Course Descriptions - Undergraduate

Penn State Adventure Lit Courses Offere through Outreach
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Spring 2008

English 129H.001
Shakespeare
Patrick Cheney
In this course, we will read Shakespeare as a new type of English author: not simply a “man of the theater” or even a poet, he is among the first English poet-playwrights, an author with a capacious literary career that includes both poems and plays.  We will read his most famous poetic work, the Sonnets, as well as examples from his four dramatic genres: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance.  Plays might include Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale.  In discussing Shakespeare’s poems and plays, we will concentrate on four cultural vectors that particularly engaged this author: religion (Protestantism, Catholicism, skepticism, immortality), politics (government, leadership, monarchy, republic), gender/sexuality (marriage, family, eroticism, identity), and literature itself (genre, allusion, myth, authorship).  We will ground our discussion of each vector in the historical environment of Renaissance England, engage in close reading of all works, and consider Shakespeare’s contribution to modern culture.  2-3 short response papers; 2 critical essays; 1 final examination.

English 194
Women Writers
Lisa Sternlieb
“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -- what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own?”  So begins Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, A Room of One’s Own.  Woolf sets out to discover what allows a woman to write fiction.  This semester we will read works of fiction by women that explore what it means for a woman to create art of any kind.  We will read novels about women writing, painting, singing, and acting.  We will encounter creative geniuses and frustrated, unfulfilled artists.  We will read 5 classic works – Jane Austen’s Emma, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse – and 3 works of fiction by young women writing today – Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. 

Requirements: Keep up with large reading load.  Attend each class.  Take occasional reading quizzes and 3 exams.

English 200
Jeff Nealon
English 200 is, broadly speaking, designed as an introduction to critical reading or what we'll be calling "theory"--an introduction to the specific questions posed by reading literature and other cultural artifacts, as well as an introduction to some recent critical concepts that offer (at least provisional, sometimes differing) answers to these questions.  What and/or how do texts and other cultural artifacts mean?  What are the roles of the author and the reader in the production of this meaning?  How are readings produced by readers, and, conversely, is there a way in which readers are produced by what they read?  What are the important differences between just reading something and interpreting it critically?  How are social roles and identities important in reading?  In short, perhaps the best way to describe the course is as an introduction to the theory and practice of interpretation.

This class assumes that the beginning student's primary difficulties with theory are not content-related ("This is too hard!"), but are related more immediately to questions of practice ("What can I do with this 'difficult' material?").  It is to the this question that we will return time and time again.

Grading:  There will be two exams and 2 graded essays--each around 5 pages. 

English 201.001
What is Literature?
Lisa Sternlieb
What is Literature?  We will answer this question by focusing on how writers converse with previous writers and how texts converse with earlier texts.  We will read Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia alongside Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and science writing by James Gleick. We will read Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita alongside poetry by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, and Browning, short stories by Poe and essays by Freud.  We will read excerpts of biographies of both Byron and Nabokov.  We will examine the influence of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost on both Nabokov and Stoppard and on such contemporary poets as Levertov, Garcia, and Kasdorf.  Our central theme, uniting many of these texts, will be exile.  We will end the semester by reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of stories about Indians in America and Americans in India, Interpreter of Maladies.

English 201.002
Linda Selzer
This class approaches the question “What is literature?” from four different critical perspectives. In the first section, Responding Formally, we will examine some formal elements of language use as we discuss a wide selection of poetry.  In the second section, Engaging the Question, we will examine some classic statements that have attacked or defended the value of literature as we discuss a selection of plays. The third section, Historicizing the Question, will focus on definitions of romanticism, realism, and anti-realism (and some short stories representing each) in order to consider the sorts of issues, concerns, and formal innovations that motivate changing definitions of literature. In the final section of the course, Entering a Critical Debate on the Question, the class will consider  what is at stake in competing definitions of literature as we read several different statements on literary art and apply their insights to Ellison’s Invisible Man.

