Hobart and William Smith Colleges

The discipline of English is as dynamic and far-ranging as the language itself. In an English class, you might analyze a medieval poem or produce your own piece of flash fiction. You might consider literature's relationship to historic social change or trace its role in contemporary political conflict. You will investigate the meanings of life, build unassailable arguments, and find your own voice.

Students majoring or minoring in English gain the critical reading, thinking, writing, and communications skills necessary for bright futures in a range of fields. Our majors go on to careers in education, law, business, publishing, non-profit work, activism, filmmaking, information technology, journalism, and the arts.

The English Department offers a wide variety of courses, including many without prerequisites that are open to non-majors. We offer majors and minors in both English and Comparative Literature, and a concentration in Creative Writing.

The English curriculum is designed to give students maximum flexibility while ensuring both breadth and depth of study. Most students begin with one or two courses at the 100-level, then take ENG 200 Critical Methods: the required gateway course for those ready to declare the major or minor. Electives at the 200and 300-level are chosen in consultation with an adviser. The major is completed with a capstone, typically a 400-level seminar taken in the junior or senior year.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MAJOR IN ENGLISH (B.A.)
disciplinary, 12 courses
ENG 200; 10 elective courses; and a capstone experience (typically a 400-level seminar taken in the junior or senior year). Of the 10 electives, three must be at the 300-level or above, and no more than two 100-level courses may count toward the major. Further requirements include: one Early Period course (pre-1800); one American Literature course; one Global Literature course; one UK/European Literature course, and a three-course concentration. Up to three courses taken outside the department may count towards fulfilling major requirements, with permission of the adviser. A single course may fulfill more than one requirement.

Concentrations may be defined by genre, literary history, theme, or field of study. A genre concentration could, for example, include three courses on poetry, while a literary history concentration might provide an overview of Modernism, or focus on one particular era, such as nineteenth-century British fiction. Thematic concentrations bring together coursework on a central topic, such as globalization, gender, or poetics. Field of study concentrations in Creative Writing, Film Studies or Critical Theory are also options for students with particular interest in those areas.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MINOR IN ENGLISH
disciplinary, 6 courses
ENG 200; three elective courses, one of which may be from outside of the department with permission of the adviser, no more than one at 100-level; two courses at the 300-level or above.

Cognate Courses Outside the Department The following list is a representative sample of "cognate" courses that could be approved to fulfill the requirements of the English major and minor: AFS 305 African American Autobiography; AMST 330 Digital Humanities; CLAS 108 Greek Tragedy; MDSC 313 Global Cinema; RUSE 352 Nabokov; SPNE 404 Lorca and Almodovar; THTR 309 Feminist Theatre; WMST 219 Black Feminism and Theater; WRRH 201 Grammar and Style; WRRH 327 Literary Journalism.

TRANSFER CREDITS FOR THE MAJOR OR MINOR
Courses taken at other institutions, excepting HWS-sponsored abroad programs, are considered on a case-by-case basis. Students must petition the department for these courses to count towards the English degree. Petition forms for transfer courses can be downloaded here.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
While all English Department courses are geared to the integrated goals of teaching and developing critical reading and thinking, as well as honing written and oral communication skills, many also partially or substantially address the aspirational goals of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges curriculum. ENG courses are numbered at the 100-, 200-, 300-, and 400-levels according to the level of research, analytical, and writing expertise required to engage effectively with the material. Within each of these "centuries," however, we have also subdivided our courses by "decade" according to the subject matter they cover. The logic for these divisions is:

00-09 Core Courses, Genre Courses, Theory Courses
10-29 Thematic Courses
30-39 British Literature to 1800 (or so)
40-49 British Literature since 1800
50-59 American Literature to 1900 (or so)
60-69 American Literature since 1900
70-79 Global Literature
80-89 Film
90-99 Creative Writing Courses

***

100-level courses in English introduce students to textual and literary study, focus on critical analysis and close reading skills, and build a foundation for critical writing in the disciplines of English and Comparative Literature. 100-level courses are suitable for first-years, sophomores, or non-majors. Students interested in the major may take 100-level courses or may also opt to begin with ENG 200 and other courses at the 200-level. No more than two 100-level courses may be counted toward the major.

