COURSE OFFERINGS

111f    Composing in English    For students for whom English is a second language. Intensive practice in composing in English with considerable attention to the requirements of the academic essay. Work on syntax and grammar only as needed. Nongraded. Three credit hours.    SANBORN

112fs    Expository Writing Workshop    For any student who wants extra work in writing. Taken in conjunction with English 115 or with a writing-emphasis course in another department at any level. Meets as individual tutorial in the Writers' Center. Nongraded. One credit hour.    SANBORN

115fs    English Composition    Frequent practice in expository writing to foster clarity of organization and expression in the development of ideas. The assigned reading will vary from section to section, but all sections will discuss student writing. Required for first-year students. Students with an Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 are exempted. Four credit hours.    FACULTY

115Jj    English Composition    Frequent practice in expository writing to foster clarity of organization and expression in the development of ideas. The assigned reading will vary from section to section, but all sections will discuss student writing. Required for first-year students. Students with an Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 are exempted. Three credit hours.    FACULTY

136f    Literature in the Post-War Era, 1945-1970    A writing course focusing on issues raised in some of the more controversial works of the period, such as Kerouac's On The Road, Olsen's Yonnondio, the dramas of Baraka, Orwell's 1984, and Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. Fulfills the College's composition requirement (English 115). Requires concurrent enrollment in Philosophy 136; admission by application. Four credit hours.    BASSETT

151s    Reading and Writing about Literature    Topics, texts, and genres will vary from section to section, but all sections will emphasize close reading, detailed analysis of imaginative literature from different times and cultures, and careful critical writing. Prerequisite: English 115 or exemption. Four credit hours.  L.    OSBORNE

156f    Writing Arguments    Students will consider and and write various forms of argument, including writing that might not be called "argumentation." Fulfills the College's composition requirement (English 115). Requires concurrent enrollment in Philosophy 156; admission by application. Four credit hours.    SANBORN

172fs    Literary Studies    "What is literature?" or "When is it literature?" A focus on the students' encounter with the text, the words on the page. Examples of poetry, prose, and drama written in English, from different times and cultures; and work toward developing a basic critical vocabulary for understanding and discussing these different forms of literature. Frequent practice in careful critical writing. Required for English majors; should be taken during the first year. Does not satisfy the College area requirement in literature. Prerequisite: English 115 or exemption. Four credit hours.    FACULTY

172Jj    Literary Studies    "What is literature?" or "When is it literature?" A focus on the students' encounter with the text, the words on the page. Examples of poetry, prose, and drama written in English, from different times and cultures; and work toward developing a basic critical vocabulary for understanding and discussing these different forms of literature. Frequent practice in careful critical writing. Required for English majors; should be taken during the first year. Does not satisfy the College area requirement in literature. Prerequisite: English 115 or exemption. Three credit hours.    SAGASER

[179]    Literature and Imagination    An introduction to creative writing and close reading. A variety of works in many different forms will be examined--poems, novels, screenplays, drama, and short stories. Issues of craft will be addressed by writing original poetry and fiction. Four credit hours.  L.    

214s    Tutoring Writing    Discussion of readings on the process of writing and methods of tutoring. Theory combined with practice in peer review of student papers, mock tutorials, and actual supervised tutorials. Students completing the course may apply for work-study positions in the Writers' Center. Nongraded. Prerequisite: Sign up with the instructor in the Writers' Center. Two credit hours.    SANBORN

216j    Advanced Academic Writing    Intensive workshop and individualized work on a range of academic writing projects. Students will write one long paper and several shorter essays; most work will undergo multiple revisions. The major project will include an oral presentation. Readings, some selected by students, will be geared to topics undertaken by the class. Weekly conferences with instructor. Three credit hours.    SANBORN

224f    Theater History I    Listed as Theater and Dance 224 (q.v.). Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.    SEWELL

226s    Theater History II    Listed as Theater and Dance 226 (q.v.). Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.    BOX

228s    Theater History III    Listed as Theater and Dance 228 (q.v.). Four credit hours.    BARNETT