English 201.003
“What is Literature?”
Emily Harrington
This course will take seriously the question in its title, asking what distinguishes literature from other kinds of writing.  In addition to supplementing literary readings with non-literary texts, the course will consider how understanding different kinds of literature helps to define it.  We will begin by looking at lyric poems, with a special emphasis on close reading, and will culminate this section with Robert Pinsky’s book-length poem An Explanation of America.  We will go on to investigate the genre of drama with two plays that focus on family conflict: King Lear and Desire Under the Elms.  In the final seven weeks of the course, we will study how narrative structure works by focusing on two long, serialized narratives: Dickens’ Bleak House and the first season of the television show “The Wire,” which we will explore in parallel.  Because the primary aim of the course is to introduce students to techniques and skills essential for the English major, there will be special emphasis on literary technique and the ways in which authors use language, poetic sound, and narrative strategies to create the worlds that so captivate their readers.

English 221
British Literature to 1798
Scott T. Smith
This course surveys British literature from its earliest beginnings and extending into the eighteenth century. Such a sprawling expanse requires selective coverage, but the course nonetheless provides a general overview of the various literary traditions spanning this broad period—including epic, romance, allegory, lyric poetry, prose, and drama—as well as some of the cultural and political forces that shaped those traditions. Our reading will include (in part) Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. These texts offer a variety of arresting content: monster-slaying, fart jokes, cross-dressing, the pain of love, sexual desire, diabolic temptation, religion, exemplary conduct, politics, travel narrative and gothic horror. Students will be required to write two short papers, take a written midterm and final, and participate in daily discussion.

The course focuses on contemporary Latina/o cultural production, placing it in historical context and analyzing it through the framework of borders. We make connections between Latina/o groups, showing both similarities and differences. We examine the politics of representation, asking how artistic texts define community and individual identities that are coherent yet also embody the complexity of these identities. The texts cross and claim borders—cultural, sexual, gender, geographical, generational, spiritual, and institutional. We will ask how these art forms work to claim border spaces: How are cultural differences retained without constructing hierarchies of exclusion? What models of identity do these artists propose in response to structures of domination? We’ll read novels, short stories, poems, history, and theoretical essays; we will also watch several films.

Throughout the course, we will attend to the particular histories and cultures of Latina/o groups; it is crucial to both maintain the specificity of each culture (for example, Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, and Dominican-American) and their connections to each other as Latinas/os in the U.S.  We inquire into the relationship between geographical borders, such as that between the U.S. and Mexico, and other kinds of borders and border spaces.

English 231.001
American Literature to 1865        
Carla Mulford
 The readings for the course comprise the British American literary canon up to the era of the Civil War.  While investigating the cultural issues relevant to the production of key writings from British North America, we will also consider the extent to which there are many American stories from which North America's story of a national literature has emerged.  N.B.: This is historical literature, and much of it is not typical of the imaginative literature with which you will be familiar from courses in later American literatures or British literature.  You’ll be putting your historical imagination to work for this course. 

Assignments: Writing assignments include three essay examinations (part out-of-class, part in-class) on issues and themes relevant to the course readings and discussed in class.  Other assignments might include impromptu writing assignments developed to stimulate class discussion.  Readings are to be completed by the date on which the reading is listed on the syllabus.  Class participation and any impromptu written work will be counted toward the final grade for the course.

Two required texts (two anthology texts):  Early American Writings, Gen. Ed., Carla Mulford, and The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition: Volume B, Early Nineteenth Century, Gen. Ed., Paul Lauter

English 265.001
“Reading Nonfiction”
Bob Burkholder
This is a course in nonfiction, a type of writing that has become increasingly popular and increasingly difficult to define.  Couldn’t a poem or a play or a film script be “nonfiction” if it aims to represent historically verifiable events?  Isn’t much of the nonfiction we read based on well-crafted narrative and therefore virtually indistinguishable from short stories or novels (that is, fiction)?   How do we define nonfiction and what can we make of attempts by writers who purposely attempt to blur the line between  fiction and non-fiction?  These questions are a starting point for our study of the genre, which will examine various types of nonfiction—such as adventure writing, science writing, the personal essay, the memoir, the autobiography, letters and journals—and focus specifically on nonfiction writers who are concerned about the relationship of culture and nature, the individual and the larger world.  Requirements will include weekly quizzes on reading, mid-term and final exams, and two brief responses to reading.

