 |
General Instructions |
 |
Concentration Areas |
| |
Announcement of Courses |
| |
R1A/B Courses |
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
|
||
|
Junior
Seminar: Studies in the 18th-Century
Novel
100/1 MW
1:30-3
Areas
of Concentration: 1C; 3
Book
List: Defoe, D.: Moll
Course Description: A study of seven rather different eighteenth-century
novels in relation to contemporary currents in non-fictional prose.
We will trace the development of the English novel from an amorphous,
experimental form to a self-conscious and self-parodying genre, while also tracing
its differentiation from (and competition with) neighboring genres, particularly
newspaper journalism, spiritual autobiography, and historical writing. At the same time, this class will make you familiar
with important twentieth-century critical accounts of the "rise of the novel."
Be sure to read the
paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding
enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Modern American Poetry
100/2 MW
1:30-3
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book
List: Norton Anthology of Modern
American Poetry; Crane, H.: Complete Poems; Eliot, T.S.: Four
Quartets, The
Recommended
Text: Ellmann, R., ed.: Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry
Course
Description: An intensive study of the
most influential poets, focusing on long and short poems. We will consider both poetic techniques and
cultural/historical contexts. We will
also consider modernist poetics through their prose, along with poems of other
modern poets (e.g., Loy, Stein, Hughes).
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: The Slave Narrative
100/3 NOTE NEW TIME!: TTh 9:30-11
B. Wagner NOTE
NEW ROOM!: 24 Wheeler
Areas
of Concentration: 1D; 2; 3; 4
Book
List: Carretta,
V., ed.: Unchained Voices; Andres, W. and H.L. Gates, eds.: Slave
Narratives; Manzano, J.F.: Autobiography of a
Slave; Prince, M.: History of Mary Prince; Crafts, H.: The
Bondwomanís Narrative
Course
Description: This course will locate the
genre of the slave narrative in relation to the broad range of political,
cultural, and economic currents that constituted the system of Atlantic
slavery. In the first place, we will
approach the slave narrative as a technology for producing a "self" in the face
of a system that denies the slaveís capacity to speak. We will ask, at the same time, how that self
is brought into existence through written conventions that determine what can
and cannot be said about life under slavery.
To that end, we will also pay attention to a number of contemporaneous
modes of writing that rely upon similar structures of address the captivity
narrative, the spiritual autobiography, the confession, life histories by
convicts and beggars with an eye to understanding the "media ecology" within
which the slave narrative was produced.
Additional topics for consideration include: the politics of slave literacy and the
heritage of the enlightenment; thematics of captivity
and dislocation; the critique of the slave trade and the rise of capitalism;
race and sexuality; sentimental masochism; and the topos
of heroic resistance. We will also survey a series of critical debates about
the slave narrative genre, examining the assumptions about race, culture, and
identity upon which these debates are frequently founded.
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Novel Technologies in 19th-Century
100/4 TTh 12:30-2
Areas
of Concentration: 1D; 3; 6
Book
List: Gaskell, E.: Mary Barton;
Collins, W.: The Woman in White; Hardy, T.: Tess
of the D'Urbervilles; Stoker, B.: Dracula; a course reader
Course Description:
In the Victorian period, labor, technology, and the novel each generated
dynamic discourses that intersected in intriguing ways. This course surveys
Victorian literature through its relationships to labor and technology. We will
investigate how Victorian essays and novels reflect historical concerns about
human labor and the technology that enhances its productivity or supersedes it.
How do humans relate to machines in nineteenth-century
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Comedy, Carnival, and Folly
100/5 TTh 9:30-11
J. Altman 243 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 6
Book List:
Erasmus: The Praise of Folly; Jonson,
B.: Bartholomew Fair; Rabelais: Gargantua
and Pantagruel; Shakespeare, W.: Twelfth Night;
a course reader
Course Description:
"License": what does it mean? It
refers to permission, and the authority that grants it. It also refers to what one enjoys or indulges one's liberty and hence to behavior that might become licentious
or libertine, thereby threatening the
authority of those who grant license in the first place. Is license
then a social fiction devised to maintain an imagined but necessary distinction
between order and disorder, moral and immoral, rational and irrational that
always threatens to collapse and must always be renewed? Renaissance writers and institutions often
seemed more willing to entertain this insight than we are, in their festivals
celebrating the inversions of power, their licensed fools, their notions of holy
folly, their provision of "liberties" where the subversive potential of theater
enjoyed relatively free play. This
central, ambiguous, proliferating term will govern our study of the rich
intersections of classical comedy, humanist learning, folk ritual, and native
traditions of folly, madness, and the grotesque in Renaissance culture and
their relation to social stability.
