COURSE DESCRIPTIONS—FALL 2007
301 / General Description
CRITICAL METHODS IN THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. For English majors and minors, this course is the required pre- or co-requisite for all upper level English courses. What is literature? Why study it? Who decides what great literature is and what is not? In this course you will ask these questions and others central to the study of literature, and you will be introduced to some ways of thinking about and discussing them. You will find out what “practical criticism” or “close reading” is. You may learn about psychological approaches to literature and ask questions about how feminism has changed our view of literature. You may explore the importance of historical or cultural context to our understanding of a text. You may discuss who determines the text–the reader or the writer? Different sections of the course will read different texts, but all sections will raise questions about how we interpret poetry, fictions and drama. In addition, all sections will help you extend your reading and writing skills, will require you to use the terms of literary analysis with precision (“caesura”–what's that?) and will introduce you to what lies ahead for you as an English major. 3-5 short papers will be required; there may also be exams.
304 / Donawerth, Jane
THE MAJOR WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. Together we will read 11 of Shakespeare's 37 plays, with special emphasis on the late tragedies. Plays will include the lesser known and gory Titus Andronicus and the romantic Antony and Cleopatra, as well as the better known Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. We will study Shakespeare's language with close reading of his sonnets and passages in plays, explore the historical contexts of theatrical conditions, women's roles, religion, politics, racial stereotypes, and emerging capitalism and imperialism. Class will be mainly discussion, with frequent handouts, mini-lectures, and student panels. Students will give biographical reports or participate in performance groups or discussion panels on the readings. We will go to a Shakespeare play together. Requirements include 1) a 5-7 pp. essay explicating a passage or short scene using the online OED and other references (with an optional revision); 2) midterm examination; 3) a 5-7 pp. essay reading a play through the lens of a theoretical concept or historical context; 4) class participation, including regular attendance and an oral report or performance or panel; and 5) final examination. (Each requirement is worth 20 % of the final grade.)
310 / Cartwright , Kent
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE BRITISH LITERATURE. This course will examine masterworks of Medieval and Renaissance British literature, including, from the middle ages, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (The General Prologue and selected tales), selections from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and some medieval plays (such as The Second Shepard's Play, Everyman, and Mankind); and, from the Renaissance, poems by Wyatt and Surrey, Sidney's Defense of Poetry, Book 2 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. We will study the readings in historical sequence, with reference to British and European history, particularly the emergence of humanism and the Protestant Reformation; we will also pay attention to issues of genre and of cultural and human representation. Written work will include probable quizzes on all reading assignments, two essays (about 10 pp. in total), mid-term and final examinations, and perhaps some in-class exercises. Class will be conducted by discussion.
311 / General Description
BRITISH LITERATURE FROM 1600-1800. This course offers a wide ranging survey of English literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the course of the semester, we will examine the contexts, ideas and genres of a variety of literary material, from metaphysical poetry to satiric prose. Authors covered in this course may include Donne, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Defoe, Behn, Swift, Pope and Austen.
312 / General Description
ROMANTIC TO MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE. Students will read works of Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Arnold, Eliot, Woolf, and Beckett. Particular attention will be given to analysis of narrative modes in novels and poetry.
313 / Auerbach, Jonathan
AMERICAN LITERATURE. Works by Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Twain, Norris, Cain, Pynchon and Auster, among others, will be discussed. Two papers and two exams.
346 / Richardson, Brian
TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION. Major fiction from modernist, postmodern, and magical realist authors. This will include Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Juan Rulfo, Yasunari Kawabata, Samuel Beckett, Chinua Achebe, Italo Calvino, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nadine Gordimer, and others.
348F / Ryan , Leigh
WOMEN ON THE FRONTIER. With its expanses of prairies and rugged mountains, broad sky and dusty trails, the American West long embodied the hopes and dreams of many different people. Through fiction and nonfiction, we will focus specifically on women's participation in the frontier experience, and on the insights that their stories and history offer into our national past. We will look at what pioneer women imagined as they anticipated their journeys and what they experienced as they traveled and settled in the West, and we will examine the roles that Native American women played in the land that was originally theirs. Assignments will include two shorter research papers and one long research paper.
