English 120: Ideas and Arguments on Stage
John Wesley
The art of persuasion and the art of acting have always been in close conversation, sometimes angrily so.
Recognizing the power of emotion in guiding belief, ancient orators urged their pupils to observe and imitate
actors on stage who expressed grief, pity, anger, and joy, while at the same time plays were performed as
vehicles for social and political satire. The histories of rhetoric and drama, in other words, tell us that the stage
is a rhetorical space; it is about the here and now; it tells us who we are, and what we can achieve. Speeches
on stage are for and about a community as much as they are studies in performance techniques. In this course,
we will situate the study and practice of effective communication in terms of staged arguments. You have
already learned the basics of argument, but every writer can learn new strategies and refine old ones to make
effective arguments on complex, sometimes contentious topics. The plays and other readings throughout the
course will challenge us to ask questions about responsibility, about authority and obedience in a civil society,
and about the relationship between art and politics. We will analyze how arguments are made about those
questions in the plays, and you will respond by constructing oral and written arguments of your own.
English 122: Nuclear Family Meltdown!
Jeff Solomon
The formative experience of family shapes most human endeavor, yet people are likely to disagree about what
a “proper” family is. The traditional nuclear family—married parents, working dad and stay-at-home mom,
with a handful of kids in a single-family home, all happy, fulfilled, and linked by love and loyalty—is surprisingly
uncommon even among those who view it as ideal. Furthermore, the nuclear family is neither a historically
nor a geographically universal model. In this seminar, we will scrutinize the fissures between the fantasy and
the reality of the nuclear family, and the explosions that may result when they meet. We will read and watch a
variety of texts closely and analytically as a means for creating insightful arguments, and we will work hard to
present these arguments in clear and sophisticated prose. Historical and psychological critiques of the nuclear
family will provide context for fiction and television—and these works of art will in turn provide context for the
historical and psychological critiques. Our task will be to ground arguments about broad cultural themes in
specific examples. Texts will probably include Lessing, The Fifth Child; Cain, Mildred Pierce; and Weiner, Mad
Men, Season 1.
English 122: Autobiography from Franklin to Facebook
Suzanne Warren
For Americans, sharing their life stories appears to be an irresistible impulse. Whether tweeting the day’s
events or updating Facebook statuses, Americans want to tell us what’s going on in their lives. Contemporary
though the phenomenon may appear, the urge to tell one’s life story has a long and illustrious history in
American literature, arguably beginning with Benjamin Franklin. In this course, we’ll practice close reading,
engage with the literary and scholarly work of others, learn to articulate a position, research and write from
sources, and situate our writing and speaking within an academic context. To that end, we’ll read American
autobiographies from Franklin to Facebook, addressing a set of linked questions: What is autobiography? Why
have Americans chosen to write it? How have its rhetorical functions in American life altered over time? What
does it mean to be an American, and how are American autobiographies shapers of and shaped by this notion?
The varied conclusions we reach will help us achieve a clearer understanding of both the uses of literature and
the complexities of American identity.
Course authors may include Mary Rowlandson, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass,
James Weldon Johnson, Mary Antin, Art Spiegelman, Danzy Senna, and Mary Karr, as well as television shows
and social media.
English 124: See What I Mean?: War in Words and Images
Daniel Cook
This seminar examines how we perceive, and make arguments about, war. It has been said that war is hell; war
is chaos; war is nightmare. But if so, how can we find the right words and images to express its reality? How
have artists like Picasso, or writers such as Robert Graves, Dave Grossman and Kayla Williams, given the
experience a meaningful shape? The course will begin with representations of war, but go on to engage the
ethical, political and psychological dimensions of state-authorized violence, since how we perceive war is
intimately connected to the arguments we make about it. What constitutes a “just war” (or is this term just a
revolting oxymoron)? Would it be morally permissible to torture the hypothetical “ticking-bomb” terrorist? —
or perhaps to imprison him indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay? Should it bother us that American national
identity, as exemplified in our National Anthem, is so rooted in the iconography of battle? As students engage
with a number of classical statements about war, they will be invited to fashion representations and
arguments of their own. Course reading will include material as diverse as The Aeneid, Goodbye to All That and
the Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as films like Triumph of the Will and Hero.
