[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Instructions "p.1-3"

Concentration Areas

Schedule of Courses

RIA/1B Descriptions

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Course: R1A
Section: 1
Topic: Historical Record and Literary Response
Instructor: Adrienne Williams
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28403

Course Description: What is history? What is literature? How are they related? In this course, we will examine texts usually thought to be, in varying degrees, historical (as opposed to literary), and, in turn, we will consider how later authors have responded to these texts. We will try to put our collective finger on what value the later authors see (or do not see) in the earlier works, and we will think about how and why the "historical" texts we study might fit into our literary history. Essentially, this course is about source work—how examining the direct sources of literary works changes/enlightens/upsets your understanding of texts—but the reading list will also give us ample opportunity to explore very different genres, periods, and historical imaginations. N.B.: Our priority will always be the writing of expository and argumentative prose. You will write many short essays, read each other’s work and that of other scholars, and you will constantly use and improve your practical writing skills.

Book List: Jocelin of Brakelond: The Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds; Carlyle, T.: Past and Present; trans. Windeatt, B.: The Book of Margery Kempe; Glück, R.: Margery Kempe; trans. Radice, B.: The Letters of Abelard and Heloise; and a course reader.

Course: R1A
Section: 2
Topic: see below
Instructor: Michael Kuo
Time: MWF 10-11
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28406

Course Description: We will look at the above works in relation to the emergence of ideas about the ‘absurd’ in the 20th century. What do the distinctions between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘surreal’ signify in the context of the ordinary chaos (and chaotic ordinariness) of everyday modern life? How do works of literature get positioned against social reality, and what are the boundaries and connections between aesthetics and politics? Students will be encouraged to develop their critical and analytical skills in order to respond to and to write clearly, provocatively, and persuasively about frequently ‘difficult’ (not easily assimilable) literary works and expository texts. We will be reading from the works listed below and from various short stories, critical articles, and student essays. Students will be required to complete three argumentative papers and several short writing assignments, as well as weekly one-page responses to topics raised in class discussion. In addition to participating actively in class and peer editing groups, each student will take part in leading discussion on the readings at least once during the semester.

Book List:
Beckett, S., Stories and Texts for Nothing
Beckett, S., Watt
Robbe-Grillet, A., The Voyeur
Sarraute, N., Portrait of a Man Unknown
Carver, R., Where I’m Calling From
Barnet, S., A Short Guide to Writing About Literature
Crews, F., Random House Handbook

Course: English R1A
Section: 3
Topic: "Writers and Writing "
Note New Instructor: Damion Searls
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 61 Evans
Course Control #: 28409

Description: What are literary writers doing when they write? And what do you have to do to put an argument into writing in the form of a college-level essay? These two questions are different, but related, and in this course we will try to answer both.
Like all Reading and Composition courses, this one is designed to be two things at once: (1) an introduction to the pleasures of literature, and (2) a tutorial in developing an argument and putting sentences and paragraphs together to express it. Luckily, the best way to improve your writing is to read more, and the best way to inspire more reading is to read the best. As a result, we will be reading a lot of great (and relatively short) novels and stories, all related to the theme of how reading and writing can shape a person’s life and vice versa. You will also be writing a lot, and in several forms, including a reading log (ungraded, personal impressions of the books we read), a series of creative descriptions assigned in conjunction with the readings, and a few traditional short papers.

Book List:
Paul Auster, City of Glass
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (we will read “The Bear”)
Yasushi Inoue, The Hunting Gun
A course reader, probably containing the following:
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
William Carlos Williams, “The Use of Force”
Ingeborg Bachmann, “Youth in an Austrian Town”
Jorge Luis Borges, something from Labyrinths or Ficciones
Elizabeth Bishop, something from Collected Prose
Barbara Kingsolver, something from Homelands
Raymond Queneau, excerpts from Exercises in Style

Course: R1A
Section: 4
Topic: "Arthur, King of the Britons?"
Instructor: Sharon Goetz
Time: MWF 12-1
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28412

