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ENGLISH MAJORS: The areas of concentration for each upper-division course are typed right above the book list for the class. In addition, see separate web-page for AREAS OF CONCENTRATION.
Note! Newly added
section:
Senior Seminar: Langston Hughes
and Zora Neale Hurston in
150/1TTh 2-3:30
L. Kramer 254Dwinelle
Course Control #: 28819
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 4; 6
Book List: Hughes, L. and Z.N. Hurston: Mule Bone; Hughes, L.: The Big Sea,
The Collected Poems, Langston Hughes Reader; Hurston,
Z.N: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, Novels and Stories
Recommended Texts: Hemenway, R.E.: Zora Neale Hurston; Rampersad, A.: Life
of Langston Hughes; Davis, A.: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
Course Description: Langston Hughes and Zora
Neale Hurston began their
careers as young rebels within the larger movement of the
1920's now known as the Harlem Renaissance. In defiance of what they considered the assimilationism of the movement's older generation of writers
and critics, Hurston and Hughes and the younger Negro
artists were determined to express [their] individual dark-skinned selves without
fear or shame, as Hughes articulated it in his famous essay, The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain. Equally committed
to capturing the genius of African American folk expression, Hurston
grounded her innovative writing in new approaches to anthropology and folklore,
while Hughes grounded his in the new music: jazz.
In those early days, they were friends and collaborators on such projects
as the one-issue journal Fire!! And the play Mule Bone, though
the latter project caused an irreparable rift between the two.
This course will explore the radical creative visions of these two writers,
using more complete editions of the texts that have recently been made available.
Reading autobiography alongside their other creative work, we will consider
how gender and sexuality, as well as the authors' political views, shaped both
writers' careers.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar:
Poets on Poetry ñ Recent and Contemporary
Poetics and Praxis
150/2 MW 12-1:30
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 5
Book List: A course reader will be available for purchase
at Copy Central.
Course Description: In this course we will undertake an investigation
into interrelations between aesthetic and social concerns on the one hand and
technical methodologies on the other in the writings of a number of contemporary
poets. In addition to readings intended to provide background and context, we
will read essays, statements, and/or manifestoes by a variety of living poets
and consider them in conjunction with their own poetry and that of writers they
are influencing. We will examine an array of technical devices (e.g., montage,
hailing, polylingualism, the new sentence) and some
overarching questions (e.g., what are words? what logics do poems elaborate?
what or who is in/on/at the margins? can poetry be political? what does as mean?).
The focus will be primarily on poetry and poetics in the contemporary
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar:
Chicano/a Literature
150/3 W 3-6
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4
Book
List: Anaya, R.: Bless Me, Ultima; Rivera, T.: and the earth did not devour him;
the drama of the Teatro Campesino;
Gonzalez, C.: I Am Joaquin; Castillo, A.: The Mixquihuala
Letters; Cisneros, S.: Woman Hollering Creek; Ramos, M.: The Ballad
of Rocky Ruiz; Cantu, N.: Canicula; Soto,
G.: Living Up the Street; Nava, M.: The Hidden
Law. Also poetry, short fiction, and
essays by Ricardo Sanchez, Denise Zamora, Helena Viramontes, Norma Anzaldua, Richard
Rodriguez, Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Diana Rebolledo, and others.
Course Description: This will be a course on contemporary Chicano/a texts that explore questions about identity formation, resistance literature, the Chicano Movement of the 1970s, feminist concerns about patriarchal structures, and more recent critiques of Chicano politics.
Enrollment
is limited and a written application is due BY
Senior Seminar:
Female Circulation and the 18th-Century Novel
150/4 MW 9-10:30
Areas
of Concentration: 1C; 3; 4
Book
List: Behn,
A.: Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister;
Richardson, S.: Pamela;
Course
Description: In this course we will trace
the various patterns of female circulation [textual, social, geographical, physiological,
and imaginative] that permeate the prose fictions of the long eighteenth century.
