Undergraduate Courses (Fall 2006)
(Last updated: 9/13/06)
Please note that when a course is marked (2nd Am Lit), it means the course fulfills the second American Literature English major requirement. Such courses offered this semester include: ENGL 368 Modern American Drama, ENGL 369 Studies in Modern (20th-Century) Fiction, ENGL 376 American Fiction, ENGL 391S-L2 Advanced Seminar: Case Studies in Modernism: Critically Thinking Poetics, ENGL 391S-L3 Advanced Seminar: Americas Fictions, ENGLS-L5 Advanced Seminar: A House Divided: Douglass, Melville, and the Bonds of Union, ENGL 491LL African American Drama and Performance, ENGL 591X American Poetry. In addition, some courses offered at the Five Colleges also fill this requirement.
Please note that when a course is marked (Jr-Yr Writing), it means the course fulfills the Writing & Criticism/Junior-Year Writing requirement for English majors. Such courses offered this semester are: ENGL 391S-L1 Advanced Seminar: Practical Criticism , ENGL 391S-L2 Advanced Seminar: Case Studies in Modernism: Critically Thinking Poetics, ENGL 391S-L3 Advanced Seminar: Americas Fictions, ENGL 391S-L4 Advanced Seminar: Writing and Teaching Writing, ENGL 391S-L5 Advanced Seminar: A House Divided: Douglass, Melvile, and the Bonds of Union, ENGL 391S-L6 Advanced Seminar: Speculative Literature as Cultural Critique, ENGL 419H Honors Games Thinkers Play.
(Click here to see a list of courses from the Five Colleges (Fall 2006)
(Click here to see a list of undergraduate courses from Spring 2006)
(Click here to see a list of undergraduate courses from Fall 2005)
115-L1 American Experience (ALU) 73169
Instructor: L. Doyle MW 4:40 pm
America is many things—two continents, many peoples, diverse histories. We will focus on America and especially the U.S. as a place of encounters. In the literature and movies we study, we will consider face-to-face encounters as they are shaped by history—and as moments in history. And we will notice the ways that literature and film not only show us these encounters but also engage in encounter with their audiences.
A packet of reading in history, political theory, and philosophy will support our conversations about the literature and film. There will be two exams, one formal paper, and some short response papers, as well as an emphasis on class participation. Two lectures and one discussion section each week.
Discussion section required.
115-D1 American Experience (ALU) 77730
Instructor: E. Fortier F 10:10 am
115-D2 American Experience (ALU) 77731
Instructor: C. Maksimowicz F 11:15 am
115-D3 American Experience (ALU) 77732
Instructor: C. Maksimowicz F 10:10 am
115-D4 American Experience (ALU) 77733
Instructor: D. Collins F 11:15 am
115-D5 American Experience (ALU) 77734
Instructor: D. Collins F 10:10 am
115-D6 American Experience (ALU) 77735
Instructor: K. Henry F 11:15 am
115-D7 American Experience (ALU) 77736
Instructor: K. Henry F 10:10 am
115-D8 American Experience (ALU) 77737
Instructor: J. Mason F 11:15 am
115-D9 American Experience (ALU) 77738
Instructor: J. Mason F 10:10 am
115-D10 American Experience (ALU) 77739
Instructor: E. Fortier F 11:15 am
115-D11 American Experience (ALU) 77740
Instructor: M. Wilson F 10:10 am
116-L1 Native American Literature (ALU) 77743
Instructor: R. Welburn MW 2:30 - 3:45 pm
The focus of this course will be selected novels, poems, and autobiographical writings by Indigenous North Americans. Texts will include Robert J. Conley (Cherokee), Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears; Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Ceremony; Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Solar Storms; and Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), Dead Voices; an anthology of poems; and a collection of personal narratives. Expect the following: writing a series of short essays; a research project for the final; participation in a panel; and a Cherokee language syllabary exercise. Texts will be available at Amherst Books.
117-L1 Ethnic American Literature (ALU) 73171
Instructor: C. Bailey MWF 11:15 am
American literature written by and about ethnic minorities, from the earliest immigrants through the cultural representations in modern American writing.
120-L1 English Composition 73172
Instructor: L. Bradley MWF 10:10 am
Stockbridge students only. English 120 is the writing requirement for undergraduates in the Stockbridge School. It gives practice in the persuasive techniques of expository writing and shows their usefulness in both academic and business contexts.
120-L2 English Composition 73173
Instructor: L. Bradley MWF 11:15 am
Stockbridge students only.
120-L3 English Composition 73174
Instructor: L. Bradley MWF 1:25 pm
Stockbridge students only.
131-L1 Society and Literature (ALG) 73175
Instructor: S. Christian MWF 9:05 am
This section of Society and Literature will use the literature of World War I and early Modernism to consider the ways in which authors deploy a variety of literary forms to create and respond to change in society and in the meanings of the self. It will also pay attention to the ways writers address social and political issues, including gender, class, race, and sexual orientation. We will also investigate the connections between art and politics, literature and society: how society and its history shape language and literary culture, how literature responds to society, and how literature affects society and influences politics. Texts may include novels, autobiographies, poems, short stories, and drama.
131-L2 Society and Literature (ALG) 73176
Instructor: B. Johnson T/Th 2:30 pm
Butterfield RAP and Commonwealth College first-year students only. This course will consider the ways in which 19th- and 20th-century authors have perceived the relationship between individuals and their societies, including the meanings and effects of being part of--or excluded from--groups, families, cultures, or nations. It will also pay attention to the ways writers address social and political issues, such as the relations between people of different races, ethnicity, genders, classes, and sexual orientations. And it will investigate the connections between art and politics, literature and society: how society and its history shape language and literary culture, how literature responds to society, how art may reimagine society in utopian or dystopian ways, and how art may affect society and influence politics. Texts may include novels, autobiographies, poems, short stories, and plays.
131-L3 Society and Literature (ALG) 73177
Instructor: V. Gramling T/Th 2:30 pm
Southwest freshman students only.
140-L1 Reading Fiction (AL) 73245
Instructor: A. Hellem MWF 11:15 am
An introduction to the themes and techniques of fiction through a reading of selected short stories and novels with emphasis on structure, style, point of view, and theme.
142-L1 Reading Drama (AL) 79029
Instructor: L. Kidder T/Th 9:30 am
An introduction to the themes and techniques of drama through a reading of selected plays. Emphasis on such matters as structure, style, staging, and tragic and comic modes. Special consideration will be given to the performative aspects of dramatic
literature drawn from a variety of time periods and traditions.
144-L1 World Literature in English (ALG) 73222
Instructor: S. Ray MWF 10:10 am
This course will examine world parables in drama. Drawing from playwrights around the world as diverse as Brecht, Soyinka, Ionesco, Genet, and Albee (to name a few), this course will investigate the intersection between two genres: parables and drama. We will first learn what a parable is and then how it is uniquely positioned in drama. This course analyzes the ways in which parables in drama pose a certain worldview and then work to dismantle that worldview, leaving the reader with the task of reordering reality and making sense of the world. Parables in drama explore the tenuous reality of the paradox of being and how the self is to function in a contradictory world.
196 Independent Study 73181
Instructor: TBA TBA
Contact department to add course.
200-L1 Seminar in Literary Studies 73182
Instructor: K. Farrell T/Th 11:15 am
Pre-English majors only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. . We live in narratives: from cultural his-story to personal life stories. Language itself is based on stories, as in the journey implied in "going to sleep." In this course the emphasis is on learning narrative forms and critical concepts that make for more meaningful reading of behavior in texts and in life. Readings include several poets, two Shakespeare plays, and three novels, as well as some background material. Requirements: a short problem-solving paper or notes most weeks, plus three essays. Students must receive a grade of "B-" or higher in ENGL 200 to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
200-L2 Seminar in Literary Studies 73183
Instructor: M. O'Brien T/Th 9:30 am
Pre-English majors only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. Students must receive a grade of
"B-" or higher to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
200-L3 Seminar in Literary Studies 73184
Instructor: J. Rosenberg MW 2:30 - 3:45 pm
Pre-English TAP first year students only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. In this course we will become strong analysts of literary texts. We will do this by developing skills in close reading and by learning how to articulate
arguments about aesthetic objects. We will work together to develop a set of key literary terms that will, over the course of the semester, become indispensable to us. They will include such concepts and constellations of concepts as: form vs. content, structure, discourse, history and historical context, irony and satire, symptom, critique. The course will span genres such as poetry, drama, novel, and short story, and will include contemporary noncanonical experimental authors - such as the science fiction writer Samuel Delany, the social ironist Laurie Weeks, and the prose poet Anne Carson - alongside canonical ones – such as Tennessee Williams, Alexander Pope, and George Orwell. Weekly writing assignments plus three papers.Students must receive a grade of "B-" or higher in ENGL 200 to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
200-L4 Seminar in Literary Studies 73185
Instructor: E. Gallo T/Th 2:30 pm
Pre-English majors only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. Students must receive a grade of
"B-" or higher in ENGL 200 to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
200-L5 Seminar in Literary Studies 78840
Instructor: J. Greve T/Th 11:15 am
Pre-English majors only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. Students must receive a grade of
"B-" or higher in ENGL 200 to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
200-L6 Seminar in Literary Studies 79034
Instructor: D. Swain T/Th 2:30 pm
Pre-English majors only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. Students must receive a grade of
"B-" or higher in ENGL 200 to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
200H-L1 Honors Seminar in Literary Studies 77752
Instructor: S. Clingman T/Th 11:15 am
Pre-English majors only. Prerequisite: Gen. Ed. CW. This is a 4-Credit Honors Course. This course is an introduction for prospective English majors to the various ways in which we read literature, think about it, and write about it, as well as the ways it helps form our perspectives and understanding of the world. Our texts will come from many periods and places: poetry selections ranging from the seventeenth century in England to the twentieth century in South Africa; one of the most famous plays of all time (Waiting for Godot), now just more than fifty years old; a short story by James Joyce, widely regarded as one of the most highly-crafted ever written; and a novel by Jean Rhys which draws on an earlier one by Charlotte Brontë. In responding to these works we'll explore a variety of approaches, from crucial skills of close reading to more theoretically informed analyses. Background critical readings will help shape our view of our subject, and there will also be a fair amount of writing, responding, drafting, editing, and revising. Overall the aim is to enhance our pleasure as well as our grip on the works we read as students of literature, and always to deepen our insights regarding ourselves and the world we inhabit. Students must receive a grade of "B-" or higher to be officially admitted to the English major. Come to 252 Bartlett at Pre-Registration to add the pre-major.