English 126: Writing Environments: Freedom and the American Wilderness
Darcy Irvin
“In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” –Henry David Thoreau
What is wilderness? And what does it have to do with America? In this class, we’ll be exploring the concept of
American exceptionalism as a mythology of freedom that stems from 19 th, 20th, and 21st century constructions
of wilderness and the environment. Discussion topics range from the frontier theory and self-reliance to
ecological feminism and political rhetoric. In addition to reading the works of famous “wilderness” writers such
as Henry David Thoreau, Roderick Nash, John Muir, and Edward Abbey, we’ll also be thinking about how
concepts of wilderness play out in contemporary rhetoric about freedom and the environment. Other texts will
include Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and the reality TV show Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
English 127: An Opinion About Everything
Keith James
This writing and rhetoric seminar invites students to study and practice academic argumentation: that is, civil,
concise, vigorous exploration of challenging issues with the intention to get at that which is true. We will read
excellent essays to serve as models of superb writing and to provoke lively discussion. We will also view three
films, about one of which students will present a group oral report, about another of which students will write
an in-class examination, and about the last of which students will present a solo speech. In addition, students
will submit four graded essays and take a comprehensive final examination. If you love ideas and discovering
the truth by deep, detailed analysis and energetic conversation, then this is the class for you.
English 129: Seminar in Writing & Rhetoric: Encountering the Other/Writing the Self
Ann Putnam
Our readings represent divergent points of view, alternative texts that insist upon oppositional readings.
Written from the perspective of the “other,” these texts oppose traditional texts in creative, compelling ways,
becoming countertexts, as it were, that question long-held assumptions.
The thematic content of the course becomes also its structural framework as we examine the pros and cons of
a variety of opinions in a variety of works, and construct both written and oral arguments about them. The
implicit if not explicit framework of the course will be the construction of persuasive arguments on both sides,
arguments that examine moral, ethical and intellectual dilemmas, issues that shoot to the core of human
existence. As both writers and speakers, we will construct persuasive arguments that either contradict or
defend given assumptions about culture, history, identity, and the natural world. For example: American
Primitive calls into question the anthropomorphism implicit in our “readings” of nature; The English Patient,
the absolute borders of geography, history, and identity; bel canto: what makes us who we are when all
known reference points have vanished? when the other (the enemy) becomes ourselves.
English 136: Welcome to Vegas!
Michael Schilling
It pops up out of nowhere on the highway. It produces no essential goods and services. It serves no civic
purpose. But Las Vegas, that mirage in the desert, is an essential piece of the American puzzle, our national
“Darkest Eden,” a funhouse mirror of lost innocence. This course ponders how Vegas illustrates and comments
upon the underlying social, economic, and cultural conflicts that haunt our American dreamscape, and how
those matters dovetail and clash with Vegas' organizing principle – that while you're there, reality and
responsibility are negotiable, if not irrelevant. We will look specifically at the interaction of labor and gender,
class and aesthetics, environment and indulgence, through readings by authors such as Robert Venturi, Hunter
Thompson, John Gregory Dunne, and Marc Cooper, considering how Vegas fits into our ideas of the west, the
frontier, and other "imagined" spaces. We’ll examine a wide range of “texts,” from film to criticism to
architecture, exploring the rhetorical expectations of those forms while developing your skills of critical
thinking, argument, and analysis in both oral and written media. We’ll also look at how the rest of the world
sees Las Vegas, and how other global “places of escape” have been rendered in its vulgar, seductive, and
fascinating image.
English 202: Introduction to Fiction Writing
Ann Putnam
You will have many opportunities to participate in panels, small group workshops, large group workshops, as
well as in-class writing sessions. So regular attendance is critical to your success in this class. Each day when
you come to class you will know exactly what to expect, but you will also be surprised. So you'll need to be
here every day--ready to do things you've never done before, remember things you've never remembered
before, ready to write about things you didn't know you knew. All you need is a brave and willing heart. You
will write two 5-6 page stories, one Short Short and one Deep Revision, in addition to keeping a writer’s log
and reading lots of short stories.