255f    Studies in American Literary History    Puritans to the Civil War. The relationships among the historical American contexts in which literary works were produced, examining them as imaginative artifacts, tracing their impact on the social and cultural elements of the America of their time, and seeking their significance for readers in later and different worlds. Preference to American studies majors. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    ONION

256s    Studies in American Literary History    Civil War to the Present. The relationships among the historical American contexts in which literary works were produced, examining them as imaginative artifacts, tracing their impact on the social and cultural elements of the America of their time, and seeking their significance for readers in later and different worlds. Preference to American studies majors. Four credit hours.  L.    STUBBS

265f    Studies in British Literary History, Beowulf to Milton    An examination of major British literary traditions by tracing the dialogues and debates on the issues of literary representation and influence, poetic traditions and counter-traditions, and aesthetics. An attempt to situate these debates within their specific cultural contexts and to examine their role in defining the parameters of literary culture through reading representative texts from the period. For students who wish to acquire a more comprehensive view of the continuum of British literature. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    MANNOCCHI

266s    Studies in British Literary History, 1600 to 1900    Selected works of British literature studied with an emphasis on the changing definition of "literature" itself. Suitable for both majors and non-majors. Readings may include lyric poems by John Donne, Defoe's Roxana, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Eliot's Adam Bede, and critical essays by Matthew Arnold. English 265 is not a prerequisite. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    KARBIENER

271fs    Critical Theory    The study of selected texts, through close reading and detailed analysis, and the consideration of various critical approaches, methods of inquiry, and strategies of interpretation. English majors should take this course in the sophomore year. Prerequisite: English 172. Four credit hours.  L.    FACULTY

278fs    Creative Writing: Fiction    Introduction to the writing of fiction, with emphasis on student manuscripts. Prerequisite: English 115. Four credit hours.  A.    KENNEY, SPARK

279f    Creative Writing: Poetry    Introduction to the writing of poetry, with emphasis on student manuscripts. Prerequisite: English 115. Four credit hours.  A.    P. HARRIS

311f    Middle Ages: Medieval Narratives and Cultural Authority    The ways in which late medieval narratives create, recreate, and resist the various forms of cultural authority in 14th-century England. Both canonical and noncanonical materials, including romance, sermon literature, chronicles, hagiography, poetic narratives, drama, and the historical, social, and material contexts in which these works were written and transmitted. Readings include Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, the Pearl poet, Margery Kempe, John Hoccleve, John of Trevisa, and Bromyard; critical skills honed with readings in the historical/cultural/critical traditions of Lee Patterson, Carolyn Dinshaw, Seth Lerer, Paul Strohm, Miri Reuben, and David Aers. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    NARIN VAN COURT

312f    Contemporary Asian American Women Writers    Listed as Women's Studies 315 (q.v.). Four credit hours.  L, D.    THOMA

313s    Renaissance Poetry    The nature, power, and history of poetry; the forms and uses--social, political, religious, personal--of lyric and narrative poetry written in English during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Analysis of the poems' constructions of voice and their representations of thought, selfhood, national identity, love, desire, faith, and mortality. The period's poetic theory, including important defenses of poetry, and the debate about rhyme. Readings in Wyatt, Pembroke, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Raleigh, Daniel, Campion, Shakespeare, Donne, and others. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    SAGASER

314f    17th-Century Poetry    Close reading of both canonical poems (mostly by men) and less canonical poems (mostly by women) written during England's volatile, fascinating 17th century. A comparison of these texts, charting representations of gender, developments in poetic style, the interrelations of secular and sacred poetic traditions, and the intersections of personal and political concerns. Readings include works by Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Speght, Herbert, Wroth, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, Philips, Behn, and others. One weekend day and night will be spent in a marathon reading of Milton's Paradise Lost. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    SAGASER

315s    The Irish Renaissance    The major figures of the literary movement that took place in Ireland at the beginning of the century. Texts include Yeats's poetry and plays, Joyce's Ulysses, Synge's Playboy of the Western World, and O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock to illustrate the nature and scope of their achievements against the background of Anglo-Irish political turmoil and European cultural transformation. Four credit hours.  L.    ARCHIBALD

[316]    The Restoration    The prose, poetry, and drama of 1660-1700, with special emphasis on the works of John Dryden and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Four credit hours.  L.    

