Spring 2014 Courses

At the 12 hour with Professors Will and Zeiger

This course will provide an overview of literature in the Anglophone world from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Dist: LIT; WCult: W.  Course Group III.

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 except by successful petition to the CDC.

At the 11 hour with Professor Travis

An introduction both to Old English literature and to Old Norse sagas. In the first half of the course we concentrate on reading, translating and setting into cultural context selected Anglo-Saxon poems, most notably 'The Wanderer,' 'The Dream of the Rood,' and 'Beowulf.' In the second half of the course we read a variety of Old Norse sagas, including 'Egil's Saga,' 'The Saga of the People of Laxardal,' and two shorter sagas recounting contacts with North America. In addition to papers and reports, we'll discuss the new film 'Beowulf,' and each student will write a mini-version of a Norse saga. Dist: LIT; WCult: W . Course Group I. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative.

At the 2 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.

At the 12 hour with Professor Boggs

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.

At the 2A 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.

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.

At the 12 hour with Professor Lenhart

This course concentrates on American poetry since 1960. We will consider the influence of the "schools" of poetry which evolved in the second half of the twentieth century, including the Beats, the New York poets, the Confessional poets, the Black Mountain School, the New Romantics, and the New Formalists. Our primary focus will be to examine a variety of poets through close readings of individual poems. Paying close attention to the crafting of the poem, we will discuss key aspects such as voice, tone, image, metaphor, and the nature of the line. Poets we will study include Ginsberg, Lowell, O'Hara, Bishop, Plath, Kunitz, Hayden, James Wright, Brooks, Levine, Levertov, and Rich. Creative Writing majors are encouraged to take this course. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tag Genre-poetry.

At the 2A hour with Professor Evens

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.

At the 10hr with Professor Otter 

This course will study translation in  the Middle Ages, as well as translations of the Middle Ages.  That is, we will consider medieval ideas of translation, translation practices in medieval England, and modern translations of medieval texts and ideas.  We will focus on Anglo-Saxon translations of Latin texts; some romances that exist in both English and French versions (such as Lanval, Tristan, or Havelok); we will study Chaucer and Wycliff as translators; and we will look at the ways medieval writers and readers "translated" Classical themes and ideas.   On the modern side, we will critically examine modern translations of poems such as Beowulf  or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and we will consider modern "translations" of medieval themes and ideas (for example, chivalry, the knight's quest).   Final research project; shorter papers and translation exercises.  Ideally, you should have taken a medieval course before this.  Some knowledge--even rudimentary--of Latin, French, or Italian is helpful but not required. Dist: LIT; WCult:W, Course Group I

At the 11 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.

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.

At the 10 Hour with Professor Gerzina (cross listed with AAAS 26)

An examination of Toni Morrison's major fictional works. We will also read critical responses by and about the author. Required texts include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and Home, as well as critical works. Central issues will include alternative constructions of female community and genealogy, and representations of race, class, nationhood and identity. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-narrative.

At the 2A with Professor Winfrey (crosslisted with THEA 22/AAAS 31)

This course will examine African American playwrights, drama, and theater from 1959 to the present. Further exploration will focus on the impact of civil rights, the Black Arts movement, and cultural aesthetics on the form, style, and content of African American plays. Readings will include plays of Hansberry, Baldwin, Baraka, Kennedy, Childress, Shange, Wolfe, Wilson, Parks and others. Open to all classes.  Dist: CI; WCult: ART.  Course Group III.  CA tags Genre-drama.

At the 10A hour with Professor Evens

This class will examine the development of science fiction as literature, considering the distinctive characteristics of the genre. We will read critical perspectives on scifi that connect it to both modern and postmodern themes; we will think through the politics of scifi, focusing especially on its utopian and dystopian elements; we will articulate the many subgenres of scifi; we will investigate the unusually strong influence of the community of readers on the published texts in scifi. But primarily we will read representative examples, novels, stories, and even some films, from well-known classics to little-known and marginal texts. Authors may include John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur Clark, Philip Dick, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, James Tiptree, Jr., Stanislaw Lem, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Samuel Delaney, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Ted Chiang, and still others. The class will have an opportunity to shape the syllabus somewhat according to the preferences of enrolled students. Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.