ENG 106 The Short Story This course introduces the short story genre, including attention to its history and development. Students read a broad range of examples, including at least one single-author collection or cycle. Assignments allow students to learn the fundamental skills of literary criticism through the practice of formal analysis. (Staff)

ENG 108 Literary Science Fiction/Fantasy This course will begin with a survey of the origins of science fiction and fantasy, the development of the genres in the post-Enlightenment era, and twentieth-century trends, but its main focus will be the relationship between mainstream literary fiction and science fiction/fantasy, and the ultra-contemporary trend of crossover between the two. We will consider the relationship between science and the genres, the exile of science fiction from canonical literature, and what the increasing openness of literary writers and academic circles might mean. Readings may include: Evans, The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction; Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; Herbert, Dune; Miville, The City and the City; VanderMeer, City of Saints and Madmen; Mitchell, Cloud Atlas; Lethem, Chronic City; Link, Magic for Beginners. (Hamilton)

ENG 110 Partial Magic In the second half of Don Quixote, Don Quixote meets characters who have read the first half of the novel. That would include us. Lewis Carol describes a map of England which represents everything in England, which would include the map, and on that map, a map of the map, and so on into infinity. In this course we will explore these disconcerting examples of what we are calling "partial magic," in both literature and the visual arts, in an effort to see that they are not unusual, but are in fact, fundamental to the way art endeavors to immerse us in its world. We will also consider the consequences of this immersion. In what sense is what Coleridge called "the willing suspension of disbelief," a loss of our critical faculties? In what sense is art related to propaganda and advertising? (Holly)

ENG 111 Experience of War in Literature We will read in the literature of war from one of its earliest representations, The Iliad, all the way through verse and film that address the realities of post-9/11 warfare. We will read chronologically and consider, after Homer, the nineteenth century Napoleonic warfare in War and Peace, the especial traumas of WW I and WW II, and late twentieth and twenty-first century warfare of the Vietnam conflict and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Special attention will be paid to the experience of soldiers, male and now female, civilians and nurses, to the ethos, psychologies, ideologies and bureaucracies that drive warfare, and to the efforts of writers to capture the toll taken by those experiences. Texts may include The Iliad, sections of War and Peace, All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, The Things They Carried, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, Redeployment. (Staff)

ENG 112 Things Fall Apart: Difficulty, Difference, Disjunction, Dysfunction & Disclosure This course traverses "dark and stormy" characters, inexplicable actions, insurmountable challenges, difficult forms, and impossible situations - all in order to discover what is possible: how does the character survive? How can we identify with her or him? How can the poem peer through its strange exterior to invite us in? How does the author make use of pain, turmoil, and confusion in the text? How can we as readers persevere in the face of these challenges and glean experience, skill and strength? By reading across multiple genres, writing critical papers, completing short creative and critical written exercises, participating in group presentations, and taking quizzes and tests, students will endeavor to become more tenacious, engaged, observant, thoughtful, empathetic, and articulate. (Staff)

ENG 113 Environment in Global Literature What is nature? What is ecology? The "environment"? What do we mean when we talk about "environmental literature" in the era of climate change and widespread ecological crisis? With a focus on twenty-first century literature from around the world, the course will address these questions by putting literary texts in conversation with some of the following concepts: "nature, "energy, biodiversity, sustainability, global interconnectivity, and environmental justice. We will examine texts that deconstruct the idea of nature and open up new ethical and aesthetic possibilities-for imagining and living in the era of the Anthropocene. Topics to be discussed include: ecology without nature; wilderness and nature writing; writing the environment in realist versus speculative fiction (weird fiction); the poetics of trash; the secret life of rust and dust; nuclear currents; multispecies ecologies and posthumanism. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 114 Sickness, Health & Disability This course explores narrative techniques and representational strategies in narratives and other literary representations of illness, health, and various forms of disability (cognitive, physical, emotional, and so forth). Through readings in different genres and from different periods and cultures, we will examine, critique, and deconstruct the ways in which sickness, health and disability - as well as normalcy - are defined in literary and cultural contexts, and how these definitions often intersect with definitions of (and assumptions about) race, class, gender, sexuality, morality, criminality, and other markers of citizenship and identity. (Cope)