English 300M
Sentiment and Sensation in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Hester Blum
The novels that were most ardently read by nineteenth-century Americans have usually been characterized as either sentimental or sensational. Both sentimental and sensational literature demanded a strong emotional response from its readers, but the terms have been used very differently: sentimental fiction has been thought to be feminine, domestic, and private, while sensational literature is understood as masculine, violent, and public. In this course we will read some of the most popular works of fiction written in the nineteenth century in order to challenge the notion of whether men read (or wrote) differently than women. What makes a reader weep or sigh, and what makes a reader shocked or aroused? And why was such literature far more popular with readers than the more canonical writings of, say, Thoreau or Emerson?  Readings may include Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lippard’s The Quaker City, Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Cummins’s The Lamplighter, Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, and Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

English 300M
Multiculturalism Inc.
Jane Juffer
In the last two decades, multiculturalism has moved from a contested term to a largely (though still unevenly) accepted set of practices in many institutions, including universities, other schools, corporations, the fashion industry, and media conglomerates. Despite its growth—or perhaps because of it—there has been no agreement on what multiculturalism actually is, how to enact it, or what to expect from it.  For some, such as Angela Davis, multiculturalism has become a tool for corporate diversity management, a way to “suppress conflict” among a “racially, ethnically, and culturally heterogeneous workforce.”  Other critics, such as Christopher Newfield and Avery Gordon, argue that  multiculturalism can be used as the foundation for a truly “pluralist” country, a foundation that does not necessarily equate pluralism with assimilation.
            This course will not attempt to reconcile competing views but rather to examine in local instances, at specific sites, the various deployments of multiculturalism. We will begin by examining multiculturalism in English departments, focusing on canon revision, then expand outward from there. We will look at the university and its diversity practices, locating those in a history of the humanities and ethnic studies programs such as Latina/o and African-American studies. What is the relation between the corporate university and the global economy, especially in relation to training students to work in a diverse labor market? How do different consumer sites, such as Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, use diversity as a marketing tool? How has advertising become invested in multiculturalism? What labor practices are erased in the push toward diversity? What is the relationship between diversity and globalization? We will attempt to sketch ethical yet practical engagements with diversity practices.
            Our texts of study will vary widely, from literature to film, from corporate policy documents to university web sites. We will also venture outside the classroom, to various sites on and off campus where multiculturalism is displayed and practiced.
            This class is highly participatory, including student investigations into different aspects of multiculturalism. Each student is required to complete four investigations, done either individually or in groups (your choice).  These investigations will have two components: an oral report to the class and a written paper. Each student will also write a long final paper.

English 303M.001
Linda Selzer
This course investigates the controversial status of black cosmopolitanism by examining several recent approaches to cosmopolitan thinking in relation to the work of two writers, Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson.  In 1953, Ellison won the National Book Award for Invisible Man.  In 1990, Johnson became the only black male writer since Ellison to win the award, for Middle Passage.  Recent debate over black cosmopolitanism has centered upon its complex relationships to nationalism and ethnicity. Does cosmopolitanism’s revitalized appeal to universal human rights provide a basis for progressive social reform, or does it promote abstract loyalties at the expense of actually existing ethnic, geographical, and national communities?  This class will explore the conceptual boundaries of black cosmopolitanism by investigating several recent attempts to describe a situated, critical, or vernacular cosmopolitanism in relation to the prose and fiction of Ellison and Johnson.  Readings will include critical articles on cosmopolitan thinking; Ellison’s Invisible Man; selections from the Collected Essays of Ralph; Flying Home: and Other Stories; and short stories and three novels by Charles Johnson (Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale, and Dreamer).

English 402.002
Literature and Society: Wilderness Literature
Bob Burkholder
Wilderness has been a constant in American culture from the beginning: it was an irrefutable fact of life for early European-American colonists, later it was a key component in the nineteenth-century concept of Manifest Destiny, and, since the end of the nineteenth century, it has been the focus of sharp ideological debates about the use and conservation of natural resources and the preservation of key aspects of American identity.  Just now, questions involving wilderness are extraordinarily timely, especially given the unresolved status of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the attempt to eliminate snowmobiles from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, and the ban on road building in National Forests announced by President Clinton on January 5, 2001 and recently upheld in federal court despite the Bush Administration’s attempts to ignore or countermand it.  The purpose of this course is to introduce you to some of the issues involved in the debate over wilderness.  We will read some fine nature writing, discuss the history of wilderness in America, and get a true sense of the debate through the writings of philosophers, ecologists, historians, and environmentalists.  Requirements will include weekly quizzes on reading, mid-term and final exams, and two critical responses to the reading of  three to four  pages.

