LITERATURE ELECTIVES
BARUCH COLLEGE - ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
SPRING 2011
Survey of English
Literature I
English 3010
Prof. B. Gluck
Tue/Thu 11:10AM12:25PM
Survey of English
Literature I
English 3010
Prof. W. McClellan
Mon/Wed 6:00-7:15 PM
Survey of English
Literature II
English 3015
Prof. M. McGlynn
Mon/Wed 12:25-1:40
PM
Early English literature includes a compelling cast of
characters. Join us as we read about heroes like brave
Beowulf and villains like John Milton’s infernal Satan, those
who are less than human (the monster Grendel) and those
who want to be more than human (the brilliant but flawed Dr.
Faustus). We will also focus on romantic (and adulterous)
relationships in the legends of King Arthur, some of Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the erotic love poetry of
John Donne and William Shakespeare. A highlight of the
course will be a close study of one of Shakespeare’s plays.
We will read and discuss literary works from the early part of
the English tradition, including, some Old English poems, a
romance, selections from the tales of Geoffrey Chaucer and
Thomas Malory, some saint’s legends, and a play of
Shakespeare’s. A major focus of our reading will be to
examine how these works represent and construct the human
subject with special attention to the issue of sexual difference.
We will analyze how sex-gender roles facilitate or limit the
choices open to the individuals in the works we read, and how
desire conforms to or disrupts this fundamental cultural
determination.
In making a survey of the last 250 years of British literature,
this class will pay particular attention to the representations
of work and leisure, of how wealth and deprivation are
depicted. We will read texts that inspired and responded to
changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution,
beginning with Burns, Sheridan, and Sterne, moving into the
Romantic poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats, and then
reading examples of the nineteenth century novel (Austen,
Gaskell). Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde will usher us into
the twentieth century and Modernism, from which we will
read selections by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot before turning
to more recent works by Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, and
Seamus Heaney. Throughout the term, we will explore
constructions of urban and rural, of rich and poor, of artist
and worker, with special focus on monsters, machines,
precarious labor, domestic workers, and snobbery.
Survey of American
Literature I
English 3020
Prof. D. Mengay
Tue/Thu 6:00-7:15 PM
This course will focus on three narratives that surface in
early-American writing through the middle of the nineteenth
century. The first has to do with land, who owns it and by
what authority a person feels entitled to claim it. The issue
becomes a contested one as Euro-Americans insist
increasingly the land belongs to them. The second is the rise
of secular discourse and the discussion of basic human
rights. We will follow the shift from Puritan views to those of
John Locke and other English philosophers, whose ideas
influenced American writers in the mid- and late-eighteenth
century. Related to this theme is the third narrative, race,
which becomes a dominant subtext in American literature
prior to the Civil War. Works will include: Bradford’s Pilgrim
Plantation; Rowlandson’s Narrative of a Captivity; Franklin’s
Autobiography; Irving’s “Rip van Winkle”; Cooper’s Last of the
Mohicans; Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter; Melville’s Moby Dick;
Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass.
Survey of American
Literature II
English 3025
Prof. S. Eversley
Tue/Thu 9:05-10:20
AM
Literature for Young
Adults
English 3045
Prof. E. Dimartino
Tue/Thu 9:30-10:45
AM
Young adult literature includes books selected by readers
between the ages of 12 and 18 for intellectual stimulation,
pleasure, companionship and self-discovery. In this exciting
course we will be reading literature that addresses the
complexities and conflicts confronting adolescents during
their journey to adulthood. Students will read fiction and
nonfiction selections that deal with such themes as adapting
to physical changes, independence from parents and other
adults, acquiring a personal identity and achieving social
responsibility. There will be ample opportunity to analyze and
evaluate literary selections pertinent to the lives of young
adults.
The Art of Film
English 3260
Prof. W. Boddy
Thu 2:30-5:00 PM
Film and Literature:
Hard-Boiled Fiction
and Film Noir
English 3270
Prof. C. Taylor
Mon/Wed 3;45-5:00 PM
In the early 1930's, a darker, leaner prose emerged on the
American landscape. It evoked an underbelly of corruption
and greed. Its heroes hardly seemed heroic at all. In this
course, we will examine the writing and the films of the
1930's through the 1950's that created a new American idiom
and a uniquely American art form. We will be reading and
discussing authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, Jim Thompson and John Franklin Bardin. We will
also view a number of film noir classics and explore their
roots in German Expressionism as well as their lasting impact
on more recent films.