201-L1 Major British Writers I 73243
Instructor: J. Freeman MW 2:30 - 3:45 pm
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only. The works we will read explode with conflict. Beowulf obviously pits human beings against monsters; beneath the surface, it reflects the duel between Christianity and Germanic codes. The Battle of Maldon pictures native Britons as they fight against Viking invaders; it also contrasts two styles of writing. Thomas More's Utopia contrasts a nation with problems like ours (clueless rulers, masses of poor struggling in London) to a fictional realm where all problems seem to be solved. Dr. Faustus asks whether people who wish to be more than human will be satisfied. Paradise Lost forces us to evaluate the attractiveness of Christian doctrine when it conflicts with plausible evil and appealing Greco-Roman myths. REQUIREMENTS: Weekly e-mail essays to the whole class; two hour exams; frequent short assignments in class that involve critical thought; take-home final.
201-L2 Major British Writers I 79035
Instructor: D. Swain T/Th 11:15 am
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only.
201H-L1 Honors Major British Writers I 77753
Instructor: J. Freeman MW 8:40 am
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only. This is a 4-credit Honors course. The works we will read explode with conflict. Beowulf obviously pits human beings against monsters; beneath the surface, it reflects the duel between Christianity and Germanic codes. The Battle of Maldon pictures native Britons as they fight against Viking invaders; it also contrasts two styles of writing. Thomas More's Utopia contrasts a nation with problems like ours (clueless rulers, masses of poor struggling in London) to a fictional realm where all problems seem to be solved. Dr. Faustus asks whether people who wish to be more than human will be satisfied. Paradise Lost forces us to evaluate the attractiveness of Christian doctrine when it conflicts with plausible evil and appealing Greco-Roman myths. REQUIREMENTS: Weekly e-mail essays to the whole class; two hour exams; frequent short assignments in class that involve critical thought; take-home final. This Honors class will expect diligent preparation and effective participation.
203-L1 Bible: Myth/Literature/Society 73249
Instructor: M. Lowance MW 2:30 - 3:45 pm
This course is an introduction to the literature of the Old and New Testaments. Our text is the Oxford English Annotated Bible, a Revised Standard Version. We will examine the genres of biblical writing, the historical books, poetry, and prophecy of the Old Testament, the theories of Biblical composition, and the influence of ancient Near Eastern cultures and myths on the development of Hebrew literature. The gospel accounts and letters of Paul from the New Testament, and the apocalyptic writings of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation will also be studied.
The critical commentary text for Bible as Literature is Harris, Understanding the Bible, a superb analysis of both the Old and New Testaments as literary compositions. Students will be assigned reading for each meeting in the Oxford text and in the Harris text, and participation is expected and will be graded. Please come prepared to analyze and discuss these stimulating and often controversial materials.
221-L1 Shakespeare (AL) 73187
Instructor: J. Black T/Th 2:30 - 3:20 pm
Why are Shakespeare's plays still so widely performed, read, filmed, revised and appropriated four centuries after they first appeared on stage? What makes them continue to speak so powerfully to audiences, writers, directors, and actors? This course provides an overview of Shakespeare's work, focusing on careful readings of eight plays, including examples of comedies, tragedies, romances, and histories. We will pay some attention to genre (what is a comedy?); cultural and social contexts (how did the Renaissance approach issues of politics, gender, social hierarchy, marriage, cosmology, and personal identity, and how do these ideas inform these plays?); and to questions of production, staging, and Renaissance theater practice. Assignments include three short papers, exam, attendance of both lecture and discussion section, and lively participation. Discussion section required.
221-D1 Shakespeare (AL) 73188
Instructor: Y. Chung F 10:10 am
221-D2 Shakespeare (AL) 73189
Instructor: Y. Chung F 11:15 am
221-D3 Shakespeare (AL) 73190
Instructor: A. Strohman F 10:10 am
221-D4 Shakespeare (AL) 73191
Instructor: A. Strohman F 11:15 am
254-L1 Writing and Reading Imaginative Literature (AL) 73192
Instructor: B. Flis T/Th 11:15 am
Analysis of issues of form, elements of genre, style, and development of themes of stories and poems, written by class members and in class texts.
254-L2 Writing and Reading Imaginative Literature (AL) 73193
Instructor: M. Carolan MWF 11:15 am
254-L3 Writing and Reading Imaginative Literature (AL) 73194
Instructor: J. Hoag MWF 10:10 am
254H-L1 Honors Writing and Reading Imaginative Literature (AL) 78653
Instructor: C. Iddings T/Th 2:30 pm
270-L1 American Identities (AL) 73195
Instructor: D. Carlin T/Th 9:30 am
"The old America, the America of our hopes and our dreams, has come to an end, and a new America is entering on the false course which has been tried so often and which has often led to calamity," wrote Harvard Professor Charles Eliot Norton in 1898, at that precise historical moment when the United States recast itself as an imperial global power with the invasion and occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. A little over one century later, we are again faced with the questions of what kind of America we have become and what version of America we wish to embrace. Such questions have long animated much of American literature, and this course will spend its time examining how writers such as Jefferson, Wheatley, Crèvecouer, Franklin, Apess, Zitkala-Sa, Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman, Melville, Davis, DuBois, Chopin, Dunbar, Chesnutt, James, Bulosan, Lazarus, Sin Far, Hughes, McKay, Baldwin, Brooks, Obejas, Cisneros, Ortiz Cofer, Rose, Simon J. Ortiz and Anna Deavere-Smith have given shape to multiple and diverse configurations of American selves through fiction, autobiography, poetry, political rhetoric and performance art. Students will meet three times a week, twice in large lectures and once in discussion sections. Lectures will be augmented with computer technology, both visual and interactive; attendance in both lectures and sections is mandatory and will be monitored. Students will also be required to purchase a PRS device in order to enhance interactive feedback in lectures. Our primary texts will be The Pearson Custom Anthology of American Literature and Anna Deveare-Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, available at Food For Thought Books in Amherst. Requirements: Weekly writing assignments posted on a course WebCT message board, one 4-6 pp.essay, a midterm and a final examination. Discussion section required.
270-D1 American Identities (AL) 77757
Instructor: K. Binette Th 11:15 am
270-D2 American Identities (AL) 77758
Instructor: K. Binette Th 2:30 pm
270-D3 American Identities (AL) 77759
Instructor: M. Boucher Th 11:15 am
270-D4 American Identities (AL) 77760
Instructor: M. Boucher Th 2:30 pm
270-D5 American Identities (AL) 77761
Instructor: N. Azank Th 11:15 am
270-D6 American Identities (AL) 77762
Instructor: N. Azank Th 2:30 pm
296 Independent Study 73196
Instructor: TBA TBA
Contact department to add course.
297H Honors Learning Through Teaching 77767
Instructor: H. Hoang W 10:10 am
Prerequisite: Grade of "B" or above in College Writing (English 112 or 113). Enrollment is competitive. Students who wish to register: (1) Request a recommendation from your College Writing instructor. These recommendations, which should briefly address why you might be an effective writing tutor, can be sent to hhoang@english.umass.edu. (2) Email Professor Hoang by April 15, 2006 to express interest in the course and request a 30-minute interview.
This course prepares students to be peer tutors in a university writing center. Writing is integral to our lives, to the ways we participate in society. So, tutoring writers can be complex and challenging. To foster a writer’s growth, peer tutors must investigate why writing matters; what writing entails; how the immediate situation and cultural contexts interact with a writer’s choices; how textual features demonstrate these dimensions of writing; and, finally, how to talk with writers about writing.
The course goals are
* to define writing and develop a vocabulary to talk about writing;
* to explore what writing has historically meant in U.S. university writing centers;
* to consider the nature of tutoring-ranging from tutor-writer collaboration to textual matters to cultural and other situational factors;
* to develop a philosophy about tutoring writers; and
* to put into practice that tutoring philosophy with specific strategies.
With these goals in mind, we’ll examine writing and tutoring writers from several perspectives: personal writing experiences; ways American university writing centers have historically conceived of writing; and theoretical and researched discussions about writing and tutoring writing. By the semester’s end, each student will have developed a tutoring philosophy-and practical strategies to match-that support his/her idea of writing, writers, and writers’ varied situations.
(After successfully completing English 297H and 298H, students may opt to work as paid tutors starting fall semester 2007.)
297W The Christian Tradition 78660
Instructor: S. Harris/R. Sullivan F 10:10 am
One credit Independent Study in the Christian Tradition. The vast majority of European and American literature is permeated with Christian ideas, images, and debates. This course introduces students to the long history of the Christian religion, its major images, selections of its art and literature, and its most important debates. Beginning with the Pauline epistles, we will cover early Christianity, the Age of Faith, the Reformation, and Christianity in the present day.
298A Practicum: Shakespeare on Film 78461
Instructor: K. Farrell M 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Mandatory Pass/Fail course. This series screens classic Shakespeare performances, one film each week. 1
credit. To enroll: at the first session, the projectionist will record the participants' names, student numbers, and email addresses so the English Deptartment can register them on SPIRE.
298B Practicum: Literary Classics on Film 78462
Instructor: K. Farrell W 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Mandatory Pass/Fail course. This series presents screen adaptations of great novels that have shaped
western literature, beginning with Cervantes' Don Quixote. Authors include Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, James, Hardy, Flaubert, and E M Forster. One film each week: 1 credit. To enroll: at the first session, the
projectionist will record the participants' names, student numbers, and email addresses so the English Department can register them on SPIRE.
311-L1 Legends Arthur/British 77769
Instructor: S. Harris T/Th 11:15 am
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only. This course introduces you to the major texts of the Arthurian tradition, their readers, and their influence.
319-L1 Representing the Holocaust (ALG) 73232
Instructor: J. Young T 2:30 pm
Same as Judaic 391A and Comp-Lit 391A. In this course, we explore the ways history and memory of the Holocaust have been shaped for the next generation by victims in their diaries, by survivors in their memoirs, by novelists in their fiction, as well as by poets, film-makers, musicians, and artists. Among readings and viewings for this course are works by Chaim A. Kaplan, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Tadeusz Borowski, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Celan,, and Art Spiegelman, among others. Discussion section required.