Course Description: Reinvented repeatedly to fulfill dreams of empire and schemes for doomed romance, King Arthur has inspired the imagination for over a thousand years. In this course, we will examine snapshots of "the once and future king" from his first (and very brief) appearance in a sixth-century text to the somewhat romanticized renditions of recent writers. Instead of trying to build a linear trajectory to the present, however, we will investigate some ways in which our texts negotiate this ambiguous hero: what kinds of emphases do texts from specific times and places give to kingship? How has Arthur come to be "king of the Britons" (as Monty Python has it), and what does that tag mean for different writers? How do portrayals of women and men shift over time in these narratives? Why does Arthur seem useful as a traditional hero to so many writers, such that contemporary readers can have access to many different (and equally valid) versions of a single character? And, especially pertinent to the texts we will read, how do we interpret these versions through the veil of translation, since few of them originated in modern English? These questions and others will serve as points of departure for class discussion as well as for the written component of this course. In a series of five short essays, we will address the argumentative thesis, issues of sentence and paragraph structure, use of textual evidence, and the process of revision. In addition, please be aware that active participation in class discussion is vital to your success in this course.
N.B. Please do not purchase any texts until after the first class meeting; the reading list is subject to change.

Book List:
Geoffrey of Monmouth: History of the Kings of Britain
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
White, T. H.: The Once and Future King
a course reader including Gildas: The Ruin of Britain (excerpt); Nennius: History of the Britons (excerpt); Culhwch and Olwen; Chrétien de Troyes: The Knight of the Cart; Malory, T.: Works (excerpt); Tennyson: Idylls of the Kin (excerpt); Morris, W.: "The Defence of Guenevere"; Ford, J. M.: "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station"

R1A/5
This section has been cancelled.

R1A/6
This section has been cancelled.

Course: R1A
Section: 7
Topic: Critics of Modernity: The British Tradition
Instructor: Mark Allison
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 80 Barrows
Course Control #: 28421

Course Description: Increased media attention to the Middle East and Asian subcontinent has raised our awareness of populations that question the founding principles of Western modernity: the secular nation-state; government-protected civil liberties; the free exchange of goods and information. While objections to these principles are often presented as radically alien, many of the misgivings are in fact strikingly similar to critiques raised in the first country in history to experience political and industrial modernization: Great Britain. Revisiting the diverse British reactions to-and criticisms of-modernity may help us gain a better understanding of the present, when modernization, now on the global stage, is again under scrutiny.

After a brief glance backward to Rousseau, we will read prose by Adam Smith, Burke, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Morris; poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Arnold, and Christina Rossetti; and fiction by Scott, George Eliot, and Conrad. Depending on class interest, we may also devote some attention to popular ballads, sermons, and the phenomena of labor strikes and machine breaking.

The authors we will read are writers of the highest merit; they are thus perfect aids to the process of learning to write sophisticated and convincing analytic and expository prose. We will focus on improving your ability to develop and defend a thesis, present and analyze evidence to support your claims, and edit your own work and the work of others through a variety of assignments and in-class exercises. Students will be responsible for writing and revising four or five essays over the course of the semester.

Book List:
Wordsworth, W. and S. T. Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
Eliot, G.: Silas Marner
Conrad, J.: Nigger of the "Narcissus"
Course Reader

Course: R1A
Section: 8
Topic: Which Century Is It?
Instructor: Vlasta Vranjes
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 109 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28424

Course Description: Many twentieth-century authors have developed their own writerly voices by consciously departing from their nineteenth-century predecessors. Others have found endless sources of inspiration among all those eccentric Romantics and stuffy Victorians. This class will look at the latter group of artists and examine how some twentieth-century novels, plays, and films rewrite their "originals" from the preceding century or reinvent the era long gone by - or not?

Since this course fulfills the first portion of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement, it aims to strengthen students’ basic writing skills and teach them how to write increasingly complex expository and argumentative essays. The course is therefore designed to be writing-intensive rather than reading-intensive.

Book List:
Austen, J., Emma
Brontë, C., Jane Eyre
Gordon, K. E., The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
Rhys, J., Wide Sargasso Sea
Stoppard, T. Arcadia
Course Reader

Films:
Clueless

R1A/9
This section has been cancelled.

Course: R1A
Section: 10
Topic: George Orwell
Note New Instructor: Flossie Lewis
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28430

Course Description: I have it from Christopher Hitchens that when Orwell was first introduced to Hemingway, the great man reached under his bed and brought out a bottle of Scotch. That should tell us something. Hemingway didn't drink with everyone, nor did he offer his Scotch to strangers. He knew Orwell's worth. And Orwell hadn't yet written 1984.

