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Click on the course title to view its course description. Please note that all courses are subject to change without notice. For the most up-to-date and current day and time information, please refer to the University Time Schedules. Graduate course information is also available on this Web site.
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Spring 2006 Courses
10100 Critical Perspectives - Sec. 1
Knight, Janice
TuTh 10:30-11:50
10100 Critical Perspectives - Sec. 2
Schleusener, Jay
MW 1:30-2:50
11400 Writing Argument
Cochran, Kathryn
Writing Arguments is a pragmatic course in the rhetoric of arguments. By "rhetoric," we mean that we won't be asking whether an argument is internally valid--we'll ask why it is more or less successful in persuading readers. By "pragmatic," we mean that we'll focus mainly on your own arguments. We'll use arguments from politics, academics and the professions to develop an analysis of argument, but the main goal is for you to use this analysis to enhance your ability to write arguments that succeed with your readers. We'll spend each Tuesday discussing your writing and each Thursday expanding, refining and criticizing the analysis. So you can expect three kinds of work: critiquing arguments, writing new arguments, and revising. In the final weeks of the course, we will look at arguments that class members have chosen for discussion, and we'll look at competing theories. But we're teaching this course for the first time, so all the above is subject to dramatic change.
13000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
TuTh 3:00-4:20
Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse) 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 $25
15203 Dreams and Literary Interpretations
Hsiao, Irene
TuTh 4:30-5:50
This course focuses on dream interpretation in the Classical, Romantic, and post-Freudian eras of Western dream interpretation. We will read texts on dream interpretation, dream-induced literature, and literary representations of dreams in order to explore the nature of dreams and their relationship to literary production.
15600 Medieval English Literature
Miller, Mark
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England.
16600 Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances
Mazzio, Carla
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This course will study 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 to be read will include: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear (2 versions), Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. There will be one short and one longer paper. Section attendance is required.
16901 Roaring Girls: Gender in Renaissance Drama
Murray, Stephanie
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This course will address some of the issues, themes, and techniques of reading Renaissance drama, both as a historical period and as a literary genre. The primary focus of the course will be on how gender, culture, and class is represented in the plays, through physical presentation onstage, through what other characters say about female characters, and through what the female characters themselves have to say. Close reading will be essential in this process, as the specific language of gender will be investigated, but we will also be addressing the historical context of these representations through consideration of the material environment of the original staging.
18901 Origins of the English Novel
Macpherson, Sandra
TuTh 1:30-2:50
The Origins of the English Novel: a study of the early English novel from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen.
20404 Narrative and the English Modern Novel
Sinha, Babli
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course will investigate some of the central issues regarding narrative in the modernist novel in England. Among the questions we will consider are the following: How did modernist novelists transform conventions of narrative form? How did these diverse writers posit new and "modern" representations of self, challenge linear notions of history, boundaries of masculinity and femininity, of self and other? We will answer these questions through a study of literature and essays from the period.
22901 Utopia and Dystopia
Atkinson, Jennifer
MW 4:30-5:50
This course will provide students with an introduction to literary utopias and dystopias, from the works of Edward Bellamy and Karl Marx to George Orwell and Ursula Le Guin. Although we will focus primarily on fiction, we will also draw on theory, architecture, sociology, historical projects, urbanism, and environmentalism. Course requirements will include a midterm and final paper (6and 10 pages, respectively).
24000 Ulysses
Ruddick, Lisa
MW 1:30-2:50
This course takes students through Joyce's novel and exposes them to various recent critical approaches, with some excursions also into materials contemporary to Ulysses that can be placed in dialogue with the novel.
25001 Jewish Latin American Literature
Obejas, Achy
A survey of Latin American literature by Jewish writers, including Ariel Dorfman, Clarice Lispector, Mario Szichman, Rosa Nissan, Jose Kozer, Victor Perera and Ilan Stavans, among others. Issues include crypto-Judaism, displacement, and the particularities of construction of identity in the New World. Readings by Jorge Luis Borges address "the mythical Jew" in Latin America. The course looks at Jewish literature in countries such as Argentina, which have historically vibrant Jewish communities, as well as places such as Cuba, where Jews have been more of a hidden influence. Students will be expected to read and discuss materials, as well as research literary and historical issues. Readings will be in English.
