Official Course Descriptions

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Supplemental Course Descriptions

Summer 2012

ENL 6930 ST: Irish Literature
Dr. Sutton
TR 6:30-9:55p.m.
This course will examine a variety of works from post-Famine Ireland. We will read some of the nationalistic poetry and journalism of revolutionary groups such as Young Ireland and Sinn Féin, which eventually gave birth to the Irish Republican Army. We will read Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Then we will read a selection of the drama performed at the Abbey Theater in Dublin written by W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey. James Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners, and his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will introduce students to what many consider the greatest fiction writer of the twentieth century. The poetry of W. B. Yeats will be examined extensively, as will that of Patrick Kavanagh. Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds (in which mythological Irish figures come to life at a modern Irish university), as well as Samuel Beckett’s existential complaints, will provide some element of comic relief. We will also consider a selection of contemporary works by writers such as Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín.

Because much Irish literature concerns a complex and tortured history, this course will emphasize social and historical contexts. We will study the revolutionary groups that were spawned by the terrible effects of the Famine and British colonization, Charles Stewart Parnell and the Home Rule Party, the Gaelic League, the Easter Uprising of 1916, the formation of the Irish Free State and the Irish Civil War, the IRA, and the “Troubles” that persisted throughout the 20th century.

Assessment will be based on class participation, a critical assessment, a research-length essay, and a final exam.

Fall 2012

AML 6930 Special Topics in the Literature and Culture of the US
“Body Functions: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Body”
Dr. Mendible
T 5-7:45 p.m.
The human body has been subjected to various technologies, medical interventions, scientific expectations and cultural controls throughout history. This interdisciplinary course explores the ways that the body has been regulated, conceptualized, represented, and incorporated into discourses of production and consumption in American culture. Topics include the construction and representation of raced, gendered bodies; and the body’s aesthetic and metaphorical meanings (the “docile” body; the “healthy” or “diseased” body; the alien body). We will examine a variety of novels and visual texts, as well theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Sander Gilman, Freud, Sandra Bartky, Sara Ahmed, and Donna Haraway.

ENL 6335 Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Earth System Science
Dr. Rebecca Totaro
R 5:00-7:45 p.m.
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” (King Lear)
Aiming to expand our understanding of the early modern world view that charged winds with personified power, comets with prodigious meaning, and tempests with preternatural and sometimes supernatural consequence, this course will take as its focus the material composition of the early modern sublunary ecosystem and its literary and cultural representation. Appropriating terms borrowed from the NASA definition of earth system science, we will attend to “the processes within and interactions among the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and geosphere from a global and local point-of-view”—what in early modern terms comprised the study of physics and meteorology. In our discussions, we will explore literary, cultural, and didactic treatments of the early modern sublunary ecosystem (as in works by Shakespeare, DuBartas, Golding, Lucretius, and Batman); the religious, philosophical, and literary critical significance associated with such treatments; and, time permitting, the relationship between current ecocriticism and early modern writing about Earth’s interdependent spheres. As for reading, we will examine 4-5 of Shakespeare’s plays, some of his poetry, and several key early modern works on what we now call earth system science