English 202: Introduction to Creative Writing: Short Fiction
Beverly Conner
You will learn what goes into the making of short fiction, giving consideration to the process of your own
creativity as well as to the techniques of theme, narrative, dialogue, description, characterization, point of
view, symbol and metaphor, revision, etc. We will aim high, hoping to create literary art (not genre fiction) as
we tell our tales, finding meaning for ourselves as well as offering it to our readers. Because writers of fiction
read fiction (a lot!), you may find that your enthusiasm for reading stories is fueled by your development as a
writer. An increased sophistication in reading imaginative literature and in developing creativity in diverse
areas of life can be valuable aspects of this course for you.
English 203: Introduction to Writing: Poetry
Beverly Conner
In this class we are attempting literary art—hoping to find meaning for ourselves and to convey it to others.
You will learn about meter, rhyme, imagery, free verse, and sonnets, as well as other forms and elements of
poetry. Through writing your own poems and reading a variety of poets, you will explore the genre not only as
an expressive art but also as a new way of seeing: a sharper condensation of yourself and of your world. You
will find that all of your writing (yes, even research papers) will be enhanced by your close attention in this
class to language.
English 203: Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry
Hans Ostrom
This course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of writing poetry. Students write poems and
present them to the class in a workshop format. The class also involves the reading and analysis of British,
Irish, Canadian, and American poetry from several literary periods, and it includes the study of prosody, using
Karl Shapiro’s and Robert Beum’s A Prosody Handbook. Students may also be required to attend poetry
readings on campus.
African American Studies 205: Survey of African American Literature
Hans Ostrom
This course aims to provide a panoramic view of African American literature, from early oral traditions through
the first written and published works in the 18th century, and continuing into the era of published slave
narratives and early autobiographies. From there the course follows African American literature as its
production accelerates and its variety expands after Emancipation, during and after Reconstruction, into the
early 20th century. Students study poetry, prose, and drama from the Harlem Renaissance (circa 1919-1934).
The latter part of the course concerns literature from the Civil Rights Era, the Black Arts period of the 1960s
and 1970s, and more recent decades, when African American literature, criticism, and literary theory achieved
immeasurable success and generated enormous influence nationally and globally. Cultivating an informed
sense of African American literature as a whole is one major objective of the course. Texts include The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature (2nd edition), which includes some novels, as well as at least one
additional novel.
English 210: Introduction to English Studies
Priti Joshi
This class serves as an introduction to the craft and study of literary and cultural texts and is required for
English majors and minors. We will read poetry (lyric, dramatic monologue, sonnet, etc), prose (short stories
and novels), drama (a Shakespeare play), and a graphic memoir. As we read, you will familiarize yourselves
with the conventions of each genre and examine the relation between form and content. The texts we read
swirl around the theme of "revision" or "rewriting," and we will consider the ways in which writers and texts
reexamine and reformulate questions – formal, as well as thematic - from multiple perspectives. In this class
you will also learn and utilize the basic tools of literary study (the OED, the MLA Bibliography, etc). Student
writing will consist of analytic papers, creative texts, and an essay engaging cultural issues.
English 210: Introduction to English Studies
Tiffany MacBain
This class is designed to introduce you to the discipline of English Studies. Most of us are here because we
enjoy and are moved by reading and writing. While our personal experiences with text can be productive
starting points in textual analysis, the study of English requires discipline—in the twin senses of work ethic and
mastery of a branch of knowledge. This course will explore what it means to study English at the university
level. The course will introduce and help you to develop the essential skills of reading actively, critically, and
creatively and of researching and writing substantive literary essays. In addition, we will consider personal,
cultural, and ideological claims about what “literature” is and why it’s important, and we will identify skills,
terms, and perspectives you will use in any English course.
The course is designed to highlight sets of questions central to the discipline: What is a literary text? What is
genre? Who should decide what “counts” as literature, and why? How ought we to read a literary text? How
do literary texts relate to social contexts? What is the discipline of “English”? This course will likely challenge
some of the assumptions and beliefs you have about what it means to be an English major, about the value of
different kinds of texts, and about the politics—cultural, academic, ideological—that influence the discipline.