ENG 115 Literature & Social Movements Can books change the world? In the U.S., readers of slave narratives and Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin were swayed to the abolitionist cause. The counterculture went On the Road with Kerouac. Second-wave feminists clutched copies of The Bell Jar, while anti-Vietnam War protestors were fluent in Heller and Vonnegut. Ayn Rand's fiction has been a powerful force for new conservatives, while Malcolm X's autobiography helped radicalize the Civil Rights movement. And why were Occupy protestors wearing masks made famous by a graphic novel? This course considers how literature has shaped and been shaped by social movements. Weaving together contextualizing historical readings and primary documents with poetry, memoir, novels, and other literary forms, students will investigate the relationships between revolution and the word. (Creadick)

ENG 116 Literature and Politics How and why do literary texts represent political persons, philosophies, and events? What is the effect (if any) of their doing so? Are a writer's politics necessarily reflected in their writing? What do we mean by politics anyway? For that matter, what do we mean by literature? When we define these terms, are we already making a political determination? This course seeks to respond to these questions by exploring two separate but related issues: 1) the representation of political persons, events, and ideas in literature and 2) the politics (cultural, social, and otherwise) of literature: who gets published and why? What do we expect when we read? How does reading inspire (or compel) us to rethink our political commitments? Our responses to these questions will engage such issues as the politics of affect, empathy, and emotion: the philosophical and political status of literature's representation of ‘ possible worlds'; utopian and dystopian tendencies in literature and political thought; the politics of representation; the politics of elitism and marginalization; essentialist and anti-essentialist discourses in literature in politics; literature in the marketplace; literature's role in the revolution against (or maintenance of) political and national structures; the ‘cultural' politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Texts will include novels, poems, stories, and plays, as well as relevant theoretical and critical essays from a range of literary and critical cultures and traditions. (Cope)

ENG 125 The Natural World in the Middle Ages Under the guidance of Michael Amadori (sustainability program / students activities / ECOREP club), students will engage in hands-on activities. Ideally, Maymester students would learn to plant/transplant the seeds or seedlings, tend to the existing perennial plants (such as the strawberries) and herbs, care for the plants by weeding, watering, sarcling and pruning. Students in the Summer session would continue to tend the garden in the same way and harvest the fruits and produces as they ripen.

ENG 130 Medieval Genres This course approaches the Middle Ages through its representation of different genres in an array of texts, manuscript illuminations, music and other artistic expressions. It exposes the cultural and social conditions that are illustrated by these texts. Students will evaluate the social, religious and gender politics that are revealed by each genre. The investigation will begin with texts originally written in Latin. It will start around 700 with the writings of an Anglo-Saxon monk, the Venerable Bede. Students will follow Saint Brendan in the adventures that probably led him from his Irish monastery to the coast of America, many centuries before Columbus. Students will then reach the continent and discover the troubadour Bernard de Ventadorn and other poets from France. They will travel between France, England, Italy and Germany to evaluate the genres of fables, popular romance, fabliaux and dramatic farce. (Erussard)

ENG 136 Shakespeare on Screen So far as we can tell, Shakespeare's plays were written for the stage rather than for the page. In other words, they were meant to be experienced in an embodied public performance of sights and sounds, rather than read silently and in solitude. In this introduction to Shakespeare's work, we will draw upon the rich archive of Shakespeare on film to study six of his most influential plays in multiple performances, exploring how different directors brought these plays to life in different ways, working in a new medium and within different social and political contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (Carson)

ENG 152 American Revolutions From Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments, America's revolutionaries and reformers have written their own literature. This course will explore the history of politics and culture in the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War. We will study the work of writers who were for the rights of women and against the removal of Indians from their lands, who were for the liberation of enslaved people of African descent and against the use and abuse of alcohol. We will also read the writings of the early labor and environmental movements. Like the figures we study, we will experiment with different forms to express our ideas and arguments. (Black)

ENG 165 Introduction to Afro-American Literature I We begin with a slave narrative from the nineteenth century, but this course concentrates on African American narratives of the twentieth century, from the Harlem Renaissance through the "protest" novel and black nationalism to black women writers. Students focus on a central concern of the African American traditions, the tension between the political and the aesthetic. Students pay attention to both the aesthetic properties of the literary text and to its political dimensions. In addition to the concerns with race, class, gender, and sexuality, students examine the intricate set of intertextual relations between different writers which constitute the tradition of African American writing. (Basu)

