Classes incorporating William Shakespeare:
EL 217 Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Lyric (PO) Pre-1800
This course will consider the development of English lyric during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on a close reading of the poems and considering, where relevant, their historical and cultural contexts. We will begin with the influence of Petrarch on the English love poetry of the period, looking first at Thomas Wyatt's translations of Petrarch's sonnets. Throughout the course we will be interrogating the representation of love and sexuality in these poems, with particular attention to the status of the female beloved. Other important themes will be the relationship between man and God, the social and political influence of the court, and the changing nature of subjectivity. The vexed position of poetry at this time will also be considered through a reading of particularly influential prose works, such as Sidney's Defense of Poesyand Puttenham's Art of English Poesy. We will pay particular attention to the works of Wyatt,Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare (sonnets), Donne, Jonson, Mary Wroth, Herbert, Marvell and Milton, though we will also consider, where appropriate, selections from popular miscellanies, ballads, and songbooks. (Formerly EL334) LIT EUR
ENGL 0224 Literary Exchanges (FI) Pre-1800
An examination of the active commerce between literary texts and other works (literary, visual, musical, documentary) to which they implicitly or explicitly "speak." We will look at ways in which writers deal with their indebtedness to their precursors, at how they "translate," adapt, or otherwise reform (and occasionally deform) prior works to meet their own ends. Readings will include Romeo and Julietand its variations (Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet; West Side Story); Moll Flandersand its generic antecedents (criminal accounts; spiritual autobiographies); The Rape of the Lock and its illustrations (including those by Aubrey Beardsley); Swift's reworkings of classical poetic genres like the pastoral and the georgic; Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Brecht's Modernization, The Threepenny Opera; Blake's illustrations to the poems of Gray; assorted literary and artistic parodies. 3 hrs. lect. LIT EUR
ENGL 0330 Shakespeare and Contexts (SH) (Spring)
This course is designed to sample the breadth of Shakespeare's dramatic art, from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, with an eye to understanding both how the plays may have resonated for his first audiences on stage and how subsequent readers have drawn their own meanings from the published texts. We will therefore pay particular attention to such dramaturgical issues as the construction of character and of plot, the reworking of sources, spectacle, meta-theatricality, and versification, as well as consider what political and commercial implications these plays might have had during Shakespeare's life and what meaning they hold for us today. (Formerly EL 321) 3 hrs. lect./1 hr. disc./3 hrs. screen. LIT EUR (T. Billings)
EL 331 Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances (SH) (Spring)
Close analysis and appreciation of the development of Shakespeare's comic vision of courtship, love, and marriage, from his earliest comedies, The Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, through the mature comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, to the final romances, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. (Formerly EL 319)3 hrs. lect. LIT(M. Wells)
EL 332 Shakespeare's Tragedies and Histories (SH) (Fall)
An intensive consideration of language, style, character, and structure, first in Shakespeare's epic history-play cycle, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V,and then in the major tragedies,Hamlet, King Lear, and Coriolanus. (Formerly EL 320) LIT EUR(J. Bertolini)
EL 414 Seminar: Literature and Aesthetic Value
In this course we will attempt to grapple with the weighty issue of literary value. How do we decide that a particular work of literature is good? How do certain works in the English literary tradition-like Shakespeare's plays, for example-become so thoroughly canonized as "great literature" that we accept their value unquestioningly? Why do certain works get left out of the canon? Are they simply bad books, or might there be social, historical, or political reasons for excluding certain works from the lineage of great literature? Readings will include various canonical texts (Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens) alongside other "questionable" texts, plus essays on aesthetics, canon-formation, and literary value. (Approval required. Please apply at department office) 3 hrs. lect.
EL 417 Seminar: Voyage to Nowhere: Utopia and Dystopia (Fall)
Since the early sixteenth century, when Thomas More coined the term "utopia" (meaning both "no place" and "good place"), writers of utopian literature have created pseudo travel-narratives describing alternative worlds. In the twentieth century, a new version of utopia, the dystopia-a bad place or evil world-has also developed. Early utopias reflect the powerful influence of the New World on the European imagination; modern and post-modern utopias and dystopias reflect anxieties about the growing role of science in daily life. We will read a selection of utopian writings in English from the sixteenth century to the present, examining how utopian fiction is shaped by changing social and cultural anxieties. Authors may include: More, Shakespeare, Johnson, Butler, Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and Atwood; films will include: Blade Runner, Forbidden Planet, and The Matrix.(Approval required: Please apply at department office). sem. w/ screenings (D. Brayton)
ENGL 0418 Seminar: The Pastoral Tradition (Not offered 2003-04)
The image of a green world, in which humans live in harmony with nature and devote themselves to love and poetry, has long been both cherished and satirized. We will ground our investigation of this ideal in the Twenty-Third Psalm of David and the First Eclogue of Virgil, then turn to poems by Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Raleigh. After reading Shakespeare's As You Like It and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," we will spend several weeks on the works of Wordsworth. During the seminar's second half we will read Eliot's Silas Marner, Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Participants will present oral reports on such related topics as the art of Blake and Constable, the music of Beethoven and Britten, and the transformation of England from a rural to an industrial society. (Approval required. Please apply at department office) 3 hrs. lect.