Planned readings include Erasmusí The Praise of Folly, Rabelaisí Gargantua and Pantagruel,
George Gascoigneís The Supposes, the anonymous commedia dellí arte play The
Three Cuckolds, Shakespeareís Twelfth Night, Robert Arminís Foole Upon Foole, Jonsonís Bartholomew
Fair, and a selection of critical and theoretical essays in a course
reader. Students are expected to participate
actively in discussion and to write three essays and a final exam.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of
this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Colonialism and Its
Dissed Contents:
An Introduction to Postcolonial Theory
100/6 TTh 9:30-11
P. Joshi 2304 Tolman
Areas of
Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 5
Book List:
Haggard, H. R.: King Solomon's Mines; Kipling, R.: Kim;
Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; CÈsaire,
A.: A Notebook of a Return to the
Course Description: In this seminar, we will explore the theories
and fictions that characterized the encounter between the European metropolis
and its colonial peripheries during the very long nineteenth century that has
somehow lingered into the twentieth. The
literary works we will read from
Requirements include two 6-page papers
and one 15-page research paper. There
will be no mid-term or final exam.
NOTE: Students wishing to take this course must
have taken two of the 45A, B, C sequence or sought prior approval from
the instructor.
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: 19th-Century
American Women Writers
100/7 TTh 11-12:30
Areas
of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book
List: Readings are not finalized but may
include: Stoddard, E.: The Morgesons; Spofford, H.: The
Amber Gods; Wilson, H.: Our Nig; Phelps, E. Hedged In; Southworth, E.D.E.N.: The Hidden Hand; Alcott, L.: Long
Fatal Love Chase; Hopkins, P.: Contending Forces.
Course Description: We will study the representational practices,
stylistic modes, and narrative structures available to nineteenth-century women
writers who chose to write about female desire.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page
1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Literature of American
Expansionism, 1885-1915
100/8 TTh 11-12:30
M. Gonzalez 234
Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 3; 6
Book
List: Ruiz de Burton, M.A..: The
Squatter and the Don (1885); Melville, H.: Billy Budd, Sailor (1891);
Twain, M.: Puddíníhead Wilson (1895);
Remington, F.: Pony Tracks (1895); Norris, F.: The Octopus: A Story
of California (1901); London, J.: The Iron Heel (1908); Austin, M.: The
Land of Little Rain (1903); Chesnutt, C.: The
Colonel's Dream (1905); Grey, Z.: Riders of the Purple Sage (1912); Cather, W.: Song of the Lark (1915)
Course Description:
In this course students will read, discuss, and write about literary
works published in the
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of
this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Fiction and the Archive
100/9 TTh 11-12:30
S. Hartman 246
Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 6
Book List: Amis, M.: Timeís Arrow; Armah, A.K.: Two Thousand Seasons; Butler, O.: Kindred; Daitch, S.: L.C.; Danticat, E.: Breathe, Eyes and Memory; Galeano, E.: Memory of Fire; Kincaid, J.: The Autobiography of My Mother; Morrison, T.: Song of Solomon; Silko, L.M.: Ceremony; Ouologuem, Y.: Bound to Violence; Swift, G.: Waterland; Whitehead, C.: The Intuitionist; Truillot, M.-R.: Silencing the Past; de Certeau, M.: Writing History; Connerton, P.: How Societies Remember
Course
Description: The course examines the
role of narrative and figuration in the construction of the past by looking at
the complicity of domains presumed to be distinct: history and fiction. Reading novels, historiography, and theories
of history, the class will consider a range of questions about the nature of
the archive, notions of progress and decline, and what, if anything, moves
history. Most of the novels have historical acts and actors at their center,
others create a counter-memory or counter-narrative of the past through
speculative fictions. The questions that
frame the course are: What is the nature of historical explication? How does the way we narrate history influence
our perception of past events? Can
fiction most adequately represent the past, particularly in the case of
genocide, slavery, colonialism, war and revolution? Can novels produce a
knowledge of the past?