ENG 170 Global English Literature What comprises global English literature? Colonialism was not only an economic, but a cultural, technological, linguistic, and demographic phenomenon. Movements of westerners to colonial spaces evoked counter-movements of people from around the globe traveling to the west. These flows resulted in a new body of literature in western languages written by people from other parts of the globe. In this course students will study examples of this world literature written in English. Readings will typically include works from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. In order to consider how these literatures have been influenced by western aesthetic values and forms, and how might they, in turn, transform and reinvent western traditions, students may also study key narratives from England and/or the United States. Following decolonization movements of the mid-twentieth century, the study of these diverse literatures spawned key terms such as postcolonialism, globalization, diaspora, transnationalism, alterity, and so on; these concepts will also be part of the course. Throughout these literary works, students will find characters who must continue to live with the alien and alienating legacies of colonialism, even in a modern and globalized world. (Basu, Ivanchikova)

ENG 175 Travel Literature The mobilities of populations have been crucial to the ways in which human beings have been organized across the planet - in empires, in nations, on continents, in hemispheres. Several factors encourage or deter mobility or travel - technological, economic, demographic, and so on. But travel inevitably introduces an encounter with otherness. We begin and end the course with an encounter with "America." We will encounter embodiments of racial and gendered otherness, but we will also examine the encounter between the human and the machine, the technological otherness of the android. The texts typically include Shakespeare's The Tempest, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Phillip Dick's Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and George Orwell's Burmese Days. (Basu)

ENG 185 From Novel to Film Film today is in a position in our culture analogous to the position the novel once held in literary tradition. It is still largely a medium that belongs to popular culture, and its sense of emotional immediacy, the persuasive power of visual storytelling, and filmmakers' ability to respond to current ideas and trends of thought often means that modern film is a useful window on the age in which a film is made. We will address narrative technique, ask how filmmakers use the visual medium to transform difficult but profoundly arresting narratives into engaging and comprehensible films, while also asking what makes an adaptation effective? Why bother if the book is satisfying? Can an adaptation ever be as good as the book? There is another focus here as well; we also want to raise important questions about how and by whom meaning is made in both novels and films and about the role of the imagination of the reader and viewer in completing the picture. Readings and films may vary. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 190 Creative Writing for FYs & SOs This course offers introductory techniques in the writing of both fiction and poetry. The workshop format emphasizes group discussion of the writings of class members. Some exercises are assigned, some individual invention is expected. Readings of modern authors supplement discussions of form and technique. This course is normally required as a prerequisite for fiction and poetry workshops. Students who complete ENG 190 may not take ENG 290. (Babbitt, Cowles, Hamilton, Staff)

ENG 200 Critical Methods This course is required of all majors and minors to prepare students for upper-level study in English and Comparative Literature, and may not be exempted. This course will train students in the concepts, vocabulary and research methods required for advanced textual analysis and writing in the discipline. Required books include core reference texts in the discipline and will be supplemented by individual professors. (Staff)

ENG 201 The Marvel Cinematic Universe (in Theory) In this class we will view about a dozen films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe through a variety of critical lenses, and in the process, we will undertake a survey of the central concepts that we employ in contemporary cultural theory. By the end of the class, our goal will be to consider movies and other forms of popular culture in a richer and more complex light, informed by the ideas we encounter in our study of formalism, structuralism, post structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, ecocriticism, and other branches of cultural criticism.

ENG 203 The Lyric This is a course about The Secret of Poetry. That secret has everything to do with the powers of language and what those powers are being harnessed to do. The premise of this course is that there is something about the use of language in lyric poetry that sets it apart from other forms of language-use. We will begin the course by considering the concept of mimesis as a way to begin discovering that secret and understanding how it is enacted. In this course we will try to get fix on what lyric poetry really is. Is it poetry that aspires to the condition of music, for example? And if it is, why? If "a poem is not the record of an event but the event itself," as Robert Lowell put it, how is that possible; that is, what makes that possible? We'll explore the way poetry doesn't refer to experience but incarnates it. Texts include Ovid's Metamorphoses, the odes of John Keats, and the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, George Herbert, among others. (Staff)