That's the first reason we should study Orwell. The second reason is that Orwell got so many things so very right. He wasn't perfect though.

The third reason was that Orwell was a great worrier. He worried about language. He got it into his head that if people used words carelessly, their thoughts grew careless too. Their prose got muddy. Look around you.

It might be fun to compare Orwell's bleak vision of the future with other prophetic visions, some not so bleak but still scary.

So . . .

Why don't you try to find your books second-hand and save the big bucks for a good handbook. You will need lots of help with run-on sentences, errors in parallel structure, and the misuse of the passive voice. Find a handbook that shows you what a good research paper looks like. Stay away from Strunk and White.

Your first assignment is to come prepared to write about Animal Farm. That means you should have the book read.

Thanks,
Flossie Lewis

Book List: Orwell, G.: George Orwell: A Collection of Essays, Animal Farm, 1984; Huxley, A.: Brave New World; James, P.D.: The Children of Men; Bellamy, E.: Looking Backward

Course: R1A
Section: 11
Topic: "Down the Rabbit-Hole"
Instructor: Fiona Murphy
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 185 Barrows
Course Control #: 28433

Course Description: In this course we will analyze the ways in which writers from a wide variety of literary genres and historical periods have explored the relationship between the internal self and the external world. To what extent do our surroundings determine our senses of ourselves? Is identity intrinsic, depending on an essential integrity of the mind, or extrinsic, predicated upon the demands of a certain environment? Does who we are depend on where we come from, where we are, where we’re going? What can other places, other people, or imaginary worlds teach us about ourselves and our own culture? Can we ever go back and do we want to? These questions and others like them will guide our reading and writing about individuals who choose or find themselves in unfamiliar worlds.

Each student in this course will be required to write five papers and revise three of them. In addition, each student will make several oral presentations throughout the term; three on the readings and one on a poem of the student’s choosing which reflects the themes of the class.

Book List:
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
Caroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Hemmingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises
Twain, Mark: Huckleberry Finn
Thoreau, Henry: Walden
Emerson, Ralph: Selected Essays
Selected Poetry

Course: R1A
Section: 12
Topic: the nth race: introduction to transraciality
Instructor: Joon Lee
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 258 Dwinelle
Course Control #: 28436

Course Description:

"The first birth is often a failure."
Anaïs Nin

Thanks to "advances" in medical and psychiatric technology, we are now able to view gender as a transformative aspect of life: we are not stuck in the sexed body with which we were born. However, our racial identity is still something that seems biologically inescapable, in spite of the now very rich and convincing theoretical history of its constructed, non-essential nature. While the history of transsexualism is marked by the potentially political affect of social transgression, the history of transraciality speaks to us from advertisements for skin-blanching creams, history-denying acts of racial passing, and community-betrayal. Why else the negative reaction-from disgust to ridicule-to Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery escapades? This is, however, contrary to the everyday experience which finds that individual and group racial identification is a process which is necessarily transracial: in declaring ourselves racially, we all cross boundaries set by societies contemporary and past. In this course, we will attempt to produce an idea of idea of race based on the best of transsexualism. The "race" produced thus, like the "third" gender produced by transsexuality, will lead to a complication of existent preconceptions about racial stereotypes and formation.

required texts:

Deirdre N. McCloskey, Crossing: a Memoir
Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy
Andre Gide, The Immoralist
Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing
Audre Lorde, Zami
R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn
Paris is Burning, (Jennie Livingston, film)

Course: R1A
Section: 13
Topic: Narrative and Place: The Writing of (Dis)location
Instructor: Catherine Mitchell
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28439

Course Description: What does it mean to inhabit a self, or a region, or even a nation? How do narratives work to constitute or critique the kinds of personal, geographic or national identities that both unite and partition our world? In this course, we will focus on the structural, thematic and philosophical ways in which 20th-century literature responded to a pervasive sense of dislocation or strangeness in the world. As an introduction to critical reading and analytical writing, this course will also examine the connection between structure and meaning within the short story, a genre whose narrative self-consciousness draws attention to its performance of meaning-making. We will approach our own analytical writing with a similar degree of self-consciousness - focusing on structural and analytical strategies for building convincing arguments while developing unique critical voices. Students will submit short (2-4 page) papers almost-weekly throughout the semester.

