Announcement of Classes: Fall 2022
Freshman Seminar: Song
English 24
Section: 2Instructor: Turner, James Grantham
Time: W 2-3 pm
Location: Dwinelle 189
Description
Literature and music are too often separated. The old epic poem begins “I sing” – but the poet doesn’t mean it literally. Performers sometimes concentrate on producing a beautiful or powerful sound, rather than making the words audible. We praise writing that is lyrical or song-like, but sing-song denotes something banal and mechanical. Ezra Pound valued “a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.” Poetry, as shown here by the great Renaissance artist Raphael, holds a book in one hand and a musical instrument in the other, a lyre (as in lyrical): together they lift her up to a higher form of inspiration, which is why she grows wings. In this seminar we will try to do the same, to study actual songs both as literature and as music. We will ask: what is song-like about poetry and what is poetic about music? What happens, emotionally, when text and music blend together? What does it feel like to perform songs, in the concert-hall or in the shower?
We will study just six samples or small song-clusters, from a 500-year period. Each unit will be given two classes, over two weeks. First we will discuss the plain text, as poetry, and only at the end of the hour hear the song itself, in a recording or performance video that you can then play over and over in your spare time. For the following week we will be joined by the distinguished soprano and conductor Christine Brandes, to enrich our discussion with all the insights of the musician and singer. We will read and hear songs from Shakespeare’s plays and a setting of Milton’s “most musical” poetry, expressions of passion, grief and calm written by a female and a male composer, a Lutheran hymn transformed by Baroque splendor, dreamy Impressionist eroticism, and a soulful jazz “standard.”
We will set aside the final three weeks for students to present a song of their own choosing - which is the only formal assignment. There is no book to purchase, because all materials will be downloadable as text (English, German, Italian and French, with translations) and as links to recordings and video clips. No previous musical expertise is required; come with an open ear and a song in your heart.
Introduction to the Study of Poetry
English 26
Section: 1Instructor: Bernes, Jasper
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 24
Book List
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry: Volume 1; Eisen-Martin, Tongo : Blood on the Fog ; Wordsworth, William and Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Lyrical Ballads
Description
What is a poem? What is poetry? What powers of language are particular to poems and poetry? In this course, we will explore various answers to these difficult if not unanswerable questions while acquainting ourselves with some of the forms poetry has taken in English over the last five hundred years: sonnets and ballads, odes and riddles, monologues and epistles.
In examining the breadth and diversity of poetry written in English, we will also consider the historical transformation of poetry, with particular emphasis on the ways that poets from the nineteenth century forward have responded to modernity and its displacements.
Literature of American Cultures: The Wild, Wild West-- California and the Politics of Possibility
English 31AC
Section: 1Instructor: Saha, Poulomi
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Physics Building 3
Description
The Golden State – fast fame, endless sunshine, and gold in the ground. California has long occupied an iconic place in the American and global imagination as the land of limitless opportunity, utopian pinnacle of the promise getting ahead, making it big, and living large. This course takes up the question California as a site of political possibility. We will take up the fraught relationship between dreams of economic prosperity and neocolonial violence that underpin a popular cultural fascination with the state and the idea of the “wild west” more generally. From Spanish missions and Anglo settler colonialism to the Gold Rush and Chinese Exclusion, we will begin with the conflicted origins of racial diversity, before moving on to a variety of political formations that emerged in the 20th century: Free Love counterculture, the IOAT occupation of Alcatraz, the Free Speech Movement, the development of Ethnic Studies, agricultural workers movements, anti-immigrant violence, Reaganism, and other radical imaginations.
This course, which satisfies the American Cultures requirement, engages a range of historical, sociological, and theoretical material to understand how ethnic and racial categories have been formed and produced in America. Students will develop a critical vocabulary for race, gender, and class in contemporary America and an understanding of their historical antecedents. This course will require you to demonstrate skill in researching, planning and writing papers, incorporating an analytical understanding of key concepts in the course, and the capacity to engage scholarly debates in the field of Ethnic American literature.
Introduction to the Writing of Short Fiction
English 43A
Section: 1Instructor: Abrams, Melanie
Time: MW 9:30-11
Location: Wheeler 300
Description
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the study of short fiction—to explore the elements that make up the genre, and to enable students to talk critically about short stories and begin to feel comfortable and confident with their own writing of them. Students will write two short stories, along with various exercises, and critiques of their peers' work. The course will be organized as a workshop. All student stories will be edited and critiqued by the instructor and by other students in the class. This class focuses on psychological realism, so genre fiction (sci fi, fantasy, fan fic, etc.) will not be workshopped.
