English

Course Offerings Spring 2013

Course Code	Title/Instructor	Meets
ENGL 101-01	Contemporary British Fiction Instructor: Susan Perabo Course Description: This class will explore the the various elements that have characterized British novels and short stories in recent decades. Authors may include Anthony Burgess, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro.	1030:TR EASTC 405
ENGL 101-02	Hard Boiled Instructor: Darrach Dolan Course Description: Well look at what the hard boiled detective of classic detective novels and their modern incarnations can tell us about the society we live in and how male and female roles, violence, sex, and the perception of crime have or havent changed since the hey-day of the genre and what they can tell us about the world we live in. From the classic hard drinking and wise-cracking of Hammetts Sam Spade and Chandlers Marlowe, through Jim Thompsons amoral anti-heroes, to Ed McBains bloody and violent police procedurals, right up to the Lehanes contemporary Kenzie-Gennaro series (a male and female detective partnership), well explore the recurring popularity of the hard-boiled investigator and his/her place in the modern world and American culture. We may also look at how Philip K. Dick adapted the classic police procedural and projected it into a dystopian future in A Scanner Darkly.	1500:MR EASTC 405
ENGL 101-03	Graphic Narratives Instructor: David Ball Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to an emerging medium in contemporary American literature: the graphic narrative. Beginning with a brief historical study of comics through the twentieth century, we will be examining recent graphic novels and memoirs (by artists/writers such as Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, Adrian Tomine, Scott McCloud and Charles Burns), as well as animated films (Disney, Pixar) and conventional authors (Michael Chabon, Paul Auster) who examine comics in their fiction and have been adapted in graphic form. Among the questions we will be asking are: Can comics become literature? How does the grammar of comics function and how does its mode of simultaneous seeing and reading complicate conventional approaches to reading literature? What relationship exists between comics, film, and other twenty-first century narrative media? Well be assessing these questions against the larger landscape of contemporary American literature, with an eye toward developing the core skills of literary analysis, critical thinking, and argument-based writing. Students will be asked to compose their own online comics, write multiple thesis-driven essays, and complete a final examination.	1330:TF EASTC 405
ENGL 101-04	Lit & Film of Globalization Instructor: Poulomi Saha Course Description: This is an introductory course about literature and film in an increasingly global world. We will trouble the assumption that globalization is just a contemporary phenomenon, examining global circuits of trade, colonialism, cultural interaction throughout the 20th century. Asking how works of literature and film in English are shaped by the forces of globalization, we will consider issues such as citizenship, travel, transnational capitalism, and the impact of digital media. How do literature and film find a new vocabulary, a new kind of English, to narrate an ever-expanding world? In turn, what do such fictions tell us about globalization and the forms it takes? Texts and films may include The Constant Gardener, My Year of Meats, and The Quiet American.	1130:MWF DENNY 104
ENGL 101-05	Shakespeare Retold Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost Course Description: In this class we will read a range of Shakespeare's plays and poems alongside the predecessors who influenced him and the successors whom he has inspired. In addition to Shakespeare himself, we will encounter figures ranging from the Latin playwright Plautus and the Romantic poet John Keats to the contemporary novelist Jane Smiley and the filmmaker Mira Nair.	0930:MWF EASTC 312
ENGL 101-06	The Haitian Diaspora Instructor: Linda Brindeau Course Description: In this course, students will read and analyze short novels by Haitian writers living in Canada (Laferrire, Ollivier), the United States (Danticat), and France (Depestre, Dalembert). Each text will be interpreted in the context of exile. Students will examine the different political and economic reasons forcing writers into exile, and how the writers relocation shaped and modified their literary expression.	1030:MWF DENNY 304
ENGL 212-02	Writing About Reading Instructor: Claire Bowen Course Description: Cross-listed with WRPG 211-02. In his autobiographical Narrative, Frederick Douglass calls learning to read the pathway from slavery to freedom. Reading is a consequential act. It involves us in social, economic, and cultural power structures. This writing intensive course examines the connections between literacy, liberty, and identity in the United States. The syllabus includes works by Bechdel, Bishop, Douglass, Obama, and X, among other writers and theorists. The course also includes a service-learning unit, in which students will complete a writing project for a local non-profit literacy advocacy organization.	0900:TR EASTC 312