Documentary Film
English 3280
Prof. C. Rollyson
Tue/Thu 6:00-7:15 PM
What is the truth-value of documentaries? This is the basic
question explored in this course through examining the
genre’s historical development and the social and political
activism of filmmakers. The filmmakers covered in this
course include the Lumiere Brothers, Robert Flaherty, Dziga
Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, Frank Capra, Humphrey Jennings,
Jill Craigie, Michael Moore, and other contemporary directors
of documentaries.
The Craft of Poetry:
Form and Revision
English 3645
Prof. G. Schulman
Tue/Thu 6:00-7:15 PM
Although this is the second of two poetry courses offered here,
you may enroll in it without having had the other. Here you
will be learning about form in poetry – from the line to the
stanza, and beyond. You will be writing in freer forms and in
set forms such as sonnets, villanelles, and haiku. You will be
learning how major poets, from William Shakespeare to
Elizabeth Bishop, and from Robert Frost to Gwendolyn
Brooks, write in such a way as to convey their thoughts and
loves and passions. If you love good books, if you enjoy
reading Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dickinson, if you have
ever been moved or disturbed or frightened by the sounds of
the language, if you have wanted to write but can’t get
started, this course is all yours.
You will be practicing revision, which is at the heart of writing
poetry. You will be sharing your poems with the class in a
workshop, and soon you will be sharing your feelings in ways
you never thought possible. You will be learning to use
language in ways that will convey your wishes, fears, and
dreams.
Your instructor, Grace Schulman, Distinguished Professor at
Baruch, is Poetry Editor of The Nation. Her latest book of
poems is Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Houghton
Mifflin, 2002).
If you have passed English 2150 or 2800/2850, you are
eligible to enroll in this course. Poetry 3640 is not required.
Departmental permission is not required.
Advanced Essay Writing:
Style and Styles in Prose
English 3680
Prof. S. O’Toole
Mon/Wed 7:35-8:50 PM
This course focuses on developing style in non-fiction essay
writing. We will read one another’s work, as well as the work
of major essayists, and discuss how writers use figurative
language, humor, repetition, and other stylistic devices to
make their work come alive and have the desired effect on
readers. Students will then have the chance to experiment
with stylistic options as they develop their own distinctive
writer’s voice and learn to craft more nuanced and powerful
prose. With an emphasis on building a writing practice,
students will compose short pieces that they revise often and
develop into longer, more complete essays in consultation
with a writing group and the professor. Classes will proceed
by lecture on issues of style, including sentence construction,
voice and tone, metaphor, humor, irony, vividness, and
rhythm; discussion of passages by major essayists such as
Thoreau, Emerson, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Baldwin, Didion, and
Dillard; and regular workshopping of student writing.
Linguistic and
Language: The Study
of Language
English 3700
Prof. E. Block
Tue/Thu 6:00-7:15 PM
“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t
a fish.”
 Marshall McLuhan
We are not fish but most often we fail to appreciate the
amazingly complex world of language that surrounds us. We
take for granted the intricate system that governs language
and the amazing task most humans accomplish in learning a
language. In this course, you will be introduced to the core
tools used in language description and analysis (the study of
sounds, words, sentences, and meaning) and the related
areas of language change, language acquisition, discourse
analysis, language varieties, bilingualism, language in society,
language and the brain, and the language of gestures and
signs.
This course is both theoretical and practical in scope.
Students interested in anthropology, sociology, psychology,
history, foreign languages, advertising and marketing, history,
philosophy, computer science, education, and English will
have much to learn from and much to contribute to this
course. The course will include regular assignments in
linguistic analysis, a midterm, a final, and a short
presentation or paper.
