English 139
Shirley Moody-Turner

This course offers an introduction to African American literature.  We will move chronologically from the early African American writings of slavery and freedom and will conclude by touching on writings of present-day African American authors.  We will gain a working knowledge of the major themes, literary traditions and narrative strategies that emerge and shape this body of literature.  We will consider, for example, themes such as the quest for literacy and freedom, the influence of double-consciousness, the role of family/community, the significance of migration and place, and the persistent presence of “the folk,” folklore and vernacular traditions in African American literature.  Our analyses of texts will be attentive to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and nation, and by the end of the semester you will be able to discuss fluently several literary techniques and strategies including irony, satire, narration, voice, characterization, imagery, style and setting.  We will situate texts in their various historical and cultural contexts, and you will be introduced to key literary concepts and terms that should inform your reading and writing about these texts. 

English 145
Modern Irish Literature
Prof. Janet Lyon

This course takes up Irish literature throughout the twentieth century, beginning with the Irish Literary Revival.  We’ll read plays, poetry, fiction and prose by William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Eavan Boland, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanaugh,  Martin McDonagh, Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney  and many others.  Midterm, final, two papers, a few quizzes, class attendance and participation.

English 184
Robert Lougy

This course is designed to introduce readers to the art of the short story and to some of it very best practitioners. We will be reading outstanding short stories from various cultures and countries, ranging from stories written in the early nineteenth-century to those written within the last few years.  English 184 is intended to help one learn how to read fiction, how to understand it, and how to talk about it. The desire to tell stories and to have stories told is one of our most basic human needs. However, we are not born knowing how to read the short story or any fiction for that matter. Rather it is a skill that one acquires, and as we become better at it, we learn what to look for and gain more confidence in our own abilities as readers.  The grade for the course will be determined by two midterm exams and one final exam.

ENGL 201.002 &003
What is Literature?
Michael Van Dussen

English 201 will familiarize students with theories and practices that are foundational for thinking about literature, and for studying narrative fiction, poetry, and drama. The course will pose such questions as “what is narrative fiction?”, “what is poetry?”, “what is drama?” It will introduce students to how conventions of literary genres operate, how they generate meaning, and how they require and manipulate readers’ responses. English 201 will also encourage students to explore whether or not literary discourse, as instanced in the genres that have been named, can be distinguished from other written or spoken discourses. While asking such questions, the course will acquaint students with technical vocabularies used by literary scholars and literary historians, and will provide students with sample scholarly rationales for hypothesizing the singularity of literary discourse, for constructing literary history, and for understanding literature’s relation to life. It will teach students close analytic practices of reading, both those that have shaped the discipline of English studies and those emerging currently.

Our section will be organized around the theme of Famous Books and their Afterlives, and will explore how authors have read and adapted literature for new purposes. We will ask what it means to have an “ethics” of reading literary texts, discussing issues like reading and writing as communal practices; how authors and readers (and authors as readers) engage with controversial writing; and the ways in which readers in different historical and cultural moments come to terms with the literature of earlier periods. We will be particularly concerned with analyzing how the formal properties of literary genres shape expectations about reading, and how literature (and the aesthetic realm) resists translation into simple statements and convenient lessons. Evaluation will be based on participation, attendance, short response papers and close readings, analytical essays, and exams.

English 231.001
American Literature to 1865
Carla Mulford

The readings for the course comprise British American literature from the era of initial settlements by Britons in the early seventeenth century to the era of the Civil War.  We will investigate historical matters while examining the literature and culture that have been taken to be the earliest manifestations of what “America” is today.  Please note that we will be studying historical literature, and much of it is not typical of the imaginative literature with which you might be familiar from courses in later American literatures or British literature.  You’ll be putting your historical imagination to work for this course.  Some of the materials are difficult, so you’ll need to allow sufficient time in your schedule toward homework and writing assignments for this class. 
            Assignments: Writing assignments include three formal essays (about 4 pages or 1,000 words), written outside class, and a short-answer final examination.  The essays will relate to issues and themes relevant to the course readings and discussed in class.  The examination at the end of the semester will be short-answer questions based on your ability to identify passages from some of the readings.  Other assignments might include impromptu writing assignments developed to stimulate class discussion.  Class participation and any impromptu written work will be counted toward the final grade for the course. 

