Immigrant Experience Through Literature

This course examines the figure of the immigrant in England and the United States through literary production. We will focus on the role of narrative and the imaginative in negotiating the various experiences that mark the immigrant’s world. We will assess texts written by authors from the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The course’s comparative (Britain and US) nature will underscore the global nature of immigration and lend a more nuanced understanding of the issue in the US. Works include Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, Sandra Cisneros’ A House in Mango Street, and Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic. Fulfills World Literature requirement for English/Education majors.

A study of selected masterpieces of Western Literature from the French classical drama of the seventeenth century to postmodern fiction, emphasizing the relation of literary works to such larger cultural movements as the enlightenment, the romantic movement, and modernism. A pervasive theme of this course is the increasing sense of alienation from the renaissance to our own time. Most of the readings will be drawn from continental European authors.

In this course, we will critically reflect on a representative sampling of British Literature in the major genres (poetry, essay, fiction, and drama) from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. In closely reading individual works by both canonical and non-canonical authors, we will study important practices and revisions of literary forms through the following literary movements: Romantic, Victorian, modernist, and postmodern. In addition to considering how various authors shape and change the British literary tradition, we will also focus on prominent issues in a literary work's cultural and historical contexts, including issues of class, race, religion, gender, nationality and empire. The course is designed for majors, but non-majors are welcome. No previous knowledge of the field is required. Fulfills English major survey requirement. Fulfills an English major survey requirement.

In this course, we will read literature written in America since 1865, considering the development of literary movements and the work of a diversity of authors within a historical context. We will consider literature’s relationship to socio-historical conditions, aesthetic ideas, and national concerns. Although we can only scratch the surface of the rich diversity of styles, writers, motivations, etc. That make up a century and a half of American literature, the course is intended to help you attain a sense of the complexities of this literature in its relationship to history, culture, and society. Fulfills an English major survey requirement.

In this class we’ll hone our craft of writing nonfiction in a creative way. Though plenty of ink has been spilled as of late to suggest this is a new genre of creative writing (dubbed creative nonfiction in about 1985 and as narrative nonfiction in about the 30’s), writing nonfiction creatively—that is with a special eye and ear for evocative language, scene setting, specific detail, storytelling, focus, character, theme, conflict, et cetera—arguably dates to back to at least Herodotus. The memoir, the biography, a proper shop manual, the essay, the travelogue, the interview, investigative immersion: nonfiction comes in many forms. In this class, we’ll try to write in some of these forms. Students should be committed to careful reading, extensive writing, active participation, and regular class attendance (as we learn in workshop—day-today, minute-to- minute—more so than out of it). Through diligent examination of peers’ work, as well the crafting of thoughtful and lengthy responses to it, we not only contribute significantly to their improvement, but better learn our own craft in the process. Lastly, sweeping and drastic revisions are a must. Poets and prose writers are encouraged to attend; work in one genre seems to stimulate growth in all of them. Fulfills a Writing concentration requirement (WT).

Playwriting is one of the oldest and most versatile arts. In this class, new students will learn about dialogue, stage direction, act structure and dramatic tension. Students will see local stage productions and hear their work read aloud. Experienced thespians and curious elective-seekers welcome.

This course satisfies a Writing Studies concentration requirement.
301W Screenwriting Workshop I

Spangler, D. (Fall 2011)

This course will prepare students to the process of writing for various kinds of film production. Students may receive instruction in such issues as form, character, story development, and dramatic structure. Fulfills a Writing concentration requirement (WT) or a Film Studies requirement (FT).

American culture has become obsessed with the memoir. In this writing class we will explore this genre through reading some of the most famous and controversial examples of the genre and exploring the mechanics of producing such a text. What is the line between fact and fiction? How do we transform our memories into memoir? What is the difference between fiction and memoir? Each student will produce a 20-page memoir of his or her own, working through the process of shaping a distinct memory into the arc of a story. For the writing track in the English major, this course fulfills a Critical and Professional Writing requirement.