317s    The Eighteenth Century I    Selected works by writers of the first half of the century, such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Henry Fielding. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    ARCHIBALD

[318]    The 18th Century II    Selected works by writers of the second half of the century, such as James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Hannah More, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Matthew Lewis, William Blake, Edmund Burke, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Four credit hours.  L.    

321s    The British Romantic Period    The British Romantics redefined literature during a period of unprecedented social and intellectual change. An examination of the revolutionary capacities of the Romantic imagination, as tested and explored by the era's poets, prose stylists, and political and theoretical essayists. Writers to be discussed include established representatives of the "Spirit of the Age," as well as voices whose significance has been overlooked or underrated, such as Hemans, Clare, and Dorothy Wordsworth. Four credit hours.  L.    KARBIENER

[323]    Victorian Literature I    The idea of "culture" in the mid-Victorian period and the social pressures of class, religion, gender, and race that formed and transformed it. Readings include Victorian predecessors such as Walter Scott, novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, and George Eliot, prose by Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill, and Matthew Arnold, and poems by Alfred Tennyson and the Rossettis. Novels, essays, and poems considered as participants in Victorian debates that created "culture" as a political category and helped shape modern literary and cultural criticism. Four credit hours.  L.    

324f    Victorian Literature II    The conflict between the elite and an emerging mass culture in later-19th-century British society and culture; how issues raised by colonialism, commodity culture, and emergent socialist and feminist movements shaped that divide. Narrative texts that related the crisis in high-cultural Victorian values to questions of racial and ethnic "otherness," including works by Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and William Morris. Four credit hours.  L.    SUCHOFF

325f    Modern British Fiction    The works of Hardy, Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Forster, and Lawrence framed within the context of the aesthetic tenets and practices of what is called "literary modernism." To what extent does the literature embody the ideas of "spatialization," "dehumanization," and "introversion"? What continuities and paradoxes are implicit in the modernist notions of "subjectivity," "tradition," "time," "history," and "identity," and how can they be explained within the larger historical and social developments of the era--post-agrarian, industrial capitalism, colonialism, and European transculturalism? Readings include novels and critical essays by early modernists, post-war scholars who attempted to map the movement, and contemporary poststructural critics. Four credit hours.  L.    ROY

[326]    Modern Irish Poetry    The origins, contexts, nature, and achievements of Irish poetry after Yeats. Poets selected from among Louis MacNiece, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Eamon Grennan, Ciar'an Carson. Four credit hours.  L.    

[333]    Modern American Drama, 1920-1970    American dramatic literature and theater history during the modern period, with emphasis on three American theater movements: the Group Theater in the 1930s, Broadway in the 1940s and '50s, and the Living Theater in the 1960s. Four credit hours.  L.    

[336]    Early American Women Writers    Is there a "female literary tradition" in America? Moving from the colonial era to the early 20th century, the course explores many of the themes central to women's lives, while also investigating the literary genres traditionally associated with women's writing, exploring the insights of feminist historians, and assessing the recent critical reclamations of "female" genres such as domestic fiction and the sentimental. Prerequisite: English 172 for English majors. Four credit hours.  L, D.    

338f    The American Renaissance I: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville    A close study of the works of these writers in the context of their times. Particular attention to such movements as anti-slavery and women's rights. Four credit hours.  L.    BRANCACCIO

339s    The American Renaissance II    A close reading of the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson with emphasis on the transcendentalists' search for heightened consciousness and the connections between poetic and scientific truth. Four credit hours.  L.    BRANCACCIO

341s    American Realism and Naturalism    Three literary genres that dominated late 19th century American literature: realism, regionalism, and naturalism. How these categories developed in relation to specific social and economic conditions. Are these genres as clear-cut as they seem? Why did certain genres "get more respect" from the literary establishment? How did issues of race, gender, and class influence whether a given text was considered realist, naturalist, or regionalist? Four credit hours.  L.    STUBBS

