Course Descriptions

Summer 2008 Upper-Level English Course Descriptions

AML 4930: Selected Topics in American Literature
Vietnam in Myth and Memory
Dr. Mendible
MW 09:30 am - 12:55 pm

America’s “lost war” has been represented and re-imagined in countless ways over the years, assuming a signifying power that has endured long after the ceasefire agreement in 1973 or the war’s official end in 1975. Yet given the contentious nature of the Vietnam War (what the Vietnamese call “the American War”), it is not surprising that our culture has produced little consensus on the war's “meaning.” Building on historical documents as well as films and memoirs, this course explores the War’s legacy through the alternating lenses of American foreign policy, cultural myths, personal and “official” memories.

LIT 4930: Special Topics
The Films of the Coen Brothers
Dr. Brock
MW 5:00-8:25 p.m.

This class will canvas the screenplays and films of Ethan and Joel Coen, especially focusing on Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (with some consideration of their other films, including Millers Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Lady Killers, and No Country for Old Men). While we'll explore both literary and cinematic contexts--from Homer to Flannery O'Connor, from Raymond Chandler to Preston Sturges--we'll consider theme-based and theory-based concerns as registered through their numbskull criminals and their nuclear family units. While these films may have a post-modern, violent, and snarky edge, we'll also regard their often old-school and conventional charm, wholesomeness.

SPW 4900: Directed Study
Dr. Marquez

A detailed study of Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares. Considered the true precursor of the modern novel, these experimental texts explore issues of realism, use of narrators, and social commentary which later would become the repertoire of literary modes of Don Quixote. 

Summer 2008 Graduate English Course Descriptions

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 Upper-Level English Course Descriptions

AML 3242: 20th Century U.S. Literature and Culture
Dr. Wisdom
TBA

AML 4300: Selected American Authors
The Captivity Narrative
Dr. Harrison
TR 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Few story forms are as enduring and deeply rooted in the American psyche as the captivity narrative. Pilgrims and Puritans modeled their immigration to New England after the children of Israel’s escape from Egyptian bondage and forty-year quest for the promised land. Settlers and colonials adapted the captivity narrative to manage and mask discontinuities in the clash between Anglo-Europeans and Native Americans. Puritans described their spiritual and religious experiences in terms of captivity to and redemption from sin. In the 19th Century, writers confronting newly urgent questions of national and individual identity found the adaptability of the captivity narrative useful in recasting problems of westward expansion and slavery in terms of bondage, freedom, and American virtue and heroism. Using Mary Rowlandson, Thomas Shepard, Olaudah Equiano, and Fenimore Cooper as our touchstone authors, we’ll read through and against various permutations of captivity narratives – whether fictional, factual, literal, or symbolic – in Early and Antebellum American literature.

ENG 3014: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies
Dr. Wisdom
TBA

ENL 3210: Anglo-Saxon & Medieval Literature
Dr. Busbee
MW 2:00 – 3:15 p.m.

This course is designed to be an overview of the early European vernacular literature we traditionally call British (and later English) from its origins to the end of the medieval period. It has three general objectives: first, to improve the clarity and logic of students’ critical writing through oral and written presentations; second, to exercise students’ skills at inter- and intra-textual reading by considering how meaning can reveal itself through close reading and comparitivist techniques; and third, to sample masterpieces of this literature from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon Period (ca. 450-1066) through the Middle Ages (1066-1500). While the first two goals are directly connected to paper writing, the last requires that students demonstrate knowledge of particular works of literature through recognition and analysis. (The readings include foundational text of so-called English literature, masterpieces ranging from Beowulf and many of its Northern European analogues, including some Irish myth and Icelandic sagas, to Arthurian romance and high medieval drama.) In an effort to meet course objectives, I have planed class meetings comprised of a mix of student presentations, performance and hands-on activities; small group work; class discussion and collaboration; occasional lecture; and regular in-class writing. (This course counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for graduation.)

ENL 4303: Selected British Authors
Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells
Dr. Kimberly Jackson
TR 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.

In this course we will discuss how each of these 19th-century authors portrays the major issues of her/his day: how late 18th-century ideals led to the creation of monsters in the 19th century, the role of scientific thought in the creation of these monsters, apocalyptic visions of the end of humankind, etc. Works discussed will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man and H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds, as well as comparative analysis of a contemporary staging of similar themes in 28 Days Later.

LIT 3400: Interdisciplinary Topics
Villains and Bombshells” Hollywood’s Narratives of Ethnicity and Race
Dr. Mendible
F 11:00 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.

Cinema is one of the principal mechanisms through which national identities are constituted, celebrated, or revised. This course traces Hollywood’s changing depictions of racial and ethnic groups from the Silent film era (pre-Hollywood) to the contemporary. Incorporating insights gleaned from critical race theory, film studies, and American social history, the course evaluates the relationship between politics and popular culture; considers the reception and impact of selected films in their historical contexts; explores the ways that popular films frame public debates about ethnicity, race, foreign and domestic policies; and how these debates inform our values and judgments.

LIT 4353: Ethnic Studies
Outcasts and Border Crossers: Inter-Ethnic Conflict and the Literary Imagination
Dr. Mendible
W 5:00 – 7:45 p.m.

Interethnic conflicts pose one of the greatest challenges to the world today, and “ethnicity” may well replace “race” as the defining issue of our time. This course involves an interdisciplinary exploration of ethnicity and violence: how is the “ethnic” defined and constituted, what are the historical and cultural roots of ethnic differences, and how do these fuel human rights violations, forced migrations, or “ethnic cleansings”? We will examine these questions through literature and film, building on insights from a broad array of disciplines, including psychology, history, cultural theory, and political science. Students will analyze novels and films that dramatize the role of ethnicity in shaping interpersonal relationships and political subjectivities.

Fall 2008 Graduate English Course Descriptions

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.