Spring Course Descriptions

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SPRING 2003 COURSES
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10100. Critical Perspectives; A. Yaphe. Autumn, Winter, Spring
10100. (Spring) Critical Perspectives. Liberty Beyond the Law: Satire in Political Cartoons and Literature of the Late 17th Century; C. Carlesn. ( Spring)
10400. Introduction to Poetry; L. Ruddick. Spring.
10700. Introduction to Fiction.; W. Veeder. Spring.
10900/30900. Issues in the Teaching of English in a Diverse Society. TBA G. Hillocks. Spring.
11500. Writing Science Journalism; T. Weiner. Spring 2003.
11800/31800. Unreal Cities: Poetry of the Metropolis; K. Volkman. Spring 2003.
13201/33201 Beginning Poetry; Writing C. McGrath
12701/32701. Memoir; M. Stielstra Spring 2003.
13000/33000. The Little Red Schoolhouse (Academic and Professional Writing); L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Winter, Spring 2003.
13600/33600. Playwriting; C. Allen. Spring 2003
14301/34301 Advanced Poetry; Writing C. McGrath
14302/34302 Advanced Poetry Writing A. Rollings
16200/36200. Spenser and Shakespeare; B. Cormack. Spring 2003.
16301/36301. Renaissance Love Poetry; J. Scodel Spring 2003.
16600. Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances; R. Strier. Spring.
17200/47200. The Religious Lyric in England and America; R. Strier. Spring 2003.
18100. The European Novel: Eighteenth Century; T. Pavel, Spring 2003.
20700. Anglo-Irish Literature; J Chandler. Spring 2003.
21700/42400. The Politics of Culture; L. Rothfield. Spring 2003.
21900/42300.Victorian Women Writers; E. Helsinger. Spring 2003.
23700/43700. Recent American Poetry; R. Von Hallberg. M. Strand. Spring 2003.
24500. Contemporary Drama; Staff. Spring 2003.
25400. The Women's West: 19th and 20th century Women's Writing; J. Munjak. Spring 2002.
25800. The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow; K. Warren. Spring 2003.
26500. The Age Of Washington and Du Bois; K. Warren. Spring 2003.
28600.The Sound Horror Film to 1936: Form, Genre, Medium; R. Spadoni. Spring 2003.
29700. Reading Course; Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

For a description of the numbering guidelines for the following courses, consult the section on reading the catalog on page 15.

Boldface letters in parentheses refer to courses that fulfill the following program requirements: (A) Period; (B) Pre-1700; (C) 1700 to 1900; (D) Poetry; (E) Fiction; (F) Drama/Film; (G) American; (H) British.

10100. Critical Perspectives.
A consideration of the uses of literary criticism. Readings will include the classic texts (Plato, Aristotle, Longinus); Emily Dickinson; Don DeLillo, White Noise.

10100. Critical Perspectives. Liberty Beyond the Law: Satire in Political Cartoons and Literature of the Late 17th Century
This course examines visual and verbal representations of liberty, legal protection, and the "rights" of citizen-subjects in their pre-18th century incarnation. It focuses on questions of freedom of speech, of the right to habeas corpus, of the grand jury as a protective agency for the accused, etc. in order to argue for the important role played by political cartoons in the debates about liberty and property in Restoration England. In the first half of the class, we will analyze two major historical events of the period: the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. In this section of the class, we will examine a range of political cartoons from the 1670's and 80's, and then focus on a single engraver, Stephen Colledge, as well as his trial for treason in 1681. Some of the questions we will be asking will be: What kind of evidence is available for understanding the importance of political cartoons in late 17th century England? How did political cartoons help to shape popular perceptions about "freedom" and the "law"? Where do we find this evidence? How is Colledge's trial important for conceptualizing a new, more "democratic" role for the grand jury? Why is the grand jury an important institution for securing the "rights" of the people? Why does a trial in which the primary piece of evidence is a series of anti-Royalist prints become the starting point for so many historical discussions of the transformation of the role of the grand jury in late 17th century England? In the second half of the class, we will look carefully at the deployment of rights discourse and the language of the aesthetic in Restoration drama, as well as the works of John Milton, John Lilburne, John Dryden, and Andrew Marvell. We will analyze the various ways in which literary forms responded to political/ religious issues as well as to the aesthetic values embodied in the political cartoons of the time. C. Carlesn. (Spring).

10400. Introduction to Poetry.
This course involves intensive readings in both contemporary and traditional poetry. Early on, the course emphasizes various aspects of poetic craft and technique, setting, and terminology and provides extensive experience in verbal analysis. Later, emphasis is on contextual issues: referentially, philosophical and ideological assumptions, and historical considerations. L. Ruddick. Spring. (D)

10700. Introduction to Fiction.
In the first half of this course, we focus on the principal elements that contribute to effect in fiction (i.e., setting, characterization, style, imagery, and structure) to understand the variety of effects possible with each element. We read several different writers in each of the first five weeks. In the second half of the course, we bring the elements together and study how they work in concert. This detailed study concentrates on one or, at most, two texts a week. W. Veeder. Spring. (E)

10900/30900. Issues in the Teaching of English in a Diverse Society.
TBA G. Hillocks. Spring.

