influenced successive generations of writers. Using a series of thematic and theoretical frameworks, we will explore the intersections between the two, asking how they staged their resistances to traditional/patriarchal literary and cultural structures. Possible frameworks are gender and genre; queer texts and contexts; war, nation, and gender; class, ethnicity, and authority; iconization. Texts by Woolf might include Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and Between the Acts; texts by Stein might include Ida, Three Lives, Everybody's Autobiography, and Mrs. Reynolds. We will also be reading a selection of critical and/or feminist theory. Suggested background courses are English 15, Comparative Literature 72, WGST 16. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. Concentration area tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 67.5, African Literatures: Masterpieces of Literature from Africa, at the 10A hour with Professor Coly (crosslisted with AAAS 51 and 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.
English 67.9, 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 67.10, The Black Arts Movement, at the 10A hour with Professor Rabig (crosslisted with AAAS 81)
This course explores the literature, art, and criticism of the Black Arts Movement. The artistic corollary to the Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement flourished in the 1960s and 1970s as artists/activists sought to put a revolutionary cultural politics into practice around the country. The Black Arts Movement had far-reaching implications for the way artists and writers think about race, history, authorship, and the relationship between artistic production and political liberation. We’ll explore these issues in work by Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, and others who forged the traditionally-defined Black Arts Movement in Harlem. We’ll also trace the movement’s flowering around country, where local political struggles and artistic traditions in Chicago, Newark, Los Angeles, and Detroit shaped distinctive regional variations of the Black Arts Movement. We’ll consider how the literature of the Black Arts Movement intersected with other cultural currents of the time, its critics, and the persistence of its themes in contemporary culture. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Popular Cultural and Cultural Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 70.3, Hamlet in Psychoanalysis: A Case History, at the 2A 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, pending faculty approval. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-Drama, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 72.1, Science, Fiction and Empire, at the 3A hour with Professor Bahng
In this course we analyze the historical relationships between science and imperialism, exploration and discovery, conquest and the mining of natural resources. Engaging with postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, we also read in the field of science and technology studies. Readings include not only a number of science fiction novels, short stories, and films by people of color across the Americas, but also a broader set of “scientific fictions.” For example, we read work by Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson alongside postcolonial critiques of the so-called “digital divide.” Similarly, we read the speculative fiction of Karen Tei Yamashita, a California native who also lived in Brazil and Japan, against the backdrop of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the fictions of “development” used to rationalize such endeavors. African-American writers Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany offer helpful counter-texts to the history of medical experimentation on people of color in the U.S. and the homophobia of AIDS discourse in the 1980s. In essence, we look to the speculative fiction by people of color as examples of what Hopkinson has termed “postcolonial science fiction,” which re-imagines science and technology in the service of transnational networks rather than Empire. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditons, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Studies.
English 75.1, High Theory, at the 2A hour with Professor Evens
This seminar for advanced students undertakes a close reading of difficult texts in philosophy and in literary and cultural theory. We will include secondary literature to help contextualize the primary texts under study, but the emphasis is on close reading to develop original and critical approaches to these challenging works. Class will be based largely around group discussion, with lectures and prepared student presentations to help stimulate conversation. Students can help to shape the syllabus by proposing texts they wish to work on together. Representative authors we might read in this class include Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Agamben, Heidegger, Virilio, Zizek, Lyotard, and others. Dist: TMV. Course Group IV.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, at the 10A hour with Professor Tudish
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.. Dist: ART.
English 80.2, 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). 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. Dist: ART.
English 81.1 Intermediate Creative Writing-Poetry, at the 2A hour with Professor Mathis
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. 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 of their fiction 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 82.1, Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction, at the 2A 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 of their fiction to the administrative assistant of 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.