ENGL 0420 Shakespeare and the Politics of Appropriation (Fall)
Although it sometimes comes as a shock to learn that the plots of most of Shakespeare's plays were lifted from other works, the more closely one studies how Shakespeare adapted his sources, the more fully one admires and understands both the plays and the playwright. In order to explore the implications of "appropriating" texts according to various discourses and exigencies, we will examine not only how Shakespeare adapted certain well-known authors (such as Ovid, Holinshed, Plutarch, and Cinthio), but also how others, in turn, have adapted Shakespeare for their own creative and political ends. We will thus survey the history of Shakespearean appropriation, century by century, up to the present day, to learn about the controversies and changing ideals that have shaped the very idea of "Shakespeare." The varied syllabus will include reading in original Renaissance texts, theoretical criticism, and some film analysis. We will give particular consideration to the "politics" of race, class, gender, sexuality, identity, and authorship. There will be periodic screenings during the term. (Approval required. Please apply at department office.) 3 hrs. lect w/screen. (T. Billings)
Classes incorporating Charlotte Brontë:
EL/WG 351 Junior Seminar: The Brontës-A Critical History
An exploration of the literary phenomenon of the Brontë sisters. In addition to reading major novels and poems by the Brontës, we will consider critical responses to their works from the Victorian period through the present day, using changes in critical evaluation of their writings to chart major trends in literary criticism. We will experiment with a variety of methodologies, including biographical, new critical, psychoanalytic, feminist, poststructuralist, and historicist approaches. Works to be read include Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Villette, and Shirley. Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; selected poetry by Anne and Emily Brontë; Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. (Approval required. Please apply at department office.)
EL/WG 413 Seminar: The Heroine as Hero
In this course, we will examine novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that feature heroines whose divergence from cultural norms of femininity, and centrality to the narratives themselves, challenged conventional conceptions of what it means to be a "heroine." By placing women at the center of their fictions, these authors insisted upon the importance of the issues that occupied women's lives in this period. At the same time, they showed how new developments in narrative form depended on enlarging the novel's sphere of representation. Novels to be read will include: C. Bronte, Villette; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Gaskell,Mary Barton; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. The course will include some historical background and reading in feminist literary theory. (Approval required. Please apply at department office.)
EL/WG 242 Victoria's Secrets: The Two Faces of Nineteenth-Century Fiction (FI) (Spring)
Known as the great age of the realist novel and the epitome of staid decorum, the nineteenth century also had its guilty pleasures: mysteries, ghost stories, science fiction, imperialist adventure tales, and radical fantasies of gender confusion. In this course we will read both canonical realist novels and their non-traditional counterparts in an attempt to understand the productive interplay between these two seemingly disparate literary traditions. In our comparisons we will focus on numerous issues, including domesticity, gender politics, class and racial identity, and international politics. Authors may include: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës, Wilkie Collins, R.L Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle,H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others.(Formerly EL/WG 214) 3 hrs.lect./disc. LIT EUR (A. Losano)
Classes incorporating Arundhati Roy:(God of Small Things, Power Politics)
EL/WG 270 Postcolonial Literatures (FI) (Fall)
The purpose of the course is to examine a cross-section of the literature that has been marked by the experience of European colonialism and its aftermath. In addition to discussing a range of writing from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada, including fiction by Dangarembga, Rushdie, Mistry, Mootoo, Coetzee, and Kincaid, we will explore the criticism and the theoretical debates that this postcolonial literature has spawned. Topics will include orientalism, colonial discourse analysis, critiques of colonialism, resistance theories, subaltern studies, nationalism, postcolonial gender studies, diaspora, and globalization. Formerly EL 241) 3 hrs. lect/disc. LIT OTH CMP(Y. Siddiqi)
EL 310 Postcolonial Studies and Politics (FI)
The field of postcolonial studies addresses the relations of power in regions marked by the experience of colonialism and its aftermath. Although the field has been dominated by literary scholars, it has become increasingly interdisciplinary, engaging political and social theorists, historians, anthropologists, geographers and the like. Readings will include work by Said, Ahmad, Hardt and Negri, Chatterjee, Appadurai, Sassen, Escobar, Orin Stern, Jeff Rubin, Ferguson and Gupta, Dirlik, Ong, and Harvey, alongside selected novels and films. The class will explore the following topics: colonial discourse, critiques of colonialism, nationalism, social movements, postcolonial gender studies, development, neocolonialism, globalization, transnationalism and diaspora. (Formerly EL313) 3 hrs. lect./disc. HIS LIT OTH CMP
Classes incorporating Virginia Woolf:
EL/LI 340 The Realistic Novel (FI)