319-D1 Representing the Holocaust (ALG) 73233
Instructor: J. Young Th 1:00 pm
319-D2 Representing the Holocaust (ALG) 73234
Instructor: P. Williams Th 1:00 pm
319-D3 Representing the Holocaust (ALG) 73235
Instructor: P. Williams Th 2:30 pm
319-D4 Representing the Holocaust (ALG) 73236
Instructor: C. Wilson Th 1:00 pm
319-D5 Representing the Holocaust (ALG) 73237
Instructor: C. Wilson Th 2:30 pm
349-L1 English Novel: Scott to Hardy 77771
Instructor: S. Daly T/Th 11:15 am
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only. A broad survey of the nineteenth-century British novel. We will consider questions of form and style as well as historical and cultural context. Texts may include Walter Scott, Waverley; Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native. Requirements: regular attendance, response papers, three critical essays.
354-L1 Creative Writing: Introduction 73198
Instructor: A. Roberts MWF 9:05 am
English majors, BDIC, UWW, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only. Writing in the various modes of fiction, poetry, drama, and essay. Analysis of student writing in class and in tutorial; development of critical skills.
354-L2 Creative Writing: Introduction 73199
Instructor: J. Bolton MWF 10:10 am
English majors, BDIC, UWW, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only.
354-L3 Creative Writing: Introduction 73200
Instructor: N. Lyalin T/Th 9:30 am
English majors, BDIC, UWW, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only.
356-L1 Creative Writing: Poetry 73199
Instructor: J. Hennessy T/Th 2:30 pm
English majors, BDIC, UWW, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only. Prerequisite: ENGL 354 or 354H with a grade of 'B' or better.
356-L2 Creative Writing: Poetry 78956
Instructor: L. Olstein T/Th 1:00 pm
English majors, BDIC, UWW, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only. Prerequisite: ENGL 354 or 354H with a grade of 'B' or better. This class aims to foster the intensive writing, reading, and analysis of poetry. As a workshop, it relies on each participant as an essential member of a reading and writing community: your poems will be our primary texts as we work to explore underlying issues of imagination and craft and to realize the full potential of individual pieces. They will serve as points of departure for discussions of issues essential to poetry, including form, voice, music, image, line, intention, effect, and the experience of engaging in the creative process. We’ll additionally read poems and occasionally prose by published authors, search out some of the unexpected locations where stimulating language may be found, experiment with some generative writing exercises, investigate contemporary literary journals, and attend several poetry readings.
358-L1 The Romantic Poets 78839
Instructor: R. Keefe T/Th 2:30 pm
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only. The English Romantic poets wrote during one of the most exciting periods of European history. The first document we will look at, Blake’s “Poems of Innocence,” was written in the first year of the French Revolution; the poems are filled with both a consciously naïve hope and a bitter cynicism. We will watch two generations of poets as they reflect in complicated fashion the polarized political and intellectual situation of England (its revolutionary as well as its dominant counter-revolutionary sentiment) during the Napoleonic Wars that lasted until 1815, and the post-war mixture of enormous self-confidence, political disgust, and deep pessimism, all of which could take hold of a single mind. Aside from Blake, we will read poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron—who was for a time the most famous personality in Europe after the fall of Napoleon—Shelley, and Keats. We will end the course with Frankenstein, the novel by Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of two of the most famous revolutionary writers in England, the mistress and then wife of one of the last revolutionary Romantics, and whose work in many ways repudiates the basic premises of both revolution and romanticism.
We will use a single text, Norton’s The Romantic Period (7th edition), which includes Frankenstein. The text will be availible at the Textbook Annex. You will be responsible for two short papers, and for attendance and participation in classroom discussion.
365-L1 20th Century Literature of Ireland (AL) 78416
Instructor: M. O'Brien T/Th 1:00 pm
The purpose of this course is, first of all, to read closely and carefully books by established Irish writers of this century including Joyce, Yeats, Synge and Heaney. Having no pretensions of being exhaustive, we will look at representative texts that provide an initial understanding of each writer. Beyond appreciating each work in its own right as literature, we will attempt to use these texts as springboards to explore key questions about Irish society, history and culture, especially literary activity. We will, for example, ask whether there really are separate native Irish and Anglo-Irish literary traditions. How do urban and rural motifs and attitudes figure? What are the differences between the experience of men and women in Ireland? What is the attitude toward history and geography in these writers? Towards the Catholic Church? What social mores are revealed, particularly with regard to family, tribe and nation? Class? The Irish language? How are Irish mythology and legend used? How has an oral tradition influenced a written one? How are idiom and dialect deployed, a unique Hiberno-English? Is there an identifiable Irish voice?
368-L1 Modern American Drama (AL) (2nd Am Lit) 73254
Instructor: J. Spencer MW 11:15 am
Examination of current directions in drama written in English, traditional and experimental, demanding close reading of texts, a good deal of writing, and an understanding of the cultural context. Discussion section required.
368-D1 Modern American Drama (AL) 77773
Instructor: T. Zajac F 10:10 am
368-D2 Modern American Drama (AL) 77774
Instructor: T. Zajac F 11:15 am
368-D3 Modern American Drama (AL) 77775
Instructor: C. Colonna F 10:10 am
368-D4 Modern American Drama (AL) 77776
Instructor: C. Colonna F 11:15 am
369-L1 Studies in Modern (20th Century) Fiction (AL) (2nd Am Lit) 73201
Instructor: K. Farrell T/Th 1:00 pm
The course uses six novels and related documentary and dramatic films to explore American life through the 1920s, the Great Depression, and post-WW 2. Focus on the way imaginations have adapted to the conflicts, catastrophes, and opportunities of the 20th century as a prelude to the troubled mood of the present. We'll use history, anthropology, psychology, and evolution to explore the impact of modernism. The material requires that you master some particular new ideas and critical terms. This is not a conventional lit course and it's unwise to sign up for it unless you're willing to make that commitment. We'll be reading: Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933); Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929); Himes, If He Hollers (1947); Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Barth, The End of the Road (1958). Also: Howard Zinn's People's History of the U.S. (excerpts); Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth; and (recommended) Kirshner, The Modern Novel. The required weekly lab session for films includes documentaries about the Great Depression, Nazi ideology, mental illness, and the U.S. prison system; King Vidor's The Crowd (1929); Chaplin's Modern Times (1936); Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five; Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Required: regular attendance; 1-2 page responses to three novels plus three 5-page essays. No exams. Independent Study credits available for lab section. Lab section required.
369-Lab1 Studies in Modern (20th Century) Fiction (AL) 77779
Instructor: K. Farrell Th 4:00 - 6:30 pm
376-L1 American Fiction (2nd Am Lit) 73256
Instructor: D. McComas T/Th 2:30 pm
In order to explore the American character, we will examine some short fiction from a range of ethnic American writers, and then explore some novels from three ethnic literary traditions--Italian American, Chinese American,
and Native American. Reading will likely include TuSmith and Bergevin, eds., American Family Album, and novels drawn from this list: (Native American) Alexie, The Indian Killer; Erdrich, Love Medicine or The Bingo Palace; Welch, Fools Crow; (Italian American) di Donato, Christ in Concrete; Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim; de Rosa, Paper Fish; (Chinese American) Jen, Mona in the Promised Land; Chin, Donald Duk; and Kingston, The Woman Warrior or China Men. Students will complete three five-page papers.
379-L1 Technical Writing 73202
Instructor: D. Toomey MW 2:30 - 3:45 pm
Senior and Junior students with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better. Introduction to Professional Writing. This course offers an overview of the field of professional writing in both theoretical and practical contexts. It also provides practice in the composition of traditional writing forms, especially letters and memorandums, interim reports, feasibility studies and formal proposals. It serves as the gateway course to the specialization in Professional Writing and Technical Communication (http://www.umass.edu/pwtc/) and the specialization in Nonfiction Writing (http://www.umass.edu/english/undergraduate_specializations_nonfiction.htm).
379-L2 Technical Writing 73203
Instructor: D. Toomey MW 4:00 - 5:15 pm
Senior and Junior students with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better.
380-L1 Professional Writing and Technical Communication I 73204
Instructor: J. Nelson T/Th 1:00 pm
Senior and Junior students with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better.
380-L2 Professional Writing and Technical Communication I 73205
Instructor: J. Nelson T/Th 2:30 pm
Senior and Junior students with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better.
391S-L1 Advanced Seminar - Junior Year Writing (Jr-Yr Writing) 77876
Instructor: A. Diamond T/Th 11:15 am
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only.
Practical Criticism. This course presupposes some familiarity with a range of readings, but the core text is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which we will examine through various critical perspectives: psychological, sociological, and historical. We will examine some theories of literature and their critical methods, with frequent imitative exercises and a final paper in which you will be able to demonstrate sophisticated use of one of more of these critical approaches in the discussion of another novel. Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
391S-L2 Advanced Seminar - Junior Year Writing (2nd Am Lit) (Jr-Yr Writing) 77878
Instructor: R. Jennison MW 2:30 - 3:45 pm
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only.
Case Studies in Modernism: Critically Thinking Poetics. This writing intensive course will introduce students to selected key texts of American Modernism. Students will also become familiar with the analytical discourses that critics have drawn upon in order to shape our current understanding of Modernism as movement and ideology. Our primary texts will be taken from the 1920s and 1930s, including but not limited to: William Carlos Williams's Spring & All, Louis Zukofsky’s “A,” Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and selected poems by Claude McKay. Alongside each text we will read a variety of critical essays. We will trace the overall historical arc of critical approaches as we move chronologically through the history of each text's reception and treatment by literary critics. While we will briefly survey early "evaluative" approaches, much of our secondary reading will be in criticism which works within and between the following critical discourses: Marxism, deconstruction, theories of race and gender, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Our critical and textual encounters will be in constant conversation; students will be expected to practice and apply these critical knowledges through concrete textual analyses. Frequent reading quizzes will ensure a collegial democracy of informed participants. Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
391S-L3 Advanced Seminar - Junior Year Writing (2nd Am Lit) (Jr-Yr Writing) 77879
Instructor: R. Welburn MW 4:00 - 5:15 pm
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only.