Book List:
Joyce, J.: Dubliners
Anderson, S.: Winesburg, Ohio
Borges, J.: Ficciones
Dinesen, I.: Winter’s Tales
Hacker, D.: Rules for Writers
Rushdie, S.: East, West: Stories
Woolf, V.: The Complete Shorter Fiction
Course Reader

Course: R1A
Section: 14
Topic: Heroes and Heroines and How We Redefine Them
Instructor: Els Andersen
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 283 Dwinelle
Course Control #: 28442

Course Description: What does it mean to be a hero? What a heroine? In this class we will study the heroism of the epic hero and of the ordinary man--and woman--in the street as presented in four closely linked texts.

We begin with the ancient Greek tale of the ideal hero, a man who filled all the important roles in life: father, son, husband, and lover; warrior and pacifist; wily outlaw and respected leader. Next we will see how Joyce resurrects the figure in his Modernist novel Ulysses, in which we follow an ordinary man through an ordinary day in Dublin and come to see him as heroic. A second landmark Modernist text, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, similarly follows an ordinary woman through a single day of ordinary life in London. She too is heroic, though Woolf is keenly aware of the limitations her society has placed on women's roles in life. We will finish the course with a recently published novel that riffs on Mrs. Dalloway, presenting three heroic/ordinary women whose lives have been touched by Woolf's novel.

What heroism means to readers and to writers of both genders, and how stories reflect and shape our ideals of what it means to be heroic, form the focus of the course. We will also see how writers reshape past narratives to suit their own purposes, and how we ourselves reshape ideas in our writing.

The course is designed to give students the critical reading skills they need to analyze and interpret the work of accomplished writers, and the writing skills they need to present their own ideas with grammatical competence, scholarly authority, and wit.

In class discussion of the reading, we will study the methods used by novelists to explore their themes and the rather different methods by which essayists argue their theses. We will also explore the expressive possibilities of poetry and other genres. Students will write about a dozen short (2-4 page) papers. In the process they will learn how to copyedit both their peers' work and their own to produce more polished, articulate writing.

Booklist:
Homer: The Odyssey
Joyce, J: Ulysses
Woolf, V: Mrs. Dalloway
Cunningham, M: The Hours
Strunk & White: The Elements of Style
Woolf, V: A Room of One's Own

There will be a course reader.
We will see the recent film The Hours.

Course: English R1A
Section: 15
Topic: "Sneaky" Perspectives
Instructor: Matthew Ritchie
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 103 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28445

Course Description: Following the usual pattern, this course offers a fairly dedicated analysis of various literatures through a critical mechanism that ultimately amounts to writing a lot of essays. The assigned literature revolves loosely around the topic of perspective and subjectivity, exploring the role of point-of-view and (for want of a better term) ‘direction’ in literature. This course also offers a greater-than-usual emphasis on essay-writing and grammar skills, including a unit on writing in-class essays. By the end of the course, you should know exactly what a good university paper looks like, and how to produce one yourself. At the very, very least, you’ll know exactly how to use ‘whom’ correctly, and how to fix a stranded preposition. There will be a heavy group-work component in this course, supporting both the composition and literature material: if you can learn to help other people with their analyses and writing, then you can learn to do it for yourself.

Book List:
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
Stoppard, Tom: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Spiegelman, Art: Maus (vols 1 and 2)
Butler, Octavia: Kindred
Tyman, James: Inside Out
Golden, Arthur: Memoirs of a Geisha
Squaresoft: Final Fantasy X (yes, this is the video game)

R1A/16
This section has been cancelled.

R1A/17
This section has been cancelled.

Course: R1B
Section: 1
Topic: Writing from a Point of View
Note New Instructor: Damion Searls
Time: MWF 9-10
Location: 103 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28454

Description: We all experience and interpret what happens around us in our own way, but these ways can be shared (to some extent), and literature is the great art form for showing us, bringing us into, these different points of view. In this course we will discuss how and why literary writing can come from different points of view at once, and also how you can write expository essays which most effectively express your own point of view.
Most of the books and stories we will read are written from different angles, and all address the theme of how the world is what our own perspective makes of it and vice versa. In addition, you will be writing in several different forms, including a reading log (ungraded, personal impressions of the books we read), a series of creative descriptions assigned in conjunction with the readings, and traditional English papers.
This English 1B course assumes that you have taken English 1A (or 1A in a related department); it is designed to build upon the reading and expository writing skills you learned there. Unlike English 1A, it has a research component: you will spend time in the library and learn how to use the arguments in secondary sources without drowning out or replacing your own argument. We will work our way up to writing a substantial essay at the end of the semester.