25100 Colonial Encounters
Janice Knight
TuTh 3:00-4:20
We will explore the project of colonialism in l7th century America, focusing on English colonies in Virginia and New England. We will begin the course with an examination of Spanish conquest and settlement of the southwest. Drawing on the work of recent critics, these regions will be studied as zones of contact between Amerindian, English, and Spanish cultures. Our approach will be varied. We will focus on primary texts, including historical accounts, maps, and traveller's portfolios, but we will also consider demographic analyses, town plans and other aspects of material culture. We will also survey the wide range of recent studies of colonialism in the period.
25901 American Modern: Experimental Fiction
Brown, Bill
MW 3:00-4:20
This course concentrates on the formal experiments of American fiction in the first three decades of the 20th century. On the one hand, we will examine those experiments within the context of a more general understanding of "modernism"-a context established through other genres (such as poetry) and other media (such as painting, photography, and film). On the other, we will locate these experiments within a broader cultural milieu-the world of war, mass production, consumer culture, and the age of jazz. Still, the primary engagement will be with the texts themselves, major works by Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen.
25904 Modernism and American South
Dahn, Eurie
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course attempts to get a sense of the different Souths that are created in the literature of the first part of the twentieth century. How do modernist techniques give these writers a way to look at the South in the twentieth century? How do regionalism and modernism work together?We will be watching Gone With the Wind and reading Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston.
25906 Time and Narrative
Hansen, Mark
MW 12:30-1:50
This course will focus on the complex and multiple relations between time and narrative following a cross-media approach. Finding orientation in Ricoeur's magisterial study of our topic, we will read philosophical texts (Augustine, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Prigogine) and literary texts (Proust, Borges, David Foster Wallace), view and study films (Godard, Inarritu), artworks (Smithson) and various forms of digital media (Marker's Immemorial, digital films of Peter Greenaway). Our aim will be to explore the place of narrative (and of the "non-narrative," whatever that is) in the human experience of time as well as its potential role in our understanding of the time of the cosmos.
26900 Postwar U. S. Literature
Nelson, Deborah L.
This survey of postwar U.S. literature begins with Arthur Miller's The Crucible and concludes with Tony Kushner's Angels in America. These works, haunted by the Rosenberg and McCarthy trials, frame a course that considers a variety of genres and formal experiments in poetic language in terms of the political and cultural upheavals of the Cold Ware. In addition to the two plays, we are likely to read prose works by Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison, and poetry by Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Monette.
27000 Fiction of Three Americas
Veeder, William
MW 4:30-5:50
What constitutes "American Fiction"? This question has become prominent in recent years as readers have begun to take seriously a fact we've always "known"--that three "America's", North, Central and South, compose our hemisphere, and that each of these geographic realms has contributed significantly to the literary compositions of post-modernism. Close reading will be central to our course. Attention to textual detail will enable us to study the work done by the intricate formal artifices constructed by our authors. In turn, close reading will be supplemented by attention to issues of gender, psychology, and society, as we explore the private and social sources of the pain so evident in our texts. Authors will include Borges, Rosario Ferre, Carlos Fuetes, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Andre Dubus, Bharati Mukherjee. Midterm and final papers.
27800 American Poetry from 1945-Present
Izenberg, Oren
TuTh 3:00-4:20
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns-Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?"
This course has two goals. The first is to introduce you to a representative sampling of important work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Allen Grossman, Frank Bidart and others. Our close attention to the forms, modes and themes of American poetry in the last half-century will enable us to see the poetry of the present, in all its volume and variety, for all its originality and innovation, as deeply continuous with the poetry of the past.
The second goal will be to pose to the poetry of the present two recurrent and related questions. The first: Can there be a poetry of the present? Not just, that is, a poetry being written in the present, but one that responds to or represents the fleeting urgency of the lived moment without either refusing the unfinished present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or skipping over the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that they are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind?
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