342s    American Indian Literature    The decades since the 1960s have seen a vigorous outpouring of literature from American Indian writers, many of whom merge oral tradition with Western literary forms to create a distinctively native voice. Mythopoetics, traditional stories and myths, poetry, narrative, and drama will provide a basis on which to establish the relationship between contemporary writers and the traditional materials on which they draw. Four credit hours.  L, D.    ONION

343f    African-American Literature    Particular attention to the much-neglected contributions of African-American women writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larson, and Zora Neale Hurston, leading to a critical understanding of the ways African-American writers in the 19th and 20th centuries have responded artistically to problems inherent in American democracy concerning race, identity, marginality, gender, and class. Interpretive methods that will inform readings by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Chester Himes include formalism, historicism, feminist criticism, and myth criticism. Four credit hours.  L, D.    BRYANT

344s    19th-Century American Poetry    A detailed study of the works of Whitman and Dickinson: poems, correspondence, and prose, with an emphasis on the tensions between body and spirit, the social world and the individual, the sublime, and questions of gender and power. Some theoretical material will serve as context to the literary works. Four credit hours.  L.    SADOFF

[345]    Modern American Fiction    Major works of American fiction since 1920--by Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bellow, O'Connor, Alice Walker, and others--will be analyzed, emphasizing the pattern of experience of the protagonist in conflict with the modern world. Four credit hours.  L.    

347s    Modern American Poetry    A close look at the poetry and theoretical constructs of Modernism, its esthetic, social and metaphysical stances as reflected in the poetry, the essays, and ideological statements of its partisans and opponents. Poets to be considered in literary, historical, and cultural context will be Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. Four credit hours.  L.    SADOFF

348s    Postcolonial Literatures    The English language presents one of the most interesting paradoxes of our times. Although it emerged as the dominant language of the British Empire, and has subsequently acquired the status of the global language of our times, it has also witnessed many transformations. Inflected by the influence of other languages and cultures of the colonies, what was once the master language of the empire has proliferated into many "Englishes." The phenomenon of literary hybridization and "creolization" in literature that has come out of former colonies of the British Empire in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. The histories that have shaped these emerging traditions, and the ways in which writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Raja Rao, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid have appropriated, challenged, or otherwise modified their inherited "colonial" literary traditions. Four credit hours.  L.    ROY

349s    Modern Jewish Writing: From the Diaspora to the Modern Israeli Novel    How did the ancient, ritual language of a European minority, no longer a spoken tongue, arise to become one of the most vibrant and creative literatures of the postmodern world? In English translation, this course will introduce students to the literature of modern Israel, Zionist programs and their conflicts, and the roots of the modern Hebrew novel in the "diaspora," Yiddish-speaking world of Sholom Aleichem and the "shtetl." Classic Yiddish stories, a novel by Franz Kafka to measure the achievement of German-speaking Jews, and then the development of modern Hebrew and Israeli fiction proper in the work Nobel Prize-winner S.Y. Agnon, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Aharon Appelfeld, and others. Students will gain an understanding of a marginal, minority culture that created a paradigmatically modern literature, but also come to appreciate Israeli fiction as a groundbreaking form of post-Holocaust, postmodern literary expression. Four credit hours.  L, D.    SUCHOFF

351j    Contemporary American Poetry    A study of some of the major and emerging figures and poetic movements in American poetry, emphasizing close readings and cultural contexts of work written primarily after 1970. Poets include Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Allen Ginsburg, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, and Richard Wilbur. Three credit hours.  L.    SADOFF

[353]    The American Short Story    A study of the genre that many analysts consider the most consistently successful in American literature--the short story. Distinguished and popular writers of short narratives will make up the syllabus, from Washington Irving to Raymond Carver, with extended emphasis on such geniuses as Poe, Hawthorne, James, Hemingway, Wright, and O'Connor. Four credit hours.  L.    