R1B/2
This section has been cancelled.

Course: R1B
Section: 3
Topic: Dream
Instructor: Jessica Fisher
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28460

Course Description: This class will address dream as a mode of communication. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst whose book The Interpretation of Dreams not only was published at the turn of the 20th century, but made possible the 20th century’s understanding of the unconscious aspects of our lives, wrote that, "[a]t bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep." In identifying the dream’s form, we will necessarily ask whether dreams are themselves representable, and what different media uncover and conceal about the dream’s form of thinking.

Frequent writing projects are designed to foster an openness between creativity and analysis. You will begin with a diagnostic essay of 3-5 pages, from which we will set individual writing goals for subsequent papers. You will then outline, write, and revise two further papers for this course, the first 6-8 pages long and the second 10-12 pages long. The final paper must include supplementary research, and will combine creative and academic work.

Book List:
Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams
Kafka, F. The Metamorphosis
Robinson, M. Housekeeping
Strindberg, A. A Dream Play
Winterson, J. Sexing the Cherry
a course reader

Course: R1B
Section: 4
Topic: "The Body in American Literature and Film"
Note New Instructor: Erin Edwards
Time: MWF 1-2
Location: 221 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28463

Course Description: This course will examine representations and figures of the body in 20th-century American literature and film. We will explore the relation of the individual body and notions of a cultural or political body, considering gender and sexuality, subjectivity and the body, the body of the other, technology and the body, and fantastic or grotesque bodies. Although we will examine literary and filmic bodies from various theoretical perspectives, we will ask of each text similar questions about the representational or narrative strategies involved in bodily depictions. Attention to such formal elements will aid students in becoming more critical readers and more deliberate writers. Students will also practice their research skills in this course; each student will complete, in addition to two short critical papers, a longer paper that incorporates historical, theoretical, or literary critical research into its argument.

Required Books:
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
Toomer, Jean. Cane.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Films:
The Birds (1963)
Modern Times (1936)
Rear Window (1954)

Recommended Books:
Strunk, William and E. B. White. The Elements of Style.
Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

R1B/5 This section has been cancelled.

Course: R1B
Section: 6
Topic: Reading/Writing Communities
Instructor: Penelope Anderson
Time: TTh 8-9:30
Location: 221 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28469

Course Description: This course will explore what happens when we understand texts as part of a community: a community constructed in the text, a writing community in which the text was written, a specific community to which the text addresses itself. In taking on this question, we will concern ourselves both with formal issues - what are the boundaries of a text? how much do we bring our own histories of communities to the texts? - and with larger cultural and political implications - how do the texts figure social responsibility? what version of selfhood emerges in a community?

It will be your responsibility as a student in this class to engage closely with each of the texts we will read, since I believe that sustained attention to the details and ideas of literary texts substantially improves your writing about those texts. This class primarily seeks to teach you to write grammatically, persuasively, and critically. Consequently, much of your engagement with these varied texts will take the form of written assignments, many of them literary close readings which you will develop into larger arguments. Each formal paper will incorporate a process of substantive revision and peer review. The class will culminate in an extended research paper on a topic of your own choosing, related to the topic of the course. By the end of the course, you will know both how to read a text attentively and how to argue your observations compellingly.

Book List:
Euripides: The Trojan Women
Shakespeare, W.: Hamlet
Jonson, B.: Every Man in His Humor
Brooks, G.: Blacks
Rich, A.: The Dream of a Common Language
A course reader including a variety of lyric poems

R1B/7
This section has been cancelled.