ENG 205 Narrative Theory What are stories made of? How does their structure and design influence what they can mean and how they are told? This course is an introduction to critical thinkers who have attempted to answer these questions. In addition to working through some fundamental theories about narrative (what it is and how it works), we will also apply what we've learned to some representative texts. Students will come away knowing how point-of-view, temporality, character representation, fictionality, and closure are not only critical to the way stories are told: they radically determine what these stories mean and how we interpret them. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 210 Viking Saga The word saga can mean story or history; it also translates as "something said," which indicates its oral origins. The 1200's and 1300's Icelandic Old Norse literary production records the cultures of the Viking Age and the Norwegian diaspora that took place before 1000, date of the Christianization of Iceland. During these two centuries, the Icelanders wrote down many sagas detailing more or less realistically the adventures of their ancestors. They also endeavored to preserve the myths and legends that had constituted the belief system of Scandinavia. In this course students will discover why Icelanders wrote so much, so well, and in so many different genres. The course focuses on the sagas that describe the social and political situations that led to the settlement of Iceland and to the discoveries of Greenland and America. It also evaluates the Vikings' mythological belief system, their concepts of heroism, individualism, prosperity, family relationships and tensions between the public and private realms, as well as the place of love in such a society. It also looks at the impacts of such historical characters as Harald Fair-Hair and Harald Hardrada. (Erussard; offered alternating years)

ENG 213 Environmental Literature What is nature? What is ecology? The "environment"?What do we mean when we talk about "environmental literature" in the era of climate change and widespread ecological crisis?The course will address these questions by putting literary texts in conversation with some of the following concepts: "nature," energy, biodiversity, sustainability, global interconnectivity, and environmental justice. We will examine texts that deconstruct the idea of nature and open up new ethical and aesthetic possibilities—for imagining and living in the era of the Anthropocene. Topics to be discussed include: ecology without nature; wilderness and nature writing; writing the environment in realist versus speculative fiction (weird fiction); the poetics of trash; the secret life of rust and dust; nuclear currents; multispecies ecologies and posthumanism. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 216 Making a Scene: Fundamentals of Writing for the Screen This course is intended to introduce students to elements and techniques of writing for the screen: film, TV, the Web. The chief challenge this kind of writing poses is learning how to tell a story in a visual medium. We're going to face that challenge by learning how to write scenes, from 1-7 pages. The premise of this procedure is that scenes are fundamental building blocks of scripts. Embodying character, location and dialogue, every scene should be a story in itself with a beginning, middle and end. This approach will allow students to work in a variety of genres - comedy, drama, Sci-Fi, Phantasy, etc., and in this way discover which genre/ genres most inspire them. Students will keep a portfolio of their scenes, and as a final project construct a sequence of scenes in a genre of their choosing that tells a bigger story. The course is writing intensive. Class attendance and participation are crucial, because during the semester students will read each other's work, and each student will have the opportunity of having her or his work discussed by the class. (Holly)

ENG 229 18th Century Novel This course is designed to be a survey of significant themes and techniques in the novels of the period, with some attention paid to continental influences and development and metamorphoses of eighteenth century themes in the novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Special attention is given to novels by and about women. (Holly)

ENG 231 Comparative Medieval Literature This course surveys some of the major forms of medieval literature - the epic, the romance, and the fable - and attempts to relate these works to the earlier classical tradition. In addition, it attempts to make both cross-cultural connections and connections with the social, historical, and philosophical levels of medieval culture. (Erussard)

ENG 232 Medieval Romance This course focuses on Old French, Anglo Norman, Viking and Middle English popular romances which are not well known, such as: Floriz and Blancheflur, Amis and Amiloun, Aucassin and Nicolete, King Horn, Havelock the Dane, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Bevis. All texts will be read in Modern English translations. These romances will be compared and contrasted with some canonical works intended for an aristocratic audience. (Erussard)

ENG 233 Medieval Drama This course offers a panorama of Medieval dramatic genres. It surveys works from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. The stylistic diversity includes the sadomasochistic plays of the Saxon canoness Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, the proto-opera form of Hildegard of Bingan, some English mystery plays from different cycles and a selection of French sexual farce. The study is based on both historicist and formalist critical analysis and on occasional classroom performance. (Erussard)

ENG 234 Chaucer: Topics Chaucer composed his poetry in the historical context of peasant risings, religious heresy, English imperialism, and the aftermath of the Black Death and in the literary context of both the Alliterative Renaissance and the influence of the French and Italian traditions. A first topic focuses on a careful reading of The Canterbury Tales and the second concentrates on a comparative study of Troilus and Criseyde and its main source, Boccaccio's II Filostrato. Both courses investigate issues surrounding the authorship, language, audience, and ideologies of Chaucer's work within the larger cultural, social, and political context of late medieval England. (Erussard)

