beyond your textbook

Courses

Some courses give you breadth of literary experience, where you taste many different kinds of literature.

English 34: Caribbean Literature - Tiphanie Yanique
This is Caribbean literature 101.  We will be taking a Pan-Caribbean approach; addressing the African, Asian and European literary presence in the region.  We will read fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction from the Anglophone, Francophone, Spanish speaking and Lusophone experiences. In the course we will address historical, political and personal questions through various rhetorical lenses.  We will utilize music and film as texts whenever possible.  The course may involve nontraditional assignments, such as museum visits outside of class and in-class art projects.

English 40: Modern Arabic Novel and Film - Gretchen Head
This course will begin with the roots of the modern Arabic novel in Egypt and trace its development through realism to the more experimental forms used by the group of writers that has come to be known as the “jīl al-sitīnāt,” or, the generation of the sixties.  We will then move geographically through Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, and the North African community in France to explore some of the most prevalent themes found in the cultural production of the Arab world today. Topics will include the relationship of women’s literature to the Lebanese civil war, narration of the Palestinian Diaspora, prison literature under totalitarian regimes, and the figure of the Sa‘lūk (rebellious outsider). Films with analogous themes will accompany the weekly readings.  All novels and films will be accompanied by short historical lectures to help students contextualize the works under discussion.   

All novels will be read in translation and films will be subtitled; no knowledge of Arabic is required. 

English 31: Dante to García Márquez - Bob Ready
Reading, or re-reading, whole (mostly) works, medieval to modern:  Dante, The Inferno; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Cervantes, Don Quixote; Molière, The Misanthrope; Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Kafka, The Penal Colony; Woolf, A Room of One's Own; García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There's an  introduction to the English major, taught by full-time faculty. Each faculty member has a different approach, but each will give you a classroom experience and writing assignments that will help you to succeed in the rest of the courses in the major: 

English 9:  Literary Analysis - Gerry Smith-Wright
Literary texts record the human experience in its infinite variety.  As readers, we not only enter the narrative worlds of “the other” but also come home to ourselves in ways we might not have ever imagined.  The goal of this course is to determine how writers construct exciting narrative worlds and how they elicit readers’ participation in those worlds.  We will focus on what is happening in selected examples of fiction, poetry, and drama and how it is happening.  What elements of craft do writers use to create specific effects in a literary text?  What kinds of interpretive tools can we use to critique a writer’s literary performance?  To answer these questions, we will practice formalist, historical, feminist, cultural, and other approaches to the study of literature on the journey to becoming more involved and informed readers. 

English 9: Literary Analysis - Peggy Samuels
The course increases the richness, flexibility, and accuracy of your writing about literature.  We will work on expanding the range of strategies available to you as an interpreter.  We will cover such subjects as over‑reading (or overanalyzing); methods for distinguishing between an illegitimate interpretation and one that feels legitimate or authoritative; the role that the community of interpreters plays in establishing the legitimacy of an interpretation; and we will look at some postmodernist theories about the way that cultural codes interact with literary works and literary interpreters.  We work on poems, short stories, and one play. 

The Department believes that creative writing transforms a student's understanding of literature. Some students choose to do an entire minor in creative writing. Some students just try one workshop. Here are descriptions for poetry, fiction writing, and travel writing. We also offer playwriting, journalism, memoir writing, spoken word (which focuses on literature and performance), literary translation (you don't have to have complete fluency to try the translation course), travel writing and more.

English 108: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry - Patrick Phillips
Practice in the craft of writing poems. Emphasizes models from throughout the traditions of English poetry (and other poetries in translation), with the goal of expanding our definition of what, both formally and emotionally, poems can do.  Weekly discussion of poems by members of the workshop.  Graded Pass/Unsatisfactory.

English 107:  Creative Writing Workshop:  Advanced Fiction - Tiphanie Yanique
This is a workshop course for students wishing to develop a sophisticated fiction writing vocabulary and a vigorous exploration of literature via the study and creation of it.  The course will be made up of creation classes on specific issues of craft; such as point of view, character development, dialogue, etc.  Students will read full novels and story collections and be expected to use skills gleaned from these texts in their own work.  We will be pushing past the “write what you know” paradigm.  Key to this course will be developing research and observational skills in order to create and appreciate literature beyond your own experience.  Students may only be admitted to the class by application.  Pre-rec for the course is any college level creative writing class (in fiction, poetry, nonfiction or playwriting).  Please see the English Department for applications or pick-up an application at 307 Sitterly Hall.

