Cates Baldridge

Reading Literature
Please refer to each section for specific course descriptions.(Formerly ENAM 0103)

Introduction to Contemporary Literary Theory
In this course we will introduce several major schools of contemporary literary theory. By reading theoretical texts in close conjunction with works of literature, we will illuminate the ways in which these theoretical stances can produce multiple interpretations of a given literary work. The approaches covered may include New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism and Cultural Criticism, Race Theory and Multicultural Criticism, Feminism, Post-Colonial Criticism, Queer Studies, Eco-Criticism, Post-Structuralism, and others. These theories will be applied to various works of fiction, poetry, and drama. The goal will be to make students critically aware of the fundamental literary, cultural, political, and moral assumptions underlying every act of interpretation they perform. 3 hrs. lect/disc. (Formerly ENAM 0205)

Nineteenth Century British Literature (II)
The 19th century is the era of “peak novel,” for never before or since has the genre exhibited such confidence in its ability to tell the truth about both the teeming world and the private life. But far from merely reflecting social reality, the novelists and poets of the period played an active part in constructing their readers' ideas about gender and sexuality, imperialism and colonialism, class, religion, and technology, insisting that literature be relevant and revelatory in a time of swift and sometimes frightening cultural and intellectual innovation. Works to be covered will include novels by Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy, and the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti. 3 hrs. lect./disc. (Formerly ENAM 0241)

The Romantic Revolution
he generation of British poets and novelists known collectively as the Romantics decisively rebelled against earlier conceptions of what literature could speak about, how it could best describe a rapidly changing world, and who was fit to be its reader. Arguably the first environmentalists, the Romantics also initiated our modern discussions of gender, class, race, and nationalism. To encounter the Romantics is to witness intellectual courage taking up arms against habit, prejudice, and tyranny. We will trace their genius and daring (and follow their personal attachments for, and rivalries with, each other) through the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the novels of Mary Shelley and Emily Brönte. 3 hrs. lect./disc. (Formerly ENAM 0250)

The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Ethics and Empire
Coetzee, whose novels engage questions of institutional racism, state-sponsored violence, patriarchal privilege, environmental degradation, animal rights, and how to ethically approach cultural Others, manages to speak of specific historical circumstances—such as South Africa’s apartheid regime—while simultaneously addressing universal dilemmas of our contemporary human condition. Having received both the Booker (twice) and Nobel Prizes for literature, Coetzee is recognized as the living heir of both Kafka and Beckett, and as a writer whose searing prose and formal experimentation both extend and transform the novel’s traditional role as our culture’s most skeptical self-inquisitor. Depicting every act of writing as either a confrontation or an evasion, Coetzee both reveres and rebukes the literary traditions he warily embraces. We will read his strongest and most globally recognized works, from Waiting for the Barbarians through Disgrace.

Poems, Poets, Poetry
Emily Dickinson declared, “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” In this introductory class we will encounter hair-raising poems from a wide variety of genres and historical eras in order to examine their structural forms, linguistic audacities, ideological captivities, and personal revelations. We will also read various poets’ meditations on their own craft, from which we will draw our own conclusions about what poems do, should, or might accomplish in the world. Our goal will always be to render poetry accessible, relevant, and enjoyable—to become confident readers of, and informed writers about, the diverse poetic utterance.