ENG 235 The Once and Future King This course tries to answer some questions about the development of stories concerning Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. How did the possibly historical and legendary figure of Arthur and his fictitious knights came to inspire so many stories? Why do Arthurian myths continue to flourish in literature and films today? This course follows Arthur, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table from the sixth century and the medieval mists of Tintagel through their Romantic revival and to the edge of the twenty-first century. The main focus is the exploration of the emergence and the development of the legends of King Arthur and their relationship to the imaginative literature and the glorious chivalric mentality of the Middle Ages. All texts and their textual characteristics are studied within their historical and socio-cultural contexts. Therefore, the basic approach is both formalist and historicist. (Erussard)

ENG 236 Shakespeare What has made Shakespeare the most influential writer in the history of literature? This class offers an introduction to his work and to the critical practices that we employ in the field of Shakespeare studies. It presupposes no background with the subject; English majors, potential English majors, and non-majors are all welcome. Through a series of activities and projects, we will collaboratively set out to develop a skill set that will enable us not only to appreciate Shakespeare's works, but also to engage with their language and dramaturgy, to contextualize them historically, and to push back against them politically, and to play with them creatively. (There will be a series of evening film screenings in this class, but alternative arrangements will be made for anyone who can't attend them.) (Carson)

ENG 239 18th C. Literature & Art This course offers a topology of desire in the 18th century as it manifests itself in literary, architectural, and graphic productions. This course pays special attention to fantasies of power; architectural fantasies and imaginary landscapes; the oppositions of Gothicism and Classicism; the garden and the city; the sublime and the beautiful; and the relationship of the teleology of desire to narrative form. (Holly)

ENG 240 Victorian Poets The poets of the nineteenth century lived in an age of rapid change, as well as the questioning and re-thinking of once-established truths. They saw themselves as participants in the collective (though not-always concerted) effort of their age to make sense of their changing world and influence the direction their society would take in politics, religion, morality, and art, to name a few areas of concern. This course introduces students to the works of well-known Victorian poets, such as Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, and W. B. Yeats. It will also focus on Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, writers we are accustomed to think of as novelists. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 241 English Romantic Poets This course is a comprehensive look at Romanticism and its proponents, its aesthetic context and the charged political environment in which it developed and thrived. The poets of this movement saw themselves thinkers and as agents of important change in the world. The poems they wrote were like the words of a magic spell, meant to unleash the power of imagination and speak new political and intellectual realities into being. In addition to reading the works of well-known Romantics such as Wordsworth and Byron, the course examines the provocative writings of abolitionists, visionaries, and poets whose support of Revolution in France made them distrusted at home in England. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 242 Victorian Literature This course investigates origins of the modern world view as anticipated and expressed in nineteenth century English literature: the breakdown of traditional religious beliefs; the alienation and isolation of the individual; changing attitudes toward nature; the loss of communication; the role of education; and the affirmation of art. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 243 Gothic Novel This course will explore the Gothic novel from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, when Bram Stoker's Dracula first appeared. Disparaged as sensational reading likely to corrupt young women and as something that distracted men from more important things, Gothic novels were extremely popular from the moment Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto found its way into booksellers' shops. It achieved this success against a backdrop of tightening social structures on the conduct of women of the upper and newly emerging middle classes. We will explore how some 18th century Gothic novels actually reinforce the values and social mores they are accused of undermining, while others subvert values they profess to uphold. We will also explore the ways in which the definition of what is horrible or terrifying changed in response to social and historical realities. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 244 19th-Century British Novel This course will focus on the intimate, socially and emotionally complex connections between marriage, capitalism, and politics in the nineteenth century. We will explore these ideas in the context of the intertwined public and private lives of women and examine the works of at least three women writers. In addition, we will also examine the development of the novel itself in the Victorian period as it becomes increasingly focused not only on popular entertainment and the chronicling of rapidly changing times, but also on initiation and shaping of important discussions about what kind of civilization the British wanted to have in a new age.(Minott-Ahl)

ENG 246 The Literature of Decadence This course offers an exploration of the phenomenon of decadence in its literary aspect, characterized primarily by the pursuit of heightened experience (sensory and imaginative) in the face of the social and ethical constraints of late nineteenth and early twentieth century European culture. Although our primary emphasis will be on the phenomenon of literary decadence in English, we will read a number of seminal French texts (in translation) and discuss a number of European painters and composers by which late nineteenth century English writers were inspired. We will explore the ways in which decadence can be situated historically in terms of such broader social and cultural phenomena as imperialism, poverty, the emergence of the metropolis, the emergence of socialism, the establishment of commodity capitalism, the "advent" of feminism and the New Woman, and debates about sexuality. (Cope)