358s    Modern American and Italian Literature    During the 1920s and 1930s, Italian writers such as Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Giorgio Bassani, and Beppe Fenoglio were intensely interested in American fiction and produced translations, critical essays and books, and anthologies of American literature. American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos discovered Italian literature. Their interactions will be explored through close readings and study of American and Italian (in translation) texts and viewing of classic Italian films. Four credit hours.  L.    BRANCACCIO

359f    Topics in Dramatic Literature: Contemporary American Playwrights    Listed as Theater and Dance 349 (q.v.). Four credit hours.    WING

362f    Art and Oppression: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Modern Society    How does a minority respond artistically to societal oppression that ranges from silencing and invisibility to censorship and persecution? The literary response/resistance of lesbian and gay people and their process of literary self-definition, in the face of what Adrienne Rich has defined as society's "compulsory heterosexuality." A study of the lives and works of Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall, discussion of selected writing by H.D., E.M. Forster, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Rechy, Rita Mae Brown, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Edmund White, Gloria Anzuldua, Jeannette Winterson, and others. Images of the lesbian and gay experience in painting, photography, film, and television. Sexuality and the transformation of literary convention, the artistic vision of the "double minority," the expression of a radical lesbian and gay political voice, and the emergence into mainstream society of lesbian and gay culture. Four credit hours.  L, D.    MANNOCCHI

376s    Land and Language    Texts by environmental essayists, poets, fiction writers, and philosophers that put nature and people in a vigorous living relationship. What language is and does in the natural world, and what responsibility to the land our status as the talking species requires. Literature that "speaks nature," "speaks of nature," and "speaks for nature" as a key to how nature speaks for itself. Four credit hours.  L.    TATELBAUM

378fs    Intermediate Fiction Workshop    Practice in the writing of short stories, with major emphasis on student manuscripts. Admission is by manuscript submission only; consult instructor for deadlines and format for manuscript submission. Prerequisite: English 278. Four credit hours.    KENNEY, SPARK

379f    Intermediate Poetry Workshop    Practice in the writing of poetry, with major emphasis on student manuscripts. Admission is by manuscript submission only; consult instructor for deadlines and format for manuscript submission. Prerequisite: English 279. Four credit hours.    P. HARRIS

380s    Creative Nonfiction    Creative nonfiction includes renderings of personal experience, presentations of opinion and passion, profiles of people, and evocations of time and place. Based upon "fact," it uses elements of fiction. A writing workshop with weekly assignments designed to help students find their best material and their strongest voices. Also, reading and discussion of the work of published essayists. Prerequisite: English 115 (or exemption). Four credit hours.    N. HARRIS

397f    Late Style in 19th Century Literature, Music, and Art    Youthful fervor, untimely death, and unrealized potential are all indicators of what one typically considers a Romantic artist. But what if such talent is allowed to ripen, mature-- even grow old? An examination of the work of Romantics who lived long enough to establish 'late styles' affords a new view of a time-honored literary tradition as a cross-cultural as well as a multi-disciplinary phenomenon. Authors include Wordsworth, Goethe, Chopin, Beethoven, Delacroix, and Goya. Four credit hours.    KARBIENER

398As    Culture and Literature of the American South    In a cold, New England dormitory room, a northern student asks his southern roommate to "tell about the South." The effort to do so engenders not just one narrative about what it means to grow up amid the palpable shadows of the Civil War and institutional slavery, but a whole tradition of imaginative fiction demarcated by elusive terms like "regionalism," "grotesque," "realism," and "modernism." Because so many of our writers are southerners by birth, experience, and disposition-- Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Dorothy Allison, Charles Frazier, Tina McKelroy Ansa, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner, to name only a few-- the South, as myth and reality, has become a trope for what is essentially and problematically "American"-- and what isn't-- in our literature and cultural history. An exploration of the intersections of these ideas and how Southern literature in the twentieth-century has helped shape our national dialogue about them. Four credit hours.    BRYANT

398Bs    Edith Wharton and Henry James    An exploration of the literary and personal relationship between Henry James and Edith Wharton as demonstrated by similarities and differences in form and content of selected novels. Their published correspondence provides insight into the influences these two writers shared and their influence on each other. Four credit hours.  L.    STUBBS

398Cs    Desire and Autonomy in Medieval Women's Writing    A selection of writings by medieval women with particular focus on the literary expression of desire (sexual, textual, spiritual, political) and the autonomy of medieval women writers as they respond to anti-feminist traditions and writings. Readings in poetry, drama, biography, feminist treatises; a study of the historical/cultural/literary environments in which they wrote. Authors include Marie de France, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Carey, and Sor Juana de la Cruz. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    NARIN VAN COURT

[410]    Arthurian Literature    The Arthurian tradition from its origins in Celtic legendary materials to its development and perfection in Chretien de Troyes's complexly textured French Arthurian romances; the emergence of an English Arthurian tradition in the Middle Ages and the reinterpretations of the Arthurian myths produced in the Renaissance; the Arthuriana revival in the Victorian period and 20th-century versions and revisions of the Arthurian tradition. Four credit hours.  L.    