English 404
Mapping Identity, Difference, and Place:
The Politics of Language in Postcolonial Literature
SURESH  CANAGARAJAH
In this course, we will analyze the role English language plays in representing the identities of multilingual writers from former British colonies. We will read representative poetry, fiction, and drama from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean Islands to consider the challenges in using a second language to articulate difference. Special attention will be paid to the writings of Achebe, Soyinka, Walcott, Rushdie, and Roy. As we consider the different strategies these authors have used over time to represent themselves more effectively in English, we will also make forays into theoretical literature on the politics of English language. After studying the early debates between Achebe, Ngugi, and Okara on ways of negotiating the possible alien values informing English, we move on to theorizations of hybrid identities and literacies in the geopolitical contact zones from the work of Anzaldua, Bhabha, and Pratt among others. In addition to articles and creative works posted electronically on Angel, we will choose texts for discussion from Rotten English, edited by Dohra Ahmad (Norton, 2007). The assignments will constitute short response essays on theoretical articles, an end of term paper on creative literature, and a mid term mini-research that involves interviewing a student from a postcolonial community to understand the strategies he/she employs to represent his/her identities in any genre of English writing

English 414
Biographical Writing
Toby Thompson
The course will be conducted as a writing workshop based on a study of the literary development of the New Biography and the New Journalism.  You will learn the careful application of fictional techniques to the writing of your own nonfiction through projects that will lead to full-length articles.

Attendance at all classes is required, as is class participation.  In fact, one third of your grade will be for your class participation.

Two 4000-word articles, one due at the middle of the semester, one at the end of the semester, are required.  One article will be biographical, one autobiographical.  These will constitute two-thirds of your grade.

Any late article will receive a maximum grade of C.

Shorter exercises will be done, either in class or at home.

There will be neither mid-term nor final examinations.

Academic Integrity Statement:
Penn State defines academic integrity as the pursuit of scholarly activity in an open, honest and responsible manner.  All students should act with personal integrity, respect other students' dignity, rights and property, and help create and maintain an environment in which all can succeed through the fruits of their efforts.

Dishonesty of any kind will not be tolerated in this course.  Dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating, plagiarizing, fabricating information or citations, facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others, having unauthorized possession of examinations, submitting work of another person or work previously used without informing the instructor, or tampering with the academic work of other students.  Students who are found to be dishonest will receive academic sanctions and will be reported to the University's Judicial Affairs office for possible further disciplinary sanction.

English 415
Advanced Article Writing
Toby Thompson
The course will be conducted as a writing workshop based on a study of the literary development of the New Biography and the New Journalism.  You will learn the careful application of fictional techniques to the writing of your own nonfiction through projects that will lead to full-length articles.

Attendance at all classes is required, as is class participation.  In fact, one third of your grade will be for your class participation.

Two 4000-word articles, one due at the middle of the semester, one at the end of the semester, are required.  One article will be biographical, one autobiographical.  These will constitute two-thirds of your grade.

Any late article will receive a maximum grade of C.

Shorter exercises will be done, either in class or at home.

There will be neither mid-term nor final examinations.

Textbooks will include Literary Journalism, by Norman Sims, The Secret Parts of Fortune, by Ron Rosenbaum, The Beholder’s Eye, by Walt Harrington, and Life Stories from The New Yorker, by David Remnick.

As this is a writing and not a literature seminar, selections from these texts will be assigned as the problems they solve or the techniques they demonstrate arise in class.  We will read biographical selections from these texts in the first half of the semester, autobiographical selections during the second.  You are encourage to read as many of these pieces as possible.

Academic Integrity Statement:
Penn State defines academic integrity as the pursuit of scholarly activity in an open, honest and responsible manner.  All students should act with personal integrity, respect other students' dignity, rights and property, and help create and maintain an environment in which all can succeed through the fruits of their efforts.

Dishonesty of any kind will not be tolerated in this course.  Dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating, plagiarizing, fabricating information or citations, facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others, having unauthorized possession of examinations, submitting work of another person or work previously used without informing the instructor, or tampering with the academic work of other students.  Students who are found to be dishonest will receive academic sanctions and will be reported to the University's Judicial Affairs office for possible further disciplinary sanction.