Be sure to read
the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding
enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: American Gothic
100/10 TTh 12:30-2
Areas
of Concentration: 3; 6
Book
List: Faulkner, W.: Absalom, Absalom!;
Gilman, C.P.: "The Yellow Wallpaper"; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw;
Hawthorne, N.: "The Birthmark"; Morrison, T.: Beloved; OíConnor, F.: Collected
Stories; Poe., E.A.: Collected Stories; films, including Candyman and Blue Velvet
Course
Description: This course will explore
a genre of literature which proudly intended, as Frankenstein author
Mary Shelley put it, "to awaken thrilling horrorÖcurdle the blood, and quicken
the beatings of the heart." We will examine
some familiar gothic tropes: unreliable, often menacing narrators; dark, collapsing
houses closeting mysterious tenants; the grotesque; madwomen in attics (or,
at least, upstairs bedrooms); incest; bodies that wonít stay dead.
But we will find that these gothic fetishes adapt when transplanted to
more modern narrative forms and to American soil. The ghosts which
stalk characters become incarnations of a troubled, and uniquely American, history:
a past which cannot be safely buried. The
fact that the entities which haunt characters reveal themselves to be psychological
hallucinations or embodiments of history does nothing to ease the intensity
of their assault. We will see how the
American gothic shuttles between an urgent need to express "itís because she
wants it told" (Absalom, Absalom!) and to repress, to shut itself up:
"this is not a story to pass on" (Beloved). For this course, you will write frequent short
responses to the reading, one short paper (5 pages), and one longer paper (10
pages).
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Contemporary Scottish Fiction
100/11 TTh 12:30-2
M. Breitwieser 259 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration:
1E; 2; 3
Book
List: Scott, W.:
Course Description:
Using Scott and Spark as historical background, our discussions will be
focussed on close readings of representative works of Scottish fiction since
the 70's. I am especially interested in
the combination of naturalism and formal experimentation that emerges in these
books, and in their connection to political and cultural developments within
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this
Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Ralph Ellison and William
Faulkner
100/12 TTh 2-3:30
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Ellison, R.: Invisible Man, Juneteenth, Shadow and Act; Faulkner, W.: Go
Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury
Course Description: In this course we will read some major works
by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner authors who took as a principal task the
act of imagining "the South" in fiction.
We will consider some of the thematic concerns and technical strategies
by means of which these authors transformed a geography
of nebulous borders into literary topoi of trauma,
absence, and flight e.g. overlapping temporalities, repetition, and multiple
perspectives and voices.
Student responsibility in
this course will include the following: class participation; an oral
presentation; and three 5-7 page papers.
Be sure to read the
paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding
enrollment in English 100!
100/13 This section has
been cancelled.
Junior
Seminar: Reading Character
100/14 TTh 2-3:30
Areas of Concentration: 1C or 1D; 3; 5
Book List: Austen, J.: Sense and Sensibility;
Burney, F.: Evelina; Dickens, C.: Great
Expectations; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Goethe: Wilhelm
Meisterís Apprenticeship; James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady;
Richardson, S.: Pamela; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein; Wilde, O.: Salome
Course Description: Although characters are everywhere, they
remain one of the least understood aspects of the novel. In this course, we will work to pull apart a
tangle of assumptions about interiority, privacy, gender, identification, and
agency that give form to character in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
novel. To this end, we will read a
number of works that figure importantly in different accounts of the rise of
the novel while considering how extraliterary
concerns like psychology, etiquette, political economy, and ethics contributed
to the way writers and their audiences thought about character. In addition to the primary texts, which we
will read very closely, we will consider works of criticism and theory by Nancy
Armstrong, Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Diana Fuss,
Deidre Lynch, Franco Moretti, and others.
Requirements include regular attendance, participation, two short papers, and
one longer essay (10-15 pages).
Be sure to read the
paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding
enrollment in English 100!
100/15
This section has been cancelled (7/25).
Junior
Seminar: Emily Dickinson and the
Victorian Novel
100/16 TTh 3:30-5
Areas
of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book
List: Dickinson, E.: Complete Poems, Selected Letters;
Dickens, C.: David Copperfield; Bront", E.:
Recommended
Text: Dickinson, E. (H. & N.