English 232.001 
Robert L. Caserio

A survey of major aesthetic movements and major writers in the United State from 1865 to the present. Readings will include examples of realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism as they appear in narrative, lyric, and dramatic forms. The syllabus of readings in narrative fiction will be drawn from stories or novellas by some of the following: George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, H. P. Lovecraft, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel West, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Chester Himes, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Dick, Donald Barthelme, and Philip Roth; lyric forms will be represented by selections from Ezra Pound, W. C. Williams, Marianne Moore, and Charles Olson; dramatic forms will be represented by some of the following: Eugene O’Neill, Rachel Carrothers, Kaufman and Hart, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee.

There will be two short writing assignments (3-5 pages); quizzes; a mid-term and a final examination.

English 245
Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies
Chris Castiglia

This class will serve as an introduction to the field of Lesbian and Gay Studies, with a particular emphasis on the period from the Stonewall Riot in 1969 to the onset of AIDS in 1981.  We will explore theories of identity and sexuality, what it means and has meant to “be” “gay” or “lesbian,” to “come out” or remain “in the closet.” The majority of the course will explore the “renaissance” of cultural production during the so-called Sexual Revolution, including literature (Dancer From the Dance, Beebo Brinker, Giovanni’s Room, The Lost Language of Cranes, Rubyfruit Jungle, Numbers), film (Boys in the Band, The Killing of Sister George, Making Love, Desert Hearts, Cruising), music, dance, comedy, political tracts and historical accounts that accompanied the rise of the modern LGBT movement.  Along the way, we will read theoretical essays that will frame, complicate, and develop our understandings of identity, community, activism, and intimacy.  Students will write one short papers and a longer research paper, and will take a midterm and final exam.

English 300M
“Writing and Revolution: The Shelleys and Their Circle”
Nicholas Joukovsky

Can writing change the world? What are the possible risks and rewards for a writer who sets out to change the social order through his or her writing? This seminar will examine the careers of an extraordinary group of English writers who lived in an age of revolutions and tried to answer these questions. The central figures will be the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who confessed to "a passion for reforming the world"; his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whose aspiring scientist Victor Frankenstein pays a steep price for discovering the secret of life; his friend and rival Lord Byron, who died while supporting the Greek revolution; and his friend and biographer Thomas Love Peacock, who satirized political corruption by having a civilized orangutan elected to Parliament. Both of the Shelleys were influenced by Mary's parents, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, author of Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But unlike these predecessors, the younger generation of Romantic writers sought to instigate social and political change mainly through poetry and fiction, rather than through argumentative prose. We will explore the various ways in which the writers of the Shelley circle reflect on the role of the artist as an agent for revolutionary change, often by drawing upon the highly ambivalent myth of Prometheus. Requirements: oral presentation, brief written responses to major texts, two critical papers, take-home final exam.

English 303M.001
Honors Course
Carla Mulford

“It does not require many words to speak the truth”: Native American Perspectives on Being “American”

This course will examine, in the context of discussion about U.S. imperialist culture, Native Americans’ views (in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction) of life in the United States.  In a well-known speech, Chief Joseph (Nez Perce, d. 1904) once remarked, “It does not require many words to speak the truth,” as he critiqued the dishonorable treatment Native peoples received at the hands of the federal and local governments.  In recent decades – indeed, across much of the last century – Native Americans have actually offered many words to explain their perspective on their pasts, their rights, and their lifeways.  Indians have written about adapting to the shifting conditions for Native peoples in contemporary North America, and they have sought to discover what constitutes “the truth” (the many truths) from a Native American perspective.  Focussing on writings by American Indian peoples, we will consider the problem, “What special questions might arise when reading indigenous writings compared to writings by members of the dominant culture?”  Students will come away with a better understanding of the multiple issues facing Native Americans and the different ways in which Indian peoples write about their lives.  We will read writings by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Susan Power, and Vine Deloria.
Assignments: Longer writing assignments include two papers employing secondary criticism (one paper serves as the first version of the scholarly paper, and the second paper is a greatly revised version of the same paper); two Talking Points (also written) in advance of class discussion on chosen authors; a Booknote on a chapter of one of the scholarly books selected for the students to read together; and a final examination.  Spirited class discussion is expected.