English 421, Sections 1 & 2
Advanced Expository Writing: Writing for the Community
Paul M. Kellermann
As college students, you naturally belong to a community—several communities, in fact.  And you can easily see how you function as a member within a community of your peers.  Students—like birds of a feather—frolic together.  But what about the larger community, the community that exists on the far side of College Avenue?  Off-campus. 

This course asks you to ingrain yourself in the community.  What’s more, it asks you to convince your peers that they too are members of this community.  To do so, you will have just one tool to work with—language. 

This will not be a traditional college class.  The walls of our classroom will extend in a ten-mile radius from the corner of College and Allen.  And your syllabus and assignments will be self-designed.  Be prepared.  Being a responsible member of the community is arduous, time-consuming work—but it offers rewards you’re unlikely to find in an ordinary classroom setting.

English 432.001
American Novel to 1900:Novel American Nations
Carla Mulford
American fiction came of age in an era of significant social unrest and transformation, almost as if it were asking a crucial question, “What is an American?”  While some fictions were pure fantasy, others spoke to the ideology of nationalism fostered by elites who, in a sense, attempted to create a putative nation from the disparate peoples inhabiting English-speaking North America.  Focusing on the ways in which fiction enabled different groups to speak to (and about) a range of putatively American publics, this course examines novels published between the 1790s and the 1890s.  To assist our thinking about societal pressures and nationalism, we’ll employ some theoretical models of national identity and look at the ways that writers of European, Irish, and African American ancestry in America employed novelistic discourse to call their own “nations” into being.  Novels we’ll likely cover are The Power of Sympathy (W. H. Brown), The Coquette (Hannah Webster Foster), The Prairie (James Fenimore Cooper), The Cross and the Shamrock (Hugh Quigley), The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Iola Leroy (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), The American (Henry James), and Blake: Or, The Huts of Africa (Martin R. Delany).

Assignments: Writing assignments include two essays (about 5 pages each, with an option for students to write a third paper) and four in-class quizzes (short answer questions) on issues and themes relevant to the course readings as discussed in class.  Other assignments might include impromptu writing assignments developed to stimulate class discussion.  Readings are to be completed by the date on which the reading is listed on the syllabus.  Class participation and any impromptu written work will be counted toward the final grade for the course.

English 435
The American Short Story
Shirley Moody
This version of English 435 focuses on the development of the African American short story within the context of American cultural and literary history. We will outline the continuity and change that exists among texts that comprises this body of literature, while also locating our discussion of the aesthetic development of the African American short story in relation to significant socio-historical and cultural moments, including slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the “Harlem” Renaissance, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements.  Authors studied in the course include Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Andrea Lee, Alice Childress, James Alan McPherson and Toni Morrison, among others. 

English 436
Jeff Nealon
The contemporary American fiction we'll be studying this semester will consist largely of what's called "postmodern" writing.  Working toward some understanding of that term will be one of the tasks of the semester (trying to think especially about whether we still live in a "postmodern" world at all), but from the start we'll be interested in specifically examining at least three topics in and around this writing:  most simply put, we'll be interested in sex and drugs and social control. 

More concretely, we'll be looking at certain kinds of limit experiences (most often concerning gender, sex, death, family, intoxicants, mania, confusion, madness, language, war, circus freaks, game show hosts--all the usual suspects) in this fiction, and trying to work out the social and textual implications of those experiences.  Why the obsession with limits in much of this contemporary writing?  Is reading itself a kind of limit experience?  Does such personal experience--however intense--pose any kind of meaningful question to mechanisms of social control?  If so, how?  And if not, why not?   Is the task of contemporary American fiction not so much to discover who we are, but to flee who we are? 

We'll read fiction by the likes of Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, Harry Crews, Don DeLillo, Phillip K Dick, Katherine Dunn, Richard Grossman, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, and/or Ishmael Reed; and theoretical work by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Tom Frank, and Fredric Jameson, among others. 

Grading:  2 exams, and a final argumentative paper, incorporating some of the critical conversations going on in and around contemporary fiction. 

Requirements:  Two in-class essay exams (25%/30%) and a final quiz (5%) on readings and discussions; critical termpaper and source review of a play not on the syllabus (30%); active participation (10%).