As a calamitous event, war inherently resists representation. This course examines the writings of men and women who employ writing as a tool to convey the experience of war and its impact on their lives and worldview. We will consider representations of war across the genres of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, from World War I to the present. As our discussions lead to contemporary accounts of the War in Iraq, we will consider how “newer” genres such as email and other forms of web media shape the experience of war for those on the frontlines as well as on the home front. Accordingly, writing assignments in this course will assume a variety of forms including: reflective responses to assigned texts, explorations of documentary-style writing, and an essay that utilizes research to forward a focused argument about a specific facet of war and writing. For the writing track in the English major, this course fulfills a Critical and Professional Writing requirement.

Why write about where you’ve been: to share the journey, or to share the destination? What impact do travel writers have on the places they traverse? Questions like these will fuel our exploration of the craft of travel writing in this course. We will think and write critically about the rhetorical strategies employed in travel narratives, use parallel strategies in our own writing, and analyze what we’ve written with a critical eye. This course will address formal writing elements, including attention to audience, purpose, style, and clear expression, and will involve substantial writing, revision, and group critique. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a critical and professional writing requirement.

Texts now increasingly take digital form. They not only begin as word processing documents, but also are born digital as multimedia creations that rely on particular digital technologies to communicate. Even those texts that started as print are increasingly being digitized (i.e., converted to digital form). Thus, often the first—and more and more the only—way we encounter and create texts is digitally. In this course, we will consider the implications. Together we will explore practical and theoretical consequences of the creation, delivery, and reception of texts in digital spaces and discuss effective digital writing principles and techniques. Coursework will include analysis and production of print and digital texts.Students will work with digital technologies in and outside of class. No prior experience is required, though students will be expected to have a basic familiarity with the Internet. Fulfills: Critical and Professional Writing requirement (WT).

This class prepares students for writing as professionals in the workplace. We will learn to write clear, persuasive, and readable documents attuned to audience and rhetorical situation. Strategies for writing letters, memos, reports, proposals, and resumes will be covered with special attention given to efficient and clear communication in today’s electronic workplace. For the writing track in the English major, this course satisfies a critical and professional writing requirement.

Focusing primarily but not exclusively on contemporary women’s novels and short stories, this course examines women’s writing in a multinational and multicultural context. We will explore how women writers of various backgrounds engage with complex issues such as women’s right to self-definition; experiences with slavery, human trafficking, and globalization; relationship to Western medicine; and practice of traditional religions and/or alternative spiritualities. Possible authors include Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Jhumpa Lahiri (India/US), Julia O’Faolain (Ireland), Margaret Atwood (Canada), Toni Morrison (U.S.), and Keri Hulme (New Zealand). This course satisfies the World Literature requirement for English Education Majors.

Sin. Lust. Greed. Redemption. City Life. These are just some of themes that characterize film noir, one of the most resilient and flexible genres in the history of cinema. And yet film noir-¬¬a genre that emerged in the early 1940s¬-is defined by more than just such themes; it’s also characterized by a particular visual style and narrative structure that reflect the social, political and cinematic context in which the genre was born. In this course we will watch a variety of noir

films, from the early classics of the 1940s and 1950s to the neo-noirs of the 1970s and 1980s to contemporary films that borrow from the genre. In doing so, we will ultimately consider film noir’s literary roots, its cinematic antecedents, its status as a genre and its enduring appeal. Questions about genre, visual style, narrative form, sexuality, gender and American national identity will inform readings and discussions. Students will be expected to master the language of film analysis. Tentative screening schedule includes The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Blood Simple, Blade Runner, as well as many other films. Please note: To accommodate film screenings, this course will begin at 5:30pm and end no later than 9pm. Fulfills a Film Studies Concentration Requirement
305 Disaster & Literature

Kurland, S. (Fall 2006)

More properly titled “Disaster in the Literary and Popular Imagination,” this Special Studies course will explore imaginative responses to disaster in literature and in popular culture, particularly film. Nowhere is human fascination with catastrophe more evident than in contemporary cultural forms, especially film and TV, which pander to our basest and most voyeuristic impulses or inspire us with examples of human courage or strength–and sometimes do both at the same time. Like drivers inching past the scene of a car wreck, humans are disaster junkies, unable to avert our eyes, both drawn to and repelled by the spectacle, which we are eager to understand and apply to our ordinary lives.