359A / Rudy, Jaso n
LOVE, SEX, AND POETRY IN THE LONG 19 TH CENTURY. This course will examine cultural and aesthetic issues circling around love and sexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, using poetry as the primary object of investigation. Through the works of John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, the lesbian couple “Michael Field,” and others, we will consider notions of effeminacy, “Sapphism,” homosexual love, modern heterosexuality, sadomasochism, and the new nineteenth-century sexual “sciences.” Course requirements will include the careful reading of long poems, active participation, two 5-6 page papers, and a final exam.
362 / Collins, Merle
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH. Political and literary traditions that intersect in the fiction, poetry, and drama written in English by Caribbean writers, primarily during the 20th century.
3 68 B / Pearson, Barry
BLUES AND AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKSONG. This course explores the rich variety of African American song–blues, ballads, spirituals, gospel, reels, worksong, zydeco, rhythm and blues, soul–in the context of the community events that supported these styles. We will focus on song as community expression, entertainment, ritual and social commentary in relation to African American folklore, American music history and the record industry. Midterm and final research paper.
368C / Lewis, William
Language of the Lower Frequencies: Intention & Impact in African-American Narrative . This course will examine the evolutions and revolutions that shape American-American literary texts. We will explore the cultural, social and historical contexts that slot particular works into the mainstreams or margins of popular and alternative cultures. Our discussions will examine writers’ intentions behind the creation of the work, the cultures represented in or by the work, the audience at which the work is targeted, and the impact that work has on targeted audiences and beyond. We will also examine how modes of African-American narrative in other texts (oral, aural, visual, movement-based) complicate what we think of when we try to label and categorize particular experiences as depicted in African-American literary narrative. Our explorations will involve many perplexing issues that don’t have clear-cut answers, including: the contexts that connect cultural traits or stereotypes to cultural oppression; cultural and racial identity (what is Blackness, Whiteness, Otherness?); the validity of vernacular culture in literary culture (example: is hip-hop poetry, something else, both?); gender identity and empowerment in African-American narratives. We will read texts crafted by classic and contemporary American authors, such as Jupiter Hammon, David Walker, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Phyllis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, James Alan McPherson, Iceberg Slim, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Cade Bambara, Touré, Richard Pryor, Public Enemy, Nikkey Finney, Kevin Young, Talib Kweli, Henry Louis Gates, Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and, strangely enough, writers like Joel Chandler Harris, Philip Roth, and Marshall Mathers. Graded assignments include discussion and participation, small group activities, brief reading responses, vernacular exploration/appreciation project, final paper, and final exam.
373 / Weiner, Joshua
SENIOR HONORS PROJECT. This course is a workshop for seniors writing honors projects. It is devoted primarily to the discussion of work-in-progress; it provides structure and support for the production of honors projects. By the end of the semester, each student will have in hand about 20 pages toward a final 30–40-page work, and extensive feedback on several drafts from the faculty advisor, the director of honors, and other honors students.
379A / Jelen, Shiela
AMERICAN JEWISH LITERATURE. In this class we will try to understand if there is any such thing as an "Jewish American Literature." Does Jewish literature need to be written in a Jewish language such as Hebrew, Yiddish or Ladino, or is it a literature written in any language by Jews? Perhaps Jewish literature is defined by its "Jewish" subject matter while the language in which it is written and the religious orientation of its author is irrelevant. We will explore the advantages and disadvantages of classifying any literature along ethnic, linguistic or religious lines within a national paradigm through the spectrum of a tentatively constructed canon of "Jewish American Literature" written during the 20th century.
379B / Macri, Linda
RHETORIC OF FICTION. When you read a novel, do you think of yourself as being persuaded by the author, the characters, or the story? Is there an argument in fiction we read just to escape? How are we moved—to think, feel, or act—by the stories we encounter? In this class, we will consider what it means to study the rhetoric of fiction. Rhetoric, after all, is in many senses the original form of literary criticism. We’ll read portions of some of that early theory, in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, then consider what happened to rhetorical criticism when literary works began being viewed as reflections of an author’s thoughts and feelings, and read excerpts from twentieth century theorists such as Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth. And we’ll consider how narrative, genre, and style may be approached rhetorically by reading a variety of literary texts, including short stories, novels, and graphic novels. Midterm and final examinations, two short papers and one long paper.