English 402.001
Literature and Society:  Wilderness Literature. 

In this course we will consider the concepts of wilderness and wildness as they have evolved in Western culture since the Renaissance.  We will begin with survival stories by Jack London and Rick Bass, and from there we will tackle The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, and Tarzan of the Apes.  Later we’ll read about Montana and the myth of the mountain man, and we’ll close the course with Krakauer’s Into the Wild.  Along the way, we’ll reflect upon several figures who shaped the wilderness idea in America—Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Abbey—as well as contemporary movements toward wilderness preservation.  We will read a lot, take weekly quizzes, write at least two critical papers, and test our mettle with a mid-term and final exam.  Possible texts include The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan of the Apes, Nature/Walking, Desert Solitaire, The Big Sky, Into the Wild, Sick of Nature.

English 402.002
Literature and Society
Robert L. Caserio

This section of “Literature and Society” explores complex relations between literary depictions of sexuality and the social environments in which those depictions appear.  We will study gay and lesbian literary tradition as a primary example of the complexity. We will also take into account alliances between gay and lesbian literary tradition and literature that represents other forms of eros.

The contributions to Anglo-American literary tradition of writers who have been amorous of their own sex includes some of the most honored or celebrated names. We will consider how same-sex love shapes the form, the content, and the attitudes towards social existence (including moral and religious aspects of social order) to be found in writers ranging from Shakespeare and Byron to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes and James Baldwin.

A primary unit of our study will consider how in the modernist era (1880-1045) homosexuality becomes prominent as a result of a combined “straight”-“gay” attack on the institution of marriage and the family and as a result of contentions that homosexual love is a key to an ultimate realization of democracy. The unit will include attention to such writers as Edward Carpenter, George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, H. D., and Noel Coward.

Students will find this semester’s concurrent offering of English 245 a useful complement to English 402-002.

Course requirements include short papers amounting to a semester total of 15-20 pages of writing; a mid-term examination; and a final.

ENGL 402.003
Heresy and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Reformation
Michael Van Dussen

Dan Brown has given us such attractive stories of underground religious dissent and intrigue in recent years, but how much do we really know about the history and literature of “underground” religious movements? This course examines the impact of heresy on medieval and early modern communities, with particular attention to the ways in which heresy intersects with literature, literacy, communication, and vernacular translation. Our approach to the topic will be transnational, and will cut across the traditional medieval/early modern periodization divide. We will come to an understanding of “heresy” as a legal category, examining how laws defined heretics and heresies in terms of communities. The prosecution of suspect heretics was indeed a communal activity, conditioned by social class, gender, legal custom, and an array of factors that could stem as much from a variety of complex human relationships as from any standard of legal process.

