ENGLISH DEPARTMENT COURSE OFFERINGS
FALL 2012
For more information, please visit the Department website:
http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/english
Gateway Course
1a
Introduction to Literary Studies
Laura Quinney
MWR 10-10:50
This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of
Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation
of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres.
Courses Pre-1800
ENG 33a
Shakespeare
William Flesch
MWR 12-12:50
A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods
of Shakespeare's dramatic career.
ENG 54a
Writing Women: Gender & Controversy
in the Enlightenment
Tina Van Kley
MW 3:30-4:50
In this class, we will read some 17th- & 18th-century women’s writings about women, sampling a variety
of discourses, genres, styles, and arguments. We will read chronologically to get a sense of how both the
arguments and modes of writing change over time.
ENG 144b
The Body as Text
Thomas A. King
TF 11-12:20
How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines
contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance
texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
ENG 148b
Me, Myself and I:
The Theme of Self-Conflict
Laura Quinney
MWR 1-1:50
Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern.
Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan.
Courses Post-1800
ENG 6a
American Literature in the Age of Lincoln
John Burt
MWR 9-9:50
The transformation of our literary culture: the literary marketplace, domestic fiction, transcendentalism,
slavery and the problem of race. Authors will include Emerson, Fuller, Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe,
Whitman, and Melville.
ENG 18b
Writing the Holocaust
Dawn Skorczewski
MW 2-3:20
Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonials, interviews, and historical records;
explores written representations of the Holocaust. Considers the role second, third, and fourth generation
responses to the Holocaust, including the responses of students, who will write their own post-Holocaust
narratives.
ENG 28a
Nature Writing
Caren Irr
MW 2-3:20
This is an experiential learning course. Explores literary responses to the natural environment from
Thoreau to the present. Several genres of creative nonfiction will be discussed, such as memoir,
manifesto, science writing, natural history, exploration narratives, and disaster stories.
ENG 34a
A Haunted America: American Dreamers
as Wanderers, Visionaries, Isolates
Michaele Whelan
MW 5-6:20
In Langston Hughes' poem "Dream Deferred," the question is posed, "What happens to a dream
deferred?" Examines what happens to the twentieth-century dreamer lured, often obsessed, and frequently
tormented by the promise of the mythic American dream. The class will map an America haunted by
various definitions of the dream, its displacement, its erosions, and its reinventions.
ENG 42a
The War that Changed Everything :
WWI and Literature
Margaret Carkeet
TR 3:30-4:50
By examining the literature of the Edwardian, WWI and early Modernist periods, this course will
interrogate the role of the war on the literature of Britain and her colonies. We will reassess conventional
assumptions on the influence of the war on British culture, and assumptions about the definition of
Modernism itself.
ENG 87b
Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
Thomas A. King
TR 2-3:20
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama,
memoirs, and film.
ENG 88b
Contemporary British Literature
David Sherman
TF 11-12:20
British fiction, poetry, drama, and film since WWII that tackles the changing politics of empire, sexuality,
and social class, especially. A close look at the weird pleasure of British humor, includes Jean Rhys,
Philip Larkin, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Harold Pinter, and Monty Python's Flying Circus.
ENG 187a
American Fiction Since 1945
Caren Irr
MWR 11-11:50
Readings of contemporary postrealist and postmodernist fiction. Authors and themes vary but always
include major figures such as Nabokov, Pynchon, DeLillo.
_______________________________________________________________
Literary Theory
ENG 111b
Postcolonial Theory
Ulka Anjaria
TR 5-6:20
Seminar in postcolonial theory with relevant background texts, with an emphasis on the specificity of its
theoretical claims. Readings from Spivak, Said, Bhabha, Appiah, Mudimbe, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Derrida,
Césaire, and Fanon, among others.
Film/Media
ENG 147a
Film Noir
Paul Morrison
MWR 1-1:50
A study of classics of the genre (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil) as well as more recent
variations (Chinatown, Bladerunner). Readings include source fiction (Hemingway, Hammett) and essays
in criticism and theory.
