FALL 2016
English Department
Course # / Course Title & Cross-lists / Location / Days / Times / Instructor / LAFsEngl. 100-01 / Analytical Reading and Writing / HOL 217 / MW / 9:30-10:50 / TBA
Engl. 100-02 / Analytical Reading and Writing / LAR 231 / MW / 1:00-2:20 / TBA
Engl. 100-03 / Analytical Reading and Writing / HOL 211 / MW / 2:30-3:50 / TBA
Engl. 102-01 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 211 / MW / 8:00-9:20 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-02 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 211 / TTH / 8:00-9:20 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-03 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 211 / MW / 9:30-10:50 / David Fite / WA
Engl. 102-04 / Academic Writing Seminar / LIB 104 / TTH / 9:30-10:50 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-05 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 211 / MW / 11:30-12:50 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-06 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 217 / TTH / 11:30-12:50 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-07 / Academic Writing Seminar / DUKE 201 / MW / 1:00-2:20 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-08 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 211 / TTH / 1:00-2:20 / TBA / WA
Engl. 102-09 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 207 / MW / 2:30-3:50 / David Fite / WA
Engl. 102-10 / Academic Writing Seminar / HOL 209 / TTH / 2:30-3:50 / Claudia Ingram / WA
Engl. 126-01 / Literary Inquiries / HOL 207 / WF / 9:30-10:50 / Heather King / HL, WA
Engl. 161-01 / Not Your Father’s Essay / HOL 207 / TTH / 9:30-10:50 / Heather King / HL
Engl. 201-01 / Critical Reading / HOL 207 / TTH / 2:30-3:50 / Sharon Oster
Engl. 212-01 / Fiction / HOL 207 / MW / 1:00-2:20 / David Fite / HL
Engl. 213-02 / Drama / HOL 213 / MW / 2:30-3:50 / Nancy Carrick / HL
Engl. 221-01 / Shakespeare to 1600
Fulfills pre-1800 requirement. / HOL 213 / TTH / 2:30-3:50 / Nancy Carrick
Engl. 233-01 / African-American Literature
Cross-listed with REST. / HOL 209 / MW / 9:30-10:50 / Sheila Lloyd / DD, HL
Engl. 237-01 / Immigrant Literature
Coming to America: Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in American Literature
Cross-listed with REST. / HOL 209 / TTH / 9:30-10:50 / Sharon Oster / HL
Engl. 250-01 / Theories of Popular Culture
Cross-listed with REST, VMS, WGS. / HOL 207 / MW / 11:00-12:20 / Priya Jha / WA
Engl. 308-01 / Mentoring College Writers / HOL 217 / MW / 2:30-3:50 / Bridgette Callahan
Engl. 322-01 / The Eighteenth Century :
Regicides, Libertines,
Bluestockings, and Fops
Cross-listed with WGS.
Fulfills pre-1800 requirement. / HOL 209 / MWF / 11:30-12:50 / Heather King
FALL 2016
English Department
Course # / Course Title & Cross-lists / Location / Days / Times / Instructor / LAFsEngl. 331-01 / American Literature:
Industry and Enterprise
“Coming of Age in the Gilded Age” / HOL 207 / TTH / 11:30-12:50 / Sharon Oster
Engl. 351-01 / Postcolonialism, Global and
Transnational Literatures:
Disease, Hygiene, and
the Colonial Imaginary
Cross-listed with BIOL, REST, WGS. / HOL 211 / MW / 1:00-2:20 / Priya Jha
Ben Aronson / DD, HL,
M3
Engl. 402-01 / History of Literary Criticism
and Theory / HOL 217 / TTH / 9:30-10:50 / Anne Cavender
Engl. 420-01 / Senior Seminar in Literature / HOL 213 / TTH / 1:00-2:20 / Judith Tschann / WB
FALL 2016
Courses taught by English Faculty
in other departments
Course # / Course Title & Cross-lists / Location / Days / Times / Instructor / LAFsEVST 215-01 / American Environmental Literature
Cross-listed with ENGL. / HOL 209 / TTH / 8:00-9:20 / Anne Cavender / HL, WB
JNST 000J-01 / Latin Tutorials / HOL 213 / WF / 9:30-10:50 / Judith Tschann
FS 100-V / Imagining Worlds: Literature and the Environment / HOL 213 / TTH / 11:00-12:20 / Claudia Ingram / FS, WA
FS 100-W / Play It Again: Love and Conflict,
Venus and Mars, or Why Can’t
We Just Get Along? / HOL 213 / MW / 1:00-2:20 / Nancy Carrick / FS, HL
3/14/16
FALL 2016
English Department
ENGLISH 102-03 MW 9:30-10:50
ENGLISH 102-09 MW 2:30-3:50
Academic Writing Seminar WA
David Fite
This course will offer intensive practice in forms of academic writing that are important to your success as students and ultimately as informed citizens of a democratic society. We will focus on critical reading and analytical writing from sources, emphasizing writing as decision-making throughout the writing process. You will construct claim-driven writing projects through repeated practice in generating, focusing, and refining ideas. You will develop your awareness and use of basic research strategies and citation conventions for arguments grounded in reference to other texts.
