Course Descriptions

Summer 2008

Summer A
AML 6930: U.S. Literature and Culture
Tech-noir
Dr. Jackson
TR 5:00 – 8:25 p.m.

In this course we will study a new sub-genre of film recently named “tech-noir.” Works discussed will include The Cell, Terminator 2, The Ring, Feardotcom, and Dark Water. (While we will look at specific scenes during class time, screenings of the films in their entirety will take place at a designated time outside of class.) Course readings will include contemporary theoretical works on our current relation to technology and the image by such authors as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Luc Marion, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Fall 2008

AML 6305: Major U.S. Authors
19th Century Women’s Fiction
Dr. Harrison
W 5:00 – 7:45 p.m.

“America,” Hawthorne wrote to his publisher in 1855, “is now wholly given over to a d---d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.” As Hawthorne’s comment suggests, 19th Century American women’s fiction has always been viewed as fundamentally different from the masculinist literary tradition exemplified by what we now call the American Renaissance, and that difference has made women’s fiction of the 19th Century a hotly contested corpus of texts. Or as critic Susan Harris has put it: is this fiction any good? This course will survey a range of fiction by women writers of the 19th Century and explore a related set of questions these texts raise about authority, gender, class, sexuality, and cultural power. In addition to several short stories by a variety of writers, our core texts will include Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing; Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World; Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner; Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and others.

ENG 6058: Literature, Language, and Society
Dr. Jackson
M 5:00 – 7:45 p.m.

In this introductory class for all students in the M.A. program in English, our primary purpose is to provide you with the intellectual tools you will need to succeed – an understanding of the theoretical approaches that tend to organize our thinking about literature and the research methodologies that structure our investigations. Those lessons, however, will be embedded in a much broader discussion of the interactions of language and literature and the society within which they are created and considered.

ENL 6335: Studies in Shakespeare
Dr. Totaro
R 5:00 – 7:45 p.m.

In this course, we will examine all things preternatural in Shakespeare, with a focus on the plays (to be determined) but also on primary documents from the period and on secondary sources. Developed in post-Reformation Europe to describe a category of phenomena that was neither exclusively natural nor supernatural, the preternatural includes all things that are on the fringe of these more stable categories, including earthquakes, curses, monstrous births, and weapon salves. Because this is not a course intended for first-time readers of Shakespeare, those students who have not had a previous course at the college level would do well to review several plays in advance and to read some basic introductory material (for example, the editors’ essays in the Norton or Longman anthologies by Greenblatt or Bevington, respectively).

LIT 6096: Contemporary Literature
Dr. Tolchin
T 5:00 – 7:45 p.m.

This course will delve into the “fourth genre,” a.k.a. Creative Nonfiction, a burgeoning category of literature that embraces autobiography, memoir, “new” journalism, and the essay. We will consider a multitude of ancient and modern prose models ranging from Seneca to Steve Almond, our discussions enhanced by contemporary criticism and genre theory by Vivian Gornick and Phillip Lopate, among others. The seminar will be driven by an examination of the cultural and historical influences behind Creative Nonfiction’s contemporary renaissance. At the same time, we will investigate the best examples of the genre, isolating qualities that redefine this rapidly evolving form. LIT 6096 will furnish adventurous graduate students with opportunities to flex both creative and scholarly writing muscles.