ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism & Theory (12433)
T.R. 10:45 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
When we read what we call literature, or literary texts, or texts,
or discourse, or signs, we bring with us a whole set of underlying
and often unconscious assumptions, expectations and perspectives
that determine how, why, and even what we read. The goal of
this course is for us to become more self-conscious about our
reading, more aware of the operations of mind that occur when we
say we are "reading a text."
This self-awareness reflects the changes in criticism and theory
since WWII, because critics have become increasingly aware of their
own activity since the advent of structuralism, which can be best
described as a language-based study of the process of
signification, or meaning-making. From this almost scientific
study of the underlying systems of meaning came a series of new
methodologies for reading texts, each distinct from the others but
all grounded in a radically new understanding of language,
methodologies that we lump under the heading of
"post-structuralism." One of the major goals of the course is
to understand how what we call structuralism becomes what we call
post-structuralism, and how this shift has given rise to new
strategies for reading and writing about the texts our culture
produces.
ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism & Theory (11929)
M.W.F. 1:25 - 2:20 p.m.
Dr. Elizabeth Denlinger
This course has two primary segments: the ancients and the
post-moderns. In it we will explore critical theory at its
beginnings in Western culture, and then leap ahead to see where it
has gone in the last hundred years or so. Our points of
reference throughout will be literary texts, from both the ancient
past and the near present.
ENG 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays
(12427)
T.R. 10:45 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.
Dr. Leonora Brodwin
This course is centered on the great Shakespearean tragedies of the
Jacobean period -- Othello,King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and
Cleopatra -- the first two tracing the process of spiritual growth
through suffering that Aristotle thought to be the defining
characteristic of tragedy while the last two bring us to an
exploration of the rewards and evils attendant upon such worldly
desires as are markedly opposed to the earlier idealism of
Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies. All also focus on the new
Renaissance woman and the problems in her various relationships
with lovers, husbands, or fathers, a subject also prominent in the
greatest of Shakespeare's "problem comedies," Measure for
Measure. The course closes, as does Shakespeare's career, with
The Tempest, a romance that seems to hold a mirror up to the
author's own imperfections while also, like King Lear, including
all the inequities of society.
ENG 3170: Milton (13766)
T.R. 1:30 - 2:55 p.m.
Dr. Leonora Brodwin
Epic is both the most exalted and difficult of literary forms, and
the writer who chooses to take on this greatest literary challenge
becomes something of an epic hero in his own right. In this
study of the complete poetry and selected prose of Milton, we will
see that this is how Milton understood both his goal and his
life. His poetry before the civil war is largely concerned
with the strenuous preparations for this task and the temptations
that beset it, their focus on the struggle of the poet to meet the
challenge of his talent being unlike anything before it and paving
the way for the similar focus of the romantic poets. When, after a
twenty-year break from poetry to serve as Cromwell's Latin
Secretary, in the defense of the finally unsuccessful puritan
revolution that cost him his eyesight, he turns to the composition
of his epic and other late works, it is with the maturity, born of
personal suffering and political disenchantment, that endow his
epic achievement with a greatness matched only by Homer. The
major segment of this course will be devoted to a close reading of
Paradise Lost, the grandest, as it is the most influential, work of
English Literature, a work in which the central conflict within
Western civilization is explored with a depth and power that
illuminate the choices we still must face between good and
evil.
ENG 3190: The Idea of Jerusalem - Special
Topics in Medieval Literature (13760)
T.R. 9:10 - 10:35 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
For biblical antiquity, Jerusalem represented Israelite
deliverance, the Golden City on the Hill, elusive, occupied but
never possessed. St. Augustine recognizes this in his City of
God: there is a city of God and a city of man, the latter forever
striving to become the former and consistently falling short of its
goal. Jerusalem was the nexus of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, and this distinction made it the flash point for the
Babylonian Captivity, Josephus's "Jewish War," and Muslim
jihad.
The Idea of Jerusalem is a multidisciplinary course that focuses
on the metaphor of the shining city, the city on the hill, the city
of gold, and the objective of pilgrimage. Its readings come
from Christian and Muslim crusader accounts, pilgrim journals,
Josephus's Jewish War, Theoderich's Guide, Margery Kempe's Book,
and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
Maps, manuscript illuminations, and Christian and Muslim art as
well as medieval, Renaissance, and modern music support the
readings.
ENG 3220: Eighteenth Century Novel
(13762)
M.W.F. 10:10 - 11:05 a.m.
Dr. Elizabeth Denlinger
A course in the development of the British novel, emphasizing the
variety of its early years with readings in the "true history," the
epistolary novel, the gothic, the picaresque, and the domestic
novel. Among the authors to be included are Defoe, Fielding,
Smollett, Lewis, Radcliffe, Godwin, and Austen.
ENG 3240: Romantic Literature
(13758)
M.W.F. 11:15 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
This course covers the bread-and-butter authors of the Romantic
Movement. Some of them elevate man to heroic heights, but
others focus upon the antihero. Male writers tend to concentrate on
aspects of the imagination - man's imagination - and relegate
females to the margins. However, authors also discuss freedom,
slavery, and women's rights. We will concentrate on the Romantic
"big six": Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats,
plus Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth.
ENG 3340: American Realism and Naturalism
(13768)
T.R. 3:05 - 4:30 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course will examine how American writers in the years from the
Civil War to the First World War set about representing and
analyzing American social and political life. Topics include: the
changing status of individuals in the face of economic expansion,
the representations of immigrants and the problems of cultural
dislocation, westward expansion, the changing status of women, and
the problems faced by newly freed slaves.