Multicultural Literature / World Anglophone
ENG 57b
Writing the Nation: James Baldwin,
Philip Roth, Toni Morrison
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman
TF 12:30-1:50
An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions
of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate
cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States.
Electives
ANTH/ENG 150a
Cases and Clues: Reading Novels and
Ethnographies as Cultural Explorations
Ferry/Plotz
TF 9:30-10:50
Compares novels and anthropological ethnographies: both are attempts to narrate human cultures, but the
ways they do so are radically different. We compare the inside/outside role of the novelist and the
anthropologist, and examine the different methodologies and assumptions of anthropological and literary
studies. Authors include Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Johannes Fabian and Sidney Mintz.
Creative Writing Courses
ENG 10b
Poetry: A Basic Course
John Burt
MWR 12-12:50
Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being
elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the
earliest period to the present.
May also be taken in fulfillment of the elective requirement for the English major.
ENG 79a
Directed Writing: Beginning Screenplay
Marc Weinberg
M 6:30-9:20
This course may not be repeated by students who have taken ENG 129b in previous years. Offered
exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of
writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and
deadlines within registration periods. This is an experiential learning course.
Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read
screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original
screenplay.
ENG 79b
Writing Workshop: From Memory to Craft
Colin Channer
T 2-4:50
Prerequisite: ENG 19b is recommended. This course may not be repeated by students who have taken
ENG 129a in previous years. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected
after the submission of a sample of writing of no more than five pages. Please refer to the Schedule of
Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
This combination workshop and contemporary literature course explores the process by which written
work moves from simple accounting into art. Texts include work by writers such as Michael
Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jamaica Kincaid, Zadie Smith, and Pico Iyer.
ENG 109a
Directed Writing: Poetry
Elizabeth Bradfield
R 2-4:50
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample
of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats
and deadlines within registration periods. May be repeated for credit. This is an experiential learning
course.
A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry,
stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms.
ENG 109b
Directed Writing: Short Fiction
Colin Channer
W 5-7:50
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample
of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats
and deadlines within registration periods. May be repeated for credit. This is an experiential learning
course.
A workshop for motivated students with a serious interest in pursuing writing. Student stories will be
copied and distributed before each class meeting. Students' stories, as well as exemplary published short
stories, will provide the occasion for textual criticism in class.
ENG 119a
Directed Writing: Fiction
Stephen McCauley
T 9-11:50
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample
of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats
and deadlines within registration periods. May be repeated for credit. This is an experiential learning
course.
An advanced fiction workshop for students primarily interested in the short story. Students are expected
to compose and revise three stories, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss
readings based on examples of various techniques.
ENG 119b
Directed Writing: Poetry
Olga Broumas
W 2-4:50
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample
of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats
and deadlines within registration periods. May be repeated for credit. This is an experiential learning
course.
For those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry, through a wide
spectrum of readings. Students' poems will be discussed in a "workshop" format with emphasis on
revision. Remaining time will cover assigned readings and issues of craft.
Graduate Seminars
ENG 200a
Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
David Sherman
R 2-4:50
Required of all first-year Ph.D. graduate students. Optional for MA students. Can be repeated for credit
with permission from advisor (if applicable) and the Director of Graduate Studies.
A broad-based theory course that will include a unit on research methods.
ENG 218b
The Modern Novel: Public, Private, and Social
John Plotz
W 2-4:50
Traces the shifting relationship between ideas of intimacy, sociability, solidarity, and publicity in the
Anglo-American novel, 1850-1950. Explores how the novel reacts to crises in the relationship between
the individual and such larger groupings as society, nation, gender, race, or species. Marxist,
psychoanalytic, Frankfort School, deconstructive, and New Historicist theory are examined. Authors
include Melville, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, James, Stein, Cather, and Beckett.
ENG 267a
Imagining Freedom in the Caribbean
Faith Smith
M 2-4:50
Notions of freedom in recent fiction, popular culture, political theory; violence in slavery and today’s
“failed state”; coercion, consent, agency, eroticism, matriarchy -- in postcolonial, feminist, queer
theorizing. Comparisons with postcolonial, African-American, and other related contexts.