All readings will be available online.
Introduction to the Writing of Verse
English 43B
Section: 1Instructor: Nathan, Jesse
Time: TuTh 8-9:30
Location: 305 Wheeler
Description
This is an introductory creative writing workshop in which participants write, revise, and discuss their original works of poetry in a collaborative group setting. We'll rely on a series of writing prompts, technical exercises, and a wide-ranging survey of poetry from this and past centuries. Our aim is to learn something about how to think about the practice and art of writing verse, how to begin poems, how to develop them, how to end them, how to revise, how to think about representation and responsibility, and generally how to find one's way to the words.
Literature in English: Through Milton
English 45A
Section: 1Instructor: Nolan, Maura
Time: MW 1-2
Location: Cory 277
Description
What is the English literary tradition? Where did it come from? What are its distinctive habits, questions, styles, obsessions? This course will answer these and other questions by focusing on five key writers from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the anonymous Beowulf poet; Geoffrey Chaucer; Christopher Marlowe; John Donne; and John MIlton. We will start with the idea that the English literary tradition is a set of interrelated texts and problems that recur over the course of several centuries. Some of these relationships are formal; we will pay special attention to the genres, techniques, and styles that poets use to create their works. Some of these relationships are linguistic; students will learn to read Middle English (out loud, too!) and explore the significance of linguistic change as the Middle Ages becomes the Renaissance. Other relationships are historical; we will explore not only the pressure of contemporary events on literature, but also literature's role in creating both historical continuity and change over time. And some of these relationships are cultural, as poets reflect upon, seek to change, furiously criticize, or happily embrace a variety of human behaviors, from religious practices to love relationships to debates about gender to death and dying.
Throughout the semester, students will work on developing their skill at close reading. We will work on close reading during lectures and in your discussion sections. You will do close readings at home. You are welcome to come to office hours to practice close reading! No one can be a literary critic who cannot perform a close reading of a literary text. We will work on learning the tools of the trade, the literary terms and generic distinctions necessary for close reading. Expect to write three papers and to take a final exam.
Literature in English: Late-17th through Mid-19th Centuries
English 45B
Section: 1Instructor: Puckett, Kent
Time: TuTh 10-11
Location: Wheeler 315
Description
This course is an introduction to British and American literature from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. We'll read works from that period (by Swift, Franklin, Equiano, Wordsworth, Austen, Brontë, Melville, Eliot, Douglass, Dickinson, Poe, and others) and think about how politics, aesthetics, race, gender, identity, and the everyday find expression in a number of different literary forms. We'll especially consider the material and symbolic roles played by the idea and practice of revolution.
Literature in English: Mid-19th through the 20th Century
English 45C
Section: 1Instructor: Gang, Joshua
Time: MW 2-3
Location: Social Sciences 20
Book List
Dickens, Charles: Hard Times; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Tutuola, Amos: The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway
Other Readings and Media
Additional course readings will be made available through bCourses.
Description
This course will examine different examples of British, Irish, American, and global Anglophone literature from the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th. Moving across a number of genres and movements, we will focus on the ways novelists, poets, and dramatists have used literary form to represent, question, and even produce different aspects of modernity (broadly construed). Particular attention will be paid to concepts such as realism, naturalism, expressionism, and modernism, and to literature’s broader engagements with ideas of race and immigration, gender and sexuality, colonialism and empire, diaspora, literacy, mythology, economics and labor, and technological advancement.
Readings will include fiction by Charles Dickens, Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, James Joyce, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf; drama by Samuel Beckett, Adrienne Kennedy, Sophie Treadwell, and Luis Valdez; and poetry or essays by Matthew Arnold, WH Auden, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Rodolfo Gonzalez, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf.
Evaluation will be based on a combination of papers, examinations, and course participation.