Americas' Fictions. English majors assume American literature to be exclusively defined by writers in the United States. What of writers from other countries throughout the hemisphere, who view themselves as part of the larger American experience? [Langston Hughes said his poem, "I Am the Darker Brother" was widely appreciated throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.] This course will help students respond to that and other questions about whether American identity is parochial or has an international dimension. Close readings of works (in translation) by seven fictionists will provide a lens through which a cross-section of cultural values can be acknowledged, how history created fundamental similarities in nation-building and its effects on diverse populations, and how the life in "el Norte" and the "Lower 48" comes under scrutiny from the outside. Magical realism, colonialism and postcolonial conditions will be included. Texts, if available: Jorge Amado (Brazil), Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; Jeanette Armstrong (Okanagon/Canada), Whispering in Shadows; Wilson Harris (Guyana), The Palace of the Peacock; Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Men of Maze; Edwidge Danticot (Haiti/U.S), The Farming of Bones; V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), The Suffrage of Elvira; and Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina), Bedside Manners.
Assignments: Includes drafting of essays around theoretical strategies in colonialism, postcolonialism, ethnic studies, diasporas, the negrism movement, and postmodernism based upon intense reading of texts, classroom discussion, individual presentations, several critically-informed essays, and a final essay project. Texts will be ordered at Food For Thought Books. Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
391S-L4 Advanced Seminar - Junior Year Writing (Jr-Yr Writing) 78419
Instructor: B. Penniman MW 8:40 am
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only.
Writing and Teaching Writing. This seminar is designed for junior and senior English majors who are interested in teaching, particularly at the middle and high school levels. Its aim is to provide students the opportunity to reflect on their own literacy learning experiences, to explore composition theory and research, and to examine current issues in the teaching of writing. Though not intended to be a “methods” course, the seminar will highlight and attempt to demonstrate effective teaching practices. Readings and research projects will focus on the writing process and its linguistic, psychological, and socio-cultural underpinnings. Concepts such as audience, voice, identity, and dialect – as well as practical matters such as approaches to teaching grammar and working with English Language Learners – will all be considered. A key assumption of this course is that the best way to learn about writing is to write – in a variety of modes and for a variety of purposes – and to reflect on the complex processes involved in that act. Students can expect to write regularly: low-stakes experiments in different genres, informal reading responses, portfolio reflections, a literacy self-study, and a well-documented research essay will all be part of the mix. Class meetings will include discussions, workshops, response groups, and student presentations. There will also be a Saturday on-campus “field trip” to the Western Massachusetts Writing Project’s annual Best Practices in the Teaching of Writing conference.Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
391S-L5 Advanced Seminar – Junior Year Writing (2nd AM LIT) (Jr-Yr Writing) 78670
Instructor: H. Phan MW 2:30 – 3:45 pm
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only.
A House Divided: Douglass, Melville, and the Bonds of Union. Through close study of key literary texts from the period 1829-1865, this course will explore the transformations of modern America set in motion by the mid-nineteenth century Union crisis. While we will read a range of texts, the course will focus on the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. The guiding lines of inquiry for this course will be: How did their writings engage with the radical changes and retrenchments occurring in that period called “the American 1848”? How did their writings imagine alternatives to dominant understandings of social, civic, and national identities? In addition to studying their representations of their world, and their imaginations of alternatives, we will approach their writings as themselves representative of changes in the modern American cultural imagination: changes in interpretive practices, rhetorical strategies, and models of subjectivity and personhood. Accordingly, we will also study several twentieth-century interpretations of their writings. Through supplementary readings in modern criticism and theory, the course will introduce students to various critical models and reading practices. Readings will include Douglass, Narrative of the Life, The Heroic Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, and selected speeches; Melville, Moby Dick; The Confidence Man, Billy Budd, and selected short fiction and poetry. Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
391S-L6 Advanced Seminar – Junior Year Writing (Jr-Yr Writing) 78739
Instructor: J. Williams T/Th 9:30 am
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only.
Speculative Literature as Cultural Critique. In this class we will consider texts that imagine the future and pose critiques of contemporary society. What can speculative literature tell us about contemporary culture and the time in which we live? What are the repeated tropes and signifying practices of speculative literature and how do they deal with contemporary issues? How do ideas of race, gender and nation figure in visions of the future? How does speculative fiction redefine ideas of cultural space, fields of belonging, transgression and subjectivity? How do new works by women and people of color revise the classical models of specualtive literature? How do different genres of drama, novel and short stories imagine the future? We will read works by authors such as José Rivera, Octavia Butler, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, and also consider the way that the speculative literature has been transfered to the small and large screen. Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
391T-L1 Introduction to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1950-Present 79202
Instructor: C. Bailey MW 2:30 – 3:45 pm
This course examines creative writing – prose, poetry and drama -- written since 1950. We will read short fiction, a few novels, poetry and drama by canonical figures such as Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott. Our selection also includes texts by more recent, but also well-known Caribbean writers such as Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Jamaica Kincaid, and a few works by new writers such as Paulette Ramsay and Oonya Kempadoo. We will pay attention to thematic and stylistic synergies and divergences among writers, note the perspectives of women writers, and observe the twists and turns of specific writers. We will consider how different writers represent West Indian experiences, particularly those related to issues of color, class, history and gender relationships. Together, we will explore how postcolonial conditions impact and might be impacted by the works we study.
396 Independent Study 73206
Instructor: TBA TBA
412-L1 History of the English Language 78420
Instructor: S. Harris T/Th 2:30 pm
Why do people in MA sound different than people in NY? Have people always talked like this? HEL is a compelling and thrilling ride through the major changes in English phonology, morphology, syntax, spelling, and vocabulary from Caedmon in 735 to the vast English-speaking world of the 21st century. We will consider historical change and dialectic difference, literacy and orality, the emergence of vernaculars and the decline of Latin, and the current state of English. No previous knowledge of linguistics, Anglo Saxon, or Middle English is required.
419H-L1 Honors Games Thinkers Play (Jr-Yr Writing) 78421
Instructor: E. Gallo T 5:00 - 7:30 pm
Senior and Junior English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with TECS subplan only. This is a 4-credit Honors course. Subject matter: the act of interpretation. Most texts are ambivalent and support a wide range of interpretation—even contradictory interpretations. From this fairly obvious fact certain less obvious consequences arise. We interpret certain texts in order to see how their language behaves and just where ambivalence resides. We then examine other critics' interpretations of texts in order to decide how persuasive these interpretations are.
Language is ambivalent and reason is often uncertain: does it follow that its meaning is forever unrecoverable? We examine postmodern claims that even the language of the hard sciences is ambivalent, that all of our knowledge is no more than an inflated myth-making. We consider the possible ways in which an interpretation can be grounded on fact--the facts of the author's intention, historical background, and--in a few cases--well supported scientific theory. There are no predetermined answers to the questions we will consider.
Nine short papers and four exercises (done in class).
Texts include Burke (on Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"); selections from the Presocratic poet-philosophers; Kenneth Burke (dramatism); Lévi-Strauss (structuralism); Joseph Campbell (Jungian analysis); Derrida and J. Hillis Miller (deconstruction); Niels Bohr (on complementarity); and others. Satisfies Junior-Year Writing Requirement.
491KK-L1 The 18th Century: Institution & Revolution 77871
Instructor: J. Rosenberg MW 4:00 pm
English majors, International/National exchange majors, or Masters students with a TECS subplan only. This course will introduce students to the eighteenth century via three major historical developments, each of which consolidates a major institution of modernity at the same time as it challenges that institution. Our first point of interest will be the institution of genre, in particular realism. We will look at novels, poetry, essays and documentary narratives that are concerned with the "realistic" depiction of social struggle and daily life, perhaps for the first time in literary history. Our second point of interest will be the notion of the Atlantic World. We will consider the eighteenth century's depiction of center-periphery relations and the development of slavery in travel
and captivity narratives, histories of slave rebellion, and literatures of scientific exploration. Our third point of interest will be representations of new forms of labor and the criminal "underground" of anti-institutional methods of making a living. Ideally, all three points of interest will intersect, diverge, and then move each other forward in surprising ways, just when we least expect it. Primary readings will likely include Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Sir Isaac Newton's Opticks, Samuel Johnson's The Rambler, Addison and Steele's Spectator, Thomas Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Daniel Horsmanden's account of New York's 1741 slave conspiracy, Aphra Behn's Ooronoko, and John Gabriel Stedman's account of the slave rebellions in Surinam.
491LL-L1 African American Drama and Performance (2nd AM LIT) 78740
Instructor: J. Williams T/Th 11:15 am
This class is a broad historical survey of plays and performances created by blacks in the Americas with a focus on the United States. It illustrates the link between theatre and other elements of African American performative culture. It includes an evaluation of formal techniques as well as historical and social contexts, as well as, a comparison of cinematic and theatrical performances. It considers the relationship of African American aesthetics to broader American, European and Pan-African forms. The course compares the ways in which African Americans have used performance to represent themselves to the images and stereotypes perpetuated the larger American cultural context. The class will include plays by authors like Susan-Lori Parks, Le Roi Jones, August Wilson, Derek Walcott, Aimé Cesaire and Lorraine Hansberry.
496 Independent Study 73207
Instructor: TBA TBA
Contact department to add course.
499C-L1 Capstone course: Lifelong Writing: Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction 73246
Instructor: A. Phillips T/Th 2:30 pm
Senior Honors students only. This Capstone course is a two semester course open to students of all majors. Preference in registration for senior honors students using this course toward their culminating experience requirement; others as space permits. Contact instructor to add course.
591X-L1 American Poetry 77870
(2nd Am Lit)
Instructor: R. Jennison MW 4:00 - 5:15 pm
This course will survey American poetry from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Students will become familiar with the canonical generational account of modernism (Dickinson; Whitman; Pound; Eliot;
Stevens; Stein; Moore; Williams). However, discussions will also take up modernism's "others" (including Crane; Hughes; H.D; McKay; Zukofsky). Against modernism's own "cult of genius," we will read our poets as exemplary participants in interconnected and sometimes antagonistic literary movements, coteries, political fronts and avant-gardes. These groupings will include, but are not limited to: Imagism, Constructivism, Colloquial Nativism, Epic Classicism, Symbolism, the Harlem Renaissance, the poetics of the Popular Front and Objectivism. As we take up these canonical and alternative literary genealogies, we will also attend to the historical and political coordinates which subtend and substructure the various ideological orientations and formal strategies of early twentieth century American poetics. To what aspects of capitalist modernity are modern poets responding? How do uneven developments in racial formation, politics, economics and culture provide the conditions of possibility for modernist poetry's contradictory commitments to precapitalist organicism and futural
experimentation? What is the relationship between the production of new social subjects (the "New Woman;" the "New Jew;" the "New Negro") and the innovative languages of a modern poetry seeking transformation in art and life? Finally, we will survey the critical construction of modernism itself -- from its initial solidification as "movement" by the "New Criticism" to its current restructuring by Cultural Materialists working in the "New Modernist Studies." In this overview of modern poetry's critical history, we will seek the answer to the following question: Why is literary modernism often the privileged site of new critical-aesthetic narratives of modernity's historical traumas and/or potentials?