11500. Writing Science Journalism.
This course will not teach you how to write scientific research papers. Instead, we'll learn how to "translate" scientific and technical research for a non-specialist audience and how to communicate with a broader public about scientific issues that concern us all. We will read and use as models science writing in several genres: science journalism in newspapers and periodicals, science books intended for general audiences, and critical essays on the role of science in the public sphere. T. Weiner. Spring 2003.

11800/31800. Unreal Cities: Poetry of the Metropolis
(=MAPH 31800, ENGL 31800). This seminar considers poetic responses to urban experience, the city as refracted and reflected in the poet's eye, and imaginative transformations of space and place. How does the collision of the lyric moment with the contingencies of urban encounter destabilize the lyric "I"? What happens to the poem's time in responding to the multiple levels of city-time, resulting in synchronic fabulations sometimes exhilarating, sometimes ghostly, sometimes appalling? We will discuss the flaneur, the Surrealist "encounter," the poetry of dailiness, and other relevant notions, exploring poetic treatments of Paris, New York, London, Petersburg, Berlin, San Francisco, and of course, Chicago. Reading will include Baudelaire, Breton, Rilke, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara, Langston Hughes, Alice Notley, Osip Mandelstam, and Gwendolyn Brooks. K. Volkman. Spring 2003. (D)

12701/32701. Memoir.
M. Stielstra Spring 2003.

13000/33000. The Little Red Schoolhouse (Academic and Professional Writing).
PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. P/N grading optional for non-English concentrators. This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project. Materials fee $20. L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Winter, Spring 2003.

13201/33201 Beginning Poetry; Writing C. McGrath.
TBA

13600/33600. Playwriting
(=ENGL 13600, GSHU 26600). PQ: Consent of instructor; consult Tiffany Trent (702-9021) for more information. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts. This course introduces the basic principles and techniques of playwriting through creative exercises, discussion, and the viewing of contemporary theater. Structural components of plot, character, and setting are covered as students develop their dramatic voices through exercises in observation, memory, emotion, imagination, and improvisation. C. Allen. Spring. (F)

14301/34301. Advanced Poetry Writing; C. McGrath
TBA

14302/34302. Advanced Poetry Writing A. Rollings
TBA

16200/36200. Spenser and Shakespeare.
This course explores the place of literature in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century culture by focusing on two exemplary and very different literary careers. Against Spenser's poetry, including parts of the Shepheardes Calender and the Faerie Queene, we will read a number of Shakespeare's plays, including Love's Labor's Lost, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra, in order to reflect on the cultural work done by renaissance lyric, pastoral and romance, both on the stage and off. B. Cormack. Spring 2003. (B, F, H)

16301/36301. Renaissance Love Poetry.
This course will explore visions of erotic love in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry. We will combine formal and historical considerations to explore the diverse ways in which early modern poems represent erotic longing, seduction, and sexual consummation; courtship and marriage; same-sex intimacy; sexual betrayal, renunciation, and repulsion; and conflicts between erotic desire and competing personal and social imperatives. Poets will include Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Katherine Philips, John Milton, Rochester, Aphra Behn. J. Scodel Spring 2003. ( B, D, H)

16600. Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances.
PQ: Eng 165 is recommended but not required. This course studies the second half of Shakespeare's career, from 1600 to 1611, when the major genres that he worked in were tragedy and "romance" or tragicomedy. Plays read include Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear (two versions), Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. R. Strier. Spring. (B, F, H)

17200/47200. The Religious Lyric in England and America.
This course will study the development of the religious lyric in English from its first flowering in seventeenth-century England (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, An Collins) and America (Ann Bradstreet, Edward Taylor) to its secularization in the Romantic lyrics of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the Victorian lyrics of Christina Rossetti and G. M. Hopkins in England and Emily Dickinson in America to the high modernist meditations of T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets. We will then consider the question of what counts as "religious poetry" after Eliot, and may consider poems by Theodore Roethke, Geoffrey Hill, Allen Ginsburg, Robert Duncan, and Carl Phillips. There will be one short and one longer paper. R. Strier. Spring 2003. (B)

18100. The European Novel: Eighteenth Century
(=CMLT 20100, GRMN 27400, GSHU 21800). The course examines the links between the development of the novel in Britain, France and Germany and the 18th-century debates on human autonomy. The course at once follows the general evolution of the novel (from romance and the picaresque to the sentimental and the Gothic) and explores the role this genre played in the rise of a new moral awareness in its public. All texts in English, students are encouraged to read French and German texts in the original, if possible. T. Pavel, Spring 2003. (C, E)

