Important notice:
In addition to the English courses listed below, two other courses are in the process of being cross-listed with English. They WILL CARRY ENGLISH MAJOR/MINOR CREDIT even if the English number for the crosslisting is not approved in time. You may enroll in these courses using the AAAS, COLT or WGST number and you will receive English major/minor credit.
(English 67.14)/AAAS 51/COLT 51, African Literatures: Masterpieces of Literature from Africa, at the 10A hour with Professor Coly
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 63.2)/AAAS 67/COLT 67/WGST 52.1, Colonial and Postcolonial Masculinities, at the 2A hour with Professor Coly
In this course, we will develop an understanding of masculinity as a construct which varies in time and space, and is constantly (re)shaped by such factors as race, class, and sexuality. The contexts of the colonial encounter and its postcolonial aftermath will set the stage for our examination of the ways in which social, political, economic, and cultural factors foster the production of specific masculinities. Texts include Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lafferiere's How to Make Love to a Negro, and additional writings by Irish, Indian, and Australian authors. Our study will be organized around the questions of the production of hegemonic and subaltern masculinities, the representation of the colonial and postcolonial male body, the militarization of masculinity, and the relation between masculinity and nationalism. Theoretical material on masculinities will frame our readings. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
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English 8, Journalism, 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. WCult: W. This course does not carry English major credit.
English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, Professor Will at the 12 hour
This course introduces the student to the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading and the study of literature. This course is designed as an introductory course to the English literature major and other literature and humanities majors. Students must complete Writing 5 before enrolling. Texts may include theory, history of literature, and will be drawn from at least two genres and historical periods. Dist: LIT. No course group or CA tag assignments.
English 15, Introduction to Literary Theory, Professor Boggs at the 12 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 21, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Other Poems, at the 3A hour with Professor Travis
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 23, The English Renaissance, Professor Halasz at the 2A hour
English verse and prose of the sixteenth century: a study of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Nashe, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and others in the cultural context of Tudor England. The course will investigate issues of classical and European influence, publication, and courtly patronage, especially under the auspices of a female ruler (Elizabeth I). Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 26, English Drama to 1642, Professor Boose at the 10 hour
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 28, Milton, Professor Luxon at the 10 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: W. Course Group I, CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities.
English 45, Native American Literature, Professor Goeman at the 11 hour (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: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 47, American Drama, Professors Pease and Colbert, 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: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 48, Contemporary American Fiction, Professor Favor at the 10 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: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 60.4, Profiles of the Dead, Professor Kennedy at the 10A hour
How do we tell a vivid story about a stranger who has crumbled into dust? During this advanced seminar in literary nonfiction, each student will write a stylish, suspenseful narrative about a dead person. We will gear up to this final assignment with exercises, individual meetings and "boot camps" on historical research. Readings will include "The Lives They Lived" profiles from The New York Times Magazine, as well as excerpts from Gay Talese, Sarah Vowell and John Hope Franklin. WCult: ART, pending faculty approval. CA tags Creative Writing, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture. 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 67.09, Modern Jewish American Women Writers, Professor Zeiger at the 12 hour (crosslisted with JWST 21.1 and WGST 51)
This course offers a survey of women writers of Jewish background and identification. We will first take up the question of who is a "Jewish woman writer," a subset of the larger question of ethnic, national, and religious identity and identification in literary studies. We will then study a variety of writers mostly from the US and Latin America, writing in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, memoir, essay, and drama from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Writers include Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Jo Sinclair, Cynthia Ozick, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Muriel Ruykeser, Irena Klepfisz, Wendy Wasserstein, Allegra Goodman, and Marjorie Angosin. Dist: LIT; WCult: Cl. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 67.10, Black Movements, Professor Colbert at the 12 hour (crosslisted with AAAS 26)