English 220: Introduction to Literature: Hemispheric Literature
Suzanne Warren
In recent years, our understanding of America has expanded beyond the geographic boundary of the
continental USA to signify the Americas. Thanks to various historical events and sociopolitical phenomena—the
end of the Cold War; NAFTA and its web of economic repercussions throughout the hemisphere; the
replacement of the nation-state by global empire as the primary source of world power; technological
developments that insure perpetual connectivity; and new patterns of immigration that include continued
contact with the home country—American literature might hail from anywhere between the poles in the
Western hemisphere. In this class, we redefine American literature to include the literatures of Mexico, South
and Central America, the Caribbean, and Canada. What new understandings can these texts, together and
apart, offer about the uses of literature and the state of the state?
Course texts may include Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America; Derek
Walcott, The Odyssey: A Stage Version; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Junot Díaz, The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon; Karen Tei Yamashita,
Tropic of Orange; and selected poetry.
English 220: Introduction to Literature
Daniel Cook
This course will focus on a number of celebrated literary texts, asking students to think about why these texts
were—and still are—valued. What gives these works their power? What forms of knowledge or experience do
they offer? What are some of the ways, critical and creative, that we might respond to such texts? More
specifically, the course is organized around the theme of human identity or “subjectivity.” In the course of the
term, we will be reading some of the great works of self-documentation, self-exploration, and self-creation
written over the last 130 years or so. Before Freud ever mapped the psyche, and before Piaget catalogued the
stages of childhood development, writers such as Flaubert were grappling with questions like the following:
Who am I? What makes me me? What stages define the path of a woman’s or a man’s life? And how can flesh
and blood experience be translated into words—and from there into art? The writers on our syllabus explore
selfhood with results which are often surprising, sometimes sophisticated—and occasionally just paranoid or
silly. Major texts will include Flaubert’s Three Tales, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the collected poems of both
Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
English 221: British Literature I: Medieval to Renaissance
John Wesley
This course will introduce you to some of the major works of literature written in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon
invasion to the aftermath of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. Along the way, you will also be
introduced to a number of different genres and forms, as well as to many of the key terms and concepts that
help us think critically about texts. Although the stories are diverse, and range over some nine or ten centuries,
our discussions throughout the term will revolve (though not exclusively) around the relationship between
literature and religion, whether in terms of shifts in heroic ideals, concepts of family and nation, the
relationship between the church and the individual, depictions of Christ, the meaning of devotion, the
understanding of the cosmos, or the apocalyptic imagination. In order to better understand how literature
expresses and re-interprets these ideas over such a vast stretch of time, we will study the survey period three
times in three ways; that is, rather than reading once straight through the centuries, this course focuses on
three different generic clusters—heroic narrative, drama, and confession and lyric—all under the broad rubric
of “Faith, Reason, and the Imagination.” Thus, while learning techniques and vocabulary for close textual
analysis, we will also gain a wider contextual framework by touching on the cultural transformations of Britain
from the Christianization of its early Germanic invaders to the religious and political revolutions of the
seventeenth century, noting especially the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century known as the English
Reformation, when Britain turned officially from Catholicism to Protestantism in a matter of only a few
decades. You do not have to be familiar with the Bible or Christian theology to take this course, and it is
literature, not religion, that is the focus of our meetings. In situating our texts historically, we will define key
religious issues and terms as they arise, but always with the aim that such context provides an important
resource for the interpretation of literature.
English 225: American Literature II: Realism to the Present
Jeff Solomon
This survey offers students a broad overview of the enormous array of American literature from the Civil War
to the present. To put this overview in perspective, there are less than twenty weeks to make sense of one and
a half century’s worth of incredible literature. We will therefore carefully pick our way through the enormous
buffet available so as to enjoy a nutritious, wide-ranging meal without getting sick. Our goal is to enable
students to broadly “place” major authors and literary movements in relation to each other and American
culture—and so we will consider the aesthetic, cultural, social, and literary history necessary to properly
appreciate our reading. Students therefore should leave the class with a fairly secure understanding of terms
such as “realism,” “modernism,” and “postmodernism,” as well as the limits of these terms. Students should
also have a sense of both the mainstream narrative of the American literature and the battles that have been
and continue to be fought over the canon.