English Courses From The Five Colleges (Fall 2006)
Please note that when a course is marked (ENGL 200), it means the course fulfills the pre-major requirement English 200: Seminar in Literary Studies for Pre-English majors.
Please note that when a course is marked (BRIT LIT Pre-1700), it means the course fulfills the British literature pre-1700 with some coverage of Medieval requirement for English majors.
Please note that when a course is marked (BRIT LIT 1700-1900), it means the course fulfills the British literature 1700-1900 requirement for English majors.
Please note that when a course is marked (ENGL 221/222), it means the course fulfills the British literature Shakespeare English 221/222 requirement for English majors.
Please note that when a course is marked (2nd AM LIT), it means the course fulfills the second American Literature requirement for English majors.
Please note that when a course is marked (JR-YR WRITING), it means the course fulfills the Junior-Year Writing requirement for English majors.
Please note that when a course is marked (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE), it means the course fulfills an Upper-Level 300 or 400 level requirement for English majors.
(Click here to see Mount Holyoke College classes)
(Click here to see Smith College classes)
(Click here to see Amherst College classes)
(Click here to see Hampshire College classes)
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE
amst 290 1 Topics in American Studies (2nd AM LIT)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 S Davis
This course explores the range and variety of American literary expression from the 1920s through the early 1940s. We will locate the works in social history and in literary history, as modernity and modernism co-created new language and projects for American writers. Let's ask as we go: what historical moment was the author participating in and is the text some kind of intervention or comment upon that moment? We will consider the "lost generation" Modernists, the Harlem Renaissance, immigrant authorship, the literary Left, the popular "middlebrow" writers and the pulp writers.
amst 290 3 Topics in American Studies (2nd AM LIT)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 E Young
An examination of how U.S. women writers in the twentieth century represented lesbian, queer, and homoerotic possibilities in prose. Topics to include: literary strategies for encoding sexuality; thematic interdependencies between sexuality and race; historical contexts such as the "inversion" model of homosexuality and the Stonewall rebellion; theoretical issues such as the "heterosexual matrix," the "epistemology of the closet," and tensions between lesbian and queer models of sexuality. Authors studied may include Allison, Brown, Cather, Gomez, Larsen, McCullers, Moraga, Nestle, Pratt, Stein, and Woolson; theorists may include Butler, Lorde, Rich, and Sedgwick.
amst 301 1 Senior Seminar (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
W 1:00 – 3:50 D Weber
The first half of this seminar examines the major works of Richard Wright, including Uncle Tom's Children, 12 Million Black Voices, Native Son, Black Boy, and Black Power. The second half explores Wright's literary influence and political legacy to a range of modern and contemporary authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Ousmane Sembene, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.
asian 211 1 Modern Indian Fiction UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE
TTH 8:35 – 9:50 I Peterson
An introduction to modern Indian fiction in English and in translation. Authors covered include Rabindranath Tagore and Mahasweta Devi (Bengali); Premchand (Hindi); Ismat Chugtai and S. H. Manto (Urdu); and Anita Desai, R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy (English). We will study the novels and short stories of these writers with reference to the themes, problems, and discourses of tradition and modernity, nationalism, and colonial and postcolonial identities. We will pay attention to issues of gender and writing and to the implications of writing in English or in Indian languages.
cst 250 1 Classics in Nineteenth Century Critical Social Thought (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTH 8:35-9:50 J Grayson
By focusing on nineteenth-century texts, this course will critically assess notions of "Revolution" in the West using two case-studies--the 1848 "Freiheit" Movement (Germany) and American Slavery (USA)--to determine the influence religion and humanistic ideas had within key moments of social reform. Contemporaneous social upheavals will also be considered. Primary texts will include selections from Hegel's Logic and The Phenomenology of Mind; Walker's Appeal; and Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Supplemental readings will include Rousseau, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Truth, Emerson, Brown, Chapman, and Stanton.
educ 300 1 The Process of Teaching and Learning: Developing Literacy in Early Childhood and Elementary Schools (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 L Carlisle
Through a balanced and integrated approach students will learn to develop literacy in early childhood/elementary schools. Class members will learn about emergent literacy, diagnosing language needs, integrating phonics skills in a literature-based program, the teaching of process writing, children's fiction and nonfiction literature, and the use of portfolios for assessment. Course required for spring semester practicum students. Course evaluation is based on written and oral work done individually and in groups. Requires a prepracticum.
engl 200 1 An Introduction to the Study of Literature (ENGL 200)
MF 8:35 – 9:50 A Ahmed
This course examines various strategies of literary representation through a variety of genres, including such traditional literary forms as the novel, lyric poetry, drama, and autobiography, as well as other cultural forms, such as film. Particular attention is given to student writing; students are expected to write a variety of short essays on selected topics. Though the themes of specific sections may vary, all sections seek to introduce students to the terminology of literary and cultural discourse. Please note that this course is a requirement for all English majors.
engl 200 2 An Introduction to the Study of Literature (ENGL 200)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 P Berek
engl 200 3 An Introduction to the Study of Literature (ENGL 200)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 E Young
engl 200 4 An Introduction to the Study of Literature (ENGL 200)
TBA J Pyle
engl 211 1 Shakespeare (ENGL 221/222)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 F Brownlow
A study of some of Shakespeare's plays, emphasizing both the poetic and the dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and varieties of critical interpretations, including those of the twentieth century. Nine or ten plays.
engl 212 1 Jewish American Fiction (2nd AM LIT)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 J Clayton
An introduction to the literature of some of the great Jewish-American writers, including Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, Art Spiegelman, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Nathan Englander. The course will address questions of Jewish identity in America, cultural adaptation and assimilation, the complex ties to the Jewish European past, and Jewish-American religious sensibilities. What makes Jewish-American writing Jewish? What makes it American?
engl 230 1 The Development of Literature in English: Late Victorian through Contemporary UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE
TTH 11:00 – 12:15 W Quillian
An introduction to English literary history from 1850 to the present, focusing on works, authors, forms, conventions, and ideas in chronological order and historical setting. As the course progresses, the range of writers studied will broaden to include writers from postcolonial societies formerly belonging to the British Empire. Frequent reference will be made to political, economic, philosophical, and cultural contexts in which works of literature were composed and read. This course is recommended for students thinking of pursuing graduate degrees in English.
engl 240 1 American Literature I (2nd AM LIT)
MW 8:35 – 9:50 C Benfey
A survey of American literature from the literature of exploration through the major authors of the mid-nineteenth century, with special attention to the formation of an American literary tradition, along with the political, social, and religious context that helped shape the imaginative response of American writers to their culture.
engl 250 1 Twentieth Century and Contemporary African American Literature: Innovation, Strategy, Form (2nd AM LIT)
TTH 1:15 – 2:30 R Wilson
This course will explore twentieth-century and contemporary African American writers of great political import and innovation, beginning in the 1950s before the Black Arts movement with Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, turning to writers such as June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed. Post-movement writers may include Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricotte, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Harryette Mullen, Rene Gladman, Gary Fisher, and Anna Deveare Smith. Students will address the role of artistic strategy in these writers' works--poem, essay, play, novel, particularly in thinking about issues of race, gender and sexuality, and (black) self representation.
engl 286 1 Sexuality and Women's Writing (2nd AM LIT)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 E Young
An examination of how U.S. women writers in the twentieth century represented lesbian, queer, and homoerotic possibilities in prose. Topics to include: literary strategies for encoding sexuality; thematic interdependencies between sexuality and race; historical contexts such as the "inversion" model of homosexuality and the Stonewall rebellion; theoretical issues such as the "heterosexual matrix," the "epistemology of the closet," and tensions between lesbian and queer models of sexuality. Authors studied may include Allison, Brown, Cather, Gomez, Larsen, McCullers, Moraga, Nestle, Pratt, Stein, and Woolson; theorists may include Butler, Lorde, Rich, and Sedgwick.
engl 307 1 Can You Trust a Journalist? (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
M 1:00 – 3:50 P Painton
In the age of Jayson Blair, Judy Miller and Mary Mapes, it is hard to remember that there are rules, expectations and obligations to the job of finding out the truth about a situation. This course, given by Time Magazine's Executive Editor, will examine what they are, where they came from, if they make sense, and how they are ignored. It will also look at all the tools journalists use to make a story seductive, and the ones editors use to make a magazine an arresting experience.
engl 309 1 Writing the Novella (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
W 1:00 – 3:50 J Frank, S Grant
An advanced-level writing workshop devoted to the reading and writing of novellas. We will study such novellas as Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Jane Smiley's The Age of Grief, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, William Gass's The Pedersen Kid in order to get a sense of the parameters and scope of this in-between form. Students will write up to ten pages per week with the aim of composing and revising a work of 70-80 pages by the end of the semester.
engl 310 1 Old English (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 S Harris
Old English is the language of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain before the Norman Conquest. In this course, you will learn it. We will translate major Old English poems and prose pieces (including riddles, "The Dream of the Rood," and "Judith"). We will also study the historical and intellectual contexts of Anglo-Saxon literary production.
engl 311 1 Chaucer: Stories and Tellers: the Canterbury Tales (BRIT LIT Pre-1700) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTH 8:35-9:50 C Collette
This course provides a close reading of the greater part of The Canterbury Tales, with collateral study of their intellectual, social, and historical context. The goal of the course is to understand the complex interplay among poetic form, social criticism, humor, sexuality, and spirituality that characterizes the stories.
engl 316 1 The Matter of Britain: Stories of Arthur and the Grail (BRIT LIT P-1700) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TH 1:00 – 3:50 C Collette
This course focuses on the various forms the legends of King Arthur take from the twelfth to the twentieth century in the literature of both England and France. While focused on medieval English versions of the Arthur myth, the course considers the political and cultural forces at work to produce evolving versions of the story over time, especially in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries with Malory's and Tennyson's tellings. We will conclude with consideration of current interest in the Holy Grail in contemporary popular culture.