Students will come to an understanding of the major late-medieval heretical movements, including the Cathars, Waldensians, Wycliffites and Hussites, exploring their major doctrines and their teachings on social order. We’ll get a sense of how heretics interacted with members of their sects, as well as with outsiders who shared some kind of communal space with them. Here the many forms of nonconformity will be especially important. How and for what reasons did dissenters perform or mask their dissent? Were there instances of tolerance toward heretics, or of “fashionable” religious opposition? Is it possible to speak of “underground” religious movements during this period? Most of our time will be devoted to analyzing literary texts as they comment on, or are themselves implicated in, questions of heresy. Among the course texts, we’ll read passages from William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and examples from the Plowman tradition that extended into the Reformation. We’ll examine selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Middle English anticlerical satires, and we’ll read early modern Protestant texts like John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. But we’ll also discuss continental texts in translation, like narratives from Joan of Arc’s trial, as well as documents about Hussite theories of just war in the face of crusading armies. We’ll continually discuss the vocabulary of “heretication” itself, and its complicated afterlife in the Reformation and in more recent discussions of religious controversy. Intricately linked with the terminology of heresy are the concepts of witchcraft, demonology, secret societies and the occult, and in our final sessions we’ll explore distinctions between these categories as they pertain to law and society. And of course, we’ll discuss the Templars, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and other groups that Dan Brown and Umberto Eco have made so popular of late.

For evaluation, students will be asked to write a series of short, focused responses to crucial issues from course readings throughout the term. In addition to completing the reading assignments, students will also take a midterm, and will write a final research paper on a topic that they develop in consultation with me. The paper may, but need not, represent a development of an earlier written response from the course.

English 412
Introduction to Fiction Writing
Charlotte Holmes

Designed for students who have completed English 212 and wish to develop their abilities further, English 412 is an intensive writing and reading course in the art of short fiction.  You’ll write two full-length short stories for workshop discussion, and will extensively revise one of them.  Each week, in addition to two student stories, we’ll discuss a story from the text�Best Ammerican Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold�and you’lll hand in a written response to your reading.  You’ll also write responses to each of the student stories we discuss in workshop.  There will be weekly journal assignments as well.  No exams.

English 413
Advanced Poetry Writing

Entrance is by portfolio only. Please submit the entrance application and submit 8-10 pages of your best work to the Department on or before November 13th.

English 432
The Nineteenth-Century American Novel
Michael Anesko

This course attempts to describe and analyze the American novel to 1900 by examining some of the more interesting—i.e., historically significant, formally influential, technically innovative—representatives of that genre written during the period.  Class time will be divided between lectures and discussion, but your principal job in the course will be to read all the assigned books with great care.  Attendance is mandatory and informed class participation will factor quite significantly into each student’s final grade.  You should plan to bring your texts to class, as we shall often engage in the close reading of passages from them in order better to gauge how works of fiction achieve their emotional hold on our imaginations.

Students will write three critical essays at various points in the semester (each roughly 6-8 pages in length), and there will be a final examination given during the examination period, as determined by the University Registrar.

Authors to be studied will include: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Horatio Alger, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Kate Chopin.

English 437
The Confessional Poet in America
John Marsh

In the decades following World War II, modernists like T.S. Eliot and his poet-critic acolytes (John Crowe Ransom, Allan Tate, and Robert Penn Warren) ruled the poetry world as surely as the Allies ruled Western Europe.  During this period, poets made their way by writing technically complex, rhetorically difficult poetry that, if it admitted the poet’s emotions at all, obscured them behind paradoxes, personae, objective correlatives and other modes of modernist impersonality.  Then, with the appearance of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959, all that changed, and the so-called “Confessional” school of poetry was born.  Lowell, as the story goes, dropped the masks and ambiguities that poets—including himself—had previously relied on and instead chose to address, starkly and plainly, the most intimate and painful aspects of personal experience, what one critic has catalogued as the parade of “destructive family relationships, traumatic childhoods, broken marriages, recurring mental breakdowns, alcoholism or drug abuse” that each of the confessional poets lived and subsequently made into poetry.        

In this course, we will spend most of our time reading the classics of the confessional school.  Through the years, countless poets have been called confessional or grouped with the school, but five poets seem to make every list: Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath.  For each of these poets, we will read a sample of the work they composed prior to the volume that made their name, the whole of the volume that made their name, and then a few of the poems that followed.  Along the way, we will try to determine what confessional poetry was, why it arose when it did, what its fate was, and whether it deserves the near-universal scorn it currently receives for its supposedly malign influence on contemporary poetry.  Basically, though, we are going to read, discuss, and write about what most critics agree is some of the best poetry written in the twentieth century. 