English 236: Literature and the Quest for Personal Identity
Michael Curley
The aim of this course is to introduce you to the rich literature devoted to the theme of the individual's search
for personal identity. The chronological reach of the course is long, and the cultural range of the assigned texts
is ample. By beginning our investigation in the classical world and examining versions and restatements of the
course theme over time, we shall come to appreciate the connection between the past and the present
through the continuity of the deepest of human aspirations. At the same time, we shall recognize that each
text and literary period has its own idiom and character shaped by its unique place in the dynamics of
history. We should come away from our reading with a better appreciation of the way that literature
embodies both continuity and change.
English 236 aspires to broaden our vision of the human condition by mixing the familiar and the
unfamiliar. We all strive to identify ourselves in relation to family, religion, nationality, social status, work,
gender, race, language, tradition, authority, and so on. Yet to understand this familiar struggle for identity in
the life of a Greek woman, a nineteenth-century Russian student or an Italian Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz
requires the exercise of our intellectual and imaginative powers. In order to give form to our reading, English
236 will be organized loosely around three topics: Family, Love and Freedom. Each of these topics will be
approached initially by reading a set of short stories by the contemporary writer Jhumpa Lahiri. This strategy
should help us to frame our topics in our own idiom before looking to earlier (and often quite alien) cultures
for their constructions of personal identity. A second benefit of this strategy will be to unify our three topics
within the work of a single author. To some degree, of course, these categories will prove artificial. We shall
quickly appreciate how interrelated our three topics are, and how uncertain are the lines that separate one
from the other. I hope that this course will play an important role in your lifelong education, and that it will
encourage you to read at some time in the future another Russian novel, another Greek play, another Irish
writer, that it will build your confidence, fire your imagination, illuminate your intellect and capture your heart.
Fulfills the HM core.
English 244: Lyric Poetry
Keith James
Students will be invited to study great poetry with the goal of evolving their own understanding of the lyrical.
Artists aspire to achieving lyricism, and literary scholars strive to identify and deconstruct lyricism. We will
read and discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wilfred Owen, William Butler Yeats, and Rainer
Maria Rilke to discover that which constitutes lyrical verse. The course grade will be determined by analytical
essays, a midterm, a group oral report, and a comprehensive final examination. Whether you intuitively
understand poetry or you struggle to comprehend poetry at all, this seminar will speak to your love of the
ineffably beautiful and your desire to have, to paraphrase Dickinson, the hair stand up on the back of your
neck when you read great art that moves you. This seminar will engage and challenge you.
English 301: Intermediate Composition
Darcy Irvin
This course offers upper-class, non-English majors a chance to hone their writing and reading skills. In
particular, we’ll be thinking about how we “translate” a given topic to suit a variety of audiences. Although the
course will focus on developing writing skills, we’ll be looking specifically at how contemporary authors write
about the human body, touching also on questions about scientific and medical ethics, disease narratives, and
political rhetoric. How do we write about a topic that is at once intensely personal and yet also universally
accessible? We’ll be thinking about the body in a number of ways, but we’ll particularly focus on the
intersection between our subjective experience of a particular body, a body’s vulnerability to internal and
external forces, and national interest in and claims over physical bodies. Texts may include Mary Roach’s Bonk,
Sherri Fink’s accounts of euthanasia at post-Hurricane Katrina hospitals, and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks.
English 340: English Poetry and Poetic Theory 1580-1820
George Erving
This course is designed to deepen your understanding of (1) the major genres of poetry from the English
Enlightenment through the Romantic period—sonnet, epic, lyric, ode, elegy, ballad; (2) prosody, that is, the
ways in which rhythm and sound affect meaning and aesthetic experience; (3) canonical English poets and
poems from the Renaissance, Restoration, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods; (4) several theoretical
explanations or "defenses" provided by the poets we’re reading regarding poetry's purpose and value.