Not only did the eighteenth century witness the rise of the first professional
female authors, but the circulation of women's letters, bodies, emotions, and
property took up an inordinate amount of space in the fictions of the day. It will be our task to determine the significance
of this intense cultural focus on women's motions within both the social and
literary history of the period, especially in terms of that process which has
been called the rise of the novel. We will approach this task by reading both canonical
and less-known prose fictions by both male and female authors. And we will be complementing our central reading
with selections from a variety of contemporary texts including conduct guides,
pornography, medical treatises, political debates, and women's epistolary correspondence.
This
course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Enrollment
is limited and a written application is due BY
150/5 This section has been cancelled.
Senior Seminar:
Death and Resistance in African-American Narratives
150/6 TTh 9:30-11
Areas
of Concentration: 2; 3
Book
List: Douglass, F.: Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass; Jacobs, H.: Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl; Wright, R.: Uncle Tom's
Children, Native Son; Baraka, A.: The
Dutchman and the Slave; Smith, L.: Strange Fruit; Morrison, T.: Beloved;
Jones, G.: Corrigedora; Walker, A.: Third
Life of Grange Copeland; Gains, E.: A Lesson Before Dying; Wideman, J.: The Lynchers;
Dash, J. (film screening): Daughters of
the Dust
Course
Description: Lying precisely at the intersection
of hegemonic and violent forms of coercion and at the intersection of absolute
power and absolute powerlessness, the threat of death (lynching, etc.) is arguably
the most fundamental mode of coercion. The deployment of this mode of coercion throughout
slavery and Jim Crow society has produced an anomaly: while African American
literature is replete with meditations on the political economy of death, the
criticism of this literature has ignored it. This course will examine 1) the effects of the
threat of death on the formation of black subjectivity in slave narratives and
in modern fictional renditions of the slave and Jim Crow experience; 2) the
different modes of resisting this threat; 3) the inchoate nature of resistance
theory in general; and 4) the implications of contemporary African-American
literature's continued fascination with the political economy of death at a
time when it is no longer deployed as a mode of coercion (at least in the form
of lynching).
Enrollment
is limited and a written application is due BY
Senior Seminar:
Mass Entertainment
150/7 TTh 2-3:30
J. Knapp 234 Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1B or 1E; 3; 6
Book List: The exact book list has not yet been determined,
but the texts will be in the bookstore by the time classes begin.
Course Description: Our topic will be the theory and practice of
mass entertainment in the Renaissance English theater
and
Students who elect to write
their final paper on Renaissance drama may use this course to satisfy the pre-1800
requirement for the English major, although papers on Shakespeare may not be
used to satisfy the requirement, by department rule.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application is due BY
Senior Seminar: American Dreams and Visions: Antebellum
150/8 TTh 3:30-5
D. Beam 41 Evans
Areas
of Concentration: 1D; 4
Book
List: The course will figure such authors
as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and Margaret Fuller, recently
recovered women writers including Harriet Spofford
and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, popular fiction writers George Lippard
and Donald Mitchell, and religious writing/spiritual autobiography by Rebecca
Cox Jackson, Lydia Maria Child, and Nat Turner.
Course
Description: This course revisits the
meaning of spirit, sex, fantasy, and death in the antebellum period and in the
process offers new comparisons of men's and women's literary output during the
period. Periodic primary archival research
will allow us to contextualize our analyses in the weird artifacts of nineteenth-century
culture, from seances to the mystical language of flowers to encyclopedias of
famous women. The course will be informed by a feminist framework that aims
to revivify a larger and richer context concerning women's access to spirituality,
prophecy, and sexuality. At the same time, the course is structured to
invigorate discussion of cross-pollination between men and women, blacks and
whites, or, as in many cases, an analysis of less harmonic borrowing, posturing,
and disavowal. Students will produce a
research paper that demonstrates their own revisioning
of these issues. The paper will grow from
and be grounded in the archival reports that students will generate for each
unit. Units may include: Love and Ritual:
Bachelors, Diana, and Erotic Languages, Veiled Ladies: Women and the Spirit,
Revisionaries: Prophecy, Gender, and Race The Romance
of Dead Women Other States of
Enrollment
is limited and a written application is due BY
Senior Seminar:
Wallace Stevens
150/9 TTh 3:30-5
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book List: Stevens,
W.: Collected Poems, The Necessary
Angel, Opus Posthumous; Sukenick, R.: Wallace
Stevens: Musing the Obscure
Course Description: In this course we will engage in a semester-long,
analytic reading of Stevens' Collected Poems[together with selected essays,
letters, and posthumous writing] in an effort to come to terms with the aggregating
complexity and internal organization of his work, and its relations to early
twentieth-century history and culture. Though I am interested in exploring Stevens'
continuing affirmations of the value of poetry and the aesthetic through decades
and in the face of varied forms of political pressure and opposition, I would
also encourage members of the class to bring their own particular interests
and concerns to the seminar.