ENGL 212-03	Writing: Creative Non-Fiction Instructor: Sha'an Chilson Course Description: Cross-listed with WRPG 211-03. Ever read a piece in Sports Illustrated about famous ballparks? Or an article in The New Yorker about a family living next to toxic waste? Chances are you were reading a piece of creative non-fiction. Creative non-fiction is the genre between fiction and journalism. It tells stories and creates characters. It uses facts and history to support its statements, all the time looking back at the narrative story it's telling. In this class we will explore different ways of writing creative non-fiction, and you will have the chance to write on a number of diverse topics, including sports, travel, the arts, childhood, and food. This will be a workshop based class, and during the semeter we will talk about student essays in-depth in workshops with an eye toward revision.	1330:MR EASTC 312
ENGL 214-01	Work w/Writers: Theory & Pract Instructor: Noreen Lape Course Description: Cross-listed with WRPG 214-01. Permission of Instructor Required. This course is only for students who have been recommended, interviewed, and chosen to be tutors in the Norman M. Eberly Writing Center.	1330:TF ALTHSE 109
ENGL 215-01	Creative Writing: Memoir/Essay Instructor: Sharon O'Brien Course Description: A workshop on the writing of memoir and personal essay. Offered every two years.	1330:R EASTC 107
ENGL 216-01	Creative Writ: Screenwriting Instructor: Alex Willemin Course Description: Cross-listed with FLST 310-03. This course will familiarize students with the fundamentals of good screenwriting: structure, theme, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students take part in weekly writing exercises as preparation for their final class project--creating a detailing outline of an original screenplay, and completing the first act. Topics include plot and subplot, character development, and commercial considerations such as format and genre. Students are required to read essential books on scriptwriting and to analyze several films and the screenplays on which they are based.	1330:M DENNY 21
ENGL 218-01	Creative Writ:Poetry & Fiction Instructor: Susan Perabo, Adrienne Su Course Description: An introductory creative writing workshop in poetry and fiction.	1330:T EASTC 107 1330:T EASTC 312
ENGL 218-02	Creative Writ:Poetry & Fiction Instructor: Gloria Boyer, Darrach Dolan Course Description: An introductory creative writing workshop in poetry and fiction.	1330:W EASTC 312 1330:W EASTC 406
ENGL 220-01	Crit Approaches & Lit Methods Instructor: Siobhan Phillips Course Description: An introduction to the basic questions that one may ask about a literary text, its author, and its audience. Study of a limited selection of literary texts using several critical approaches. The course will also offer instruction in the elements of critical writing.	1030:MWF EASTC 406
ENGL 220-02	Crit Approaches & Lit Methods Instructor: B Ashton Nichols Course Description: An introduction to the basic questions that one may ask about a literary text, its author, and its audience. Study of a limited selection of literary texts using several critical approaches. The course will also offer instruction in the elements of critical writing.	1330:TF KAUF 178
ENGL 220-03	Crit Approaches & Lit Methods Instructor: Thomas Reed Course Description: An introduction to the basic questions that one may ask about a literary text, its author, and its audience. Study of a limited selection of literary texts using several critical approaches. The course will also offer instruction in the elements of critical writing.	0930:MWF EASTC 406
ENGL 300-01	C.A.L.M. Lab Instructor: Christine Bombaro Course Description: This P/F non-credit research course introduces students to research methodology for advanced literary studies. ENGL 300 is a co-requisite with a student's first 300-level literature course (except ENGL 339).	:
ENGL 329-01	Postcolonial Sex Instructor: Poulomi Saha Course Description: This course will explore the intersection of theories of gender and sexuality and the postcolonial world. We will consider how gender and nation are shaped and represented in literature and film. Why are nations routinely imagined as women, and imperial dominion expressed in terms of sexual conquest? Western academic models of gender and sexuality provide one set of frameworks by which to discuss desires, identities, and affectsin this class we will ask how well they travel to a postcolonial context. How do theories, practices, and identity categories translate? What do they elide? What do they take as natural? We will suggest alternative frameworks for describing sexuality around the world and for exploring non-Western literary representations of non-normative gender identities and sexualities. Readings and films may include work by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Shyam Selvadurai, Deepa Mehta, Sigmund Freud, and Judith Butler.	0930:MWF EASTC 300
