Course Listings

Summer 2008 Courses

Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)

7258 Shakespeare’s Communities: African American Intersections/Ms. Hendricks/T, Th 9-11:45
Since the creation of the African Shakespeare Company in the nineteenth century, the plays of William Shakespeare have been a significant part of African American culture. This course will focus on a select number of Shakespeare's plays—listed below—as this community embraces, assimilates, appropriates, and redefines the cultural importance of Shakespeare in the United States. Through close reading of these plays, students will explore how one community establishes its relationship with the notion of cultural heritage, canonicity, and theatricality. As part of our study of these works, we will examine the textual and cultural contexts within which they developed, the dramatic and poetic conventions that shape Shakespeare’s use of language, the role of theater in Renaissance and early modern London, and the social and cultural ideologies that frame the play-texts and their reception, then and now.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Richard III, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (Norton).

7280 Reading Renaissance and Early Modern Poetry/Ms. Hendricks/T, Th 2-4 :45
This course explores the modes and forms of poetry written between 1550 and 1660, with an emphasis on close textual analysis. We examine the history of poetic forms used by Renaissance and early modern poets in conjunction with the cultural context that redefined what writing poetry meant. As its principal aim, this course seeks to provide students a way of engaging and responding to Renaissance and early modern poetry both historically and as literature, just as they engage and respond to contemporary music and narrative. We will begin by looking at Petrarch and the lyric tradition while reading Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Campion, and Thomas Wyatt. We will look at classical influences as we read Virgil, Catullus, Horace, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Christopher Marlowe. We will read poetry by Isabel Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth, and end by looking at the pastoral poetry of Virgil, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser.

Texts: The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509–1659, ed. David Norbrook (Penguin); Jack Myers and Don C. Wukasch, Dictionary of Poetic Terms (North Texas).

Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century) 

7305 Jane Austen in Print and Film/Ms. Booth/M, W 9-11:45
I assume most people wanting to take this course have read one or more Austen novels. I hope everyone will have a chance to read each of them once before our course starts. Then the fun of rereading begins, and the challenge of sifting through the critical history and popular response. We will aim to enhance critical understanding of each of the six novels and to gain familiarity with Austen’s life and times as well as the reception history of her works. What is the shape of her career, and how has the acclaim of Austen modified across the generations? What significant cultural issues do her novels confront and temporarily resolve? How do Austen’s novels lend themselves to teaching in the high school and undergraduate classroom? Why is Austen such ripe material for film in the later twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries? From the level of the sentence on out to the myriad of paperbacks and generations of film adaptations, we will cultivate an acute perspective on Austen’s works, scholarly and general responses to them, and adaptations of them. While our course will include concentrated viewing of several films, we also will browse through the Austeniana of tourism, “sequels” in print, and Web sites.

Texts: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman and Sense and Sensibility (both Norton); Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. E. Copeland and J. McMaster (Cambridge); Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Riverside) and Mansfield Park (Broadview); Janeites, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton); Austen, Emma and Persuasion (both Norton); Jane Austen on Screen, ed. Gina MacDonald and Andrew MacDonald (Cambridge).

7312 Ballads/Mr. Elder/T, Th 2-4:45
We will explore three outgrowths from the early ballad tradition of England, Scotland, and Ireland. One of our emphases will be on the poetry of Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, and W.B. Yeats, through whom ballads became a significant influence on Romantic and modern poetry. A second, of special importance because of our class’s location in North Carolina, will be on the musical heritage of the Southern Highlands. We will listen to recordings by ballad singers like Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Jean Ritchie, visit the Carter Family Fold, and attend many of the other performances of Appalachian music for which the area around Asheville is so well known. Finally, we will look at contemporary expressions of the ballad tradition in film and literature. A course-pack of photocopied selections will sample the voluminous scholarship on ballads by folklorists, anthropologists, and literary critics. But our own personal and reflective essays, grounded in a journal-practice, will be more central to the course. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Texts: Readings will include Selections from the Early Ballad Poetry of England and Scotland, ed. Richard John King (Elibron Classics); Robert Burns, The Works of Robert Burns (Wordsworth Poetry Library); William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Penguin Classics); Charles Vess, The Book of Ballads (Green Man). We will listen to numerous recordings, including Jean Redpath’s renditions of Burns songs, and will also watch and discuss the music-filled films Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, and The Song Catcher.

7330 The Pastoral Tradition /Mr. Elder/M, W 2-4:45
The image of a green world, in which human beings live in harmony with nature and devote themselves to love and song, has long been both cherished and satirized. We will ground our investigation of this ideal in the 23rd Psalm of David and the First and Fourth Eclogues of Virgil, then turn to poems by Marlowe and Raleigh. After reading Shakespeare's As You Like it and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," we will devote several meetings to the works of Wordsworth. We will then investigate the pertinence of Wordsworth's themes of childhood, loss, and the healing power of nature to Eliot's Silas Marner, Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, and Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge. Exploratory journals will frame our discussions and our formal writings alike, while we will also look for opportunities to take our conversations out under the sky.