Organizing the material by type (beginning with natural disasters and moving to man-made ones), we will examine works in various media (plays, novels, poems, short stories, prose fiction, film), focusing on certain recurring themes and issues, including heroism, fear, courage, altruism and sacrifice, competition, cruelty, and the drive to survive and the impulse to submit.
305W Magic Realism in Fiction

Mirmotahari, E. (Fall 2011)

Magical realism, or lo real maravilloso, coined by German art critic Franz Roh and Cuban author Alejo Carpentier respectively, is the term given to works of art that incorporate the extraordinary, magical, and/or supernatural as commonplace phenomena into their rendering of human experience. It is also understood (albeit contentiously) to have origins in Latin America in the twentieth-century. This course is designed to acquaint you with the various literary and filmic expressions of magical realism around the world. In the process, we will evolve new conceptions of magical realism and explore the cultural and historical developments with which it is conversant. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Fulfills World Literature requirement for English/Education majors.

The course will begin with considerations of fundamental conventions of the detective fiction genre established by Edgar Allan Poe, go on to notice how they are elaborated and extended by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, and then undertake examinations of the conventions and permutations found in such representative American genres as hard-boiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and Ross MacDonald; the culturally attuned detective novels of James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly. Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation, two mid-term exams, and a final exam.

The legend of King Arthur is the most durable myth of the Middle Ages, and the only one that still has the power to spark significant new versions. This course is a historical study of the origins and the efflorescence of that myth, with special attention to the legend of the Holy Grail from its origins in the twelfth century to modern times. (In twenty five hundredths of a second a Google search for ‘holy grail” returns 4,225,000 hits; the grail lives.)

Note: all texts will be read in modern English translations, or in well glossed and annotated early English versions.

Fulfills World Literature Requirement for English/Education Majors.
306W Literature & Science

Beranek, B. (Fall 2011)

The course will examine a miscellany of literature about science and scientists, avoiding the clichés of the “mad scientist,” and popular science fiction. There is no shortage of novels about the trials of musicians; there are few about the anxieties of a life that depends on research grants. Science, technology, and mathematics are acknowledged to be at the core of modern life, but they are not often the focal point of serious literature. This course is an exploration of literature that takes science seriously, and finds it exciting; literature for which having an interest in science is an advantage. Science fiction? Well, we will read Jurassic Park, but more for the mathematics rather than the dinosaurs. Also look for plays by Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, as well as novels about light and quantum theory.

Drama in Ireland, which was long associated with the conquerors, is now one of the art forms for which the Irish are most famous. In this class, we will read widely over time, from the 18th century into the 21st. We will read plays that are generally considered English plays, but which are written by Irish playwrights (such as George Farquhar, Richard Steele, Thomas Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, GB Shaw), as well as plays written by playwrights of the Irish Revival (such as Lady Gregory, John Synge, Sean O'Casey), plays written by playwrights of the Counter-Revival (such as Denis Johnston and Brendan Behan), and plays written by contemporary playwrights (such as Stewart Parker, Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, Frank McGuinness, Anne Devlin, Clare Dowling, Emma Donoghue). Some of the plays we will work with you will have heard of; some you will not. The course will provide you with a new view into drama in English, and a new view into Irish literature.

Meyerhold wrote, "Women should take over men's roles on stage as well as in real life, by acting parts written for male actors. Give me the actresses, and I’ll make a Khlestakov and Hamlet of them, a Don Juan or a Chatsky!" In this course we will examine how gender and sexuality have been expressed in Drama and Theater. Using both Literary Theories and Performance Theories, we will investigate how playwrights and performers have altered societal perceptions of gender. We will study the difference between men writing (playing) women’s roles, women writing (playing) men’s roles, stereotyping, and stock characters. We shall study how the feminist movement started in theater, fostered by some of the art form’s greatest playwrights, and the effect those plays had on society and future playwrights. We will also look at the burgeoning Gay Theater in America and its impact on gender. Playwrights examined include Ibsen, Shaw, Hellman, Wilson, Ludlam, Merriam, Ensler and others. We will also look at the writings of Meyerhold, Grotowski, Stanislawski, Brecht and other theorists. Fulfills World Literature requirement for English/Education majors.