Smith): Open Me Carefully
Course
Description: This seminar puts Emily
Dickinson's poems and letters in dialogue with three Victorian novels Charles
Dickens' David Copperfield, Emily Bront"'s Wuthering
Heights, and Charlotte Bront"'s Jane Eyre. While
Course
requirements will include active participation in seminar discussion, two short
papers, and a long essay.
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding
enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Re(sistance)/Emergence Contemporary Literature
by Native North
American Women
100/17 TTh 3:30-5
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4
Book
List: Erdrich,
L.: Jacklight, Love Medicine; Harjo,
J.: She Had Some Horses, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems;
Hogan, L.: Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, Mean
Spirit; Power, S. The Grass Dancer; Silko,
L.M.: Almanac of the Dead, Ceremony; Tapahonso,
L.: Saainii Dahataal:
The Women Are Singing; Walters, A.L.: Ghost Singer; a course reader
Course
Description: We will focus on the prose
and poetry of a select number of contemporary Native North American women
writers (from within the
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Note! Newly added section:
Junior
Seminar: The Fictionalization of the
American Sixties Novel or History?
100/18 MW
4-5:30
D. Richards 235
Dwinelle
Course
Control #: 28735
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5; 6
Book
List: Atwood, M.: The Handmaidís Tale;
DeLillo, D.: Libra, Mao II; Mailer, N.:
The Armies of the Night; OíBrien, T.: The Things They Carried, In
the Lake of the Woods. There will
also be a xeroxed reader containing excerpts from the
works of Joan Didion, Todd Gitlin,
Ken Kesey, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tom Wolfe, among
others; some theoretical material on the novel; and newspaper reportage from
the Sixties.
Course
Description: In this course we will
examine a number of fictionalized representations of the tumultuous liberal
revolutions of
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Note! Newly added section:
Junior
Seminar: Asian Character in Anglophone
Fiction
100/19 MW 12-1:30
H. Levien 305
Wheeler
Course
Control #: 29342
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3
Book
List: Buck, P.: The Good Earth; Conrad, J.: Victory;
Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India; Drabble, M.: The Gates of Ivory;
Chang, N.P.: Bound Feet, Western Dress; Hagedorn,
J.: Dogeaters; Tsukiyama,
G.: The Samuraiís Garden; Hwang, D.H.: M. Butterfly; Cha, T. H.: Dictee; Fenkl, H.I.: Memories
of My Ghost Brother; Rushdie, S.: Shame; Trinh, M.T.: Shoot for
the Contents; a course reader
Course
Description: In this course we will read
various kinds of Anglophone fictions that have represented Asian characters,
along with several articles discussing the role of these fictions in our
postcolonial/postmodern period. Our
eventual focus will be the recent experiments that artists have performed in
response to judgments that many early representations are "racist" or "orientalist." We
will analyze in some detail what various critics mean by these terms as applied
to works of fiction and will consider how the standards for fiction might
differ from those for works considered history, memoir, or ethnography. We will then look at some of the many
innovative ways in which novelists have tried to represent Asian character.
While
some novelists have decided to continue with the techniques of realism, a
number have used alternative approaches to represent their characters to
English-speaking populations whose composition is increasingly complex. We will discuss the role, for example, of the
growing Asian American communities in the formation of more complicated fictive
formulations of Asian identity. While
not privileging modernist/postmodernist formulations, I want to consider the
social and political conditions which have made very experimental expressions
of Asian character possible only since late in the twentieth century.
A
presentation on material not assigned for class and a short (2-3 page)
prospectus for the final paper and a 20-25 page paper are required.
Be
sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes
regarding enrollment in English 100!