To what extent is it possible to mimic the real world in fiction? We use the term "realism" with astonishing frequency and confidence, but why should some novels be called "realistic" and others not, when all novels are collections of people who never lived and events which never happened? Is "realism" then a question of style, of subject matter, of point of view, of gender or national origin? Does the term "realism" have any stable, useful meaning at all? This course will both celebrate and trouble the notion of "realism" by closely examining novels by Austen, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, Achebe, Norris, Flaubert, Woolf, Faulkner, Kafka, Camus, Garcia-Marquez, and Borges, among others. (Formerly EL 211) LIT EUR
EL 418 Seminar: The Pastoral Tradition (Fall)
The image of a green world, in which humans live in harmony with nature and devote themselves to love and poetry, has long been both cherished and satirized. We will ground our investigation of this ideal in the Twenty-Third Psalm of David and the First Eclogue of Virgil, then turn to poems by Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Raleigh. After reading Shakespeare's As You Like It and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," we will spend several weeks on the works of Wordsworth. During the seminar's second half we will read Eliot's Silas Marner, Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Woolf's To the Lighthouse,and the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Participants will present oral reports on such related topics as the art of Blake and Constable, the music of Beethoven and Britten, and the transformation of England from a rural to an industrial society. (Approval required. Please apply at department office) sem. (J. Elder)
EL/WG 242 Victoria's Secrets: The Two Faces of Nineteenth-Century Fiction (FI) (Spring)
Known as the great age of the realist novel and the epitome of staid decorum, the nineteenth century also had its guilty pleasures: mysteries, ghost stories, science fiction, imperialist adventure tales, and radical fantasies of gender confusion. In this course we will read both canonical realist novels and their non-traditional counterparts in an attempt to understand the productive interplay between these two seemingly disparate literary traditions. In our comparisons we will focus on numerous issues, including domesticity, gender politics, class and racial identity, and international politics. Authors may include: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës, Wilkie Collins, R.L Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle,H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others.(Formerly EL/WG 214) 3 hrs.lect./disc. LIT EUR (A. Losano)
Classes incorporating Robert Frost:
EL/AL 353 The Poetry of Robert Frost (PO)
We will take our cue from MacLeish's remark: "Frost has looked as long and deeply into the darkness of the world as a man well can . . .he met the Furies on their own dark ground." Reading all of Frost's poetry, and much of his prose, classes will focus on "major" poems. Secondary reading in biography, criticism, and letters is expected. A part of our effort will be to evaluate Frost's achievements among his (more or less) contemporaries, i.e., Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, et. al. (Formerly EL 316)
EL 354 Darwin Among the Poets: Monkeys, Cats, and Black Holes (PO) (Spring)
Scientific determinism lies at the core of the Victorians' problem with themselves. This course will deal with the impact of Newtonian physics and the Darwinian hypothesis as evident primarily through a study of the novel, poetry, and prose writings from major figures from mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the novel, Hardy and Conrad; from poetry, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, and Frost; in prose, some attention to short excerpts from Lyell, Mill, Darwin, and Huxley, with access to commentary from such modern figures as Russell, Einstein, Pagels, Weinberg, Feynman, and Hawking. I will attempt to bring the implications of the nineteenth-century "New Science" up to date. We will conclude with a possible reconciliation through quantum mechanics of two great opposing laws: Darwinism and the second law of thermodynamics. (Formerly EL 314) 3 hrs. lect. LIT (R. Hill)
Classes incorporating Joseph Conrad:
EL 410 Seminar: Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene
These two authors are unique in their ability to write "thrillers" that nevertheless inhabit the highest precincts of literary art. Indeed, in their insistence that only a tenuous political and moral solidarity can safeguard us from a cosmos bereft of God and a radically fallen human nature, Conrad and Greene can be said to have, respectively, created and perfected "noir" fiction. We will read the major novels of both authors, including Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The Comedians.(Approval required. Please apply at department office) 3 hrs. lect.
EL 354 Darwin Among the Poets: Monkeys, Cats, and Black Holes (PO) (Spring)
Scientific determinism lies at the core of the Victorians' problem with themselves. This course will deal with the impact of Newtonian physics and the Darwinian hypothesis as evident primarily through a study of the novel, poetry, and prose writings from major figures from mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the novel, Hardy and Conrad; from poetry, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, and Frost; in prose, some attention to short excerpts from Lyell, Mill, Darwin, and Huxley, with access to commentary from such modern figures as Russell, Einstein, Pagels, Weinberg, Feynman, and Hawking. I will attempt to bring the implications of the nineteenth-century "New Science" up to date. We will conclude with a possible reconciliation through quantum mechanics of two great opposing laws: Darwinism and the second law of thermodynamics. (Formerly EL 314) 3 hrs. lect. LIT (R. Hill)
Classes incorporating Seamus Heaney:
EL 175 The Structure of Poetry (Fall)
An introduction to the reading and writing of poetry emphasizing its structural and musical aspects. Exemplary American and English poems will be examined carefully to appreciate, as Frost says, "the easy way the obstacle of verse is turned to advantage." Among the poets we shall read are Seamus Heaney and Charles Simic. Students will write their own poems and give oral reports on contemporary poets. 3 hrs. lect. ART