Your presence and participation in class will be
essential to its success. There will be
one long term-paper, roughly twenty pages in length, due
at the end of the semester.
Enrollment is limited and a written application
is due BY
150/10 TTh 3:30-5
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book
List: Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the
Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!;
a course reader including excerpts of literary criticism on Faulkner
Course
Description: This course will cover four
masterpiece novels which this seminal American Modernist wrote at the prime
of his career, from 1929 to 1936. Among
the themes we will address is the narrative centrality of absences missing women,
undisclosed mysteries, and loss itself; obsession with the past; sexual transgression;
race and the pressures it exerts upon families and individuals.
We will also attend to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Faulkner's
narrative form, including his penchant for peculiarly compromised narrative
voices (mentally disabled or even dead narrators), and for narratives that are
self-consciously troubled and withholding. Far from seamless, Faulkner's greatest
texts present themselves as unraveling. They
resemble the metaphor one of his characters has for life: like five or six people
all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own
pattern into the rug. We will explore
such competing patterns, both within the often multiply narrated novels themselves,
and also among them, as each novel presents a unique, though similarly shifty,
narrative form. For this course, you will
write frequent short responses to the reading and one long final paper (15-20
pages).
Enrollment
is limited and a written application is due BY
150/11 This section has been cancelled.
Senior Seminar:
Gender and Detection in 19th-Century Fiction
150/12 TTh 3:30-5
S. Zieger 255
Dwinelle
Areas of Concentration: 1D; 3; 4
Book
List: Dickens, C.: Bleak House;
Course
Description: What difference does gender
make to the genre of detective fiction? When we think of Victorian detective
fiction, Sherlock Holmes usually leaps to mind. In actual fact, female private
and police detectives populated the pages of serialized fiction throughout the
second half of the nineteenth century, though the first female British police
detective, Lilian Wyles,
was not hired by the Criminal Investigation Department until 1922. How does
the detective's gender make a difference to the form of the detective novel
and the shape of detection plots? Why do female detectives seem to appear most
frequently in fiction in the 1860s and the 1890s? How is the female detective
similar to the flaneur? What urban and social spaces
does she inhabit? Equally, what do male detective stories have to tell us about
late Victorian masculinity? And how are the genders of the detection genre related
more broadly to concerns about national identity, class identity, private and
public transactions, and the empire? These are some of the questions we will
ask as we examine a fascinating and relatively under-scrutinized area of Victorian
fiction.
Enrollment
is limited and a written application is due BY
Women Writers
152 TTh 2-3:30
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 4; 7
Book List: Savage, A. and N. Watson, trans.: Anchoritic
Spirituality; Windeatt, B.A., trans.: The Book
of Margery Kempe; Millett,
B. and J. Wogan-Browne, eds.: Medieval English
Prose for Women; Talbot, C.H., ed.: Life of Christina of Markyate
Course Description: This term we will focus our attention on an important
though neglected body of anonymous thirteenth-century religious prose works
written in English about, and apparently for, women more specifically, for anchoresses:
women walled up or enclosed for life by choice in an individual cell
(usually built onto the side of a church), and surviving by the beneficence
of patrons. These works include the Ancrene
Wisse, a guide for anchoresses, and the closely
associated texts of the Wooing and Katherine groups lives of virgin martyrs,
a discourse on virginity and the appalling conditions of motherhood, and other
lyrical and allegorical meditations and excursions. We will consider the implications of anonymous
authorship for perceiving gendered voicing in these texts (for ourselves and
for medieval readers equally uncertain of the specific conditions of authorship),
as well as the ways in which textual voicing might shift with the shifting contexts
of reception, including translation into Latin or French, or transmission in
male monastic or in popular communities. We will assess the position of women in these
works as projected readers/listeners, as inscribed objects of discourse, and
as imagined discursive subjects, investigating all the while the precarious
distinctions which may inhabit the category women's writing. Near the end of the term, we will test our understanding
of this complex of issues against the difficult case of the fourteenth-century
woman writer, Margery Kempe, whose third-person autobiographical
narrative admits to filtering through the male voice/pen of a priest.