Travel Writing - Sandra Jamieson 
In this section of 104, students will practice writing several kinds of articles; however, all of those articles will have something to do with travel. Travel writing encompasses familiar journeys as well as the more exotic form of this genre, because travel writing is as much about the author as it is about the location of the journey. We are always traveling somewhere, and those journeys all provide excellent material for travel writing. Some essays may strive to make the unfamiliar and the strange accessible to readers, but others may render the seemingly familiar strange and new, allowing us to see things differently. Students may write several articles on aspects of the same journey, or they may explore the notion of travel in less traditional pieces or to less traditional destinations.  

Many literature courses go into depth on particular authors, eras, or themes.

English 114:  Victorian Gothic - Wendy Kolmar 
How did the Victorians use the Gothic – a genre which explores the macabre, the supernatural, the uncanny – to explore, represent and reimagine the complexities of their own age?  To play out in the realm of fantasy the challenges of urban life, of science, of the empire, of shifting definitions of sexuality, gender and art?  Fiction and poetry including: Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Wuthering Heights.

Engl 173:  Contemporary American Poetry - Peggy Samuels
We will read examples of some contemporary poets, and then students will pick a question that they are interested in answering and will work with a partner to answer it. Examples:  Why were contemporary poets (e.g., Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Levine) so intrigued by the work of Latin American poets?  How have recent poets (Olds, Bidart) extended or reimagined the tasks of earlier confessional poets (Lowell, Plath)?  How have visual arts influenced contemporary poets (such as O’Hara and Ashbery)? What do poets (in interviews and prose) have to say about their own work and the work of their contemporaries? How do poets orchestrate immersion in experience and reflection on it? Can we use the language of commentary on visual art to enlarge our own possibilities for writing about poetry?

English 133: Latino/a Literature – Charli Valdez
In this class, we will study the contemporary “Ola Latina”, or Boom, in Latina/o culture as expressed in literature, film, print media, tv and music - considering principally those texts written in English and salted strategically with Spanish. There will be two experiential components to this course - including a visit to the Museo del Barrio - and we will discuss such timely issues as immigration, trans-nationality and diaspora. This course will cover such authors as Junot Diaz, Daniel Alarcón (recently named by Granta magazine as one of best young U.S. writers), Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros (MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipient), Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, Gloria Anzaldúa and Gary Soto.  

Engl 174:  The Shelleys:  Imagination Unbound – Robert Ready 
Telling horror.  Transgressing marriage.  Living in exile.  Revising Western myth.  Creating with Byron.  Tracing the limits of lyric and narrative.  Penetrating nature.  Resisting empire.  Tracking the father, evading the mother.  Figuring science.  Imagining utopia.  Surviving alone.  Writing the West Wind. 

English 134 Advanced Studies in American Ethnic Literatures:
The American Dream in 20th C. - Geraldine Smith-Wright
This course will focus on the American Dream as both the ideal and the antagonist in works by 20th century African American writers. How do fictional characters, speakers in poetry, and essayists define the dream? To what extent does it elude them? What strategies do they adopt to access the dream, or to compensate when the dream is impossible to reach? We will address these questions, and others, to see how African American authors create a distinctly American literature that simultaneously pays homage to the uniqueness of the African American experience. Writers include: Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paule Marshall, Maya Angelou, Dorothy West.

Engl 112: The Remarkable 14th Century - Jim Hala
War, epidemic disease, social unrest, and the questioning of all certainties: the perfect formula for innovative art. To set the tone, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, then Chaucer, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Thomas Usk, Julian of Norwich, drama, and more. Theoretically oriented and research intensive. (And you thought post-modernism was new!) 

English 143: Shakespeare - Frank Occhiogrosso
Designed for the general student as well as for the English major; focuses on the development of Shakespeare as a dramatist through the study of about seven plays—comedies, histories, and tragedies, such as The   Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, Henry IV, Part One, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest.