Practices of Literary Study: Murderers, Madmen and Dissolutes: Cormac McCarthy and His Progeny
English 90
Section: 1Instructor: Danner, Mark
Time: TuTh 12:30-2
Location: Wheeler 300
Description
The heroes of Cormac McCarthy's novels occupy the borderlands of the American imagination and court its darkest urges. He is a writer fascinated by violence and the sacred, by loneliness and worship, by the American jeremiad and the scream in the forest. The haunting rhythms of his prose echo Melville and Faulkner and the King James Version but the anguish of his protagonists in their battered landscapes evoke Dostoevsky and Kafka and Beckett. This fall the 88-year-old master will publish not one but two new novels. In this seminar we will read those new works and endeavor to set them against his large body of writing -- novels as well as films -- in an attempt to come to grips with McCarthy's six-decade foray into the furthest reaches of the American Gothic.
Practices of Literary Study: Reading and Writing about Science Fiction
English 90
Section: 2Instructor: Snyder, Katherine
Time: MW 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 301
Book List
Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake; El Akkad, Omar: American War; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Shteyngart, Gary: Super Sad True Love Story
Other Readings and Media
Novels will likely include some of those listed here but the readings for the course haven't yet been finalized, so don’t buy the books until after our first class meeting. We will also read a number of short stories and possibly watch a couple of movies or TV show episodes.
Description
As a genre, science fiction has always pushed at the limits of the human—What makes us different from machines or animals? What is our place in the universe? What can the future tell us about the present day and the historical past? Yet science fiction has long been seen as a limiting case for literature, as a flimsy gadget unworthy of the serious literary critic whose methodologies are calibrated to more finely-grained texts. This view, however, reveals questionable assumptions about both science fiction and literature, and about what literary critics do when they read and write about them. In this class, we will put our own assumptions to the test, exploring various modes of textual interpretation and developing our analytical and argumentative skills. By attending closely to science fiction short stories and novels in a range of styles and modes, we will ask what makes for good reading and we will practice to become better writers.
Practices of Literary Study: Walt Whitman and the Idea of America
English 90
Section: 3Instructor: Nathan, Jesse
Time: TuTh 9:30-11
Location: Wheeler 305
Description
Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass for forty years, over at least six editions. In this course we'll devote ourselves to reading Leaves of Grass, comparing versions as well as reading selections from his prose, such as his famous 1855 preface and various Civil War sketches, including those published in Specimen Days. To deepen our sense of Whitman's context, we'll also read short selections from some of his contemporaries: Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sojourner Truth, and Mark Twain. Our aim will be to understand what Whitman's styles, forms, methods, and principles have to say about the idea of America, and democracy in general. In a larger sense, we'll try to understand what was going on in American literature at the very moment that the generous, idealistic conception of America collided with the barbarism of the slave system that built it. Requirements include two four-page essays and one six-page essay, as well as regular attendance and participation in discussion.
Books: Whitman: Prose and Poetry (please find this exact edition: published by Library of America, ISBN 978-1-883011-35-2).
Other Media: Course reader selections handed out by instructor.
Practices of Literary Study: Seamus Heaney and the Twentieth Century
English 90
Section: 4Instructor: Nathan, Jesse
Time: TuTh 2-3:30
Location: Wheeler 305
Description
In this course, we'll read the poetry of Seamus Heaney, from his early work to his last poems. We'll also take a look at some of his prose and translations. Our hope is to use the oeuvre of Seamus Heaney as a lens with which to view the history and politics of the twentieth century, particularly in the English-speaking world. We'll touch on the work of Heaney's contemporaries, writers and thinkers in the Anglophone world such as Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Derek Walcott, and we'll understand the poetry in terms of questions of form, lyric, colonialism, empire, translation, transatlantic culture, the natural world, childhood, and the connections--as well as vast differences--between rural life and the urban milieu in which many poets end up living and working. Requirements include two four-page essays and one six-page essay, as well as regular attendance and participation in discussion.
Practices of Literary Study: Poetry and Revolution
English 90
Section: 5Instructor: Bernes, Jasper
Time: TuTh 5-6:30
Location: Social Sciences 180
Book List
DiPrima, Diane: Revolutionary Letters; Eisen-Martin, Tongo: Blood on the Fog
Description
Why write a poem? What powers are specific to poetry? In this course, we will seek answers to these questions and others by examining the many varieties of poems written in English since the sixteenth century: sonnets and ballads, odes and riddles, monologues and epistles. Our broad survey will funnel into a discussion of poetry as a mode of symbolic and even revolutionary action, pursued through a reading of politically powerful “case study” poems by P.B. Shelley, Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Tongo Eisen-Martin.