Texts will be read in modern English with reference to Middle English
(and Latin) originals; no prior experience of Middle English (or Latin) is required.
This course satisfies the
pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
newly established 7/12; description revised 7/31):
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism: Psychoanalysis and Literature
160 TTh 12:30-2
instructor: R. Terada location: 305 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28856
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 4; 5; 6
Book List: Freud, S.: Interpretation of Dreams, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Bronte, E.: Wuthering Heights; Zizek, S.: Looking Awry; a course reader
Films: Hitchcock, A.: Vertigo; Bertolucci, B.: The Conformist; Lynch, D.: Lost Highway
Course Description: In this course, we will consider how psychoanalysis, and
especially Freud’s writings, is a form of literary reading—a way
of paying attention to literary features in the language of ordinary life—and
will also read psychoanalytic texts with attention to their own literary qualities.
The course will provide a comprehensive account of Freud’s thought (including
his theories of dreaming, repression, words and images, and sexuality) and an
introduction to the work of some more recent psychoanalytic thinkers. We’ll
also study some 19th- and 20th-century texts and films’ contributions
to psychoanalytic thinking, and will talk about the dynamics of psychoanalysis
in contemporary culture.
Special Topics:
The Empire's New ClothesThe English Novel in
165/1 TTh 12:30-2
P. Joshi305 Wheeler
Areas of Concentration: 1D or 1E; 2; 3
Book List: Chatterjee, B.: Anandamath;
Ruswa, M.: Umraon
Jan Ada; Tagore, R.:
Home and the World; Anand, M.R.: Untouchable;
Ali, A.: Twilight in
Course Description: The novel arrived in
Requirements include an oral presentation; a 15-page research paper; and a web
presentation.
NOTE: Students without an upper-division literature
or writing course should seek prior approval from the instructor.
Special Topics:
Cultural Encounters in Modern Arabic Literature
165/2 TTh 2-3:30
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 5
Book
List: ben Jelloun, T.: The Sand Child; Husayn,
T.: The Days; Maalouf, A.: The Crusades
through Arab Eyes; Mahfuz, N.: Midaq Alley; Kanafani,
G.: Men in the Sun; Barakat, H.: Days of
Dust; al-Tayyib, S.: Season of Migration to
the North; Jabbar, A.: Fantasia; Coetzee, J.M.: Waiting for the Barbarians; Suweif, A.: In the Eye of the Sun
Recommended
Texts: Shakespeare, W.: Othello,
The Tempest; Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India; Rushdie, S.: Midnight's
Children; Anand, M.R.: Untouchable; Hitti, P.: A Short History of the Arabs; Abu-Lughod,
Course
Description: This course is organized
around two broad but inter-related issues: the
quest for identity and the representation of the other in modern Arabic literature.
Variations on these twin issues inform a vast number of Arabic literary
works, especially fiction, to form what can be called the Arabic cultural novel. Such novels invariably dramatize an encounter
between Arab and non-Arab characters, all of whom possess attributes that invest
them with symbolic (cultural) significance. Representatives of
The
objective of the course is to examine the dynamics of cultural encounter in
modern Arabic literature against the backdrop of the historical encounter between
the Arab world and the modern (colonialist) west. After an introductory set of lectures on the
emergence of modern Arabic literature in the context of Arab nationalism, which
is itself an outcome of the renewed encounter with the modern west, and a brief
discussion of constitutive terms such as self, individual, subject, and other
variants of personal, national, and religious identity, the class will proceed
to read and discuss in some depth a number of Arabic novels in conjunction with
novels from other national literatures that also dramatize the theme of cultural
encounter.