Junior
Seminar: Shakespeare and Film
100/20
K. Elliott
Seminars MW 12-1:30 in 222 Wheeler, plus film screenings W
Areas of Concentration: 1B; 3; 6
Book List: Shakespeareís The Taming of the Shrew,
Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Macbeth
Films Considered (some in
part, some in entirety): The Taming
of the Shrew: a hilarious slapstick
version (1908), the 1929 film with Pickford and
Fairbanks, a fifties made-for-TV version starring
Charlton Heston, the Taylor-Burton film directed by
Franco Zeffirelli, and Kiss Me Kate. Romeo and Juliet: the 1936 film with Leslie Howard and Norma
Shearer, Zeffirelliís 1967 adaptation, West Side
Story, Tromeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmannís film, Romeo
Must Die. Othello: several early silents,
the 1922 silent with Emil Jannings, Orson Wellesí adaptation, Olivierís film, Branaghís version, Sergei Bondarchuckís film, O (2001), and the 2001 televization. Macbeth: the Orson Welles
version, Polanskiís film, Kurosawaís Throne of
Blood, Trevor Nunnís filmed play, Men of Respect, and a cartoon
version for children
Course Description: We examine films and telefilms
of four Shakespearean plays The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet,
Othello, and Macbeth spanning from 1908 to 2002. Requirements:
regular attendance of and active participation in classes and
screenings, oral presentation, midterm essay, major final research project,
creative project, or academic essay.
Be sure to read the
paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding
enrollment in English 100!
History
of the English Language
101 TTh 11-12:30
Area of Concentration: 7
Book List: Millward, C.: A Biography of the English Language, 2nd ed.
Recommended
Texts: Pinker, S.: The Language
Instinct; Crystal, D.: The
Course Description: This course surveys the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots, through its Old, Middle, and Early Modern periods, to its different forms in use throughout the world today. Topics include changes in the core grammatical systems of phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure); in vocabulary; in writing and literary forms; and in the social position of English and its dialects.
Requirements: Three short
research assignments, two midterm tests, a short paper, and a final exam.
The
English Bible as Literature
Area
of Concentration: 6
Book
List: New
Course
Description: In this class we will read
a selection of biblical texts as literature, which means we will read them as
anything other than divine revelation.
We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and
structure, but we will also learn how to ask political and theoretical
questions of a text so thoroughly fissured and historically sedimented. Among other topics, we will pay special
attention to how authority is rhetorically established and contested in
biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition
against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and
historically poised between the original Jesus movement that is their source
and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments will include a take-home midterm
and a final, perhaps more.
Course 110
This course has been cancelled. Note that Prof. Middleton will teach English
112 (see below) instead.
The following course was re-established on 6/18, with some modifications:
Middle English Literature
Area
of Concentration: 1A; 7
Book
List: Burrow and Turville-Petre:
A Book of Middle English; Langland, W.: Vision
of Piers Plowman; Andrew and Waldron, eds.: Poems of the
Course
Description: This course will study
Middle English both as a language and as a period of literary production. The first third of the course will introduce
the language: its structure, vocabulary,
and dialectal varieties, as well as the linguistic history that both created
what we call "Middle English" and brought it to an end. During these first weeks, we will also be
reading passages from several Middle English texts, starting with the most
familiar (Chaucer) and moving through weirder and more challenging works. The rest of the semester will be given to
reading the work of Chaucerís two greatest contemporaries: the author of Piers Plowman (William Langland) and the anonymous author of four poems surviving
in a single manuscript ("the Gawain-poet"). There will be quizzes, an in-class midterm, a
take-home midterm, and a final exam.
This
course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
114A This
course has been cancelled.
The
English Renaissance: 17th
Century
Areas
of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book List: Di Cesare, M., ed.: George Herbert and the
Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets; Donne, J.: Complete English Poems;
Maclean, H., ed.: Ben Jonson
and the Cavalier Poets; Marvell, A: Complete Poems; Milton, J.:
Recommended
Texts: Bacon, F.: The Essays;
Hill, C.: A Century of Revolution, 1603-1714
Course
Description: Although I am putting a
history book on the recommended list, this will be a course on works written in
the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, not a course on the
century itself.
I
think I can teach you more about the seventeenth-century works I don't discuss
in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by moving fast over
every poem assigned or by generalizing at length about either the particular
qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular
qualities that characterize the culture that seventeenth-century literature
reflects. I'm not good at categorizing,
and I deeply mistrust categories.