411f    Shakespearean Text/Performance    Analysis of the range of competing material forms in which Shakespeare's plays circulate, established at one extreme as canonical literary texts and realized at the other as only authentic in performance. Includes film and on-campus performances as well as interactions of text and performance within the plays. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    OSBORNE

412s    Shakespeare's Construction of Character    Analysis of Early Modern ideas about character by exploring the links between character and identity in Shakespeare's dramatic roles and their critical and theatrical histories. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    OSBORNE

413Af    Author Course: Toni Morrison    An intensive exploration of Toni Morrison's life, fiction, and non-fiction-seven novels, collected essays/lectures, and short fiction-- in terms of diverse Modern and Postmodern cultural issues. These concerns intersect race, class, and gender, the debate about canonicity, literary tradition(s), and the politics of literary production. As a writer, teacher, and critic, Toni Morrison has positioned her work at the crossroads of current cultural criticism, insisting that we, her readers, look unflinchingly at issues that, in the African American vernacular, "worry" all of her writing-brutality, wholeness, love, community, cultural and political marginalization, and history. Like so many of her characters, who struggle to find a voice to speak the unspeakable, this course is predicated upon dialogue and critical inquiry. Four credit hours.  L.    BRYANT

413Bf    Author Course: Geoffrey Chaucer    An introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, reading closely in the poetry and investigating the historical, social, and material contexts in which Chaucer's work was written and transmitted. The poetry will be read as performed verse in its original Middle English form and will be approached through a variety of topical and critical issues grounded in the history of late-medieval literary life and practice. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    NARIN VAN COURT

413Cs    Author Course: Virginia Woolf    Author Course: Virginia Woolf--Modernism and Feminism. One of the pre-eminent literary voices that emerged in the inter-war period in Britain, Virginia Woolf is recognized as the leading woman intellectual and artist within the modernist movement and a prolific writer, producing in a span of about 25 years a dazzling array of novels, short stories, and essays... Four credit hours.  L.    ROY

[417]    Literary Criticism: 20th-Century Marxism and Popular Culture--The Frankfurt School    The theories of the German (and Jewish) cultural critics Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who revolutionized the study of literature and society from the 1930s forward by combining Marx, Freud, and a commitment to see both high art and popular culture as driven by the same social forces. Four credit hours.  L.    

[423]    The Holocaust: History, Literature, Film    The destruction of the European Jewry and the counter-responses of testimony, first-person narrative, fiction, and film produced by and about the victims during the war and afterward. A study of the motives of the perpetrators and bystanders and anti-semitism, with a focus on understanding attempts to find terms to represent the unrepresentable of collective and individual catastrophe and to find forms of continuity amidst destruction. Four credit hours.  L, D.    

429s    Passionate Expression: Love, Sex, and Sexuality in Western Literature    A study of the Western tradition in love literature focusing on representative masterworks both from "mainstream" culture and from counter-cultures through the ages; topics begin with the Bible, Greek drama, and medieval lyric and conclude with classic Hollywood versions of love stories and the fiction of contemporary liberation movements. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L, D.    MANNOCCHI

[457]    American Gothic Literature    Horror, especially gothic horror of the American variety, always masquerades as something else; it can usually be found "playing in the dark," in Toni Morrison's phrase, or beneath a monster-other mask. Surveying horror's effects--the narrative strategies that make horror fiction so horrifying--is a focus, but emphasis is on learning to use various "critical" tools, Jungian myth, psychoanalytical, feminist, and race criticism, to explore the deeper, semiotic relation of signs and signifying that codify the cultural meaning behind the monster masks--werewolves, shapeshifters, vampires, succubi, demons, and (extra)terrestial aliens--that conceal a humanity too terrifying to confront consciously. Four credit hours.  L.    