Texts: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry; Robert Lowell, Life Studies (1959); W.D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle (1959); Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones (1962); John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs (1964); Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965).  Assignments will most likely include a short paper, a longer term paper, a midterm, and a final. 

English 441
Chaucer
Robert Edwards

This course will focus on a critical reading of major works by Geoffrey Chaucer. We will read a significant portion of the Canterbury Tales as well as several earlier works that give a sense of Chaucer’s range and the various literary contexts that influenced him. Our chief concern will be to develop sound close readings of the poetry, which attend to the structure, themes, and verbal complexity of the texts. Chaucer is a poet of great craft, subtlety, irony and humor. We will spend some time working through the fundamentals of Middle English, so that we can read him in the idiom he used. We will also consider conventions of writing and interpretation in the Middle Ages and the differences that separate those conventions from modern practices. The course will require several quizzes, a midterm, and a final critical paper.

English 443.001
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE    
Michael Kiernan

Come examine and enjoy the rich range of late sixteenth/early seventeenth century literature: sonnets and lyric, Ovidian erotic, pastoral eclogue, wedding song, proto-novel, prose essay, all manner of drama.  Close critical reading of individual works, with particular attention given to the dialogue created among writers and their genres as they discover, exploit, and evaluate a brave new world.
Among the readings: the sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth; Marlowe's Hero and Leander; the pastoral of Spenser, Marlowe, Sidney, and Ralegh; Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F.J.; Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe's Dr Faustus, Jonson's Volpone, Webster's Duchess of Malfi; Ben Jonson, and; Jack vs. Dr John Donne's verse, Bacon's Essays.
REQUIREMENTS:  Two in-class essay exams (25%/30%) and a final quiz (5%) on readings and discussions; critical termpaper (30%); active participation (10%).
TEXTS: Norton Anthology English Literature: 16th-17th centuries  Vol. B.  8th edn., New York: Norton, 2006.
Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, New Mermaids.  New York: Norton, 1990.
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, New Mermaids.  New York, 1989.

An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman.  World Classics.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

English 452
The Sensations of Victorian Poetry
Emily Harrington

 Perhaps more than the poetry of any other period, Victorian poetry aimed to engage the senses.  The course will begin with a question posed by Arthur Hallam at the beginning of the period: does poetry produce its effects more with sound or with sense? The landscapes and soundscapes of Victorian poetry in this course will be natural, urban, imaginative, and aesthetic, and our exploration of these categories will consistently ask how the visual can be a poetic effect. We begin with the significance of scientific developments of the period on conceptions of nature, then move on to ways of seeing the urban world, and understanding the signs of empire within and without British borders.  As the course considers imaginative visions, we will explore how Pre-Raphaelite and aestheticist poetry both engages in and withdraws from gritty modernity in its idealization of the artificial and the imaginary. The section on aesthetic visions will consider the hotly debated question of whether or not visual art can be translated into poetry. We’ll read poets lambasted as the “Fleshly School” of poetry and others that caused a scandal with their sensuous approach.  At the end of the term, we will compare two very different ways of envisioning Victorian landscape: the intensely spiritual and visceral works of Hopkins, and Hardy’s secular, deeply retrospective moments of vision. Throughout the course, we will consider how the poetry sounds, to the silent reader as well as when read aloud, and how the poetic rhythms represent poets’ visions.

English 453
The Victorian Novel
Robert Lougy

English 453 will be devoted to a reading of a number of major Victorian novels. The novels we will be reading will probably include the following:

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
George Eliot, Middlemarch

The nineteenth century is to fiction in England what the Renaissance was to drama, for it was an age in which great novelists flourished and in which great novels were written. We will be looking at some of the best of these novels, examining them as closely as time permits, looking not only at what the novelists had to say, but also the ways in which they said it. The novels we will be reading are firmly set in their own age and yet still speak to us today. I am interested in exploring the ways in which they do so.