Literature and
Psychology
English 3730
Prof. E. Kauvar
Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00
PM
Have you ever wondered what makes someone so enraged
that someone else ends up dead? Do you speculate about the
reasons why two people are attracted to each other? Do you
question why families end up the way they do? When you
read a story, have you ever tried to figure out why you dislike
it? Whether we read to escape, to discover, or even to fulfill
requirements, we have a purpose, a motive, and more than
likely some expectations. Both psychology and literature are
windows into human behavior. English 3730 examines the
similarities and differences between literary and psychological
treatments of various major human motivations and
conditions. Which method--psychology or literature--is the
most accurate way to explain human behavior? A major
objective of this course is to analyze and interpret literature in
the light of psychological theories of personality and human
development. Our goals will to be to gain a deeper
understanding of psychological theories of personality and
development and to discover how these theories provide the
reader insight into literary works. Our reading will range from
Freud’s case histories and other more contemporary
psychologic theorists to contemporary writers like the
Japanese writer Murakami.
The Structure and
History of English
English 3750
Prof. Dalgish
Mon/Wed 12:25-1:40
PM
What is misleading about advertising like "Campbell soup has
one-third less salt"? How about "This car is engineered like no
other car in the world"? What are characteristics of female
speech that distinguish it from those typical of men's speech?
How do we form new words in English, and where do they
come from? How does a word get in the dictionary?
Are the "p" sounds in the words "pot," "spot" and "sop" really
the same? Why can we say "whiten," "blacken," "redden," but
not "*bluen?" Why does "New Yorker" (= a person from New
York) sound correct, while "*Denverer" (= a person from
Denver) does not? How many verb tenses are there in English:
3, 12, more, fewer?
Which should we say: "between you and I" or "between you
and me"? How about: "She dated the man whom you ditched,"
or "She dated the man who you ditched"? Is there a rule in
English not to end a sentence with a preposition? Or is that a
rule up with which we should not put? English spelling seems
different from Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Swahili, etc.
For instance, in those languages, "a" is almost always
pronounced the same way. Yet in English "a" is pronounced
differently in each of these words: lame, pad, father, tall,
many, above. Why are those languages so regular and
English irregular?
English once borrowed thousands of words from French. Did
English therefore become a Romance language? There are
many different dialects in English, some describable in terms
of geography, some in terms of social class, some in terms of
gender. Which dialects are "better"? Why do we say "That
shelf is five feet tall," and not "*That shelf is five feet short"?
Which linguistic features help to make poetry effective? What
does it mean when a person says "I know English"?
This course introduces students to these and other questions
about English, its structure and its history. We examine
sounds, word structures, new coinages, slang, sentences and
meaning patterns, how Old and Middle English evolved into
Modern English, and how varieties of English (from regional
and social dialects to the emergence of World Englishes)
developed. Hands-on computer software illustrates many of
these concepts. There will also be reference to applications of
these analyses and insights to the learning and teaching of
English for speakers of other languages. Students will learn
about unconscious rules, patterns, presuppositions and
assumptions that permeate conversations, advertising, and
writing. The course is aimed at helping students understand
how spoken and written standard English functions, and how
it evolved.
Contemporary Drama:
The New Theatre
English 3780
Prof. H. Brent
Mon/Wed 9:05-10:20
AM
This course traces contemporary drama’s remarkable history
of experiments with new and powerful techniques of
dramatizing and analyzing human behavior. The emphasis is
on groundbreaking works from provocative contemporary
playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Edward
Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Tom Stoppard, Joe
Orton, and Sam Shepard.
Topics in Literature:
The Rhetoric of
Terror: America since
9/11
English 3950
Prof. C. Mead
Tue/Thu 11:10AM12:25 PM
This course will employ a combination of literature, nonfiction, and
film to examine the language of the “war on terror,” and the way that
rhetoric has been used to justify the global counter-terrorism
offensive as a response to 9/11. We will discuss, in particular, how
language has been used to manipulate public anxiety about terrorist
threats to gain support for military action. Along the way we will
visit such issues as: the rise of Al Qaeda; violence as a means of
political change; and American foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and beyond. The goal is to develop a shared understanding of our
nearly decade-long war against terrorism and its impact on American
society.
Among the authors we will read are Lawrence Wright, George
Orwell, Jane Mayer, Dexter Filkins, Joseph Conrad, Susan Sontag,
Marc Sageman, and Gilles Kepel.
