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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.
2008-2009 |
2007-2008 |
2006-2007 |
2005-2006 |
2004-2005 |
2003-2004 |
Winter 2009 Undergraduate Courses
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| 10400 | Introduction to Poetry | |
| 13000/33000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 13900/31100 | History and Theory of Drama 2 | |
| 15105 | Newberry Library: The Junius Manuscript | |
| 15200/35200 | Beowulf | |
| 15500 | Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales | |
| 15800 | Medieval Epic | |
| 16300/36300 | Renaissance Epic | |
| 16500 | Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies | |
| 16706 | Shakespeare at the Opera | |
| 17503 | The Renaissance Lyric Sequence | |
| 20208 | How Walden Was Made | |
| 21908 | Shopping and Fornicating: The City Drama and City of London | |
| 23406 | From Victorians to Modernists | |
| 24400/44505 | Brecht and Beyond | |
| 25602/47808 | 20th Century Fictions: The Novel and Its Others | |
| 26500 | The Age of Washington and Du Bois | |
| 27303 | Wright, Ellison, Baldwin: American Lit, Social Protest, Race |
ENGL 10400 Introduction to Poetry
Izenberg, Oren
This course involves intensive readings in both contemporary and traditional poetry. Early on, the course emphasizes various aspects of poetic craft and technique, setting terminology and providing extensive experience in verbal analysis. Later, emphasis is on contextual issues: referentiality, philosophical and ideological assumptions, and historical considerations.
ENGL 13000/33000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn;
Weiner, Tracy
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
ENGL 13900/31100 History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David; Coleman, Heidi
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The course features voluntary but highly recommended end-of-week workshops in which individual scenes will be read aloud dramatically and discussed. Assignments at mid-quarter and at the end of the quarter will give the option of two substantial essays, or (in place of either or both) the putting on of a short scene in cooperation with some other members of the class. Acting skill is not required; the point is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report.
ENGL 15105 Newberry Library: The Junius Manuscript
Breen, Nathan
This seminar is for participants who have already completed at least one course in Old English. Participants will translate selections from the four Old English poems contained in manuscript Junius 11 (Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan) with an eye toward the functions of poetry based on Biblical translations in Anglo-Saxon England. Participants will read numerous critical essays concerning the literary and cultural elements of the manuscript and its individual poems to develop a greater understanding of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated over the years. In addition, participants will develop an understanding of Anglo-Saxon manuscript and codex making through an orientation with the many resources available at the Newberry, and will become acquinted with the key role of this particular manuscript's owner (Fransiscus Junius, 1591-1677) and the inception of the scholarly study of Germanic philology.
ENGL 15200/35200 Beowulf
von Nolcken, Christina
This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the poem as edited in Klaeber's Beowulf (4th ed., Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008). Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. Prerequisite: Eng 149/349 or equivalent.
ENGL 15500 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
von Nolcken, Christina
We examine Chaucer's art as revealed in selections from The Canterbury Tales. Our primary emphasis is on a close reading of individual tales, although we also pay attention to Chaucer's sources and to other medieval works providing relevant background.
ENGL 15800 Medieval Epic
Murrin, Michael
We will study a variety of heroic literature, including Beowulf, The Volsunga Saga, The Song of Roland, The Purgatorio, and the Alliterative Morte D'Arthur. A paper will be required, and there may be an oral examination.
ENGL 16300/36300 Renaissance Epic
Murrin, Michael
A study of classical epic in the Renaissance or Early Modern period. Emphasis will be both on texts and on classical epic theory. We will read Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Camões' Lusiads, and Milton's Paradise Lost. A paper will be required and perhaps an examination.
ENGL 16500
Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies
Bevington, David
An exploration of Shakespeare's major plays in the genres of history play and romantic comedy, from the first half (roughly speaking) of his professional career: Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida.
ENGL 16706 Shakespeare at the Opera
Bevington, David; Gossett, Philip
TBA
ENGL 17503 The Renaissance Lyric Sequence
Cormack, Bradin
This course will focus on two major poetic sequences—Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare's Sonnets. More briefly, as context for these, we will consider some earlier examples of the genre as well as miscellaneous collections of lyric such as the one in which Wyatt's and Surrey's poems were first gathered. The course will be concerned with questions of lyric subjectivity, gender and desire; and it will consider as well the tension between the lyric utterance and the implied narrative through which a sequence gestures toward unity.