Accounting for the multiple meanings of "movement," this course will explore representations of migration, immigration, community activism, and embodied performance in black literature and cultural productions. We will examine how black people's ambiguous relationship to space and place in the Circum-Atlantic world informs modes of representation, by focusing on images of home, homelessness, flight, entrapment, embodiment, and metaphysical transcendence. These images permeate the African American literary tradition and the literatures of the black diaspora. The tenuous relationship between black subjects and place, nationally and internationally, also calls for consideration of how social, cultural, and historical conditions work to create overlapping and often contradictory images of movement(s) in black expressive culture. At the same time, we will analyze how movement functions as a mechanism to explore some of the predominate themes of black expression, including: freedom, family, identity, subjectivity, nationally belonging, and history. We will read such works as Jean Toomer's Cane, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Aime Cesaire's A Tempest, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist; watch Josephine Baker's Princess Tam Tam and listen to musicians including Billie Holiday and Kanye West. Dist: LIT, WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 67.11, James Joyce, Professor Cosgrove at the 12 hour
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 67.13, Contemporary Native American Poetry, Professor Palmer at the 10A hour (xlist NAS 47)
As Muscogee poet, Joy Harjo, expresses in the introduction of the anthology, REINVENTING THE ENEMY'S LANGUAGE, a collection that she co-edited, Native peoples are "...still dealing with a holocaust of outrageous proportion in these lands...Many of us at the end of the century are using the 'enemy language' with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves during these troubled times." This course in Native American poetry examines the ways contemporary American Indian poets employ literary gestures of resistance to the ongoing effects of colonization, and how their poetry contributes to the survival of tribal memory and the regeneration of tribal traditions and communities. We examine the influence of oral tradition and ritual life upon contemporary poets, as well as the position Native American poetic "voice" occupies in contemporary postcolonial discourse. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW, pending faculty approval. Course Group III, CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 70.2, Love, Gender and Marriage in Shakespeare, Professor Boose at the 12 hour (xlist WGST 48.3)
In Shakespeare, issues so seemingly "domestic" as love, sexuality and family are problems of such colossal significance that they could be said to constitute the focal center of the canon itself. Hamlet and King Lear, for instance, are plays more truly "about" the politics of family than they are about the politics of kingdom. Focusing on seven plays, this course will interrogate the knotty issues of love, sexuality, and family. As part of the course, students will be required to participate in at least one scene production. Dist: LIT. WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities.
English 71.3, The Brontës, Professor Gerzina at the 3A hour
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 the seminar we will do close readings of four Brontë novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), and critical articles, look at some of their juvenilia, and read Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth. We’ll end with Maryse Conde's Windward Heights and Jasper Fforde’s imaginative novel, The Eyre Affair. We will also view 2-3 film adaptations of their novels. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag Genre-narrative.
English 72.4, The Harlem Renaissance, Professor Favor at the 12 hour (crosslisted with AAAS 91)
This class will examine the literature and social contexts of a period widely knows as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Part of our mission in the class will be to deconstruct some of the widely held presuppositions about that era, especially by interrogating questions of class, race, gender and sexuality as social constructs. Although this class will focus mainly on fiction writing, we will also consider some poetry and non-fiction prose as well. Dist: LIT, WCult: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 75, Form and Theory of Fiction, Professor Tudish at the 2A hour
How do fiction writers think about fiction? What aesthetics, goals, tools, strategies, and theories have been explored and employed by fiction writers as they write their own works, read the works of other fiction writers, and postulate on the role of fiction in literature and among a general readership? Topics will include the ways that writers consider and work with point of view, dramaturgy, narrative sequence, character, voice, psychic distance, and authorial presence. In addition to examples of the novel, novella, and short story, readings will include theory and craft texts by such fiction writers as James, Poe, Forster, Calvino, Atwood, Gordimer, Ecco, Macauley, Lanning, Cixous, and others. Dist: LIT, CA tags Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, Professor Huntington 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.2, Creative Writing, Professor O'Malley 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.3, Creative Writing, Professor Harrison 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. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 81.1, Intermediate Creative Writing-Poetry, Professor Mathis at the 10A 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. DIST: ART.
English 82, Intermediate Creative Writing-Fiction, Professor O'Malley 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. Dist: ART.