Topics in Literature:
Language in Action
English 3950
Prof. G. Dalgish
Mon/Wed 2:05-3:20PM
This course will examine language used in propaganda
and politics, language in advertising, language in
social/cultural interactions, language in gender studies, and
computational applications in language study. Through
readings and the use of software, students will explore these
areas, comment on contrasting viewpoints about them, and
conduct their own research.
The course will include some basic concepts in
Linguistics: sounds and sound symbolism, how words are
formed, how sentences are structured, and a look at
semantics and meaning. Students will apply this knowledge
to a study of language in propaganda, specifically in Orwell’s
1984. They will examine how Orwell’s “Newspeak” is
structured, create their own “Newspeak,” and explore
whether we have currently begun to approach a 1984
scenario in sloganeering, texting, computer-speak, and the
like. Students will then examine current political propaganda
to examine how sound bites, slogans, and other political
messages are created, how they are constructed (sound
symbolism, new word formations, “shorthand” descriptions,
hidden presuppositions) and what makes them effective
and/or misleading. This turns naturally to the next topic,
language in advertising, where students will read and critique
articles discussing the issues of effectiveness and truth in
advertising, and will analyze written and visual advertising to
determine how sound symbolism, word formation, sentence
structure, and semantics would be utilized in the creation of
commercials or print ads. A debate on whether advertising is
by its nature deceptive and misleading is a possible class
activity for oral presentations. Students will then examine the
role of culture and society in certain social interactions.
Starting with conversational analysis, students will explore
how different cultures determine how conversations should
proceed, whether and how interruptions are tolerated, how
gender roles interact with the patterns of conversation, and
how unconscious “rules of conversation” (Is truth-telling
expected? How much of an answer is enough? How does irony
function?) are embedded in even apparently simple
conversations. Students will examine readings about
conversational structures in English and in other cultures,
and will be asked to perform their own analysis of
conversations in their own first language (if other than
English) or in some other suitable context, and to compare
their responses to the primary readings. Students will explore
and utilize software to help them become aware of the
structures of sounds, word formation, sentence structure,
and semantics, and will learn how to use computers as an
aid in textual analysis.
Topics in Literature:
The Harlem
Renaissance
English 3950
Prof. T. Allan
Mon/Wed 6:00-7:15 PM
The Harlem Renaissance has been described as “the first
black American literary movement” and for good reason. The
writers broke new ground in style and subject matter;
expanded and revitalized earlier themes on sexuality, race,
and gender; and embraced the freedoms of the modern world.
The literary works produced in this era range from novels,
plays, poetry, short stories, and essays to anthologies,
biographies, folklore, journalism, and cultural criticism.
With the emphasis on the novelists of the Harlem
Renaissance in this course, we will highlight a topic of great
significance to understanding the historical, social, and
intellectual contexts that prompted the growth in black
writing during the period. We will pay special attention to the
‘modernist’ elements of the novels – the way these writers
captured the changing face and consciousness of the modern
black character Alain Locke called “the new negro,” how they
invoked and challenged received traditions, the various
collaborations across race and culture, the local and
international perspectives of the texts. We will read, discuss,
and write about the following works: Cane (Jean Toomer),
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson),
Passing (Nella Larsen), Not Without Laughter (Langston
Hughes), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston),
and Home to Harlem (Claude McKay).
Films and guest speakers will add to the excitement of this
class.
Topics in Literature:
Media, Spectacle,
Literature
English 3950
Prof. S. Cucu
Tue/Thu 7:35-8:50 PM
Since the publication in the 1960s of Marshal McLuhan’s
groundbreaking work, media technologies have been
considered as the “extension of man.” This conception still
holds true today, if we consider human interaction from the
perspective of Internet-based communication and social
networking. The goal of this class is to explore the forgotten
story of the technologies that organize our social and
economic lives. We will read literary texts that look at the
birth of modern media and its later development in the
Internet age. As we remember the days when the telegraph
and the gramophone were seen as spectacular inventions, we
will also learn about the history of writing and publishing,
and about American writers’ fascination with cinema and
Television.
Some of the questions that will emerge in class conversations
will constitute the foundation for the students’ final projects:
Is the wireless reading device the new super-book? What is
the future of literary writing? What is relation of literary text
to image and sound? Is the TV series modeled on the design
plot of the classic novel?