English 175 Major Author, American Novels - Bob Weisbuch
Why do American writers seem interested in anything but telling a simple, well-made tale?  Why do they make novel-writing such a problem?  Why is American fiction at once deliberately pop-vulgar and philosophically obsessed?  Why do its characters seem more like natural forces or personified ideas than like ordinary personalities?  Why, in all, is American fiction so haunted, wild, experimental, and downright strange?

We'll try for some partial answers via stories and novels by Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Chopin, FitzGerald, Faulkner, O'Connor, Ellison, Barth, and Morrison--and just possibly Poe. 

English 119 British Modernism and WWI - Cassandra Laity
This course explores the impact of World War I on modernist American and British writers. We will be reading 20th-century writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and others. The course seeks to explore such questions as: how did modernist writers find language and literary forms to express the horror of war? How did war impact on issues such as gender and nation? How did World War I contribute to modernist themes such as alienation and changing conceptions of "time" and "reality."

English 132: Women’s Literary Tradition, Early Modern Women Writer’s - Nicky Ollman
Women at the beginning of the 18th century began to venture into print—some of them tentatively (and often in “code”), some of them assertively (and often in trouble).  All of them, from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, saw their writing as a place where they might speak for themselves and their experiences, express their nightmares and their utopian hopes, and experiment with forms of “authority.”  Our readings will trace the variety of these early women’s voices (called by some critics the “Mothers of the Novel”) as they helped to develop the shape of modern prose fiction. 

We want to widen our students' ability to ask new questions about literature and experiment with different ways of writing about literature, so we have a number of approaches courses that introduce you to new ways of writing about literature.  

English 121: Comparative Critical Theory and Practice - Neil Levi
This course introduces you to some of the most important thinkers, ideas, and debates in contemporary literary and cultural theory. You’ll find out what people such as Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Spivak really said, and you’ll become acquainted with such movements as structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, gender studies, post-colonial theory, and Marxist criticism. We’ll also try to trace the influence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud throughout. Excellent preparation for graduate school, and for careers in conceptual art. 

English 126: Approaches to Literature: Intertextual - Peggy Samuels
Why do writers continue to go back to the Bible? The first rewritings of the Bible occur inside the Bible itself (the biblical writer “P” rewrites “J,” later Hebrew books rewrite earlier ones, and Christian gospels rewrite Exodus). Following the thread of these rewritings will give you some familiarity with the Bible. We’ll then look at ancient rewritings of the Bible after the canon was closed (2nd-6th C midrash). Finally, we’ll look at short medieval, Renaissance, and 20thC texts that respond to the Bible. 

English 127: Approaches to Literature: Cultural - Wendy Kolmar
This courses examines the variety of cultural approaches to literature that have developed in 20th-21st century Anglo-American criticism, particularly British Cultural Studies and New Historicism.  We will examine these approaches particularly as they are practiced by critics in relation to particular nineteenth century texts. Jane Eyre and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. Students will try out these cultural approaches in class by putting nineteenth-century historical, social and cultural material in conversation with particular texts.

We have a sophomore survey course in British and American literary history that gives you a conceptual map of the changing relationship between literature and culture form the medieval era to the present.

English 20 and 21:
Students learn to tell the story of changes across the centuries in the rise and fall of particular themes or genres; the changing purposes of art; huge cultural shifts in author/audience relations; the role that literature plays in creating or producing the "self"; literature's response to conflicts or traumatic breaks/shifts in culture; literature's role in renegotiating the boundaries of nation, colony, region, race, gender and sexuality; authors' reshaping of culture by revising or reviving texts and images from the past.

We have a half-semester writing course for all majors, to give you time to focus just on your writing.

English 4: Writing in the Discipline of English
This six-week module will use the texts from the sophomore survey course as the basis for an extended research project. Students choose a topic or question that interests them and then find out what previous scholars have had to say about that topic or question. Students learn to enter an on-going conversation among literary scholars and use close-reading skills to evaluate, modify, and add to the ideas that have already accumulated about the topic. The course will include advanced library research and bibliographic skills. Independent meetings with faculty will help you to narrow your topic and navigate your way through your project. Students collaborate in revising each other's research questions, thesis statements, and arguments.