The
reading list will be heavily weighted toward verse. That's mainly because verse was what the
seventeenth century did best, but also because I don't have much that is worth
listening to to say about much seventeenth-century
prose. We will probably read some Francis
Bacon, but most of the reading will be of verse by Donne, Jonson,
Herrick, George Herbert, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I want particularly to talk about things that
most English majors have dealt with before;notably the most often assigned
poems of Donne and Herbert and, most notably, Paradise Lost. (I realize that putting Paradise Lost
on the reading list might put some people off taking the course. Such people have probably tried, or been
asked to try, to read Paradise Lost as if it got the stock
Sunday-school responses it sounds as if it's trying to get. Given a chance to read the poem as something
other than a failed effort to versify its editors' footnotes, such people are
likely to see how beautiful Paradise Lost is and to wish it longer.)
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say
and how efficient you are in saying it. The
third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due on the
day assigned this course for a final exam.
This
course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Shakespeare: The Elizabethan Shakespeare
Areas
of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book
List: Greenblatt,
S., ed.: The Norton Shakespeare
Course
Description: In this course we will be
studying the development of Shakespeareís work in the theater through the
beginning of the seventeenth century, culminating in Hamlet. Weíll also read many of his sonnets, which
are related thematically to the plays and offer glimpses of the writer or the
speaker envisioned by the writer as friend, lover, poet, and actor. Plays will include both popular and
lesser-known comedies, histories, and tragedies, and weíll pay close attention
to Shakespeareís language, the historical and social contexts in which he wrote, the specifically theatrical dimensions of his
texts. Weíll view scenes on video to
explore various interpretive possibilities.
There will be two papers, two midterms, and a comprehensive final exam.
Shakespeare: Selected Plays
Areas
of Concentration: 1B; 3
Book
List: The
Course
Description: This course is designed to
give you a sense of the range of Shakespeareís career. Lectures will focus on two related topics:
first, Shakespeareís ways of thinking about literary, political, social,
religious, sexual, and philosophical issues through plot and character; second,
Shakespeareís reasons for becoming an actor and playwright when much of English
society regarded those professions as frivolous, low, and vaguely criminal.
121 This course has been cancelled
(postponed till Spring 2003).
125A This
course has been cancelled.
The
European Novel: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and
the English Novel
This course is cross-listed with Slavic 132.
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book List: Dostoevsky, F.: Netochka
Nezvanova, The
Idiot, Great Short Works; Tolstoy, L.: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,
Anna Karenina, Great Short Works; Bronte, C.: Jane Eyre;
Eliot, G.: Middlemarch
Course Description: A close reading of works by Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy in conjunction with two English novels. In "The Russian Point of View," Virginia Woolf notes that whereas an English novelist feels a
"constant pressure" to recognize barriers, both ideological and formal, a
Russian novelist appears to feel less restraint. The English novelist is "inclined to satire,"
the Russian to "compassion," the English to "scrutiny of society," and the
Russian to "understanding of individuals themselves." As we read, we will look for both affinities
and differences between nineteenth-century English and Russian novels.
The course consists of three
units:
Coming of Age in
Love and Death in the
Russian and English Novel: We will read
Dostoevskyís The Idiot, George Eliotís Middlemarch, and Tolstoyís
Anna Karenina. Particular
attention will be given to stylistic and formal features of these complex
novels and to their treatment of philosophical questions and social issues,
especially the status of women.
The Russian Point of View:
Interior Monologue and Innovations in Poetics. We end with two short
stories, Dostoevskyís "A Gentle Creature" and Tolstoyís "The Kreutzer Sonata,"
which are remarkable for their narrative style, as
well as what they say about love and marriage.
These stories are used to highlight the contrasts between Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy and to help to define the Russian point of view.
Workload: one paper, short assignments, midterm, final
exam.
Modern
Poetry
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book
List: Stein, G.: Tender Buttons;
Williams, W.C.: Spring and All; Toomer, J.: Cane;
Crane, H.: The Bridge; Stevens,
W.: "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and "EsthÈtique
du Mal"; Berryman, J.: The Dream Songs; Duncan, R.: The Opening of
the Field and Bending the Bow; Hass, R.: Human Wishes;
Carson, A.: Eros the Bittersweet; Sze, A.: The
Redshifting Web; a course reader
Course
Description: What does poetry have to do
with freedom of speech? Poems not only speak to us but teach us to punctuate
what we think we are saying differently. They hatch ideas about how we might be
more free. We will look at some revolutionary and
substantial volumes of poetry of the twentieth century in
The
Making of Americans:
Areas
of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 3
Course
Description: We will read a diverse
selection of writing, predominantly prose fiction, published in the