In the first half of the class we will discuss why literary texts
about media devices have a predilection for envisioning a
bizarre, uncanny, or absurd spectacle. Texts will include:
Bram Stoker, Dracula; Henry James, “In the Cage”; Herman
Melville, “Bartleby”; Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony.” In the
second half of the class, we will read experimental texts and
graphic novels, which explore the Hypertext and multi-media
art.
Topics in Literature:
Desire & Identity in
Contemporary
American Poetry
English 3950
Prof. E. Shipley
Mon/Wed 7:35-8:50 PM
Desire has always preoccupied poets. While poems about
desire traditionally address a god, lover, or love itself,
ultimately it is the poet him/herself who’s revealed. In this
course, we will actively read desire as a move toward a sense
of self, or, at least, self-understanding. What does this mean
for contemporary American poets, who represent such a
diverse landscape of sexual, racial, class-based and familial
experiences? What tensions can we draw out of poems if our
sensitivities are attuned to issues of alienation and
difference? How might our identities and political affinities
affect our capacity for experience, empathy, and
understanding? How do poems themselves incite desire?
Some texts for this course will include: Juliana Spahr’s Fuck
You-Aloha-I Love You, Jillian Weis’ The Amputee’s Guide to
Sex, D.A. Powell’s Tea and Cocktails, Brenda Shaughnessy’s
Interior with Sudden Joy, Carl Phillips’ Riding Westward, Anne
Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Gloria Andalzua’s
Borderlands/La Frontera, Li-Young Lee’s The City in Which I
Love You, Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object and
Richard Siken’s Crush, among others.
Assignments for this course may include creative and critical
writing responses, several short papers, a presentation and a
poetry project.
Topics in Literature:
The Body in
Renaissance
Literature: Sex,
Violence and
Subjectivity
English 3950
Prof. A. Deutermann
Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45 PM
This course examines how the body is imagined in sixteenthand seventeenth-century theater. In plays by Shakespeare,
Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and others, bodies
perform sexual acts; undergo torture, rape, and other forms of
violence; experience selfhood; and suffer through the
humiliations of old age. Reading these plays alongside current
work by philosophers, legal experts, and anthropologists, we’ll
ask how literature shapes the ways in which we think about
our physical selves and the society in which we live. For
instance, what does King Lear tell us about the bodily theme
of aging, both in Shakespeare’s time and our own? Key topics
to be investigated include the creation of sexual and gendered
identities, the production of embodied political subjects, and
the cultivation of urbanity. Works we will read include
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine I, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and
John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, as well as excerpts from
Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex and Pierre Bourdieu’s
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Approaches to Modern
Criticism
English 4020
Prof. Nematollahy
Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM
This course is a historical survey of literary theory from its
beginnings in Antiquity to the present. We will begin with
selections from Plato and Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric. We
will then move to the medieval and Renaissance critics, and
explore the emergence of classicism in France in the
seventeenth century. We will continue with Classicism and
the pre-Romantics in the eighteenth century, Longinus’
treatise on the sublime, Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, and
Lessing’s Laocoön. We will examine the theories of the English
and German Romantics, and the late Romantic ideas of the
French poets Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier that prefigure
the symbolist aesthetic of the fin de siècle, as well as Poe’s
theory of poetry. We will also study the social and materialist
theories of Marx and Marxists and other socialist groups of
the nineteenth century, and follow through their heirs in the
twentieth century, namely Lukacs and the critics of the
Frankfurt school. We will continue with the Russian
Formalist school, early structuralism and conclude with the
post-structuralists, namely Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the
Author,” Michel Foucault’s “What is an author,” and Paul de
Man’s Resistance to Theory.
Feit Interdisciplinary
Humanities Seminar
“When I Ruled the
World” or Viva la
Empire:
English 4050H
Prof. K. Frank
Tue/Thu 4:10-5:25 PM
Senator J. William Fulbright once warned, “The price of
empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.” Is the
price of empire too high, and for whom? Are the current U.S.
crises (economic, cultural, and so on) parts of that price?