Course: R1B
Section: 8
Topic: Middle-Western Literature
Instructor: Paul Hurh
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 103 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28475

Course Description: This course is designed to teach writing and research skills through the examination of works and authors native to the American Midwest. Not only is this course centered geographically, but it also tends towards a historical cluster of writers at the turn of the century. By "centering" our focus, we will explore the question of interior borders: the Mississippi as the East-West divide, the small-town community as dystopic microcosm, the gradual emergence of a "Midwest" from the western frontier, and the troubled distinctions between self and community. Although drawing connections between such regionalist writers as Twain, Anderson, and Masters treads a well-worn path, we will also read writers who "escaped" from the Midwest, such as Eliot, Hughes, and Fitzgerald, and ask whether a Midwest heritage influenced their more cosmopolitan works.

Students will research, write, and revise throughout the semester. A six-page paper will be due at mid-semester; a ten-page paper will be due as the final. With luck and panache, we may convince the Bancroft librarians to let us explore their extensive, and new, collection of Mark Twain papers.

Book List:
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Cather, Willa. My Antonia (1918)
Dreiser, Theodor. Sister Carrie (1901)
Masters, Edgar Lee. Spoon River Anthology (1916)
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn (1894)

A Course Reader will also be required.

Course: R1B
Section: 9
Topic: Epiphanies, Revelations, Seizures, and Self-Delusion
Instructor: Omri Moses
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 222 Wheeler (note room change)
Course Control #: 28478

Course Description: Literature is often read, particularly in the modernist period, as in search of states of epiphany or revelation. But literary modernism and postmodernism have with equal vigor devoted themselves to exposing all of the fallacious assumptions and complacencies about what we know and should do. What kind of insight can one expect a literary text to make possible? Is there a specific kind of knowledge which literature offers, or even a distinct vantage point from which to judge? How does literature serve as a testing ground for developing our emotional and affective powers? We will be sorting out some of the immoderate ambitions of the literature that came out of the modernist period, and we will even make a foray into the skeptical world of the postmodern novel. The idea will be to look at various texts, both poetry and prose, that thematize insight or epiphany as something that literature should enable, or cannot enable. These texts will be difficult, and writing about them will be even more so. A substantial portion of the class will be dedicated to cultivating reading skills that will allow us to produce some insights of our own into these texts without reducing their complexity, and to developing writing techniques which will generate well-organized and precise expository articulation of our ideas. In addition, as this is a 1B course, there will be a research component. Students will be asked to carry out historical and literary critical research in the library on one of the authors of their own choosing, and this will culminate in an argumentative paper that develops a thesis at least partly on the basis of information gathered and synthesized.

Booklist: Crews, F.: The Random House Handbook; Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Woolf, W.: To the Lighthouse; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Norton Anthology of American Literature & some handouts, out of which we will read selected poems by Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, and short stories by Flannery O'Connor, and James Baldwin.

Course: R1B
Section: 10
Topic: Get Your Story Straight
Instructor: Talissa Ford
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 259 Dwinelle
Course Control #: 28481

Writing Requirements: three essays, substantial revisions, research, peer-review workshops

And what is the opposite of what really happened?
My mother used to say: "The opposite of what really happened is what has not happened."
And Father: "The opposite of what has happened is what is going to happen."
Once, when we bumped into each other in a little fish restaurant in Tiberias . . . some fourteen years later, I asked Yardena. Instead of answering me, she burst into her luminous laughter, that laugh that belongs to girls who enjoy being girls and who know pretty well what is possible and what is doomed. Lighting a cigarette, she replied: "The opposite of what has happened is what might have happened if it weren’t for lies and fear."
- Amos Oz, A Panther in the Basement

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

What is the opposite of "what really happened"? For Oz it’s what didn’t happen, it’s nothing; for O’Brien it’s everything, all that happened and then some. But for both, what "really happened" is not the war or the affair or the surrender; what really happened is that a story was told.
Or not. What can you say, when you just can’t say? This is a class as much about the not told as the told- about the inconsistencies, breakdowns, detours, and silences that compel people to tell, and keep them from telling. Nabokov’s narrator is bored with his story, Albee’s couple can’t keep their story straight, Dick’s stoners don’t know they’re telling stories. We’ll read them to learn their strategies: how to say what you mean ("what really happened"), and how to get by when you can’t. This is a course meant to teach you to write, even when- especially when- you feel you have nothing to say.