ENGL 20208 How Walden Was Made
Slauter, Eric
This course on literature and social history explores the composition, production, and reception of Thoreau's Walden. In early sessions we trace Thoreau's writing process from his journals, lectures, and early drafts to the finished, copyrighted manuscript and attend the way in which his text registers and resists political and social issues in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s (especially immigration, slavery, and war). Then, taking Walden as a case study in the history of the book, we investigate key aspects of industrial book production in the mid-nineteenth century (from papermaking, stereotyping, lithography, engraving, printing, and binding to marketing, distribution, and bookselling); in doing so, we make visible the large cast of players (including female operatives, child laborers, and free and enslaved African Americans) who ultimately turned Thoreau's manuscript into a book. Finally, we examine various historical contingencies that made the book into a classic, attending to its reception by different domestic and international readers and movements from the 1850s to the present. This hands-on course meets in the Rosenthal Seminar Room in the Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library.
ENGL 21908 Shopping and Fornicating: The City Drama and City of London
Meeuwis, Michael
From its earliest days, the city of London has been known as a center of trade and a center of theater, contending as the most expensive, garish, colossal, vulgar, erudite city in the Western world. The unceasing unsettling of social, sexual, and political hierarchies produced by commerce sustains the earthy devotional drama of the York Cycle mystery plays (ca. 1325), the world of arms manufacturing in Major Barbara (1905) and the postmodern queer agon of Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and F***ing (very 1996). In this course, we examine the twinned histories of London and its history by adhering, loosely, to the genre of citizen comedy (plays from the York Cycle, Shakespeare, Jonson, Etheridge, Wycherley, Behn, Congreve, Bulwer-Lytton, Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw, Osborne, Delaney, and Ravenhill) and critical theorists of sexuality, theater, and shopping (Eliot, Roach, Montrose, Greenblatt, Foucault, Gallagher, Addison and Steele, Goldsmith, Marx, Miller, Blair—and an episode of Dr. Who.) London history and geography will form a third register of our inquiries: using satellite imaging software, we will develop an interactive map of theatergoing London on the Internet, understanding in the process how the geography of this singular city has impacted the British drama of the past seven hundred years.
ENGL 23406 From Victorians to Modernists
Rothfield, Lawrence
This course examines the transition from Victorianism to modernism, with an eye to evaluating Virginia Woolf's claim that on or about Dec. 10, 1910, human nature changed. The method will be to read paired texts: Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" and Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and Joyce's Portrait; Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, etc.
ENGL 24400/44505 Brecht and Beyond
Kruger, Loren
Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the twentieth century. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theatre, from the anarchic plays of the 1920's to the political learning plays to the classical parable plays, as well as the works of his heirs in Germany (Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss), Britain (John Arden, Caryl Churchill), and sub-Saharan Africa (Ngugi, and various South African practitioners). We will consider the impact of Brechtian theory on film, from Brecht's own Kuhle Wampe to Jean-Luc Godard to African film makers.
PQ Juniors, seniors and/or graduate students with at least one of the following: Intro to Cinema, History and Theory of drama, or their equivalents. Working knowledge of German and/or French would be helpful but is not required
ENGL 25602/47808 20th Century Fictions: The Novel and Its Others
Izenberg, Oren
The novel, that most public and popular of our literary genres will, at crucial moments in its history, visits modes of art that offer alternatives to its own increasingly dominant nature—such arts may be "difficult" like poetry, or nonlinguistic, like music. Such novels raise questions about the social function of the imagination, the relation between kinds of literature and kinds of knowledge, the tension between high and mass culture. This course studies 20th century novels (and films) in which poets and poetry or musicians and music appear as central characters and concerns: James' The Aspern Papers, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Mann's Doctor Faustus, Richard Powers' In the Time of Our Singing, Cocteau's Orphée, Hal Hartley's Henry Fool and others.
ENGL 26500 The Age of Washington and Du Bois
Warren, Kenneth
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?
ENGL 27303 Wright, Ellison, Baldwin: American Lit, Social Protest, Race
Godfrey, Mollie
This course looks in depth at three of the most influential voices in twentieth century African American literature: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. We will look at the ways in which they defined their relationship to American literature, to an African American tradition, and to one another, while considering their impact on American literary studies as a whole.
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