These courses in literary history will study British, American and Anglophone literature during the periods of the English Department's Course Groups.
In 2013 Winter, English 11, Literary History III, at the 10 hour with Professors Will and Zeiger
This course will provide an overview of literature from the Anglophone world in the twentieth century. Key critical essays will be included. Course Group III. Dist: W; WCult: LIT.
At the 12 hour with Professor Edmondson
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 12 hour with Professor Halasz
A survey of the historical, formal, and theoretical issues that arise from the materiality and technology of communication, representation, and textuality. The course will address topics in and between different media, which may include oral, scribal, print, and digital media. Readings and materials will be drawn from appropriate theorists, historians, and practitioners, and students may be asked not only to analyze old and new media, but also create with them. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
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.
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.
At the 2 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.
At the 10 hour with Professor McCann
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars.There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions.
At the 11 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.
At the 11 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, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
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.
At the 11 hour with Professor Giri (crosslisted with AAAS 65)
An introduction to the themes and foundational texts of postcolonial literature in English. We will read and discuss novels by writers from former British colonies in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, with attention to the particularities of their diverse cultures and colonial histories. Our study of the literary texts will incorporate critical and theoretical essays, oral presentations, and brief background lectures. Authors may include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, V.S. Naipaul, Merle Hodge, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Paule Marshall, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie, Earl Lovelace, Arundhati Roy. Serves as prerequisite for FSP in Trinidad. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
At the 10A hour with Professor Chaney (crosslisted with AAAS 90, COCO)
This course examines the work of David Drake, a South Carolinian slave who made some of the largest ceramic storage vessels in America during the 1850s, signing them and etching sayings and poems onto them as well. This seminar engages with Drake's poetry-pottery through critical and historical research, interpretive writing, and our own creative adventures in ceramic handicrafts. In addition to writing your own updated imitations of Dave Drake's poetry and attempting ceramic facsimiles of his earthenware, students will also spend time in the letterpress studio as a means of acquiring a deeper historical and aesthetic appreciation of Dave's life and work; it was while working as a typesetter for a regional newspaper that Dave acquired literacy. As a culminating assignment, students will contribute chapters to a scholarly book on Drake, which the instructor will edit. Dist: LIT or ART. Course Group II. CA tags Creative writing, National Traditions and Countertradtions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
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 tags Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
At the 2 hour with Professor Will
Cosmopolitanism has been described as a way of thinking and working outside the boundaries of the local and the national, a way of living ethically "in a world of strangers." In recent years, in the work of writers as diverse as Jacques Derrida and Anthony Appiah, "cosmopolitanism" has emerged as a way of pushing forward, or even transcending, some of the theoretical impasses of postmodernism and some of the political impasses of multiculturalism. This course will focus on the idea of cosmopolitanism as it has been used (and perhaps abused) in contemporary theory, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial 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.
At the 10 hour with Professor Crewe (crosslisted with AAAS 85.1)
This course will examine works by South African men and women of various ethnicities who have chosen to write in English since the publication of Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm in 1883. This richly diverse literature will be tracked through the cultural and political history of South Africa with primary emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries before and after the fall of Apartheid. Confrontation between black militancy and white oppression characterizes much writing and social interaction in South Africa before the fall of Apartheid, but complex forms of multi-ethnic coexistence and interchange have also been evident since the first white settlement of the country in 1652. Recent work by J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda among others explores the difficult, unmapped terrain of post-Apartheid South Africa. Works by the following writers may be included in the course: Olive Schreiner, Solomon Plaatje, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zoe Wicomb, Alan Paton, J.M Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Athol Fugard, Nelson Mandela. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
At the 2 hour with Professor Zeiger (crosslisted with JWST 21.2, WGST 51.5)
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: CI. Course Group III. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
At the 11 hour with Professor Otter
Arthurian quest romances; seafaring stories; the semi-historical "matter of England": this seminar will consider the diverse and elusive genre we now call "romance," try to understand its special role and development in medieval England, and see if we can find a satisfactory definition for a term that covers anything from chivalric adventure and love stories to quasi-hagiographic and pseudo-historical narratives. We will also seek to place romance in larger contexts, such as the literature and ideology of "courtly love"; gender issues; political and propagandistic uses of literature; its relationship to adjacent genres such as saints' lives and sea voyage tales, and traditional Celtic narrative. Readings--in translation where necessary-- may include selections from the earliest Arthurian narratives in Latin, French, and English; Middle English romances such as Havelock, Athelstan, Sir Gowther, Ysumbras, Yvain and Gawain, Morte d'Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; seminal Continental texts such as Chretien de Troyes's Yvain and Andreas Capellanus's De Amore; Anglo-Norman narratives such as Thomas of Britain's and Beroul's Tristan romances; Marie de France's Lais; The Life of St. Alexis, and the life of one of its real-life readers, the 12th-century recluse Christina of Markyate; the fantastic seafaring yarn The Voyage of St. Brendan, an ancestor of both Dante's Divine Comedy and Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym; the outlaw tale and "ancestral romance" Fouke le Fitz Warin; Latin narratives such as De Ortu Walwanii ("The Origin of Gawain"), Meriadoc, and selections from Walter Map's Trifles of the Courtiers; and traditional Celtic tales such as the Mabinogi and the Irish Dairmaid and Grainne. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-narrative, Genders and Sexualities.
At the 10A 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 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, Agambekn, Heidegger, Virilio, Zizek, Lyotard, and others. Dist: TMV. Course Group IV.
At the 2A 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). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
At the 10A hour with Professor Mathis
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). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
M/W 7-9pm 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 pick up the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. 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 pick up the form titled "How To Apply for English 81, 82 or 83" from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-to-eight-page writing sample to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART. CA tag Creative Writing. No Course Group designation.
This term, English 83 will be offered as "Ordinary Extraordinary" by Professor Sharlet
"Ordinary Extraordinary" is a creative writing workshop in the mutant genre known variously as creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and the lyric essay—the art of telling stories rooted in fact, using the techniques of fiction and poetry. While this writing sometimes brings news, as in the best of magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper's or radio such as This American Life, it is not "about" news. It's about the story. In the Winter '13 offering of 83.1, Intermediate Creative Writing, we'll concentrate on stories drawn not from the headlines but from everyday life, "full of reality, full of illusion," as a pioneer of the genre, Walt Whitman, put it. The revelation of this writing is that of the extraordinary within the ordinary, the astonishing true stories all around and within us, awaiting our perception and narration. Writing is intimately linked to reading in this course. Alongside your own experiments you'll encounter new and forgotten geniuses of the genre—Katherine Boo, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Zora Neale Hurston, Ben Hecht and others—for you to mimic, mock, steal from or pay tribute to as you develop your own voice as a writer of the real.