Drawing on a variety of sources, including texts from popular
culture (Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida,” for instance) and narratives
of quest (for example, the story of Perseus, the
Gorgon/Medusa slayer), among others, this course examines
the price paid in the rise and fall of empires from ancient to
modern times.
Chaucer
ON THE ROAD WITH THE
CHIVALROUS, THE PIOUS
AND THE ‘NOT-SO-PIOUS’
English 4120
Prof. C. Christoforatou
Mon/Wed 2:05-3:20 PM
Knights, merchants, rogues,
and self-proclaimed saints share
fascinating stories of their travels
and misfortunes in Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Written at the end of the 14th
century, Chaucer’s masterpiece
contains a series of stories, ranging
from the serious and pious to the
unabashedly earthy and
outrageously funny. The tales are
told by a cast of memorable
pilgrims that includes among
others a dashing knight, a drunken
miller, a bookish young scholar, a
conniving pardoner, and the
infamous Wife of Bath.
In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval
society, we will discover how the poet illuminates and distorts
social realities, rendering a colorful portrait of life that is
strangely familiar to modern readers six hundred years later.
Our study of the pilgrims’ quests in their various
manifestations—amorous, heroic, religious, and political—will
allow us to understand medieval individual’s relationship to
God, society, and the foreign. As a class, we will have an
opportunity to appreciate the cultural influences that allowed
medieval civilizations to evolve through the study of various
artifacts—illuminated manuscripts, relics, tapestries,
mosaics, and ivories—in a visit to The Cloisters or the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Shakespeare Love and
Power
English 4140
Prof. T. Hayes
Mon/Wed 6:00-7:15 PM
We will explore manifestations of evil in Richard III, The
Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and
The Tempest and try to answer such question as: What is the
nature of evil in Shakespeare’s plays still fascinate us? Why
do some of Shakespeares’s characters deliberately choose to
do evil? Does evil serve a useful purpose in Shakespeare’s
plays? If so, what is that purpose?
Romantic Revolt
English 4300
Prof. C. Jordan
Mon/Wed 3:45-5:00 PM
This course will examine the nuances of Romanticism. In
addition to exploring the Romantic obsession with ecstasy
and the voluptuous surrender to beauty and imagination so
evident in the Romantic writers, we will examine the darker,
more sinister side of Romantic literature. The Satanic Hero
and the Fatal Woman motifs will be looked at from different
perspectives (including the feminist perspective), and works
dealing with sexual and psychological vampirism will be
explored. The semester’s readings will cover a variety of
literary forms by Romantic writers, as well as by Victorian
writers imbued with the Romantic spirit. Readings will
include Emily Bronte’s novel of ferocious, obsessive love—
Wuthering Heights, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles about the brutal rape of an innocent girl which
ends with the murder of the rapist. The novel’s spectacular
ending takes place amidst the pagan monuments of
Stonehenge! We will luxuriate in the exquisite poetry of John
Keats where bewitching enchantresses, sensuous flowers and
magical bedchambers lure the reader into a world of
tantalizing beauty, and be drawn into the exotic, forbidden
landscapes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron.
These are just a few of the exciting writers we will be
discussing next semester
Contemporary
America: Protest in
American Culture and
History
English 4500
Prof. M. Staub
Mon/Wed 2:05-3:20 PM
What is the place of protest in American culture? When
and how have Americans chosen to resist authority? This
course will examine the theme of protest in U.S. history
from the revolutionary era to the present, with a strong
emphasis on the last fifty years. We will explore protest
across the political spectrum and analyze topics such as:
radical thought in revolutionary America; abolitionist and
anti-lynching campaigns; the Ku Klux Klan and antiimmigrant sentiments; African American militancy and
Black Power; free speech and anti-war protests; feminism
and gay liberation; environmental activism; prisoner rights
advocacy; and the Tea Party movement. Since this is an
interdisciplinary course, we will work to integrate an
examination of historical and cultural sources, including
manifestos, fiction, drama, journalism, and film. Works to
be considered include: Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen, The
Exonerated; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique; D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation;
Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July; Stanley Kubrick, Dr.
Strangelove; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; Malcolm X,
“The Ballot or the Bullet”; Thomas Paine, Common Sense;
and Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. Note: This
course is also cross-listed with HIS 4900 and AMS 4900.