The heart of the course will be class discussion. During the course of the semester written responses to the various novels will be asked for, and while these response papers will not be graded, they will be read. There will be two mid-terms and one final exam. Also all members of the class will be asked to participate in one class presentation involving one or more of the novels we will be reading.

English 457
Sandford Schwartz

A whirlwind tour of modern British Fiction from the end of World War II to the present day. The texts will be selected from a list of authors including Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, John Le Carre, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Jeannette Winterson, and Zadie Smith. We will also pay some attention to the recent revival of regional traditions and to concurrent developments in the drama, cinema, and television. A whirlwind tour of modern British Fiction from the end of World War II to the present day. The texts will be selected from a list of authors including Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, John Le Carre, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Jeannette Winterson, and Zadie Smith. We will also pay some attention to the recent revival of regional traditions and to concurrent developments in the drama, cinema, and television.

English 471  
Classical Rhetoric and American Movies
Xiaoye You

 Rhetoric is generally understood as the artistic way of communication or the study of effective communication. This class first surveys rhetorical theories and practices in both ancient Greece and ancient China. Then we will examine how rhetorical concepts and theories developed in those traditions remain powerful tools for us to understand American popular culture, particularly American movies. Students will read both primary and secondary texts to develop a firm grasp of concepts in the two traditions. Then together we will apply those concepts to study a few movies. In the second half of the semester, students will examine a movie of his or her choice, lead class discussions on this movie, and then write a research paper on the rhetorical aspects of the chose film. Course assignments include readings, notes, a term paper on an American movie of your choice, and a group presentation.

English 474  
World Englishes in Literature and Education
Xiaoye You

There is not just one English but in fact many global and regional variations of it. English is owned not only by its native speakers but by all its users around the world. These notions nowadays have become increasingly commonsensical among scholars and educators. What do those concepts mean for English majors and minors, who are future politicians, teachers, journalists, lawyers, and businessmen? The spread of English from Britain to the rest of the world is deeply trenched in colonialism and globalization. As it spreads, English has entered literature of many nations. This class will examine how English language is utilized in literature over the last two centuries and how it has transformed in the process. We will take a close look at the characteristics of Chinese English and African American English and draw implications for English literacy education in the United States. The class will have opportunities to interact with overseas college students to explore together the teaching and learning of English as an international language. Course assignments include readings, notes, and a term paper investigating English in literature and education.

English 482
Contemporary Literary Theory and Practice: Media Theory and Literature
Brian Lennon

An introduction to media theory in liaison with literature, literarity, and literary study. We will consider the novelty of electronic screen media, in a print culture of newspapers, magazines, and books; the simulation and remediation of older by newer media, and of newer by older media; the residuality of literary modernist print culture in a “postmodern” technocratic society; and the broader questions of technology, temporality, and modernity that shape these concepts. We will also examine a selection of key historical and contemporary artifacts in genres of hypertext and hypermedia fiction and nonfiction, “code poetry,” cybertext and “ergodic” literature, net art and Web art, and software and electronic installation  art, along with the critical debates generated by (and in some cases producing) them. Core readings from Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Marshall McLuhan, and Raymond Williams; Tim Berners-Lee, Vannevar Bush, Theodor Nelson, Richard Stallman, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener; Espen Aarseth, Jay David Bolter, N. Katherine Hayles, Michael Joyce, Lev Manovich, Stuart Moulthrop, and Rita Raley, among others.

English 487W.001
SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES  
Michael Kiernan 

We will explore together Shakespeare's protean response to the challenges and opportunities of comedy with particular attention to its dramatic script: from the robust early farces of Comedy of Errors and Taming of the Shrew, to the greenwood and fantasy of Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, the lively wit of Much Ado about Nothing to the troubled satire of All's Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure, culminating in the genre-bending of Winter's Tale.
REQUIREMENTS: Two in-class essay exams (25%/30%) and a final quiz (5%) on readings and discussions; critical termpaper (30%); active participation (10%).
TEXT: The Riverside Shakespeare.  Ed. G. Blakemore Evans.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn, 1997.