474fs    Public Speaking    An intensive course in the practice of public speaking, with special attention given to current political and social issues and the development of an effective and persuasive platform personality. Attendance at campus debates and speech contests required. Four credit hours.    MILLS

478f    Advanced Fiction Workshop    Practice in the writing of short stories and longer fiction, with major emphasis on student manuscripts. May be repeated once for additional credit. Admission is by manuscript submission only; consult instructor for deadlines and format for manuscript submission. Prerequisite: English 378. Four credit hours.    KENNEY, ROORBACH

479s    Advanced Poetry Workshop    Practice in the writing of poetry, with major emphasis on student manuscripts. May be repeated once for additional credit. Admission is by manuscript submission only; consult instructor for deadlines and format for manuscript submission. Prerequisite: English 379. Four credit hours.    SADOFF

483f, 484js    Honors Thesis    An independent, substantial project approved by the department. The student will work in close consultation with a faculty member. Students are responsible for selecting their faculty tutor and submitting their proposal by May of their junior year. Prerequisite: A 3.25 grade point average in the major and approval from a faculty tutor. Two to four credit hours.    FACULTY

491f, 492s    Independent Study    Individual projects exploring topics for which the student has demonstrated the interest and competence necessary for independent work. Prerequisite: Permission of a project advisor and the chair of the department. One to four credit hours.    FACULTY

493Af    Seminar: Lyric Self & Other    How do lyric poems construct selves and others? A study of poems and theory exploring poetic address, the power of form, the gendering of lyric conventions, the paradoxes of representation, and the role of language in experiences of solitude, melancholy, and intimacy. Emphasis on the founding period of modern English lyric--the 16th and 17th centuries--with frequent comparisons to poems of later ages, including the present one. Counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors in 2001-02. Four credit hours.  L.    SAGASER

493Bf    Seminar: Reading in Early America    The impact of "print culture" on early American literary history, social relations, and power formations. Works of early American fiction in the context of their publication histories and their critical and popular reception. Topics include: the early history of literacy and popular reading in the U.S.; the role of printers; democratization and the expansion of the literary marketplace; censorship and state power; race, gender, class and reading practices. Four credit hours.  L.    STUBBS

493Cf    Seminar: Franz Kafka    Kafka's novels and short fiction, in English translation. Few writers become adjectives: Shakespearean, Dickensian, Kafkaesque. The novels and stories of this committed Jewish writer, who names his Jewish themes both clearly and abstractly, but wrote in German, have become central texts of the Western canon, telling the story of a society that is brutally divided, but which tells its citizens they are equal and whole (The Castle). Kafka's "nonsense" world, where animals are more human than the "academy" they wish to join, is a distorted, but accurate, reflection of our own. Four credit hours.  L, D.    SUCHOFF

493Ds    Seminar: Mark Twain    As novelist, satirist, essayist, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) charts the perilous progress of American culture in the late-19th century and the emerging crisis over nation, race, wealth, progress, and power. In an age when none of these vexing issues could be approached directly without potentially devastating consequences, Mark Twain's double-voiced narrative strategies and tricksters (dis)guised in "boys'" books about adult nightmares, mysterious strangers, race-crossed brothers switched at birth, and "gilded ages" of conspicuous consumption, go to the heart of what it means to be American-- and to not be one. Four credit hours.  L.    BRYANT

497f    Modern Irish Short Story    From James Joyce (1882-1941; Dubliners is 1904-1914) to Wiliam Trevor (1928 and still writing). Students will select other writers from a long list which includes O'Kelly, Corkery, Stephens, both O'Briens, Bowen, both O'Faolains, O'Connor, Lavin, Keily, Moore, Johnston, NcGahern, Daly, Barrington. Background includes the transformation of the short story at the end of the 19th century; 20th century Irish and Anglo-Irish history; post-colonial and narrative theory. Four credit hours.    ARCHIBALD