ENG 3390: Special Topics-American
Literature to 1900: (13761)
Poe and Melville
M.W.F. 11:15 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
Poe and Melville (and Hawthorne) have often been unfairly cast as
gloomy counterpoints to Emerson and Whitman's romantic
optimism. In this class we'll explore extensive portions of
both writer's work, paying attention to Poe's comic moments as well
as his popularlization of morbid obssessions. We'll read Poe's
detective fictions, his tales of the macabre and the grotesque, and
his bizarre novella, the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Background
readings will include Baudelaire and Freud. We'll also read
Melville's Moby Dick, and a few of Melville's shorter sea-fictions
detailing exotic life in the South Seas.
ENG 3430: Modern Poetry
(13759)
M.W.F. 9:05 - 10:00 a.m.
Dr. David G. Farley
In this course we will examine some of the major works of modernist
poetry, including works by W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, Mina Loy, and others. We will
focus in particular on the various ways in which these poets
attempted to "make it new," to borrow a phrase from Pound, and
examine the different genres from the lyric to the long poem, from
satire to the travel poem. We will concentrate as well on the
international elements of the modernist movement within the English
speaking world during the strife-filed period between the wars.
ENG 3450: Modern Drama
(12424)
T.R. 1:30 - 2:55 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
This course focuses on the work of major playwrights of the modern
era who have revolutionized the stage for our
time. Consideration will be given to the innovative works of
such significant dramatists as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov,
Pirandello, O'Neill, and Williams. Also examined will be the
developments in dramatic theory over the past 100 years, with
attention paid to new concepts which came into vogue in the
twentieth century as well as certain traditional views which have
been reintroduced.
ENG 3470: Twentieth-Century
African/American Literature (13764)
T.R. 9:10 - 10:35 a.m.
Dr. John Lowney
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that "the
problem of the Twentieth-Century is the problem of the
color-line." Beginning with Du Bois's prophetic claim, this
introductory course will explore how African American fiction,
drama, poetry, and essays have responded to and influenced issues
of race and racism, nationalism and assimilation, and racial and
gendered identity. The course will present an overview of
Twentieth-Century African American literary history, concentrating
especially on the oral tradition (particularly music) and its
impact on literary expression, from the Harlem Renaissance until
the present. Readings will include Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes
Were Watching God; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Toni Morrison,
Song of Solomon; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin on the Sun; Amiri
Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dutchman; and August Wilson, Fences.
ENG 3690: Special Topics in Cultural
Studies: (14344)
Border Literatures of the American "West"
T.R. 3:05 - 4:30 p.m.
Dr. Willard Gingerich
This course will survey the 400+ years of diverse literatures that
have grown and flourished in the territory known as the Spanish
borderlands, which since the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848)
form a major part of the American West from Texas to
California. We will read examples of preEuropean Native
American oral literatures that survive among the Navajo, Zuni and
Hopi, as well as contemporary Native American poets (Simon Ortiz,
Luci Tapahonso) and storytellers (Leslie M. Silko). Colonial
Spanish literatures of discovery and exploration will be
represented by Cabeza de Vaca and by Perez de Villagra's
little-known poem, The History of New Mexico. Mexican Republic
and Chicano/a writers will be represented by Maria Amparo Ruiz de
Burton (selections from The Squatter and The Don), Rudy Anaya
(stories), Leroy Quintana (poetry), Ron Arias (The Road to
Tamazunchale), and Sandra Cisneros. Anglo-American writers
will be Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage), William Carlos
Williams (The Desert Music), Willa Cather (Death Comes for the
Archbishop or The Professor's House), Cormac McCarthy (All the
Pretty Horses and/or Blood Meridian), and perhaps one of the Jim
Chee detective novels of Tony Hillerman. Through these
literatures the course will survey the long history of struggle and
syncretism and compromise between cultures which has made this
region one of the richest in the nation. Frontiers, borders,
hybridity will be sub-themes of the course.
ENG 3730: Poetry Workshop
(12426)
M.W.F. 12:20 - 1:15 p.m.
Dr. Adeena Karasick
Focusing on a wide range of poetic writing strategies, this course
will aim to both workshop poems and explore a variety of
contemporary experimental procedures and poetic praxes. With
particular attention to the construction of genre, form, analysis
and revision, we will track through some of the most significant
postmodern texts of poetic
thinking, and ground them within a historical-cultural framework.
In addition, this course will also provide students with continual
information on upcoming readings, performances, open mics, slams
and other poetry-related events in the city.
ENG 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction
(13763)
W. 3:35 - 6:20 p.m.
Prof. Thomas Philipose
This fiction writing workshop will focus on your writing and your
thoughts. We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques
of others to help us forge our paths. An experimental and
non-traditional approach will be encouraged to help elicit fresh,
unique work that reflects the individual writers in our
workshop. The majority of our classwork will entail reading
and discussing your stories. We will use texts from various
genres/media as guides for discovery of what your voice/style can
be.
ENG 4991: Seminar in British Literature
(13767)
M.W.F. 1:25 - 2:20 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
Students will read literature from England, Wales, and Scotland
before the year 1500. As literature from this period was
written in different languages, dialects, and they belong in
diverse literary and cultural traditions, the focus of this course
will be the diversity of early British literary culture and how to
understand it as a web of mutually competing social
dialogues. Texts to be read range from the well-known, popular
texts such as Beowulf, works of the Gawain poet, the autobiography
of Margaret Kempe, to religious devotional writings, Welsh lyrics
and the works of Scottish Chaucerians. While most of the texts
will be read in translation, students will learn and be expected to
read later Middle English in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
works.
ENG 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres:
(13765)
Art and Propaganda
T.R. 1:30 - 2:55 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
An advanced course on the political uses of literature, art, and
film--from the rise of Napoleon to the collapse of Nazi
Germany. Works and artists to include Jacques Louis David,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Arno Breker, and Leni
Riefenstahl. Students will develop individual projects and
present their research before the conclusion of the term.