ENGL 487W
Literature and Culture: Bloomsbury
Christopher Reed

This section of ENGL 403 focuses on the famous Bloomsbury Group, which came together a century ago among students at Cambridge University. We will explore how the fiction produced by E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf relates to the art, ethics, aesthetic theory, historical writing, and economic theory produced by other members of the group. The class will also consider the ways that Bloomsbury continues to attract interest – and controversy – today.

Readings include Forster’s Howards End, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, selections from Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and other writings by and about Bloomsbury, including Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours. The class will also see films of Bloomsbury texts and about the Bloomsbury group.

In addition to studying Bloomsbury as an intellectual group, the seminar will attempt to recreate something of its dynamic of collaborative intellectual endeavor. Students will be expected to keep up with the readings, to participate actively in discussion, and to produce three polished essays.

English 487W
The Sonnet
Emily Harrington

From the persuasion of lovers to political protest, the sonnet has served poets over the centuries as a form that expresses large and complex ideas with utmost economy.  Asking why this form has been so essential to lyric poetry, this course will focus on the startling variety of approaches to the fourteen-line form from the early modern period to the present day.  Sonnets have most frequently been love poems, and we will explore the form’s modes of persuading lovers in all their scintillating variety.  In addition to reading numerous love sonnets, we will read poets who adapt the form to explore ideas about familial ties, religious devotion, death, mourning, and war. We will discuss how sonnet conventions change over time, and how those changes in poetic convention represent changes in the social, cultural, and political climate.   We will focus on how the form changes as its modes of circulation change over time. The course will emphasize sonnet sequences in particular, examining how individual poems work together, viewing the sequences potentially as narratives, arguments, and collections.

ENGL 487
The Films of  Alfred Hitchcock
Sandford Schwartz

A study of Alfred Hithcock's long career from twenties to the seventies, with some consideration  the variety of literary sources upon which he relied, from "serious"  authors such as Conrad and O'Casey to  "popular"  romances, mysteries, espionage thrillers, and horror fiction.  We will be examining the characteristic features of the stories that Hitchcock created out of his literary sources, the recurrent use of the theatrical conventions within his films, and the relationship between his films and the changing  artistic and cultural conditions of the twentieth century. We will also be looking at the variety of critical approaches (both literary and cinematic) that have been brought to bear on Hitchcock’s films Each session will involve some preliminary reading and a viewing of a film followed by discussion

English 487W
Senior Seminar: Genres of Migration and Displacement
Brian Lennon

Does the content or “experience” of migration and displacement place a certain pressure on the form of writing about it? Ought it to? In this seminar, we will explore the transcultural encounter in globalization as mediated in and by genres of writing. Examining literary figurations of Sephardic, Ottoman, and Maghrebi cosmopolitanism (Aciman, Pamuk, Djebar), North American aboriginal migration (Momaday), Caribbean diasporic return (Césaire), European civil war and unification (Sebald), and the production of the U.S. American West (Ondaatje), we will consider how memoir both serves and disserves authors’ (and narrators’) stories. We’ll consider the relationship between linguistic and cultural translation, and the literary implications of a cosmopolitanism experienced from above and from below, in the knowledge of languages and cultures meaningfully distant from one’s own. Finally, we’ll think about “life writing” as autobiographical writing that exceeds, resists or fails the existing generic conventions of published or publishable autobiography (and as writing that perhaps resists or fails publication itself).

English 487W
"American Renaissance:  Representations of Wildness in Antebellum American Literature"
Robert Burkholder

This course examines the way in which wildness, usually represented by indigenous people, was represented in works by writers like Bryant, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville, and Poe.  The course requirements include weekly objective quizzes on assigned reading, 2 critical papers, mid-term and final examinations. 

Undergraduate

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