ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(13649)
T.R. 9:10 - 10:35 a.m.
Prof. Robert Frumkin
This course will introduce English majors to fundamental methods of
literary interpretation such as close reading and the writing of
research papers in MLA format. Through the readings, the
course will introduce students to a variety of genres and
interpretive approaches. One special focus will be a rigorous
introduction to prosody, the study of verse forms.
ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(14112)
M.W.F. 10:10 - 11:05 a.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
The goal of this required methods course is to prepare you for your
future as a student of literature. You will enhance your
skills in close reading and learn how to approach a poem, a play,
or a novel with confidence. You will research, write, and
document scholarly essays. As a result of our studies, you
will expand your ability to think about texts in a thorough and
exciting way.
ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism and Theory (14113)
M.W.F. 11:15 - 12:10 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
In this introduction to literary theory and criticism, we will
practice productive readings of literary, visual and cultural
objects using various contemporary theorists as
models. Beginning with basic skills of etymological research,
we will progress through the study of various contemporary
approaches to literature interpretation from New Criticism to
post-structuralism. Intensive reading, in-class discussion and a
portfolio of essays will be required.
ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism and Theory (13647)
T.R. 3:05 - 4:30 p.m.
Dr. Willard Gingerich
The course is an introduction to literary theory and the practice
of criticism, designed for English majors, secondary education
students specializing in English, and anyone wishing to become a
more serious reader of literature and other texts. The course will
survey some primary texts of the critical tradition and will touch
on many different theories of reading and the construction of
meaning and art through language, from prehistoric practices of
oral tradition to the debates of structuralism and
post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, cultural studies and other
movements. Concentration will be on the 20th century.
ENG 3000: Medieval Romance
(13874)
M.W.F. 1:25 - 2:20 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
From Hollywood film productions to re-creations of medieval jousts
as sporting events and motels built to look like medieval castles,
modern popular culture has transformed the stuff of medieval
romance into something fluffy, fantastic, pretty, and
unthreatening. In this course we will read the real thing, the
actual romance written in the Middle Ages, as a powerful genre
central to major western cultural experiences and to the
development of narrative fiction in European
literature. Besides the well-known topics of honor, chivalry,
King Arthur and the Round Table, medieval romance serves up a
serious discourse of courtly love, the heroic self, and political
history that is still influential in modern western
culture. We will read the treatments of the stories of Tristan
and Isolde, Lancelot and Guenevere, Arthur, and other Arthurian
knights by major authors such as Malory, Chrétien de Troye, and
Gottfried von Strassburg.
ENG 3120: Renaissance Literature: Empire,
Utopia, and the New World (13645)
T.R. 9:10 - 10:35 a.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
The English Renaissance was a time of imperial and colonial
expansion, and literary culture played a key role in creating,
disseminating, and critiquing the national mythology that
underwrote Britain's imperial reach. This course will explore early
modern expansionism and nationalism through three critical frames:
the idea of empire, in which British power derived from and was
modeled on Augustan Rome; the fantasy of Utopia, an imaginary
no-place which boasted an ideal government and social organization;
and the fascination with New World trade, exploration, and
colonization. These cultural fantasies reveal England coming to
grips with its own triumphal history -including the defeat of the
Spanish Armada, the unification of Scotland and England, the
establishment of the Virginia Colony, and the Dutch Revolt against
Imperial Spain - and also expose the roots of our contemporary
discourses of empire and colonialism. Given that we are living
through a new phase of imperial history, this course will provide a
touchstone for contextualizing current world events. Major
texts will include Virgil's Aenid, the primary model of a just
empire in Western literature and one of the most influential books
in the Renaissance, More's Utopia, Spenser's Faerie Queene Books 2
and 5, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Lodge's Margarite of America, and
several Shakespeare plays that present a qualified critique of
imperialism and New World expansionism, Julius Caesar, Antony and
Cleopatra, and The Tempest.
ENG 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays
(11731)
T.R. 10:45 - 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 3230: The Nineteenth-Century Novel
(13643)
T.R. 3:05 - 4:30 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
A study of major nineteenth-century novels, including Jane Austen's
Emma, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and
Bram Stoker's Dracula.
ENG 3240: Romantic Literature
(12510)
M.W.F. 11:15 - 12:10 p.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
In this course we will study the British Romantics, who wrote in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Heirs to
the ideals of the French Revolution, the Romantics admired
individuality and freedom. While far from a cohesive group,
they frequently reflect their personal and philosophical
interactions in their poetry and prose. We will concentrate on
the "big six": Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy, Shelley,
and Keats. We will also make time for some ballads and slave
narratives, a Jane Austen film, and a few short and relevant
surprise texts.
ENG 3310: Antebellum Literature
(13638)
T.R. 1:30 - 2:55 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course will introduce you to the literature that helped to
redefine the nation, to challenge the social order, and to
establish a distinctly American literary tradition. Together we
will examine the relation between literacy and freedom, literature
and politics, and we will shape new questions around the
construction of authorship, the emergence of genre, the nature of
"Americanness," as well as the status of race, class, and gender in
the United States. Authors will include: Poe, Melville,
Douglass, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Wilson, and Fern.
