ENAM News and Events
Harriet Scott Chessman
The Beauty of Ordinary Things
Monday, December 2, 2013
4:30 p.m. Abernethy Room
Axinn Center
Author Harriet Scott Chessman will read from her new book, The Beauty of Ordinary Things (Atelier26 Books, 2013). This passionate, honest novel is the story of the unexpected love between a young Vietnam veteran and a Benedictine nun. As Benny Finn and Sister Clare come to know each other at an abbey in New Hampshire, in 1974, their profoundest desires emerge with courage and contemplative power. www.harrietchessman.com
Co-sponsored by the Scott Center, and the Department of English and American Literatures.
David Price
C. A. Dana Professor of English and American Literatures
Email: price@middlebury.edu
Phone: work802.443.5278
Office Hours: Fall 2013: Monday 1:00-3:30, Wednesday 3:00-4:00 and Friday 1:00-2:00 or by appointment
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Courses
Courses offered in the past four years.
▲ indicates offered in the current term
▹ indicates offered in the upcoming term[s]
CRWR 0560 - Special Project: Writing ▲
Special Project: Creative Writing
Approval Required.
Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013
CRWR 0701 - Senior Essay: Creative Writing ▲
Senior Essay: Creative Writing
Discussions, workshops, tutorials for those undertaking one-term projects in the writing of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. (Formerly ENAM 0701)
Spring 2013, Fall 2013
CRWR 0711 - Senior Thesis: Creative Writ. ▲
Senior Thesis: Creative Writing
Discussions, workshops, tutorials for those undertaking two-term projects in the writing of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. (Formerly ENAM 0711)
Spring 2013, Fall 2013
ENAM 0103 - Reading Literature
Reading Literature
This course seeks to develop skills for the close reading of literature through discussion of and writing about selected poems, plays, and short stories. A basic vocabulary of literary terms and an introductory palette of critical methods will also be covered, and the course's ultimate goal will be to enable students to attain the literary-critical sensibility vital to further course work in the major. At the instructor's discretion, the texts employed in this class may share a particular thematic concern or historical kinship. 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012
ENAM 0110 / CMLT 0110 / LITP 0110 - Continental Fiction
Continental Fiction
An introduction to some major novels and shorter works by 19th and 20th century European authors, including Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Zola's L'Assommoir, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Mann's The Magic Mountain, Kafka's The Trial, Sartre's Nausea, Camus's The Stranger, and others. These works of fiction are triumphs of achievement and innovation aesthetically and conceptually; and they give us a powerful sense of significant and significantly different levels of society, culture, and periods of history. 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Fall 2010, Spring 2013
ENAM 0117 - The Short Story ▲
The Short Story (AL)
This course approaches the short story as a distinct prose genre, beginning with work by Edgar Allen Poe and Guy de Maupassant and concluding with stories by contemporary authors. We will examine the particularly notable growth of the genre in America and survey various trends in the form, from "local color" sketches and realistic tales to experiments in modernism and postmodernism. Throughout, we will consider issues of structure, characterization, style, and voice. Other authors may include Anderson, Barthelme, Cheever, Chekhov, Hemingway, Joyce, Moore, O'Connor, Twain, and Welty. 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Spring 2010, Fall 2013
ENAM 0204 - Foundations of English Lit. ▲
Foundations of English Literature (I)
Students will study Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost, as well as other foundational works of English literature that may include Shakespeare, non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama, the poetry of Donne, and other 16th and 17th century poetry. 3 hrs. lect./dsc.
Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Spring 2013, Fall 2013
ENAM 0244 - 20th Century English Novel
Twentieth-Century English Novel
This course will explore the development of the novel in this century, with a primary focus on writers of the modernist period and later attention to more contemporary works. We will examine questions of formal experimentation, the development of character, uses of the narrator, and the problem of history, both personal and political, in a novelistic context. Readings will include novels by Conrad, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, and others. 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Spring 2012
ENAM 0408 - D.H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence
We will explore the ways in which Lawrence’s dynamic literary style dramatizes his vision of how the destructive forces of the will, linked with consciousness, industrialization, and the collective mass, are in mortal conflict with the redemptive and salvific forces of sexual passion, linked to the unconscious, nature and natural processes, and the absolute integrity and otherness of the individual. We will also consider how Lawrence’s literary representation has diminished in recent years in America (though much less so in England and elsewhere), and why he is now so infrequently taught in American colleges and universities. Works to be studied include the collected short stories, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, St. Mawr, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, selected essays, and poems 3 hrs. lect. (D. Price)
Spring 2011
ENAM 0409 - Seminar: James Joyce
Seminar: James Joyce
In this seminar we will study two of Joyce’s major works of fiction: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. There will be some emphasis on background material to illustrate and clarify the rich array of specific details, settings, persons, and events which make up the turn-of-the-century world of Irish Catholic Dublin, the exclusive scene of all of Joyce’s fiction. We will also consider various critical approaches to Joyce’s monuments of modernism. 3 hrs. sem.
Fall 2012
ENAM 0500 - Special Project: Lit ▲ ▹
Special Project: Literature
Approval Required.
Fall 2009, Winter 2010, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Winter 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Winter 2012, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Winter 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Winter 2014
ENAM 0560 - Special Project: Writing
Special Project: Creative Writing
(Approval Required)
Fall 2009, Winter 2010, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Winter 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Winter 2012, Spring 2012
ENAM 0700 - Senior Essay: Critical Writing ▲
Senior Essay: Critical Writing
Individual guidance and seminar (discussions, workshops, tutorials) for those undertaking one-term projects in literary criticism or analysis. All critical essay writers also take the essay workshop (ENAM 700Z) in either Fall or Spring Term.
Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013
ENAM 0701 - Senior Essay: Creative Writing
Senior Essay: Creative Writing
Discussions, workshops, tutorials for those undertaking one-term projects in the writing of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction.
Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Spring 2012
ENAM 0710 - Senior Thesis: Critical Writ. ▲ ▹
Senior Thesis: Critical Writing
Individual guidance and seminar (discussions, workshops, tutorials) for those undertaking two-term projects in literary criticism or analysis. All critical thesis writers also take the thesis workshop (ENAM 710z) in both Fall and Spring terms.
Fall 2009, Winter 2010, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Winter 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Winter 2012, Spring 2012, Winter 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Winter 2014
ENAM 0711 - Senior Thesis: Creative Writ.
Senior Thesis: Creative Writing
Discussions, workshops, tutorials for those undertaking two-term projects in the writing of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction.
Fall 2009, Winter 2010, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, Winter 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2011, Winter 2012, Spring 2012
ENAM 1003 - Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is widely regarded as the first “modern” novel and as one of the best novels ever written. First published in serial form in France in 1856, this story of a deeply dissatisfied provincial wife provoked a sensation, culminating in a spectacular state trial of author and publisher on charges of public immorality. Those events have long since faded into history, but the novel’s freshness, brilliance, psychological power, and literary influence can be felt to this day. In this course we will read the novel in two English translations, briefly review its historical and cultural context and its enduring literary heritage, and conclude with its most recent film adaptation, by Claude Chabrol (1991).
Winter 2011, Winter 2013
FYSE 1153 - Poems, Poets, Poetry
Poems, Poets, Poetry
In this seminar, we will read a wide range of lyric and narrative poems and explore ways of responding to them, in discussion and in writing. We will contemplate the resources of language and expressive form and structure upon which poets variously depend and draw. We will ask such questions as: can a poem really be "analyzed " or "explicated", and what assumptions lie behind such an attempt? The aim of this seminar is to assist in making poetry accessible and enjoyable without diminishing its complexity or its challenge, and to encourage a sense of poems as companions for life. 3 hrs. sem.
Fall 2009, Fall 2011
LITS 0500 - Independent Research Project
LITS 0701 - Independent Reading Course ▲
Independent Reading Course
Intended for majors in literary studies preparing for the senior comprehensive examinations. At the conclusion of this course, students will take a one-hour oral examination (part of the senior comprehensive examination) in a specialization of their choice. (Approval Required) (Staff)
Fall 2012, Fall 2013