English 360A: Milton
John Wesley
John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in order to “justify the ways of God to men,” which takes the reader from hell
to heaven, and everywhere in between. This is the epic to end all epics—the story not only of human destiny,
but also of the origins of epic itself. Here is the first war, the first love affair, and the first hero. In imagining the
conventional biblical story of mankind’s fall and redemption, Milton nonetheless took great liberty, not only in
terms of giving voice and action to God, Satan, Adam, Eve, and a host of demons and angels, but also in
flouting many of the political and religious orthodoxies of his day. Indeed, a statement in Areopagitica,
published some twenty years before Paradise Lost, would seem to hold as creed for all his political and
poetical endeavors: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above
all liberties.” Never one to shy from controversy, Milton wrote elsewhere in favor of divorce, of getting rid of
hierarchies within the church, of regicide, and of republican government. How and to what extent do these
views give shape to Milton’s poetry? As well as Paradise Lost, then, we will consider Milton’s prose works on
theology, marriage, politics, and intellectual freedom; we will also read selections from his earlier poetry, his
late Samson Agonistes, and historical documents related to the English Civil War and Restoration. Finally, in
the spirit of Miltonic controversy, we will discuss some of the most famous critical problems and debates
raised by Paradise Lost in the last three hundred years.
English 360B: Melville: A Whale of an Author
Alison Tracy Hale
Melville is unanimously acclaimed as among America’s finest writers; his works are often used to make a case
for the aesthetic and intellectual value of U.S. literature among other great literatures of the world. His most
(in)famous novel, Moby Dick, has assumed among contemporary readers the same vexed fascination with
which Ahab chases his whale: they feel compelled to read it, dread reading it, or are ashamed at having not yet
read it. So, of course, we will read Moby Dick—and, I strongly suspect, you will enjoy it; it’s a fascinating
adventure story populated by gripping characters. The course will locate this greatest of Melville’s works, and
his career more broadly, within a set of contexts: biographical, bibliographical, socio-historical, and critical.
We’ll consider the broad shape of Melville’s career, and we will read widely texts selected from among his
well-known works (Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd), his lesser-known works (Omoo, Typee,
The Confidence Man, and Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities), and even his letters and poetry. We’ll use Andrew
Delbanco’s excellent recent critical biography as a point of entry into Melville’s fascinating life, consider the
dramatic socio-historical transformations against which his life and his career were fashioned, and engage with
both historical and contemporary reactions to his works. Requirements: lengthy reading assignments; one
shorter (7-8 page) and one longer (12-14 pages) analytical essay; active discussion participation; a class
presentation and précis of a critical or secondary text. Note: Completion of English 224 and/or 225 is strongly
recommended.
Connections 375: The Harlem Renaissance
Hans Ostrom
This course examines the renaissance of African American literature, music, and visual art that, for the most
part, emerges from Harlem, a cultural hub in the 1920s and 1930s. The course also approaches the literature,
music, and visual art, as well as the social changes in Harlem, from different disciplinary perspectives, including
literary criticism, cultural history, music criticism, art criticism, and aesthetic theory. Students explore social
and aesthetic debates that arose during the Harlem Renaissance and connect these to parallel debates today.
Students also make connections between and among different artists and thinkers of the period, including
Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellingston, Louis Armstrong, Jean Toomer, Jessie
Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Sargent Johnson, Romare Bearden, Cab Calloway, Bessie
Smith, and Walter White. The course invites students to make connections between literature, visual art, and
music from the period and between the Harlem Renaissance and their own ideas about art and society.
English 380: Literature and Environment
William Kupinse
ENGL 380 will explore the development of environmental writing in English-language texts with an emphasis
on twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and memoir. Covering a wide range of geographical settings and literary
genres, we will examine each text as an argument for a particular “reading” of the environment, and we will
further inquire about real-world consequences of that reading. Our investigation will address questions of
both historical and topical importance: How pervasive is the Romantic vision of nature today? Is it useful or
even possible to speak of “nature” as separate from human activity? How have the legacies of capitalism and
colonialism affected not only the environment but our understanding and use of it? What does environmental
literature have to add to current scholarship on race, class, and gender? Finally, what kind of ethical positions
do various environmental texts encourage us to adopt, given what we know about the current state of the
environment and its anticipated prognosis? Unit topics will encompass such fields as "Nature and
Apocalypse," "Environment and Social Justice," and "Animal Rights." Writers studied will include Henry David
Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Hugo, and Amitav Ghosh;
Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism will provide a theoretical complement to our reading of literature.