ENG 247 Irish Literature Renaissance This course is designed as a sustained and extensive study of the major texts (poetic, novelistic, dramatic, essayistic) of the "Irish Renaissance" and an Irish Modernism in which thematic concerns with cultural and political nationalism converged with an abiding interest in radical forms of literary experimentation. We will look at these texts in terms of what Seamus Deane has called "Irish Renaissances": those periods of Irish literary flourishing that both inspired and were inspired by Irish Modernism. (Cope)

ENG 248 Modern British Novel This course consists of an exploration of the development and transformation of the British Novel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as exemplified by the work of three British writers. Our emphasis will be on the ways in which definitions of British culture and identity were reflected by these novelists' representations of the city, the country, and the colony as the defining social and geographical features of the British Empire. We pay close attention to the ways in which race, class, gender, and other markers of social difference and inequality are represented and redefined in the novels as the opportunities and encroachments of Modernity - increased social and geographical mobility, the emergence of commodity Capitalism, first-wave Feminism, colonial exploration and exploitation. World War - radically transform the social and cultural landscape of Britain, Europe, and the world as a whole. Novelists may include: Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf. (Cope)

ENG 249 Contemporary British Fictions In this class we will read a survey of recent British fiction, a selection of first-rate novels and short stories that examine changes in British identity from 1945 to the present. And we will situate these texts within a media-rich historical account of post-war Britain, by watching British films and television programs, listening to British music, and reading British news media through term. George Bernard Shaw once quipped that "England and America are two countries divided by a common language." He makes an excellent point: because there are so many superficial similarities between the two cultures, our goal will be to dig deep with our cultural analysis, exploring some of the paradoxes at the core of contemporary Britain and reflecting, in turn, on what this might reveal to us about the state of America in the present. (Carson, Hamilton)

ENG 250 Early American Literature This course surveys the development of U.S. literature up to and including the Civil War period. Literary works will be analyzed in terms of both their textual qualities and the social contexts that produced them. Readings may include Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville. Not open to students who have taken "American Literature to Melville." (Black)

ENG 251 Recovering African American Literature This course will study African American literature from the late eighteenth-century to the early twentieth-century. In this period, African Americans developed a literature to express themselves and communicate with each other. They wrote and read poetry by artists like Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar and prose by artists like Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. We will explore these texts in the context of when they were written and read, a time of radical change that these writers and readers helped enact. We will also examine the formation of African Americanist literary scholarship, without which a course like ours would be impossible. We can read this literature because other scholars have recovered it. These texts had been known at one time, but had since become lost, forgotten, or neglected. These scholars performed this work by finding these texts, by researching who wrote and read them, by preparing versions of them that presented what they had learned, and then by teaching and writing about them. In addition to reading, talking, and writing about this literature, we will ourselves engage in the collaborative work of literary recovery. (Black; offered in alternate years)

ENG 252 American Women Writers This course focuses on a selection of women writers who have made important contributions to U.S. literature. Authors, genres, and periods will vary depending on the instructor's area of interest and expertise. (Creadick)

ENG 254 19th Century American Poetry American poetry from the nineteenth-century can both seem too much of its own time and way ahead of its time. Poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are, in their own ways, entirely exceptional and wholly representative of verse written before the Modernist Movement. This course will explain why. In addition to spending about half of the term on Whitman and Dickinson, the course will treat the work of a dozen other poets, black and white, who worked in as many different forms. We will read authors who are better known for their prose (Poe, Melville), authors who were popular in their time but have since fallen our to critical favor (Longfellow, Whittier), and a large group of women writers who were described, and were often dismissed, as "poetesses." We will also read prose-like Emerson's essays, Poe's articles, Whitman's prefaces, and Dickinson's letters-that will help us understand them. Together, they will demonstrate for us the diversity of writers and writings from this period. (Black)

ENG 260 Modern American Literature This course surveys American Literature written during the first half of the twentieth century, from the Civil War to the 1940s. Focusing on the novel, we will trace the overlapping literary movements of this era, including realism, naturalism, and especially modernism. We will chart the personal, social, and political forces (such as industrialization, immigration, war, feminism, urbanization, depression) that shaped the production and reception of these literary works. Not open to students who have taken "American Literature from Crane." (Creadick)