Book List:
Albee, E.: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Dick, P.K.: A Scanner Darkly
Jones, G.: Corregidora
Nabokov, V.: Transparent Things
Oz, A.: Panther in the Basement
Course Reader

Course: R1B
Section: 11
Topic: Tracing Orientalism, Past and Present
Note New Instructor: Padma Rangarajan
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 204 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28484

Course Description:
This course seeks to provide students with the tools to make their writing powerful and more effective. We will be aided in our work on composition by studying the political and cultural influences of the literature we read, by thinking of it not as just imaginative fiction but as a collection of persuasive and historically situated texts. This definition of literature is crucial in studying the influence and effect of literature about the "East" or "the Orient"-the construction of a cultural "Orientalism." We will be looking at "Orientalist" texts --literature that scrutinizes and offers pictures of the so-called Orient-- over a large span of time, as well as literature that seeks to counter Orientalist discourse and provide different modes of thinking about the non-European world. We will examine this discourse and counter-discourse as a way of critiquing and reading into our own writing. A central feature of this course will be a research paper that will allow students to explore topics and literature covered in the course with more attention to socio-historical, critical, and theoretical discourse. Students' writing will focus primarily around one short paper (5-7 pp) and one longer research paper (8-12 pp), but there will be smaller writing assignments, with a focus on drafting and revising the longer assignments.

Book List:
Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness
De Quincey, T.: Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Marlowe, C. Tamburlaine
Said, E.: Orientalism
Smith, Z.: White Teeth
Course Reader
(In addition to the above texts, the course will include a study of Delibes' opera Lakme, and the 1939 film Gunga Din.)

Course: R1B
Section: 12
Topic: Strange Relationships
Instructor: Misa Oyama
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 103 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28487

Course Description: The thing these books and films have in common is the problematic nature of the main character's relationship to other people, usually one particular person. The relationships range from the disturbing and exploitative to the comical and unconventional. Sometimes the relationship involves a power imbalance in class, age, beauty, or education. In many of them, the main character has difficulty interpreting another person and understanding what their relationship is really about.

What do people look for in their relationships with parents, friends, rivals, lovers, and mentors? What problems arise when there is a conflict of expectations? I hope these texts will provoke discussion about the nature of relationships and the possibility of seeing another individual clearly.

This class requires both writing and research. There will be brief close readings of the books and films, and two longer essays with rewrites. Students will also give oral presentations on critical reactions to these texts.

Films will be screened at an alternate time in the afternoon or evening. Students who cannot make the screening can see the films on their own at the Media Center in Moffitt.

In addition to a course reader of selected essays and short stories, the texts will include the following:

Book List:
Freud, S.: Totem and Taboo
Martin, S.: Shopgirl
Oates, J. C.: Beasts
Russell, W.: Educating Rita

Film List:
Allen, W.: Another Woman
Bennett, C.: The Seventh Veil
Brooks, A.: Mother
Gilbert, L.: Educating Rita
Narrizano, S.: Georgy Girl
Nichols, M.: The Graduate
Sondheim, S.: Passion
Zwigoff, T.: Ghost World

Writing Guides:
Booth, W. C.: The Craft of Research (required)
Crews, F.: The Random House Handbook (recommended)
Gibaldi, J.: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (recommended)

Course: R1B
Section: 13
Topic: Positive I.D.
Instructor: Judith Goldman
Time: TTh 3:30-5
Location: 54 Barrows
Course Control #: 28490

This course will study identity as an authority-effect that emerges at key points of intersection between the individual and society. As we explore identity as a perpetual work-in-progress, always produced in relation to others, we will bring to the fore questions of power, agency, and ethics. In particular, we will focus on constructions of social difference, with an eye to how social difference, in important ways, reflects and distorts the difference within the self that constitutes an individual in the most basic sense. An important part of our analysis of identity in this course will be our attention to the identities we produce as critical readers and writers. There will be major emphasis in this class on student writing; students will generate some of the main texts of the course. We will develop worthwhile questions and substantial, provocative theses, strategies of argument, and use and interpretation of evidence. We will examine, too, how identity connects to expository rhetorical concerns, such as the terms that frame our discussions, self-presentation and positioning, style, and audience. Students will also hone their research skills, both in short literary critical essays and in a longer research paper at the end of the course.

Book List:
Sophocles, Antigone
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
James Weldson Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912)
[an error occurred while processing this directive]