engl 317 1 Gender and Power in Early Modern Theatre (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 P Berek
How is gender represented, and how is power gendered, in plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors? Examples: unruly Alice Arden murdering her husband, Kate "tamed" in The Taming of the Shrew, Fletcher's "reply," The Tamer Tamed, and Middleton and Dekker's Roaring Girl, Moll Cutpurse. Topics such as boy actors, cross-dressing, early modern theories of sexuality and the cultural construction of same-sex relationships. Readings in plays by such writers as Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Elizabeth Cary, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Middleton, Webster and Ford, and in recent criticism. Substantial opportunity for independent work reflecting each student's own interests.
engl 318 1 John Donne (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
M 1:00 – 3:50 E Hill
The life and works of John Donne, in both verse and prose.
engl 320 1 Jane Austen: Readings in Fiction and Film (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 J Lemly
A study of Austen's six novels through the lenses of Regency culture and of twentieth-century filmmakers. How do these modest volumes reflect and speak to England at the end of world war, on the troubled verge of Pax Britannica? What do the recent films say to and about Anglo-American culture at the millennium? What visions of women's lives, romance, and English society are constructed through the prose and the cinema?
engl 325 1 Victorian Literature and Visual Culture (BRIT LIT Pre-1700) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 A Martin
This course will examine literary texts that represent new forms of visuality in 19th century Britain as well as examples of visual culture that provide a framework for reading Victorian culture in innovative ways. We will study 19th century photography--portraiture, prison photography, imperial photographs, and private and popular erotic images--as well as novels and autobiographical writing that engage with new photographic technology and its transformation of the ways in which Victorians understood identity, politics, aesthetics and representation. The course will take a similar approach to painting, literary illustration, political cartoons and caricature, and advertising.
engl 329 1 British Literature Since 1945 (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
W 1:00 – 3:50 N Alderman
A survey of British literature since 1945 that will include plays, novels, and poems as well as crucial essays of social and cultural thought. Authors will include Spark, Rhys, Churchill, Larkin, and Ishiguro.
engl 332 1 Modern Drama (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
M 1:00 – 3:50 B Leithauser
Classics of modern European and American drama from the late nineteenth century to the present. Readings include plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, O'Neill, Williams, Stoppard. We will also look at one or two musicals.
engl 341 1 American Literature III: Between the Wars (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 S Davis
This course explores the range and variety of American literary expression from the 1920s through the early 1940s. We will locate the works in social history and in literary history, as modernity and modernism co-created new language and projects for American writers. Let's ask as we go: what historical moment was the author participating in and is the text some kind of intervention or comment upon that moment? We will consider the "lost generation" Modernists, the Harlem Renaissance, immigrant authorship, the literary Left, the popular "middlebrow" writers and the pulp writers.
engl 345 1 Studies in American Literature: The Career and Legacy of Richard Wright (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
W 1:00 – 3:50 D Weber
The first half of this seminar examines the major works of Richard Wright, including Uncle Tom's Children, 12 Million Black Voices, Native Son, Black Boy, and Black Power. The second half explores Wright's literary influence and political legacy to a range of modern and contemporary authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Ousmane Sembene, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.
engl 349 1 Globalization and Culture (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TH 1:00 – 3:50 S Ahmed
This class will probe the global conflicts exploding around us to find the material forces hidden there. We will briefly study market cultures from time out of mind to recover how Greek and Renaissance literature reconciled 'civilization' with the ancient powers that precede it and remain occulted within it. Topics will include neoliberalism and neoconservatism; terrorism, counter-terrorism, and torture; and, inevitably, the U.S. in the Middle East. Fiction by Coetzee, Ondaatje, Rushdie, Devi, and Subcomandante Marcos; documentary film on the Caribbean and Chiapas as well as the backrooms of U.S. foreign enterprise; theory by Klare, E. Ahmed, Khalidi, Mamdani, and Chomsky, among others.
fren 215 1 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 E Gelfand
This course introduces students to literature and culture from a variety of perspectives. It will increase confidence and skill in writing and speaking, integrate historical, political, and social contexts into the study of literary texts from France and the French-speaking world, and bring understanding of the special relevance of earlier periods to contemporary French and Francophone cultural and aesthetic issues. Students explore diversified works - literature, historical documents, film, art, and music - and do formal oral and written presentations.
fren 215 2 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTH 2:40 – 3:55 G LeGoius
This course introduces students to literature and culture from a variety of perspectives. It will increase confidence and skill in writing and speaking, integrate historical, political, and social contexts into the study of literary texts from France and the French-speaking world, and bring understanding of the special relevance of earlier periods to contemporary French and Francophone cultural and aesthetic issues. Students explore diversified works - literature, historical documents, film, art, and music - and do formal oral and written presentations.
fren 219 1 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 S Gadjigo
This course introduces the literatures of French-speaking countries outside Europe. Readings include tales, novels, plays, and poetry from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, and other areas. Discussions and short papers examine the texts as literary works as well as keys to the understanding of varied cultures. Students will be asked to do formal oral and written presentations.
fren 225 1 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 C Rivers
This course will introduce students to contemporary popular culture in France and the French-speaking world, largely through the study of recent (post-1995) best-selling novels, popular music, and feature films. Students will be asked to give formal oral presentations based on up-to-date materials gathered from the Internet and/or French television and to participate actively in class discussion.
fren 311 1 Period Courses (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 M Switten
A study of how medieval stories propose simultaneously the celebration of sexuality and its containment within the social fabric. Against what constraints do individuals pursue their desires? Are masculine and feminine desires equally represented? After initial review of the Tristan legend, readings will include courtly romances placed beside bawdy and humorous tales to engage the full spectrum of emotions and relationships and to ask if those relationships differ (and if so how they differ) from relationships that pertain today.
fren 351 1 Courses on Women and Gender (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
W 1:00 – 3:50 C Rivers
This course will examine contemporary autobiographical narratives written by women, with a particular focus on living authors whose works include fictional, non-fictional and semi-fictional texts (Ernaux, Condé, Cusset, Nothomb). We will analyze the ways in which these authors present their life-stories, especially its traumatic or secret episodes, and the ways in which their works discuss the process of that presentation and of memory itself. Themes that are common to these autobiographical texts include: relationships with family, education, sexuality, class, and love. We will study several autobiographical films made by women.
germ 310 1 Transgressions: The German Romantic Spirit (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 The Department
An investigation of Romanticism, "the most revolutionary and the most radical movement of the German spirit" (Thomas Mann) and its intricate ties to postmodern cultural movements. This course explores Romanticism as an interdisciplinary cultural and social phenomenon in eras of political unrest. We study such fundamental Romantic concepts and topics as irony, Poesie, Volk; the cult of night and death, gender roles, Salonkultur, nationalism, myth as history and utopia. A particular focus on issues of identity and the unconscious. Authors/filmmakers include Günderrode, Varnhagen, the Brothers Grimm, Fouqué, Kleist, von Arnim, Hoffmann, Schlegel; Bachmann, Arendt, Freud; Trotta, Rohmer.
gndst 204 1 Women and Gender in the Study of Culture (2nd AM LIT)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 E Young
An examination of how U.S. women writers in the twentieth century represented lesbian, queer, and homoerotic possibilities in prose. Topics to include: literary strategies for encoding sexuality; thematic interdependencies between sexuality and race; historical contexts such as the "inversion" model of homosexuality and the Stonewall rebellion; theoretical issues such as the "heterosexual matrix," the "epistemology of the closet," and tensions between lesbian and queer models of sexuality. Authors studied may include Allison, Brown, Cather, Gomez, Larsen, McCullers, Moraga, Nestle, Pratt, Stein, and Woolson; theorists may include Butler, Lorde, Rich, and Sedgwick.
gndst 333 2 Interdisciplinary Seminar (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 M Ackmann
This course will examine the writing of Emily Dickinson, both her poetry and her letters. We will consider the cultural, historical, and familial environment in which she wrote, with special attention paid to Dickinson's place as a woman artist in the nineteenth century. Students will be asked to complete a community-based learning project in which some aspect of Dickinson's life and work is interpreted for the general public and incorporated into an ongoing display at the Dickinson Homestead. The class will meet at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst.
gndst 333 5 Interdisciplinary Seminar (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 P Berek
How is gender represented, and how is power gendered, in plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors? Examples: unruly Alice Arden murdering her husband, Kate "tamed" in The Taming of the Shrew, Fletcher's "reply," The Tamer Tamed, and Middleton and Dekker's Roaring Girl, Moll Cutpurse. Topics such as boy actors, cross-dressing, early modern theories of sexuality and the cultural construction of same-sex relationships. Readings in plays by such writers as Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Elizabeth Cary, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Middleton, Webster and Ford, and in recent criticism. Substantial opportunity for independent work reflecting each student's own interests.
jewish 210 1 Jewish-American Fiction (2nd AM LIT)
MW 1:15 – 2:30 J Clayton
An introduction to the literature of some of the great Jewish-American writers, including Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, Art Spiegelman, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Nathan Englander. The course will address questions of Jewish identity in America, cultural adaptation and assimilation, the complex ties to the Jewish European past, and Jewish-American religious sensibilities. What makes Jewish-American writing Jewish? What makes it American?
latam 278 1 The Fiction of History: Historical Truth and Imaginative Invention in the Latin American Novel (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 R Marquez
Examination of the scope, reach, and limits of the Latin American variant of the historical novel as a narrative form. The variety of ways in which it fictionally strives to re-create "certain crisis in the personal destinies of a number of human beings [which] coincide and interweave with the determining context of an historical crisis," the historical vision each writer brings to the work, will be given particular attention.
medst 300 1 Seminar in Medieval Studies (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TH 1:00 – 3:50 C Collette
This course focuses on the various forms the legends of King Arthur take from the twelfth to the twentieth century in the literature of both England and France. While focused on medieval English versions of the Arthur myth, the course considers the political and cultural forces at work to produce evolving versions of the story over time, especially in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries with Malory's and Tennyson's tellings. We will conclude with consideration of current interest in the Holy Grail in contemporary popular culture.
relig 204 1 Introduction to the New Testament (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:15 M Penn
This course investigates the social and historical context of first and early second-century Christianity, examines New Testament and select non-canonical documents, and introduces participants to the principal methods of New Testament studies. Students will read the principle works that make up most modern collections of the New Testament, a number of early Christian documents that did not make the final cut, and several ancient non-Christian sources. Examples of recent New Testament scholarship will provide historical background for better understanding Christian writings and will present different methods for approaching and interpreting ancient texts.