Examination
in NES 152/English 165 consists of three analytical papers, growing in length
and complexity from book review to research projects. The respective range in length is roughly 3-12
pages.
Note! Newly added section:
Special Topics:
Novel and Epic
165/3 MW 10:30-12
A. Banfield 305 Wheeler
Course Control #: 28864
Areas
of Concentration: 3; 5; 7
Book
List: Auerbach,
E.: Mimesis; Heaney, S., translator: Beowulf; Foley, J.M.: The
Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology; Joyce, J.: Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man; Mansfield, K.: Stories; McKeon, M.:
Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, A Critical Anthology; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse
Recommended
Text: Watt,
Course
Description: This course will raise the
question of a theory of genres by looking at two narrative forms, the epic and
the novel, one from the oral tradition and the other a written form. We will consider the differences as well as the
relations between these two forms both thematically and stylistically. The latter will lead us to questions of language
and, in particular, the language for the representation of subjectivity or point
of view developed by the novel but not by the epic. We will also reflect on the difference between
prose and poetry, which further divides novel from epic, and ask whether this
distinction sheds any light on the formal differences between novel and epic.
Finally, we will look at some theories about the relation between these
genres and the societies out of which they came, that is, the theories that
see the epic as aristocratic and the novel as bourgeois.
Special Topics:
166/1 TTh 3:30-5
Areas
of Concentration: 1E; 3
Book
List: Eisley,
L.: Immense Journey; James, H.: Aspern
Papers;
Course Description: Writers teach writers how to see and hear. We will read and discuss ñ and hope to be influenced by ñ authors who wrote about writing and made breakthroughs in literature. Putting into practice ideas that these authors suggest for writing the Great American Novel, the Book of the Americas, a book about heroines, the Novel as History, and History as a Novel, each student will write a 50-page portfolio of original prose. There will be at least one oral presentation to the class and a final exam.
Special Topics:
Theorizing Children's Literature
166/3
Note new instructor: D. Muse
Lectures MW 9-10 in 390 Hearst Mining, plus one
hour of discussion section per week (secs. 301-304:
F 9-10; secs. 305-308: F 11-12)
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6
Course
Description: What is children's literature?
How do (real and imagined) children read?
What do various texts in the canon of children's literature (and texts
that lie outside that tradition) reveal about our own culture's, and other cultures,'
ideologies of childhood? Do most children's books serve the needs of American
children facing the complex world they negotiate today? (For instance: how has
children's literature prepared or failed to prepare American children for living
in the world after the events of
The Language and Literature of Films:
The Twenties Film and Culture
173
R. Hutson
Lectures MW 2-3 in 2040 Valley LSB, plus weekly film screenings M 4-6
in 105 North Gate, plus one hour of discussion section per week (secs. 101-104: F 2-3; secs. 105-108:
F 4-5).
Note: All students need to enroll in the lecture, in
the lab (film screenings), and in one of the discussion sections.
Areas of Concentration: 1E; 3; 6
Book List: Anderson,
S.:
Course Description:
This is a course on American culture in the 1920s, the jazz age. There are film viewings each week. Since this is mainly the era of silent film,
we will screen a number of classic silent films and move into the early sound
era as well. Along with the literary examples
and the films, we will be able to think about some of the main features of an
important era in American culture, in some ways a well-defined era between World
War I and the onset of the Great Depression in the late 20s. It is in this period that the
Autobiography
The Romance
Areas of Concentration: 1A; 3; 4
Book List: See below
Course Description: This course will begin by considering some medieval
English romances still circulating in the 18th and 19th
centuries as a way of discerning not only an historical evolution of romance,
but also how reading old books informs quite literally the conceptualisation
of romance in a later period. We will
work our way to Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752), Clara Reeve's
The Old English Baron (1778), Ann Radcliffe's
The Romance of the Forest (1791), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
(1818), and the works of Thomas Love Peacock, especially Maid Marian
(1822) and The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829),
attending in particular to the invention of a writing and reading female subject
in relation to the subject female, and the engagement of antiquarianism, or
an archival imagination, with political power.
This course satisfies the
pre-1800 requirement for the English major.