ENGLISH 102-10 TTH 2:30-3:50
Academic Writing Seminar WA
Claudia Ingram
Discovering new writing strategies can be a peculiarly liberating experience. This may be the most important class you’ll take in college.
ENGLISH 126-01 WF 9:30-10:50
Literary Inquiries HL, WA
Heather King
This course will begin with some iconic titles of nineteenth-century British Literature. Over the course of the semester, we will work on developing the analytic skills necessary to have a meaningful conversation about a piece of writing, by practicing those skills in both our in-class discussions and in written essays. The central theme that will unify the reading list is the image of the monster. How have authors represented monstrosity? How have we adapted those monsters to modern media? What do the monsters we imagine tell us about our world? Ourselves? Readings may include: Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Dracula (Bram Stoker), Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson).
ENGLISH 161-01 TTH 9:30-10:50
Studies in Literature: HL
Not Your Father’s Essay
Heather King
Despite repeated cries about the death of print media, we are swimming in written communication these days, including the evolving essay format. From Cracked to Slate to HuffPo to the National Review, and across more blogs than one could count, the essay is still thriving after more than 2000 years of circulation. This course will begin with a look at the progenitor of our modern blogs and short essays, the “periodical essays” of the British eighteenth century. It is no coincidence that these early magazines flourished as social concepts of popular culture were changing. We’ll move quickly forward, exploring a variety of essay genres and formats, include those just-written. Students will produce their own essays, first individually, then later in a “club” a lá the eighteenth-century practice, culminating in a public essay (format will be determined by club preference – zine, blog, vlog, etc).
ENGLISH 201-01 TTH 2:30-3:50
Critical Reading
Sharon Oster
Why do we study literature? Distinct from other kinds of writing, literature demands our active interpretation—both of its content and form—and makes that task at once arduous and, for all that, pleasurable. In this course, we will acquire and hone our critical interpretive skills, and deepen our experience of reading. Together we will explore some phenomenal literary works: turn them this way and that, examine them from multiple sides, over and over, to see not just what each says, but how. In other words, we will practice reading actively, critically, and deeply, with a deliberate curiosity about literary form, within a range of genres (poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, etc.) and traditions. We will develop our critical vocabularies, explore different interpretive approaches, and produce our own individual and collective interpretations, sometimes in dialogue with established literary scholarship. Authors may range from John Donne to Sylvia Plath, Sophocles to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry James. This course is the gateway to the English major, and excellent for anyone interested in literature. Assignments will include multiple revised essays, a mini-teaching exercise and a final exam. Be prepared to immerse yourself in literature!
Prerequisite: one 100-level literature class or comparable first-year seminar or by permission.
ENGLISH 212-01 MW 1:00-2:20
Fiction HL
David Fite
In this course we will read a variety of novels from the 19th and 20th centuries, including novels by Gustave Flaubert, Kate Chopin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison. We will address the topics of romance and realism, modernism and post-modernism, and magical realism in the novel.
ENGLISH 213-02 MW 2:30-3:50
Drama HL
Nancy Carrick
As Tolstoy tells us, “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We will read plays in which unruly love challenges families and the communities they comprise. From Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to Kate and Petruchio, from Nora and Torvald to Stella and Stanley, we will explore the consequences of passion as depicted on the stage. We will read Greek tragedy and modern comedy, Shakespeare and Williams, and view a few contemporary films. As each work invites you into its world and the perspectives of the time in which it was written, we will discover both the traditions of tragedy and comedy and innovations in the forms. We will read, discuss, debate, perform, and write.