res 210 1 Great Books: The Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTH 11:00 – 12:15 P Scotto
In no other culture has literature occupied the central role it enjoyed in nineteenth-century Russia. Political, social, and historical constraints propelled Russian writers into the roles of witness, prophet, and sage. Yet, far from being limited to the vast, dark "Big Question" novels of legend, Russian literature offers much humor, lyricism, and fantasy. We will focus on the Russian novel as a reaction to western European forms of narrative and consider the recurring pattern of the strong heroine and the weak hero. Authors will include: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.
res 221 1 Texts and Contexts: Introduction to Russian Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MWF 1:15 – 2:30 P Scotto
From "Lady into Lassie" to "Lady with the Dog": A study of the nineteenth-century prose and poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov.
span 361 1 Seminar on Latin American Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTH 11:00 – 12:15 N Scott
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51? - 1695) was the most gifted writer of the colonial Americas: poet, playwright, feminist, rebel against gendered barriers of society and Church. Born an illegitimate child, her genius lifted her out of her rural origins to become first a lady in waiting at the viceregal court of Mexico, then a nun in a prestigious convent, and finally an acclaimed poet and outspoken defender of the right of a woman to an intellectual vocation. She definitely made waves, both in her time and ours. We will look at her major writings, those of some of her contemporaries, and then examine how Sor Juana keeps on inspiring playwrights, filmmakers and writers of today.
theat 215 1 Topics in Performance: Scene Study--Alice Childress and Tennessee Williams (2nd AM LIT)
MW 2:00 – 3:50 J Devlin
An in depth study of the dramatic and non dramatic works of two Southern American, mid-century playwrights, Alice Childress and Tennessee Williams. Childress, the only African American woman whose plays were produced for four decades, is known for her sensitive characterizations of black women as seen through the lens of her feminist ideology. Williams, known for his poetic realism, depicted the ills of our world and a search for truth through his passionate characterizations of women and men. Students will study selected texts and present four scenes during the course of the semester.
theat 281 1 Shakespeare (Eng 211) (ENG 221/222)
MW 1:15- 2:30 F Brownlow
A study of some of Shakespeare's plays, emphasizing both the poetic and the dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and varieties of critical interpretations, including those of the twentieth century. Nine or ten plays.
theat 332 1 Modern Drama (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
M 1:00 – 3:50 B Leithauser
Classics of modern European and American drama from the late nineteenth century to the present. Readings include plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, O'Neill, Williams, Stoppard. We will also look at one or two musicals.
theat 334 1 Topics in Theatre Studies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Theater (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 3:50 P Berek
How is gender represented, and how is power gendered, in plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors? Examples: unruly Alice Arden murdering her husband, Kate "tamed" in The Taming of the Shrew, Fletcher's "reply," The Tamer Tamed, and Middleton and Dekker's Roaring Girl, Moll Cutpurse. Topics such as boy actors, cross-dressing, early modern theories of sexuality and the cultural construction of same-sex relationships. Readings in plays by such writers as Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Elizabeth Cary, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Middleton, Webster and Ford, and in recent criticism. Substantial opportunity for independent work reflecting each student's own interests.
SMITH COLLEGE
AAS 348 01 Black Women Writers (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:10 – 2:30 D Lamothe
Same as ENG 334. How does gender matter in a black context? That is the question we will ask and attempt to answer through an examination of works by such authors as Phillis Wheatley, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones and Audre Lorde. Prerequisite: one college-level literature course or permission of the instructor.
AAS 366 01 Seminar: Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Classic Black Texts (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 3:00 – 4:50 K Quashie
This seminar will study closely a dozen or so classic texts of the Black canon. The intent here will be to look at each text in its specific historical context, in its entirety, and in relation to various trajectories of Black history and intellectual formation. Though this course will necessarily revisit some works that a student might have encountered previously, its design is intended to consider these works in a more complete context than is possible in survey courses. Authors might include W.E.B. DuBois, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Marlon Riggs and Audre Lorde. This seminar serves as the capstone course for majors.
ARH 293 01 The Artist's Book in the 20th Century (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 10:30 – 11:50 M Antonetti
A survey of the genre from its beginnings in the political and artistic avant-garde movements of Europe at the turn of the 20th century through contemporary American conceptual bookworks. In particular, the course will examine the varieties of form and expression used by book artists and the relationships between these artists and the socio-cultural, literary, and graphic environments from which they emerged. In addition to extensive hands-on archival work in the library's Mortimer Rare Book Room and the museum's Selma Erving Collection of Livres d'Artistes, students will read extensively in the literature of artistic manifestos and of semiotics, focusing of those critics who have explored the complex relationship of word and image. Prerequisite: one 100-level art history course or permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 12.
CLT 205 01 Twentieth-Century Literatures of Africa (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 10:30 – 11:50 K Mule
An introduction to the major genres and writers of modern Africa. Novels, short stories, drama and epics from every region of Africa, focusing on the way in which they draw upon traditional oral cultures, confront over a century of European colonialism on the continent, and represent contemporary postcolonial realities. Texts, some written in English and others translated from French and such African languages as Swahili and Songhay, will include Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngugi's The River Between, Bessie Head's Maru, Mariama BA's So Long A Letter, Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, and The Epic of Askia Mohammed recounted by Nohou Malio. Open to students at all levels.
CLT 234 01 The Adventure Novel: No Place for a Woman? (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 2:40 – 4:00 M Bruzelius
This course explores the link between landscape, plot and gender: how is the adventure landscape organized? Who lives where within it? What boundaries mark safe and unsafe places? Beginning with essays on cartography by Denis Wood, we'll read three classic 19th-century boys' books (Scott, Stevenson, Verne), then adventure fictions with female protagonists by E.M. Forster, Ursula Le Guin, Peter Dickinson, Astrid Lundren and others, to explore the ways in which this genre has embraced and resisted female heroes.
CLT 237 01 Travellers' Tales (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 9:00 – 10:20 M Gorra
How do we describe the places we visit? How do both guidebooks and the reports of earlier travellers structure the journeys we take ourselves? Can we ever come to know the "real Italy," the "real India," or do those descriptions finally provide only metaphors for the self? A study of classic travel narratives by such writers as Calvino, Twain, Goethe, Stendhal, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, V.S. Naipaul, Roland Barthes, Bruce Chatwin, and others.
CLT 240 01 Childhood in the Literatures of Africa and the African Diaspora (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTH 1:10 – 2:30 K Mule
Childhood, intimately tied to social, political and cultural histories, to questions of self and national identity, entails specific crises in Africa and the African diaspora, focused on loss of language, exile, and memory. How does the enforced acquisition of a colonizer's language affect children as they attempt to master the codes of an alien tongue and culture? How do narratives told from the point of view of children represent and deal with such alienation, and what are the relationships between recollections of childhood and published autobiography? Texts will include Camara Laye's The African Child, Tahar Ben-Jalloun's The Sand Child, Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Open to students at all levels.
CLT 268 01 Latina and Latin American Women Writers (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:10 N Sternbach
This course examines the last twenty years of Latina writing in this country while tracing the Latin American roots of many of the writers. Constructions of ethnic identity, gender, Latinidad, "race," class, sexuality, and political consciousness are analyzed in light of the writers' coming to feminism. Texts by Esmeralda Santiago, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Denise Chávez, Demetria Martínez, and many others are included in readings that range from poetry and fiction to essay and theatre. Knowledge of Spanish is not required, but will be useful. First-year students must have the permission of the instructor.
CLT 298 01 The Picaresque in Fiction and Film (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 1:00 – 2:50 J Vanpee
Picaro, rogue, outcast, vagrant, con artist, thief, fast talker, story teller, survivor -- who is the antihero after whom a sub-genre of the novel is named? How does the story he tells of his adventures unmask the ideologies, the hypocrisy, and the corruption of the society from which he is marginalized? The course will study the evolution of the picaresque genre from its origins in 16th-century Spain (Lazarillo de Tormes) to its modern development in American literature (Kerouac's On the Road; Ellison's Invisble Man), South American tales and films. French film (Varda's Vagabond) and beur fiction from France's immigrant population (Sebbar's Sherrazade). Our discussions will center on the following questions, from the pragmatic and empirical to the more conceptual and theoretical: How does the picaresque genre relate to other genres such as autobiography, beggar's cant, criminal accounts, confessions (true or false), the Bildungsroman, television serials, tales of exile, and the "road movie?" How does the picaresque novel translate into and adapt to other cultural and historical traditions and circumstances? How does the picaresque genre lend itself to the construction and deconstruction of the self and its identities? What if the genre's relation to gender and why have women writers, until very recently, not been drawn to it? Particular attention to a variety of theoretical approaches: psychoanalytic, post-colonial, post-structuralist, feminist.
CLT 299 01 Europe on the Move: Recent Narratives of Immigration (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 11:00 – 12:10 A Botta
How has the dissolution of the colonial empires and the Soviet Union redefined European identity? In the new geopolitics of the European Community, have borders moved toward the center of states and societies and created new transnational classes of inclusion and exclusion? The narratives of the many immigrants who have recently moved to and within Europe explore how to restructure life stories, translate the self, and negotiate new subjectivities in the shifting landscape of a Europe undergoing profound changes in the process of renewing itself. We will focus on the political, social and ethical issues raised by this emerging literature and examine how its stories call accepted notions of European identity and borders into question. Readings from a broad selection of genres, authors and languages: Lela Sebbar, Azouz Begag, Juan Goytisolo, Milan Kundera, Pap Khouma, Julia Kristeva, Eva Hoffman, Slavenka Drakuli. Regular film screenings.
CLT 300 01 Contemporary Literary Theory (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 3:00 – 4:50 A Jones
The interpretation of literary and other cultural texts by psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist and post-structuralist critics. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods: their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, as well as Donna Haraway, Patricia Williams and Rey Chow. Enrollment limited to 25.