At the 2A hour with Professor Vasquez (crosslisted with AAAS 83.6 and LACS 66)

This course will examine the work of a variety of Caribbean writers from former British colonies. We will look at several issues that reappear throughout the work of these authors. These concerns include (but are not limited to) notions of exile, the importance of language and music, the articulation of identity in varying post-colonial states, and representations of gender, race and ethnicity.  The class will move from early twentieth century writers like Claude McKay to the important contributions of later writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Olive Senior and Derek Walcott. We will examine the more recent innovations in form, as musical elements are introduced by writers such as Mikey Smith and Kwame Dawes. Each week's readings will be supplemented with seminal critical writings including excerpts from the text The Empire Writes Back. Dist: LIT: WCutl: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.

At the 2A hour with Professor Milich (crosslisted with JSWT 21)

The history of Jewish American literature is a history of many literatures. It reflects the broad variety of historical, political, social and cultural experiences that Jews from very different places and backgrounds brought to the United States. The course introduces students to the central topics, motives and literary strategies from the beginnings of a tangible Jewish American literature in the late nineteenth century to the present.  Dist: LIT. WCult: CI.  Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.

At the 10 hour with Professor Zeiger (crosslisted with WGST 47)

This course focuses on the emerging counter-tradition, within American modernism and within the larger tradition of poetry in English, of American women poets in the twentieth century. Taking our cue from Adrienne Rich, who ambiguously titles one book of essays On Lies, Secrets and Silences (is she for or against?), we will follow debates about what makes it possible to break previous silences--and to what degree and in what ways it is useful or satisfying to do so. Topics within this discussion will include sexuality, race, illness, literary modes, female literary succession, and relations with the literary tradition. We will read in the work of eight or nine poets and recent critical and theoretical writings, with some attention in the first weeks to important female and male precursors. The syllabus will include such writers as Edna St.Vincent Millay, HD, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Louise Gluck, Rita Dove. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualitiies.

At the 10A hour with Professor McKee

In this seminar we will consider Austen's place in the history of the novel and read her works in light of the fiction of some of her contemporaries. Discussions will focus on Austen's reactions against Romanticism; her continuing exploration of the moral and emotional dynamics of domestic life; her concern with the freedom of middle-class women within their families and class; her use of history; and her innovations in fictional narrative. We will read Northanger Abbey (written 1797, published 1818), Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791), Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816) together with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).   Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II.

At the 11 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.

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.

At the 2 hour with Professor Will

A study of the literature, art, and music that emerged in response to the First World War. The work of soldiers, nurses, journalists, civilians, and bystanders will be considered. Dist: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Countertraditons.

At the 10A hour with Professor O'Malley

A beginning workshop and reading course in fiction. Open to sophomores, juniors, seniors, and first-year students who have completed Writing 5. Seminar-sized classes meet for discussion and include individual conferences. Topics and emphases may vary from term to term. English 80 is the prerequisite to English 83, Intermediate Workshop in Fiction. Dist: ART.

At the 2A hour with Professor Hebert

A beginning workshop and reading course in fiction. Open to sophomores, juniors, seniors, and first-year students who have completed Writing 5. Seminar-sized classes meet for discussion and include individual conferences. Topics and emphases may vary from term to term. English 80 is the prerequisite to English 83, Intermediate Workshop in Fiction. Dist: ART.

At the 10A hour with Professor Hebert

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 use "How To Apply to English 83, 84 or 85" and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter.  Students must submit a 5-8 page sample of their writing along with a cover letter by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. These materials should be submitted electronically to the instructor. Dist: ART.

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 use "How To Apply to English 83, 84 or 85" and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter.  Students must submit a 5-8 page sample of their writing along with a cover letter by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. These materials should be submitted electronically to the instructor.  Dist: ART.  CA tag Creative Writing. No Course Group designation.

This term 14s: 40 Towns

40 Towns is a creative writing workshop in the mutant genre known variously as creative nonfiction, literary journalism, the lyric essay, documentary prose, and simply "longform" stories rooted in fact, told with techniques borrowed from fiction, poetry, and visual mediums.  Regardless of its name, the moral tension at the heart of the genre is that of the relationship between a writer and his or her subject. Whose story is really being told? What is the role of empathy between writer and subject?   You'll examine these questions through close readings ofboth new and old literary journalists, and make such questions urgent by writing for publication yourself. You¹ll be part of the writing staff of 40Towns.com an online student magazine with long reach, widely read by writers and editors‹working throughout the term toward a deeply researched, workshopped, and fact-checked "longform" essay about life the "40 towns" of the Upper Valley region. Note: There may be some exceptions to the prerequisite of English 81 (formerly English 80) by special permission of the instructor.