20700. Anglo-Irish Literature.
This course studies the long and rich tradition of Irish writings in English, with particular focus on the long eighteenth and the long twentieth centuries. We will look at writers of the Protestant Ascendancy, writers of the long struggle for independence from British Rule, and writers of the time of the "Troubles" and after. Readings will include works chosen from among the following: fiction by Edgeworth, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien; poetry by Goldsmith, Moore, Yeats, Kavanagh, and Heaney; plays by Wilde, Shaw, Synge, O'Casey, Friel; prose by Swift and Burke; recent criticism by Deane, Kiberd, Gibbons, and Eagleton. J Chandler. Spring 2003. (H)

21700/42400. The Politics of Culture.
Whether focused on beauty and justice or on issues of race, class, and gender, critical work in the humanities tends to take for granted the assumption that-as ideology, ethical resource, swource of resistance, means of transcendence or moral improvement, and so on--culture matters politically. Yet that assumption is itself worth exploring. This course examines the history of the ways in which, beginning in the victorian period but intensifying over the last half century, culture has been defined as an object of political concern, an objective of political action, or a means to a political end. Topics to be discussed may include the understanding of the arts and humanities. In addition to reading key texts by a diverse group of cultural critics, philosophers, economists, and writers we will evaluate the arguments that have been made in several concrete policy debates from recent years. L. Rothfield. Spring 2003.

21900/42300. Victorian Women Writers
(=ENGL 21900/42300, GNDR 21900). This course covers the difficulties and possibilities for women writing in nineteenth-century Britain, as these are variously encountered and exploited in works by Victorian poets and novelists. Likely texts include Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights and selected poems; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; George Eliot, Middlemarch; and selected poetry by Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Michael Field, and Charlotte Mew. We also evaluate some approaches to Victorian women's writing (Gilbert and Gubar, Armstrong, Homans, Mermin, and Leighton) and look at various analyses of sex and gender roles in the Victorian period (e.g., Davidoff, Hall, and Poovey). E. Helsinger. Spring 2003. (C, E, H)

23700/43700. Recent American Poetry.
R. Von Hallberg. M. Strand. Spring 2003. ( D, G)

24500. Contemporary Drama
(=GSHU 24350). This course will investigate how new works for the theater may reflect the philosophical and ideological thought of our time. Readings require that students analyze the push for innovation in dramatic structure, linguistic structure, and form. Staff. Spring 2003. (F)

25400. The Women's West: 19th and 20th century Women's Writing.
(=GNST?) This course aims to introduce students to the large but understudied body of women's writings about the American West produced during the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. We will read a number of non-fictional and fictional texts and interrogate the role region and race has played in women's representations of western life. We will explore how women write about the self when thrown into a new environment. How do they represent cultural others and the minutia of everyday life? How does their audience influence their writing? Did women experience and depict the West differently than men? What issues seemed to primarily concern them and motivate their writings? These are some of the questions we will investigate as we work to understand the role women have played in shaping our current notions of what constitutes the "West." J. Munjak. Spring 2002. (G)

25800. The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow
(ENGL 44800, AFAM ??) Taken as a whole the fiction of Richard Wright, Willam Faulkner, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor and James Baldwin constitutes a powerful testament to the common humanity of black and white Americans in a nation where "separate but equal" in matters of race was deemed consistent with the law of the land. How decisive was the humanistic eloquence of these writers in helping to shift the nations legal climate against de jure segregation? How Successful was the American novel of race in coming to terms with the turbulent social reality of the civil rights era ? K. Warren. Spring 2003. (A, E, G)

26500. The Age Of Washington and Du Bois.
(AFAM??) The turn of the century, the period which historian Rayford W. Logan has designated as the nadir of African American history, also marks what literary historians are calling the first black cultural renaissance. How are we to think about the relationship between cultural production and black political liberation during the decades that brought to prominence Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois as iconic figures marking the range of black political thinking? K. Warren. Spring 2003. (A)

28600. The Sound Horror Film to 1936: Form, Genre, Medium
(=CMST??). This course explores the Classic Horror cycle (1931-1936), which marks the beginning of the history of the horror film as a recognized genre in American cinema. These films will occasion our investigation of fundamental questions about the nature of film genres, including questions about their origins, patterns of development, and the problems of their definition. The classic cycle, which includes such seminal genre works as Dracula (Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (Whale, 1931), also will facilitate our investigation of the nature, specifically, of the horror film. We will consider various approaches to understanding the genre and this cycle, from cultural to psychoanalytic, to newer approaches that focus more on historiographic methods and questions. Also we will consider the impact of the coming of sound on the early development of the genre. Major emphasis throughout will be on matters of film form and on close textual analysis. R. Spadoni. Spring 2003. (F)

29700. Reading Course.
PQ: Consent of instructor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. May not be taken for a letter grade. The kind and amount of work to be done are determined by an instructor within the Department of English Language and Literature who has agreed to supervise the course. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

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