CLT 305 01 Studies in the Novel: The Philosophical Novel (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 10:30 – 11:50 M Banerjee
This course charts the evolution of the theme of reason and its limits in the European novel of the modern era. Beginning with an examination of humanist assumptions about the value of reason in Rabelais, the course will focus on the Central European novel of the 20th Century, the age of "terminal paradoxes." Texts will include Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Kafka's The Trial, Musil's Man without Qualities, and Kundera's The Joke, The Farewell Party, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
CLT 361 01 Composing Knowledge in the Renaissance (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 3:00 – 4:50 N Russell
The Renaissance in Europe (1350-1600) was a time of new forms of inquiry and knowledges: travelers to New Worlds making maps and writing narratives of their adventures, scholars recovering classical Greek and Latin and reading ancient books in new ways, scientists using empirical observation to transform ideas about nature, the human body and the heavens, religious reformers and mystics exploring new ways of reaching God. These new knowledges called for new discourses-that is, new logics and vocabularies. We'll explore the languages and literary forms writers found to formulate and explain these new systems of thought. Our reading will include treatises, dialogues, poems, essays, and new kinds of authorial personas (speaking voices) created by writers engaged in this quest, from Italy to France, England and Spain, including Petrarch, Christine de Pizan, Thomas More, Erasmus, Teresa of Avila, Michel de Montaigne, and René Descartes.
EAL 231 01 The Culture of the Lyric in Traditional China (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 2:40 – 4:00 S Wu
This course surveys the masterworks of the Chinese lyric tradition from its oral beginnings in pre-Confucian times through the Yuan dynasty. Through the careful reading of selected works including shaman's hymns, protest poetry, and even excerpts from the great novels, students will inquire into how the spiritual, philosophical and political concerns dominating the poets' milieu shaped the lyric language through the ages. No knowledge of Chinese language or literature is required.
EAL 242 01 Modern Japanese Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 3:00 – 4:20 K Kono
Selected readings in translation of Japanese literature from the Meiji period to the present. In the past 150 years Japan has undergone tremendous change: rapid industrialization, imperial and colonial expansion, occupation following its defeat in the Pacific War, and emergence as a global economic power. The literature of modern Japan reflects the complex aesthetic, cultural and political effects of such changes. Through our discussions of these texts, we will also address theoretical questions about such concepts as identity, gender, race, sexuality, nation, class, colonialism, modernism and translation. All readings are in English translation.
EAL 244 01 Construction of Gender in Modern Japanese Women's Writing (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 1:10 – 2:30 K Kono
This course will focus on the construction of gender in the writings of Japanese women from the mid-19th century until the present. How does the existence of a "feminine literary tradition" in premodern Japan influence the writing of women during the modern period? How do these texts reflect, resist, and reconfigure conventional representations of gender? We will explore the possibilities and limits of the articulation of feminine and feminist subjectivities, as well as investigate the production of such categories as race, class, and sexuality in relation to gender and each other. Taught in English, with no knowledge of Japanese required.
ENG 184 01 Survey of Afro-American Literature, 1746-1900 (2nd AM LIT)
MW 9:00 – 10:20 D Lamothe
Same as AAS 113. An introduction to the themes, issues, and questions that shaped the literature of African Americans during its period of origin. Texts will include poetry, prose, and works of fiction. Writers include Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley.
ENG 199 01 Methods of Literary Study (ENGL 200)
MW 9:00 – 10:20 M Thurston
This course teaches the skills that enable us to read literature with understanding and pleasure. By studying examples from a variety of periods and places, students will learn how poetry, prose fiction, and drama, work, how to interpret them, and how to make use of interpretations by others. English 199 seeks to produce perceptive readers well equipped to take on complex texts. Readings in different sections will vary, but all will involve active discussion and frequent writing.
ENG 199 02 Lec Methods of Literary Study (ENGL 200)
MW 1:10 – 2:30 M Gorra
This course teaches the skills that enable us to read literature with understanding and pleasure. By studying examples from a variety of periods and places, students will learn how poetry, prose fiction, and drama, work, how to interpret them, and how to make use of interpretations by others. English 199 seeks to produce perceptive readers well equipped to take on complex texts. Readings in different sections will vary, but all will involve active discussion and frequent writing.
ENG 200 01 The English Literary Tradition I (BRIT LIT Pre-1700)
MWF 11:00 – 12:10 D Patey
A study of the English literary tradition from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Recommended for sophomores. Open to first-year students with SAT verbal score of 710 or higher and students with English AP score of 4 or 5.
ENG 210 01 Old English (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 C Davis
A study of the language of Anglo-Saxon England (c. 450-1066) and a reading of the Old English elegies.
ENG 231 01 American Literature before 1865 (2nd AM LIT)
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 R Millington
A study of American writers as they seek to define a role for literature in their changing society. Works by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, and others.
ENG 238 01 What Jane Austen Read: The 18th-Century Novel (BRIT LIT 1700-1900)
MW 2:40 – 4:00 E Harries
A study of novels written in England from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (1688-1818). Emphasis on the novelists' narrative models and choices, with special attention to novels by and about women.
ENG 242 01 A History of Mystery (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 2:40 – 4:00 D Flower
A study of the development of detective fiction in English, starting with gothic mysteries in the late 18th century and with the investigatory puzzles of Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s Exploration of the ways in which the conventions of the genre reflect issues of class, gender, and social change, and how in the 20th century those conventions have been re-invented, stylized, parodied, and transformed. Writers discussed will include Poe, Wilkie Collings, Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, E.C. Bentley, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. Open to non-majors.
ENG 250 01 Chaucer (BRIT LIT Pre-1700) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 10:30 – 11:50 N Bradbury
His art and his social and literary background. Emphasis on the Canterbury Tales. Students should have had at least two semester courses in literature.
ENG 254 01 English Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 10:30 – 11:50 G Kendall
The evolution and interplay of structure, theme, and character in plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, particularly in genres such as the tragedy of blood and the city comedy. Authors to include Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Tourneur, Dekker, Ford. One play by Shakespeare will also be examined.
ENG 255 01 For the Love of God and Women: Seventeenth-Century Poetry (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 S Seelig
An exploration of the remarkable variety of seventeenth-century lyric poetry, which includes voices secular and sacred, witty and devout, bitter and sweet, male and female. Attention to poetic forms, conventions, and imagery, to response and adaptation of those forms. Particular emphasis on Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and Marvell, set in the context of their time and their contemporaries.
ENG 256 01 Shakespeare (ENGL 221-222) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 9:00 – 10:20 C Reeves
A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Tempest. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.
ENG 272 01 Recent British Literature (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MWF 11:00 – 12:10 J Hunter
Consideration of selected fiction and non-fiction written during the last twenty-five years or so; attention to memoirs as well. Some drama, and perhaps a little poetry. Course will have an eclectic reading list: it will not be a survey. Works by writers such as John Banville, Alan Bennett, Angela Carter, Alec Guinness, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Le Carre, Andrew Miller, Emma Tennant, and Muriel Spark likely included. Largely discussion, with few lectures.
ENG 276 01 Contemporary British Women Writers (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 1:00 – 2:20 R Hosmer
Consideration of a number of contemporary women writers, mostly British, some well-established, some not, who represent a variety of concerns and techniques. Emphasis on the pleasures of the text and significant ideas-political, spiritual, human, and esthetic. Efforts directed at appreciation of individuality and diversity as well as contributions to the development of fiction. Authors likely to include Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Isabel Colegate, Eva Figes, Penelope Fitzgerald, Molly Keane, Penelope Lively, Edna O'Brien, Barbara Pym, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Jeanette Winterson; some supplementary critical reading.
ENG 278 01 Writing Women (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:10 – 2:30 F Cheung
Asian American Women Writers. The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past one hundred years has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text central or marginal to the tradition? Writers to be studied include Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, Mitsuye Yamada, M. Eveline Galang, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Paisley Rekdal, Lynda Barry, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Bharati Mukherjee, and Smith College alumna Frances Chung.
ENG 281 01 Modern American Poetry (2nd AM LIT) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TTh 1:00 – 2:20 M Thurston
A survey of the mainstream of American poetry from 1914 to the present, including the work of Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Williams, Hart Crane, Millay, Bishop, Lowell, Clampitt, Ashbery, Merrill, and O'Hara. The emphasis is on literary analysis.
ENG 284 01 Victorian Sexualities (BRIT LIT 1700-1900) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:10 – 2:30 C Pearsall
The Victorians have long been viewed as sexually repressed, but close attention reveals a culture whose inventiveness regarding sexual identity, practice and discourse knew few bounds. This course will explore a range of literary, visual and scientific representations of Victorian sexuality. We will read novels, nonfiction prose and poetry by authors such as Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti and Oscar Wilde. We will make use of visual materials, including Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Aubrey Beardsley illustrations and photographs by Carroll and others. Literary readings will be informed by Victorian sexologists such as Freud, Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, as well as contemporary historical and theoretical writings. Prerequisite: ENG 120, 199, or equivalent writing-intensive course.
ENG 290 01 Crafting Creative Nonfiction (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 2:50 A Boutelle
A writers' workshop designed to explore the complexities and delights of creative nonfiction. Constant reading, writing, and critiquing. Admission by permission of the instructor.
ENG 291 01 Writing for the Theatre (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
T 1:00 – 2:50 A Hairston
Same as THE 261. The means and methods of the playwright and the writer for television and the cinema. Analysis of the structure and dialogue of a few selected plays. Exercises in writing for various media. Plays by students will be considered for staging. L and P with writing sample required.
ENG 295 01 Advanced Poetry Writing (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
M 7:30 – 9:30 M Fried
Admission by permission of the instructor.
ENG 296 01 Writing Short Stories (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
TBA TBA
Admission by permission of the instructor.
ENG 353 01 Advanced Studies in Shakespeare: Reimagining Shakespeare for Children (ENGL 221/222) (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
Th 3:00 – 4:50 N Miller
A consideration of how Shakespeare has been reimagined for different audiences, particularly through adaptations for children of different ages, and for use both within and outside the classroom. We will read a range of Shakespeare's plays as well as adaptations of these plays for children and young adults, in genres ranging from picture books to novels. Assignments will range from analytic to creative, pedagogical to personal.
ENG 362 01 Satire: Execution by Words (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
Th 1:00 – 2:50 N Crow
A consideration of theoretical problems (definitions of satire, responses to satire, satiric strategies) followed by a study of the development of satire from Horace and Juvenal through Shakespeare, Swift, Pope, Austen, and Byron to Waugh, West, and Vonnegut. Some attention given to differences between male and female satirists.
ENG 386 01 History of Criticism (UPPER-LEVEL ELECTIVE)
MW 1:10 – 2:30 C Reeves
The Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy. An historical examination of one of the most fruitful sources of tension in Western lit