Course text: The Riverside Shakespeare.  Ed. G. Blakemore Evans.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn, 1997.

English 452
“The Victorians”
Rachel Teukolsky
This course will introduce the prose, poetry, and short fiction of Victorian England. The literature will be organized according to some of the most important topics of the era, including the rise of the modern city, reactions to the Industrial Revolution, the “Woman Question” and theories of gender, literatures of social protest, religion and doubt, changing views of the natural world, and the culture of travel and imperialism. Authors will likely include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde, among others.

English 466
The African American Novel I
Shirley Moody
This course explores the development of the African American novel, from the 1850s through the Harlem Renaissance.  Students in English 466 gain a working knowledge of the major themes, literary traditions, narrative strategies, stylistics features and structural characteristics that emerge and shape this body of literature. Our discussion of the aesthetic development of the African American novel will by be informed by questions of race, class, gender and nation, and we will situate texts in their various historical and cultural contexts.  Students are introduced to key literary concepts and terms that will inform their reading and writing about these texts.  Authors studied in the course may include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Sutton Griggs, Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. 

English 487W.004
HITCHCOCK
Sanford Schwartz
In this seminar we’ll explore the Gothic tradition since its inception in the second half eighteenth century and continuing into our own time.  After looking at some British and American texts of the foundational period (c. 1760-1820) and few mid-nineteenth century works, we’ll focus on the Gothic resurgence at the end of the 19th century—Bram Stoker, Stevenson, James among others—and on the Goth(ic) revival of recent years, including some of the vast body of theoretical, critical, and historical studies that have appeared in the last two decades.  At all points we’ll be probing the social and cultural conditions that have given rise to the Gothic in its various forms and account for its perpetual return over the course of several centuries.  We’ll also pay some attention to the development of the Gothic into modern popular genres such as the detective story, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and to its seemingly inexhaustible capacity to haunt the silver screen.    

English 487.005
The Sonnet: from Petrarch to Seamus Heaney
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.  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.  Literary culture and ideas about the circulation of poems will be an essential part of the course, as we investigate how poets write for particular audiences. The course will emphasize sonnet sequences in particular, examining  how individual poems work together, viewing the sequences potentially as narratives, arguments, and collections.  Poets considered might include, but are not limited to, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Lady Mary Wroth, John Donne, Wordsworth, Keats, Charlotte Smith, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, and Marilyn Hacker.

English 487.007
SHAKESPEARE COMEDY
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.

REQUIRED TEXTThe Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn.  Houghton Mifflin, 1997.PARTICIPATION

Your daily imput is expected and valued; attendance noted.EXAMINATIONSTwo bluebook essay exams and a final quiz on course readings and lecture-discussions.CRITICAL TERMPAPER

English 490 / Women’s Studies 490
Seventeenth-Century Women Writers
Laura Knoppers
This course looks at a rich and diverse range of women’s writing in seventeenth-century England.  Genres will include women’s diaries, autobiography, letters, poetry, prophetic writings, political and religious tracts, prose narrative, recipe books, and drama.  Particular texts include the diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, the autobiography of Alice Thornton, the love letters of Dorothy Osborne, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and The Convent of Pleasure, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter.  Requirements: faithful attendance, spirited participation, midterm, final, and a research paper.  

Latina/o Studies Descriptions

The course focuses on contemporary Latina/o cultural production, placing it in historical context and analyzing it through the framework of borders. We make connections between Latina/o groups, showing both similarities and differences. We examine the politics of representation, asking how artistic texts define community and individual identities that are coherent yet also embody the complexity of these identities. The texts cross and claim borders—cultural, sexual, gender, geographical, generational, spiritual, and institutional. We will ask how these art forms work to claim border spaces: How are cultural differences retained without constructing hierarchies of exclusion? What models of identity do these artists propose in response to structures of domination? We’ll read novels, short stories, poems, history, and theoretical essays; we will also watch several films.

Throughout the course, we will attend to the particular histories and cultures of Latina/o groups; it is crucial to both maintain the specificity of each culture (for example, Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, and Dominican-American) and their connections to each other as Latinas/os in the U.S.  We inquire into the relationship between geographical borders, such as that between the U.S. and Mexico, and other kinds of borders and border spaces.

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