Texts: Virgil, The Eclogues (Penguin); William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Penguin, or any other edition); William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Riverside); Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (Penguin); George Eliot, Silas Marner (Signet); Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (Penguin); Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (Oxford); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt); Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (Vintage). Photocopies of other materials will be available at Bread Loaf.

7360 Forward and Backward in Victorian Fiction/Ms. Booth/M, W 2-4:45
The Victorian period was the first in which the novel was taken seriously as an advanced genre of literary merit. During the Victorian period, as well, competing ideas of development or evolution and degeneration or dissolution played out in many forms of writing and art. This course will encourage us to look back on Victorians and their novels (with an earlier work, Frankenstein) with a focus on their narratives of progress—and the movements—reversals, returns, inertia—that resist such forward propulsion. Our goals will be to get to know these works and the Victorian context; in both, the promise of triumph or restitution is counterbalanced by literal and figurative arrest; the desire for movement conflicts with the desire for stasis or retreat. Each of the novels portrays a new sort of ambitious subject, a haunted “house” or family, and a monstrous figure. Industrialization, science, empire, the spread of education and rights all generated confidence accompanied by fear of the revenge of the oppressed or the return of the repressed. We will combine close and “distant” reading, aided by selected poetry and prose as well as secondary materials in two anthologies. Students will participate in current research in Victorian cultural studies, aided by these specific editions. We should all try to read/re-read several of the novels before the course begins, as Victorian literature takes time (backwards and forwards).

Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Norton); The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2B, The Victorian Age, 3rd ed., ed. Heather Henderson and William Sharpe (Longman); A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Blackwell); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 3rd. ed., ed. Richard Dunn (Norton); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Alison Booth (Longman; pub. expected January 2008); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Janice Carlisle (Bedford/St. Martin's); M.E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Natalie Houston (Broadview).

Group IV (American Literature)

7312 Ballads/Mr. Elder/T, Th 2-4:45
(See the description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

7581 Teaching African American Literature/Ms. Richardson/M, W 2-4:45
African American literature is an exciting field of study whose resources have expanded exponentially in the past several decades with the publication of monumental works. One way that one can think of African American literature is to recognize that it tells a "story," moving from slavery to freedom and beyond, with a range of themes and images that have been strongly recurrent. Once students understand how to trace this story, they are able to draw on it, even in interpreting and understanding aspects of contemporary culture. Exploring this story is one of the central goals of this course, which surveys a range of representative texts in African American literature, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the contemporary era. Our priority will be the close and critical reading of primary literary works. The course will build interpretive skills across a range of literary genres, including the slave narrative, the novel, the short story, poetry, and the essay. We will also examine materials such as letters, prefaces, journal entries, and photographs. Finally, a central aspect of the course will be exploring strategies for teaching the literature.

Texts : The Norton Anthology of African American Literature , 2nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay (Norton); Lovalerie King, A Student's Guide to African American Literature: 1760 to the Present (Peter Lang).

7591 Faulkner/Mr. Donadio/T, Th 9-11:45
An intensive reading of the major works.

Texts: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Sanctuary; As I Lay Dying; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; The Wild Palms; Go Down, Moses; Collected Stories. Except for the Collected Stories (published in paperback by Vintage), these works are all included in the Library of America volumes devoted to William Faulkner: Novels 1926-1929; Novels 1930-1935; Novels 1936-1940; Novels 1942-1954. (There is also a fifth volume that includes works published in the author’s final years.) These Library of America hardbound volumes may be purchased from various sources at a considerable discount, and in the end they will prove far more durable and economical than the paperback editions of these individual novels, which may appear cheaper initially.

7690 Toni Morrison: A Study of the Novel/Ms. Richardson/T, Th 2-4:45
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison emerged as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. She has been an editor at Random House, has produced work in several literary genres, and is a gifted essayist. In this course, we will focus on reading selected novels by Morrison, including The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). We will consider ways in which Morrison has shaped African American and American literature. Finally, we will consider how to read novels critically and explore strategies for teaching them.

Texts: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Plume), Sula (Vintage), Song of Solomon (Plume), Beloved (Plume), Jazz (Vintage), Paradise (Plume), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination (Vintage); Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay and Kathryn Earle (MLA).
 

Group V (World Literature)

 7767a Studies in European Fiction/Mr. Donadio/T, Th 2-4:45
Readings of varying lengths by major authors in a variety of literary traditions, with particular emphasis on exemplary predicaments, forms of dislocation and estrangement, and manifestations of innocence and guilt.

Texts: Heinrich Von Kleist, Selected Writings (Hackett); Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (Everyman); Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (Modern Library); Honoré de Balzac, The Black Sheep (Penguin); Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (Vintage paperback or Everyman hardback); Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales (Oxford World’s Classics); Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (New Directions). Please note that we will be working closely with the specific translations that appear in these editions.