ENGLISH 221-01 TTH 2:30-3:50
Shakespeare to 1600
Fulfills pre-1800 requirement
Nancy Carrick
With attention to Shakespeare's times, his linguistic and literary tradition, and his stage, English 221 will focus on selected sonnets and early plays, likely including Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard II. Informal writing and research, watching live performance, an exam, and performances will offer a variety of ways to encounter Shakespeare's work.
ENGLISH 233-01 MW 9:30-10:50
African-American Literature DD, HL
Cross-listed with Race and Ethnic Studies
Sheila Lloyd
In this course, we will use Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’s 2012 book Racecraft and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book Between the World and Me to guide us through our study of prose fiction and nonfiction by African-American writers working between 1845-1996. Spanning a sesquicentennial, these writers’ texts reveal at least two things about the United States: the persistence of the social fiction of race and the many acts of resistance against this fiction. In our time together, we will consider how the texts of the past inform our current cultural and social sensibilities when it comes to the dynamics of race and racism as well as their reinforcement of other forms of identity and inequalities ¾whether defined in terms of nation, gender, economic status, sexuality, and/or disability. We will see how writers deploy the rich resources of literature to imagine the world otherwise and to imagine other possibilities for the human. In addition to Fields and Fields and Coates, the writers we will read include Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison. Assignments will include two formal essays, a take-home midterm, facilitating class discussion, and a final.
ENGLISH 237-01 TTH 9:30-10:50
Immigrant Literature HL
Coming to America: Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in American Literature
Cross-listed with Race and Ethnic Studies
Sharon Oster
Have immigrants to the US succeeded “on the backs of blacks,” to quote Toni Morrison? In this course, we will explore key literary texts of twentieth-century immigrant experience together with theories of ethnicity, race and whiteness. Our principal goal will be to explore the relationship between the stories we tell about US immigration and the black/white “color line”—to invoke W.E.B. DuBois’s famous formulation – that has defined the American racial imaginary for centuries. We will examine the extent to which literary authors depicting experiences of becoming American rely upon this entrenched black/white racial “logic,” challenge it, or struggle to find other ways of articulating Americanness, that are not racially-inflected. We will also explore related questions: many of these texts are bilingual; how does language shape immigrant narratives? What about gender and sexual differences, particularly across perceived racial and cultural lines? Generational difference? To what extent is the law—US immigration law—central to these narratives? Authors may include Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Rodriguez, Julia Alvarez, Maxine Hong Kingston or Gene Luen Yang, and films like Hester Street, El Norte, Better Luck Tomorrow, or The Visitor. I am open to other text and film suggestions if there is something you are dying to read in this field. Expect a lot of reading. Grading will be based on participation, one short and one longer final literary interpretive essay, frequent short papers, and a class presentation.
ENGLISH 250-01 MW 11:00-12:20
Theories of Popular Culture WA
Cross-listed with Race and Ethnic Studies, Visual and Media Studies,
and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Priya Jha
In the 21st century, our existence is marked by constant flows of messages disseminated globally via various media forms and of the ease of travel by people all over the world. These movements have led to deep transformations in the ways we see ourselves as observers and participators of/in culture, at both the local and global levels. Moreover, these shifts have led to a compression of time and space in a way that would not have been possible even fifty years ago. Thus, our interpretive models have also had to change in accordance with these transformations. Our main goal this semester will be to develop critical frameworks which we can then apply to analyzing and (re)defining identities. Our focus will be on popular culture and mundane everyday cultural practices with which we engage, from walking to watching youtube to food to television and film. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, both in theory and in practice – spanning fields as diverse as literature, film studies, feminist studies, critical race theories, postcolonial theory, anthropology and sociology. Complementing our fieldwork will be some of the key figures who have contributed to cultural studies such as Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz, Angela McRobbie, Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Arjun Appadurai, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, Anne McClintock, and Louis Althusser. While we will not be able to map out all of the issues and subjects that currently occupy the attention of cultural studies scholars, we will give detailed attention to some of the most important of these. Interspersed in this work will be discussions of methods and methodologies in writing about culture. In-class work includes short writing assignments, presentations, and an interdisciplinary final project, the topic of which will be collaborative.