English 402: Advanced Fiction Writing
Suzanne Warren
In this course, you’ll deepen your ability to write and revise short stories. You’re expected to have a firm grasp
of the basic elements of fiction—plot, character, point of view, timeline, setting, and tone—and a nascent
understanding of your writerly identity—what you love to read and write. You may have begun to think about
what role your fiction might play in shaping our understanding of the world. With that in mind, more of the
responsibility for the success of the class is shifted onto you, the student. Students are responsible for
selecting the work of published authors to read and present. We adopt selected literary journals as class texts,
which students present to the class as a panel. At the same time, the big lessons of Fiction 101 bear repeating
in this class: reading makes writers; participation in workshop benefits the reader as much as the writer; the
art of revision distinguishes awesome writers from OK ones.
Course assignments may include drafting and revision of 3–4 short stories, workshops, writing journal,
participation in a literary journal panel, and a craft presentation on a favorite story.
English 403: Advanced Poetry Writing
William Kupinse
“A line will take us hours, maybe,” writes W. B. Yeats on the craft of poetry. “Yet if it does not seem a
moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” This creative writing workshop will take
seriously Yeats’ notion that the effect of spontaneity in poetry is achieved only through fierce attention and
substantial effort. By stitching and unstitching multiple drafts of their poems, participants will hone the critical
skills that will allow them to become more effective writers of poetry. Assignments in this course will
emphasize writing as a process and will include selected reading of canonical and contemporary poems,
weekly exercises, in-class discussions, and peer reviews. Students will produce a polished portfolio of
approximately ten poems by the semester’s end, and a public reading of student work will provide a capstone
experience to the workshop.
English 408: Print Media: Genre and Culture
Julie Christoph
This course explores the generic traits of journalistic writing, examining how events in the lives of individuals
and our culture are represented in different kinds of publications, as well as how social forces and journalistic
writing mutually shape each other. Assigned material will include short readings from genre theory, current
periodicals, and case studies of ethics and representation in the media, as well as Susan Orlean’s The Orchid
Thief and its earlier and later incarnations in magazine and film. The major assignment for the course is a 12to 15-page essay growing out of class readings and library and original research into a particular journalistic
issue or into a case study of a particular news story as it developed over time. Although this course is not
designed to be a how-to course on journalistic writing, students will do short assignments in several
journalistic genres to develop experiential knowledge of these genres.
English 447: Power and Pallor: Constructions of “Whiteness” in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.
Tiffany MacBain
In his historical study of Anglo-Saxonism entitled Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman writes that in
the early nineteenth century, “even outside the South,” it was “rare for anyone to think of the possibility of
Americans ultimately becoming a blend of white and nonwhite races” (256). Although racial admixture was
everywhere evident in the U.S., racial union was all but inconceivable. In the latter half of the century, if
Americans could imagine such a future, they were divided on what it prognosed. Naturally, the literature of
these one hundred years both reflects and contributed to the concern, curiosity, and anxiety over the racial
future of a nation that defined itself as “white” and observed the increasing racial and cultural complexity of its
body politic. Recent scholarship finds evidence of this national interest even in texts that seem to elide race
altogehter. Students in ENGL447 will read and apply these theories to a variety of primary sources in class and
as they perform independent research. Moreover, students will trace the emergence of “whiteness” as
symbol of what we might call “Anglo-Americanness” and signifier of the various, and conflicting, traits that
whiteness comprises in the nineteenth century (and beyond). For example, the class will interrogate
whiteness as located in the blood, the miscegenous body, agents of disease, and other literary materializations
of racial contact. We will identify how Anglos imagine and construct themselves; how they are imagined and
constructed by “others”; how, and to what effect, characters and texts move through racial and cultural
“contact zones”; and when and how amalgamation is imagined. The course will offer texts representing a
variety of genres and experiences.