379G / Miller, Joseph
THE FILMS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK. This course explores themes and style in the films of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). We consider the traditional narrative structure of melodrama or "romance," the struggle of an individual against an enemy outside him/herself, and the modern idea of a crisis in existence--the loss of physical or psychological security that forces a re-evaluation of one's life and its assumptions. Hitchcock's world-model sets up a situation of initial complacency, a subsequent crisis provoking a "night journey," and a resolution that tempers the original equilibrium. Some titles: Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Marnie, The Birds, Notorious, North by Northwest.
379I / Feitell, Merrill
THE SHORT STORY COLLECTION. By providing multiple perspectives on a single theme, the short story collection has the capacity to illuminate not just the conflicts of a given individual but also the collective concerns of a greater community. Whether united by factors such as city (as in James Joyce’s Dubliners), catastrophe (as in Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake), ethnicity (as Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies) or grotesque consumer culture (as in George Saunders’ Pastoralia), the single-author collections we study will be discussed for their insights into the individual, the group, society, and, finally, the biases the author brings to the text.
379J / Williams, Laura
IDENTITY POLITICS IN CONTEMPORY AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE (1980-2000). This course examines coming-of-age narratives in order to explore contemporary constructions of racial, national, and hybrid identities. The theme of this course will explore notions of authentic blackness and the association of black art with social protest. The response to current prominent figures in the U.S., like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and others, will figure into our discussions. Some questions for consideration: What constitutes “blackness” in the U.S.? Is African-American identity distinct from American identity? Primary texts include Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips, Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Percival Everett’s Erasure and Dana Johnson’s break any woman down. Supplementary required readings and materials include film and music. Requirements: 2 Papers (4-5 pp.), Lead Class Discussion, Midterm Exam and Final Exam.
379K / Kauffman, Linda
HIGHER LEARNING IN AN AGE OF TERROR. This course focuses on world historical events leading up to 9/11 -- as well the post-9/11 climate -- as represented in fiction and non-fiction (predominantly British and American). It also has a film component. Requirements: 2 papers; oral midterm and final exam; class presentations, collaborative exercises. Texts selected from the following: Don DeLillo, Falling Man; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Joan Didion, Fixed Ideas since 9/11; Pat Barker, Double Vision. I urge you to read these over the break. Consult my faculty Web site for additions to the definitive syllabus & updates. Note: this is a rigorous course for dedicated students only. You will be at an extreme disadvantage if you miss any class, beginning with the first day. Late enrollees invariably drop because they never catch up.
379M/ Olmert, Michael
BRITISH PLAYS IN PERFORMANCE. The main thrust of this course will be to learn five plays that will be presented as “rehearsed table-reads" to the whole university. Everyone who signs-up for the course must be prepared to stand up on his or her hind legs and act on stage in Susquehanna. NOTE: The course meets on Mondays for 3 hours, BUT PERFORMANCES WILL BE ON WEDNESDAYS, FIVE DAYS DURING THE SEMESTER. So that time slot on your class schedule must be open. ALSO, STUDENTS WHO ARE CAST IN THAT WEEK'S PLAY MUST BE AVAILABLE ON MONDAY & TUESDAY NIGHTS FOR REHEARSALS FROM ABOUT 6 TO 9. Do not attempt this course if you don't want to perform. Course writing: a research paper (covering a single playwright) and several short reports. Total pages of writing for the course: 25. There will also be two quizzes.
379P / Peterson, Carla
TEXTS OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC, 1770-1900. This course will explore the concept of the Black Atlantic – the world formed as a result of the Atlantic slave trade – through reading of fictional and non-fictional texts written by black authors between 1770 and 1900. We will begin by looking at the narrative of Afro-British writer Olaudah Equiano, which details his kidnapping from Africa, enslavement, and experiences in the black Atlantic world. Then we will cross the Atlantic to examine texts by black American authords in which they address issues of black identity both as Americans and as members of the black Atlantic (poetry by Phillis Wheatley; autobiographical narratives by Mary Prince and Mary Seacole; novels by Martine Delany and Pauline Hopkins). REQUIREMENTS: midterm exam; paper (8-10 pp.); final exam.