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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 2008 Undergraduate Courses
11002 Critical Theory
Schleusener, Jay
TuTh 9:00-10:20
11100 Critical Perspectives
TBD
15600
Medieval English Literature
Schleusener, Jay
TuTh 12:00-1:20
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.
16181 (CMLT 29001, EALC 27450) Silk Road Fictions
Chin, Tamara
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students who are majoring in Comparative Literature. The Silk Road is a modern idealization of a pre-modern crossing of peoples, ideas, and cultural traditions across a Eurasian continent. The array of texts that falls under this rubric has historically grown from a few ancient Greek and Chinese narratives to embrace any number of works that exemplify or narrate cross-cultural encounters between a notional East and West. This course introduces students to some basic problems in cross-cultural comparative reading through the example of the Silk Road. We will look closely at a selection of Silk Road fictions and their relation to multiple literary or aesthetic traditions, and consider the ways in which writers have used, translated, and even forged ancient manuscripts in constructing cross-cultural history. We will also consider theories of world literature, cosmopolitanism, and bilingual and bicultural texts. Primary readings will include The Monkey and Monk (from the 16th century epic Chinese novel The Journey to the West), the Greek Alexander Romance, Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, and David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Knowledge of classical Greek or Chinese is helpful but not required.
16600
Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances
Cormack, Bradin
TuTh 10:30-11:50
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, Othello, King Lear (quarto and folio versions), Macbeth, Coriolanus, 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
MW 3:00-4:20
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.
18903 The Lives of Animals
Keenleyside, Heather
This course starts from Foucault’s famous claim that neither “life” nor “man” existed until the end of the eighteenth century. We will look at how the “lives” of all kinds of things, animals, and people are depicted in a range of eighteenth-century texts and genres: philosophy (Locke, Hume), novels (Defoe and Swift), object-narratives, children’s literature, and poetry (Gray, Cowper).
22804 Latino/a Intellectual Thought
Coronado, Jr., Raul
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course will trace the history of Latina/o intellectual work that helped shape contemporary Latina/o cultural studies. Our focus is on how Chicanas/os and Puerto Ricans have theorized the history, society, and culture of Latinas/os in the U.S. Themes we will study include folklore and anthropology, cultural nationalism, postcolonialism, literary and cultural studies, community activism, feminism, sexuality, and the emergence of a pan-Latino culture. Throughout, we will pay attention to the convergences and divergences of Chicana/o and Puerto Rican studies, especially as contemporary practitioners have encouraged us to (re)think Latina/o studies in a comparative framework.
23400 Virginia Woolf
Ruddick, Lisa
MW 3:00-4:20
In this course we will explore the works of one of the major British authors of the twentieth century, and develop a sense of her place within literary modernism. We will read works spanning Woolf's literary career, including Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts. Also included will be a series of short texts by other twentieth-century authors, which we will put into conversation with Woolf's work in order to investigate the central concerns of the modernists and their heirs in the later twentieth century. Authors thus introduced will include Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, and women writers of the later twentieth century including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Sylvia Plath.
25305 American Revolution
Slauter, Eric
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This course explores the causes and consequences of independence and the creation of national identity. Readings include texts by Abigail and John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine, as well as recent histories describing the contributions of ordinary people, free and unfree, and the meaning of the Revolution for later generations.
25912 The Bestseller in 20th Century America
Perrin, Tom
MW 1:30-2:50
This course surveys the kinds of novels that have been bestsellers in the American twentieth century. In addition to the primary reading, students will examine the cultural contexts in which the notion of the "bestseller" has emerged, and will develop a sense of changing historical attitudes to the popular novel.
25915 Rewriting the Novel
Rosen, Jeremy
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This course examines a surging phenomenon in the contemporary novel: the rewriting of a canonical text from the perspective of a minor character. We will ask whether the formal features of the novel make it particularly suited to this form of intertextual dialogue, and study the politics and aesthetics of contemporary culture to ask why the last forty years have seen such an accelerated production of this kind of novel.
25916 The Portrait of the President
Macdonald, Amanda
This course enquires into the work of power that is done by the portrait of the powerful. We will interrogate the portraiture of the President of the United States (and of those who would be President) not simply for its systems of meaning, its legibility, nor only in the spirit of diagnostic criticism, but most crucially for the portraiture’s efficacy. This last is the most treacherous question of all for image studies, and it is the one we will articulate and pursue: What is it that portraits, in and of themselves, are able to do? What is the power of the portrait of the President? We will thus consider what we mean by “power” and by “representation”, and how the portrait tradition effects both. Louis Marin’s The Portrait of the King will offer us a bundle of rich theoretical premises and analytical models. Other readings will include portrait theory, literature on US presidential portraiture, and a minor critical tradition linking the portrait of the monarchic bust to the portrait of the political ruler (Foucault on coins and caricatures; Barthes on election posters; Fresnault-Deruelle on French presidential portraiture). We will focus on four contemporary genres of representation of the President and of the “presidential”: money; election posters; official presidential portraits; and television “talking heads”.
All students will be enrolled in the two hour Monday class, in addition to which they will choose between one of two meeting times on Wednesdays. Students wishing to read in English only will need to attend the 9:30-10:30 session on Wednesdays. Students who are literate in French and who wish to take the course with a French language component will need to attend the 10:30-11:30 session on Wednesdays, where they will read the key set text in the French original (Louis Marin's Le Portrait du roi), along with a selection of other set texts in French (e.g. Barthes, Foucault). The choice of session on Wednesdays is workload neutral.
26203 Native American Writing in the Progressive Era
Berliner, Jonathan
TuTh 3:00-4:20
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American writers composed literary and critical works that challenged prevailing cultural assumptions about Indians. Native Americans mobilized on a national level during this time, gaining full citizenship rights by the 1920s and laying the groundwork for a re-orientation of national discourse that recognized the value of Indian culture. In this course, we will consider works by American Indian writers of this period, including Simon Pokagon, Charles Eastman, and Zitkala-Sa, as well as those of other authors writing in local newspapers, boarding school journals, and for the fledgling Society of American Indians. Students should expect to write two short essays and a longer research paper on the course topic.
27302 Emancipation and Literature
Warren, Kenneth
TuTh 9:00-10:20
By taking up a variety of writers including, Herman Melville, John William De Forest, Albion Tourgée, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, & Henry James we will examine how the struggle over how to understand and represent the emancipation of the nation's southern black populations shaped novel writing during the late 19th century.
28806 Beyond Baker St: Classic Detective Fiction from Holmes to Wimsey
Hunt, Kerri
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course is a selective survey of the history of the classic detective story. In it, we will apply critical tools traditionally reserved for erudite dissection of "literary" texts to works often viewed as "middlebrow" or "light reading". This course will investigate, among other issues, the question of genre formation and definition; the narrative structures and conventions of the mystery plot; early mystery writers' bids for cultural capital; taste and politics of readership; the marketing of literature; and, not least, the role of enjoyment in reading and evaluating these texts.
28907 The Idea of Europe in Idealist Prose
Steiner, Lina
The idea of “Europe” as a shared cultural space, in which different national cultures and literatures can engage in a dialogue, emerges in the second half of the nineteenth century in the works of the Western-European authors and several “outsiders,” including Gogol, Turgenev, and Henry James. This course will examine the connections between the development of realist fiction and the formation of the transnational cultural conception of “Europe” as a realist-age successor of Goethe’s conception of “Weltliteratur.” The texts in this course will include fictional works, essays, and criticism by Goethe, Mme de Staël, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Henry James. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Readings are available in English and in the original languages. Discussion and papers are in English.
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