ENGL 339-01	The Craft of Poetry Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston Course Description: Looking mainly at modern and contemporary poetry, we will examine poems from the point of view of the apprentice poet, discussing what makes a poem succeed. To do so, we'll think about poems in the context in which they were written and the possibilities the poet could have chosen (but did not). We will become familiar with the language used to discuss poems and will read poets writing about poetry. There will be a research paper. Among the likely poets: W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glck, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li Young Lee.	0900:TR EASTC 301
ENGL 339-02	Letters And/As Literature Instructor: Siobhan Phillips Course Description: Letters give us an intimate view of writers lives and relationships. But are letters literature, and if so, how do they relate to other fictive or nonfictive kinds of writing? This course examines the indefinite status of correspondence as a form and epistolarity as a concept. We will examine work by Austen, Bishop, Dickinson, and Keats, among others, as we think about letter-writing from the era of eighteenth-century conduct books to the era of twenty-first-century text messages.	1330:TF EASTC 300
ENGL 354-01	Restoration/18th C Comedy Instructor: Robert Ness Course Description: Study of texts written in England from the late 17th to the end of the 18th century. Topics may include the poetry, drama, or prose fiction of the period. Readings in plays by Wycherely, Etherege, Congreve, Behn, Pix, Centlivre and others.	0900:TR EASTC 405
ENGL 360-01	Ecocriticism: An Introduction Instructor: B Ashton Nichols Course Description: Ecocriticism is a recent form of literary and cultural interpretation that has emerged out of emphasis on the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Ecocritics emphasize the role played by nonhuman nature in a wide range of texts, literary and otherwise. They also interrogate the ways that human interactions with nature (plants, animals, geology, landscapes) have affected human life and the natural world. Many ecocritics have environmentalist or preservationist agendas; others are more interested in the philosophical and cultural implications of human understanding of and impact on the natural environment. We will set literary works in dialogue with scientists and nature writers of the past two centuries and will examine the current importance (as well as the controversial aspects) of ecocritical ideas. We will emphasize the role played by literature in the development of our own assumptions and values. The course will also focus attention on critical approaches and literary methods and will help students to develop more sophisticated research skills as they move toward the senior seminar year.	1330:MR STUART 1104
ENGL 375-01	African American Women Writers Instructor: Lynn Johnson Course Description: Cross-listed with AFST 320-01 and WGST 300-04. This course examines a range of the literary productions written by African American women. Specifically, we will span the African-American literary tradition in order to discover the historical, political, and social forces that facilitated the evolution of Black women's voices as well as their roles inside and outside the Black community. Additionally, we will discuss such issues as self-definition, womanhood, sexuality, activism, race, class, and community.	1330:MR ALTHSE 206
ENGL 389-01	Poetry of the Mad Men Era Instructor: Claire Bowen Course Description: Literary scholarship describes the immediate postwar period as notable primarily for witnessing the dusk of modernism or the dawn of postmodernism. Midcentury poets, by contrast, figured their epoch as bearing, in Wallace Stevenss words, the weight of primary noon (1947). This course explores how transatlantic poetry shaped, and was shaped by, the shifting political, artistic, and social ground of the mid-twentieth century. We will situate our primary texts in contemporaneous public culture and amid classic and recent accounts of the midcentury. Poets include: Auden, Bishop, Brooks, Hughes, Larkin, Moore, OHara, Plath, Pound, and Rich, among others.	1030:TR EASTC 301
ENGL 392-01	Shakespearean Genres Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost Course Description: We will read a wide selection of Shakespeare's plays and poems, paying particular attention to how he masters the genres of comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, as well as writing plays that trouble or transcend generic boundaries. We will deepen our understanding of Shakespeare's context by reading individual plays by major contemporaries: Marlowe, Middleton, and Jonson.	1130:MWF EASTC 300
ENGL 404-01	Senior Workshop Instructor: David Ball Course Description:	1330:W LIBRY E. ASIAN
ENGL 404-02	Senior Workshop Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston Course Description:	1330:T EASTC 406
ENGL 404-03	Senior Workshop Instructor: Thomas Reed Course Description: A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor. Prerequisites: 300 and 403.	1330:R EASTC 406
ENGL 418-01	Mixed Genre Workshop Instructor: Adrienne Su Course Description:	1330:M EASTC 406