English 449: Passing Fancy
Jeff Solomon
To “pass,” a member of one group must have the ability to be taken as a member of another. Passing may be
actively sought or an inadvertent misrecognition, and its effects range from the amusing to the profound.
Though passing in the United States is historically associated with race, passing may also be provoked by other
characteristics, such as gender, sexual orientation, and social class. Usually, someone who passes seeks to be
mistaken for a member of group with superior status, but “superior” status is not so easily determined;
members in both groups may wish to be taken as members of the other. We will investigate various
experiences of passing as reflected in twentieth-century literature and film, primarily from the United States.
While most of our texts directly address passing, we will also consider texts and authors who themselves try to
pass, through case studies of writers who claim a false identity to sell and promote a novel in the guise of a
“memoir.” We will also read early reviews of our texts, history that relates to them, and some critical theory.
Novels will likely include Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the
Cedars; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; James Weldon
Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; and Nella Larsen, Passing. Plays will certainly include John
Guare, Six Degrees of Separation and David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly. There also will be some film and video.
English 470: Bleak House and Middlemarch
Priti Joshi
Hailed by contemporaries and considered by critics to be the two greatest English novels of the 19th century,
Bleak House (1852-3) by Charles Dickens and Middlemarch (1871-2) by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary
Anne Evans) could not be more different and, for us, better entries into the complexity, richness, and
strangeness of Victorian Britain. Dickens penned his novel during the heyday of British prosperity and global
ascendency, but aimed to expose his culture’s failings; Eliot’s novel is set in the 1830s and imagines a largely
agricultural England on the cusp of railroads and industry. Both are magisterial novels, aiming to encompass
the “totality” of English society: one is urban (London has never looked grubbier and more lively as fog and
soot encompasses it in Bleak House), the other “provincial”; one tackles the legal system, the other medical
reform; Bleak House is one of the earliest “detective novels,” Middlemarch a “historical novel”; the central
protagonist of each novel is a woman, but no two women could be more different than the orphan Esther
Summerson and the ardent Dorothea Brooke; both novels contain a multitude of characters and perspectives
and the sweep of each is vast; Bleak House was credited with initiating judicial reform in Britain, while
Middlemarch, in the words of Virginia Woolf, is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
Despite their importance and range, these novels seldom get assigned in the undergraduate classroom
because ... each is 800 pages long. This course aims to correct the woeful neglect by closely focusing on these
two brilliant novels. We will take the time to read each carefully, our schedule emulating to some extent their
publication time-table (both novels were published serially, Bleak House in twenty monthly-installments,
Middlemarch in eight installments that appeared in two month intervals). We will immerse ourselves in the
historical context and along the way learn about: suffrage and municipal reform, doctors and scholars, women,
men and the choices available to them; inheritance and debt, the landed gentry and disease; the judicial
system and philanthropy, agricultural methods and canvassing strategies, the London police force and banking;
the Great Exhibition and classical art; Victorian publication, periodicals, and serialization. We will also pay
close attention to the literary strategies of each novel: both are “realist” texts, but Dickens and Eliot could not
be more different as practitioners of realism, and in these novels each pushes and prods the novel form and
realism in innovative directions. As time permits, we will look at some central works of literary criticism.
Requirements:
Weekly reflective essays (~300 words), two 7-8 page papers, a presentation, one seminar paper (~15 pages),
and engaged class participation.
Gender Studies 494: Gender Research Seminar
Alison Tracy Hale
This research seminar is designed for students completing the Gender Studies minor by writing an original
thesis. The course is open to GS minors, and provides a structured, sequenced format within which each
student will produce a thesis on a topic of his or her choice. The course is structured as a sequence of drafts,
workshopping, and revision leading to the completion and presentation of a polished, substantive piece of
independent research. Expectations include extensive pre-writing and research, the production of draft
segments, receiving and providing extensive feedback with peers, and revision.