At the 12 hour with Professor Huntington

Continued work in the writing of poetry, focusing on the development of craft, image and voice. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor and reading across the genre. The process of revision is emphasized. Topics and emphases may vary from term to term. Prerequisite: English 82 and permission of the instructor.  Please use "How To Apply to English 83, 84 or 85" and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter.  Students must submit a 5-8 page sample of their writing along with a cover letter by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. These materials should be submitted electronically to the instructor. Dist: ART.

At the 2A Hour with Professor O'Malley

These courses are offered periodically with varying content: examinations of craft and form, reading and writing in specific areas, such as the prose poem, short story, memoir, biography, hybrid forms, or approaches to creative writing not otherwise provided in the workshop format. Course requirements will typically include a mix of creative and critical work. Enrollment is limited to 18.

Dystopian Visions: Exploring the Fiction of Catastrophe and Apocalypse

What do dystopian fictions say about our world, our place in it, and the future before us? Are they merely reactions to damaging contemporary trends or richly imaginative, fully realized conceptions of what is to come? Do dystopias foresee the future and perhaps challenge us to change and alter the way we live in order to avert such predictions/ends? Via intensive reading, discussion of work in the genre in combination with contemporary essays, newspaper accounts, film and documentary, we will consider the power of fiction to shape and draw attention to the dilemmas that face humankind in the 21^st century and beyond. We will touch upon and reference those earlier works that have shaped the genre, such as We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 1984 by George Orwell, but our primary focus will be on those fictions of the last forty years that ring prophetically and frighteningly true vis-à-vis events in our current world. We’ll be reading a wide variety of authors, which may include, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, J.G. Ballard, John Wyndham, Richard Matheson, and Anthony Burgess. We will also consider the British New Wave and their concerns, not with the far future, but with the perilous and unstable conditions of the modern world. We will look at the potential threats and effects of catastrophe in our time, and when a society fails “to exercise a sense of concern for future generations”—from viral-biological pandemics such as the Ebola virus to man-made environmental disasters created by the dumping of toxic waste, such as the Love Canal tragedy in Niagara Falls, NY, during the late 1970s—and we will experiment with writing our own dystopias. Students will write two short stories that extend a particular author’s dystopian vision, and a longer fiction originating from their own imaginings, but with, of course, an awareness and consideration for those dystopias we have explored in class and that draw upon popular societal, medical, environmental and scientific trends.

At the 2A Hour with Professor Sharlet

These courses are offered periodically with varying content: examinations of craft and form, reading and writing in specific areas, such as the prose poem, short story, memoir, biography, hybrid forms, or approaches to creative writing not otherwise provided in the workshop format. Course requirements will typically include a mix of creative and critical work. Enrollment is limited to 18.

This Term, 14S: Raising the Dead.

How can we practice "immersion journalism," as creative nonfiction is sometimes described, when writing about people and events of the past? In this creative nonfiction writing course, we'll immerse ourselves in the kind of research that will allow us to recreate moments and moods for which we couldn't be present. We'll become witnesses at a remove; and, through careful attention to our own roles in the construction of our stories, participant-observers. We'll learn how to use archives; make creative use of documents and artifacts; engage with scholarly historical writing as a source for creative writing; and interrogate our assumptions about research and representation, all in the service of character-driven narratives as vivid, nuanced, and dramatic as writing based on contemporary fieldwork. This course is an attempt to raise the dead, to resurrect truths from dormant facts, to find stories of the present within the past. You'll write two short nonfiction stories, of a person and a place, based on secondary sources, and one long narrative based on original research. The texts we'll be reading, by Lauren Redniss, John D'Agata, Svetlana Alexievitch, Joe Sacco, Maggie Nelson, and Michael Lesy, among others, vary radically in form and medium, as may your own experimental nonfictions. Instructor permission required. Dist: ART, pending faculty approval. CA tag Creative Writing.