Honors Course
(Though the official time of this class is 10-12, on most days it may
end by
Area of Concentration: 5
Book List: Culler, J.: Ferdinand de Saussure; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw;
Recommended Texts: Gibaldi, J.: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers;
Abrams, M.H.: A Glossary of Literary Terms; Eagleton,
T.: Literary Theory: An Introduction
Course Description: This course
is designed for qualified students who wish to undertake an honors thesis: a
critical essay of 40+ pages on a topic of your design. The fall semester will
be devoted to three projects. The first is to explore some large theoretical
questions about literature's relationship to structures of language, subjectivity,
culture, and society. We will examine the critical debates constellated around
such terms as writing, author, gender, and ideology, and ask how these and other
terms structure literary production and interpretation. These questions may
or may not play a direct role in your honors thesis, but they should help you
frame your topics in more ambitious and nuanced ways. The second project is
to develop research skills through library visits and assignments that will
help you prepare an annotated bibliography for your honors thesis. The third
is to refine your thesis topic so that, by the end of the semester, you have
a firm command of the questions that are motivating your project, the texts
in which you plan to locate them, and the kinds of research that will help to
answer them. A ten-page prospectus will be due at the end of the semester. In
the spring, students will organize into writing groups and meet regularly to
help one another with their research projects.
Enrollment is limited and a
written application (and a photocopy of a critical paper that you wrote for
another class) are due BY
Honors Course
(Though the official time of this class is 2-4, on most days it may end
by
Area of Concentration: 5
Book
List: Eagleton,
T.: Literary Theory: An Introduction; Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin, eds.: Critical Terms
of Literary Study; Lodge, D.: Modern Criticism and Theory; a course
reader
Recommended
Text: Gibaldi,
J: MLA Style Manual
Course
Description: This course is designed for qualified students who wish to undertake
an honors thesis (an essay of 40+ pages produced after substantial independent
research). The fall semester will survey contemporary literary criticism and
theory, with a particular view toward understanding the convergence between
poststructuralist and postcolonial criticism. This section of the honors seminar
is likely to be most useful to students who are interested in exploring what
it means to undertake political readings of literary texts to make claims
about literature in the name of the political by recourse to various kinds
of historicist, social, and cultural criticism. The fall semester will also
be devoted to the development of a thesis topic, an annotated bibliography,
and a prospectus. In the spring, students will organize into writing groups
and meet regularly to help one another with their research projects.
Enrollment
is limited and a written application (and a photocopy of a critical paper that
you wrote for another class) are due BY
Honors Course
Area
of Concentration: 5
Book List:
The exact book list has not yet been determined, but it may include many
of the following: Abrams, M.H.: A Glossary of Literary Terms;
Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Eagleton, T.:
Literary Theory: An Introduction; Gibaldi,
J.: MLA Style Manual; Gilman, C.P.: The Yellow Wallpaper; Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin, eds.: Critical Terms
for Literary Study; Richter, D.H.: Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views
on Reading Literature; Twain, M.: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
plus a photocopied course reader containing supplemental theoretical and critical
readings
Course Description: This course is designed for qualified
students who wish to undertake an honors thesis: a critical essay of 40+ pages
produced after substantial independent research. The fall semester will serve
as an introduction to literary theory and criticism, with a focus on the post-structuralist
turn that has shaped contemporary production in such otherwise diverse schools
of thought as reader response criticism, postcolonial and cultural studies,
gender studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and new historicism. We will read
primary theoretical texts by such foundational figures as Barthes
and Foucault, as well as a wide range of writings by more recent theorists and
critics. We will also consider several highly canonical primary texts (possibly
to include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Yellow Wallpaper
and/or Heart of Darkness, but no promises!) in the context of their publication
and reception histories, as a way to begin to understand what literary criticism
is and what it can do. Importantly, in the fall we will also be actively engaged
in the process of developing the thesis project: establishing research topics,
preparing annotated bibliographies, writing and presenting prospectuses. In
the spring, students will organize into writing groups and meet regularly to
help one another with their research projects.
Enrollment is limited and a written application (and
a photocopy of a critical paper that you wrote for another class) are due BY