Since 1901, the Nobel Academy in Stockholm has honored 104 writers from across the world with the prestigious (and lucrative) Nobel Prize for Literature. Focusing principally on authors who won the award after the Second World War, this course looks at several laureates whose poetry, drama, fiction, and essays stand as landmarks of art and humanity in an age of great conflict and change. With a special emphasis on the national and international dynamics of the times in which they wrote, we shall read and discuss laureates such as T. S. Eliot, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Albert Camus, Salvatore Quasimodo, Odysseus Elytis, Gabriel García Márquez, Jaroslav Seifert, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Gao Xingjian, and Doris Lessing. Requirements include three shorter essays (5-7 pages), a presentation, a mid-term examination, and a final examination. (WDLI 306W) Fulfills World Literature requirement for English Education majors.

This course will explore the varieties of Catholic literature from the later nineteenth century to the present. It will be international in scope, with texts from Roman Catholic, Eastern, and Anglo-Catholic traditions. Key works will include poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins and Francis Tompson, Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, as well as novels by French and Japanese authors. This course satisfies the World Literature requirement for English Education students. Fulfills World Literature requirement for English/Education majors.

Alfred North Whitehead once claimed that the freedom of the will was the subject of all western literature. This course will explore a representative slice of that subject. Readings will include: Sopholces: Oedipus the King, Cocteau: The Infernal Machine, Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy, V, Diderot: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Zola: Therese Raquin, Crane: Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, Tolstoy “Epilogue to War and Peace”, Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, Coover: The Universal Baseball Association, Kafka: “A Hunger Artist”

The readings in literary texts will be augmented with selections from philosophical and religious writings from St. Paul to William James and the existentialists, with a bit of Clarence Darrow’s twelve hour speech from his celebrated 1924 defense of admitted murderers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. This course should meet World Literature requirements. This course satisfies the World Literature requirement for English Education Majors.

307W The Bible as Literature

Beranek, B. (Fall 2009 (cancelled low enrollment))

The Bible is a literary treasure, compiled over a period of centuries, comprising forms as different as the erotic lyric, the courtesy book, codes of law, collections of proverbial wisdom, dynastic history, and symbolic apocalyptic visions. In this course the methods of literary criticism will be used to foster appreciation of the Bible as literature, in some cases, against the backdrop of other ancient near-eastern literary traditions. The aim of this course is neither to teach nor to displace theology, but to emphasize the ways in which biblical writers have consciously shaped their materials, and to explore ways in which the literary skills we have developed to deal with narrative and poetry can make us better readers of biblical texts.

The Japanese Nobel prize novelist Yasunari Kawabata said: “I believe that Dante’s Divine Comedy can still save the world.” This course is an introduction to Dante’s great poem with special emphasis on the author’s aim to “remove those living in this life from the state of misery to the state of happiness” through poetry. In addition to the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, we will also read Dante’s “little book,” La Vita Nuova, The New Life, which is the first step on the path from romantic infatuation to the “love that moves the sun and the other stars,” at the culmination of the work that he called the Commedia, but which for its sublime excellence has ever since been known as the Divine Comedy. This course satisfies the World Literature requirement for English Education students.

The practice of documenting "the real" is an obsession in our current culture. Think YouTube, Survivor, or MTV's The Real World. But the documentary itself is a form with a long history stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the origins of cinema itself. It is also a form that has generated much debate: What is a documentary? Is it art? Is fact? Is it propaganda? This course will survey some of the classic documentaries over the past hundred years (Nanook of the North, Man With a Movie Camera, Harlan County, USA, among many others) with the goal of developing a better understanding of the variety of forms of the documentary (social documentary, propaganda film, mockumentary, etc.) and considering some of the central questions and issues surrounding the documentary, particularly the problematic nature of "representing reality." In addition to weekly screenings, students will read, discuss and write responses and papers to a variety of reviews, essays, and theoretical texts. Students will also be expected to master the language of film analysis. Please note that this class has both a class time and separate "screening" time. Attendance is required at both. Fulfills Film Studies Concentration requirement.