ENG 3360: Early National Literature
(13875)
M.W.F. 10:10 - 11:05 a.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
Stretching from the Revolutionary period to the death of Jefferson
and Adams in 1826 (or the election of Andrew Jackson), this course
surveys the literature of the early U.S. republic. In addition to
reading the Gothic fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and local
color stories by Washington Irving, we'll read captivity and
travel/exploration narratives, natural history, and women's fiction
and drama. We'll also look at texts that emphasize the Indian
presence in the U.S., which was a significant element of early
national life: the Narrative of Mary Jemison, the speeches of Red
Jacket, and Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok.
ENG 3450: Modern Drama
(11729)
T.R. 1:30 - 2:55 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A study of the major playwrights of the modern era who
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.
ENG 3490: Special Topics in Twentieth
Century Literature (13644)
T.R. 10:45 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This special topics course will concentrate on the literature of
the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance (or New Negro
Renaissance) was a remarkably prolific period of African American
literature, music, art, and scholarship that followed World War I
and lasted into the 1930s. In this course we will examine the
Harlem Renaissance as a cultural and political movement in relation
to both international modernism and African American literary
history. The primary emphasis of the course is on intensive
study of significant African American writers, with attention to
parallel developments in music and the visual arts. Readings
include W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Jean Toomer, Cane;
Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Langston
Hughes, Not Without Laughter; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were
Watching God; and selected poetry by McKay, Hughes, Countee Cullen,
Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson.
ENG 3600: Classical Epic in Translation
(13877)
M.W.F. 9:05 - 10:00 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
We will touch on the expected classical epic poets (Homer and
Vergil), but we will be particularly concerned with how these
authors have been adapted by medieval, Renaissance, and modern
writers. Statius, for example, influenced Chaucer far more
than either Homer or Vergil, and we will read a substantial portion
of the Thebaid with Chaucer in mind. Statius and Apollonius
Rhodius influenced John Lydgate and we will read a portion of the
Troy Book. The course will conclude with some modern
adaptations of classical epic formulas by Brian Hall (The Saskiad)
and Derek Walcott's Caribbean iliad-odyssey, Omeros.
ENG 3730: Poetry Workshop
(13651)
M.W.F. 1:25 - 2:20 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This workshop will alternate between reading poetry and essays on
poetics as models for our own works, and round-table group critique
of the new work we write. Both traditional poetic forms and
experimental forms will be presented and enacted. An
articulation of poetics, public distribution of creative work and
attendance of public literary events is required. No prior
experience writing poetry is required but you will be expected to
pursue and develop a daily writing practice during the run of the
semester.
ENG 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction
(12515)
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 become careful readers and diligent
writers. 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
(13652)
The Epic Writer as Hero: Milton, Wordsworth, Joyce
T.R. 1:30 - 2:55 p.m.
Dr. Leonora Brodwin
The epic is the most demanding of literary genres, and those
writers who have set their sights on this challenging prize have
seen themselves as the heroes of their own lives for just this
dedication. Milton is unique in his period for largely
devoting his early verse to his own struggles with what he saw as
the Circean temptation to settle for anything less than his bardic
vocation, a vocation finally realized in his great epic Paradise
Lost. The Romantic period embraced the Miltonic understanding
of such poets as prophets, as, in Shelley's words, "the
unacknowledged legislators of the world." But none wore the
poet's mantle as heroically as Wordsworth, who not only cast
himself as the subject of much of his shorter verse but wrote a
whole fourteen-book epic on his early development, The Prelude, or
Growth of a Poet's Mind. Finally Joyce, as future author of
the epic novel Ulysses, one in which his alter ego will largely
figure, gives modern expression to the heroic view of the epic
writer in the earlier novel whose title well epitomizes the theme
of this seminar: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In
this historical fusion of epic subject and epic writer we may
witness the value most celebrated in the genre of epic, the
fortitude that, against all difficulties and perils, affirms the
possibility of such worthy accomplishment as truly ennobles
humanity.
ENG 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres
(13642)
M.W.F. 2:30 - 3:25 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
"The West" is a loaded term in literary and cultural studies
today. We read about "the West vs. the Other," "Western
imperialism," "Western domination," "Western civilization,"
"Western literature." The reality of the economic and
political power of the West, besides its cultural ascendancy in the
world, is undeniable, and it is important for us to understand
critically its history and its relation to "the Other." In
this course, we will critique the imagination and discourse of a
place, a civilization, a community, an entity, known as "the West"
-from an interdisciplinary perspective, reading theoretical,
historical, anthropological, political, and political writings that
may shed light on the idea. Often the West is identified as
the combination of various conditions and experiences-white,
patriarchal, Christian, straight. Are these "essential"
components of the West? And is there an "essence" that
underlies the idea of the West? Reading medieval literature,
literature before European hegemony in the modern world, allows us
to understand the idea of the West in historical terms. What are
the ethnic and cultural origins of Europe? When did Europeans
first come to identify themselves as "Europeans"? We will
tackle such questions and issues in the works of medieval and
modern writers from both within and without Western traditions of
discourse. Readings include writings from the debates over
orientalism by critics such as Edward Said; the fiction and travel
narratives of contemporary writers V.S. Naipaul and Caryl Phillips;
Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe and Norman Daniel's Islam
and the West; European accounts of exotic societies and culture;
and medieval literature from both the West and beyond, such as
Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," Arabian Nights, and Ibn Khaldun's
Muqadimmah.