ENG 261 Popular Fiction When a novel acquires a mass readership, does it lose aesthetic value? What is the difference between "literary fiction" and "popular fiction"? Focusing on a genre fiction, cult bestsellers, middlebrow blockbusters, "pulp" or "trash" fiction produced across American history, this course invites students to consider the politics of taste and hierarchies of literary value embedded in popular reading practices. Students will read these literary works alongside a number of primary and secondary texts in order to illuminate the pleasures and anxieties of reading. (Creadick)

ENG 263 Jewish-American Fiction This course will trace chronologically the course and development of Jewish American fiction in the 20th century and survey the work of some of its great writers. We will tackle the issues of the immigrant, the outside and the condition of minority status. We will address the issues and problems around assimilation to do with identity, language, religious belief and values, class and anti-Semitism. We will address the changing experience of women in the confrontation with a new culture and with an evolving American culture. We will also examine the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish-American identity and its ramifications in the children-of-survivors generation. Authors may include Yezierska, Roth, Malamud, Bellow, Paley, Elkin, Ozick, and Shteyngart. (Staff)

ENG 264 Southern Fictions An introduction to fiction from the American South as well as to fictions of the American South from the late-19th century to the present. We will analyze works by major southern authors to uncover what if anything they have in common. We will also look at "The South" itself as a kind of fiction - constructed through literature, film, and popular culture. Through readings that cluster around subgenres of southern fiction and contemporary "grit lit" movements, we will work to unpack the tensions around sex, race, class and religion that have haunted southern fiction from its beginnings. (Creadick)

ENG 266 Modernist American Poetry This course is a study of selected major early twentieth century figures, including Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, H. D., Jean Toomer, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. (Cowles)

ENG 267 Post WWII American Poetry An introduction to contemporary American poetry, this course emphasizes both the close reading of poems and the placing of recent American poetry within its social and literary contexts. (Cowles)

ENG 270 Globalization & Literature Globalism as a contemporary phenomenon has been in the ascendancy. It is, among other things, an economic, cultural, technological, and demographic phenomenon. Students examine globalism and its related metaphors of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, migrancy, exile, and so on against nationalism and its privileged metaphors of rootedness and identity. If the production of a national subject is no longer the purpose of "discipline," what does it mean to produce a transnational subject? These are some of the concerns of the fiction students read for this course. We typically begin with two famous American novels, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Don DeLillo's White Noise, to examine the impact of globalization on the United States. We then move to two South Asian novels, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Hanif Kureishi's Black Album. We end with two important novels by black women writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. (Basu)

ENG 272 India and the Global The course typically begins with two novels by famous English writers, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934). We then move to several highly acclaimed award- winning recent novels by Indian writers which are set in the United States, England, and India. Among them are The Namesake (2003; Pulitzer Prize; also a film), The God of Small Things (1997; Booker Prize), Transmission (2004), and The White Tiger (2008; Booker Prize).These primary readings will be supplemented by articles and essays which will help to contextualize the primary texts in a study of diaspora. We situate the earlier novels in the context of colonialism and the more recent ones in that of postcolonialism and globalization. We will begin by speculating about the place of "India" in the global imagination. India has many names: Bharat, Hindustan, India, British India, the Subcontinent, and the Jewel in the Crown, South Asia. Many places and peoples other than India(ns) are named after India: the East Indies, the West Indies, and of course, American Indians. Indians now inhabit Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. What and who are India(ns)? (Basu)

ENG 273 Crime Fiction This course will explore the genre that's variously called crime fiction, murder mystery, the detective novel. We will look at its origins in the 19th century, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, as a response to the Enlightenment and the positivist optimism about the powers of logic, reason and rationality to explain and know. And the genre wades into the historical nature v. nature debate, which is also the Rousseau/Hobbes debate: is "badness" innate or is it societally induced (so the ills of society make its individual members ill or corrupt). As Prospero says of Caliban: "a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick." Our seminal text will be Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, whose focus is on crime as transgression and the consequences of a "trans-valuation of values." The novel is a meditation on the nature of goodness and cruelty and weakness, self and selflessness. We will then look at some of the fine instances of the genre in the 20th century. Students will be encouraged as part of their coursework to write their own crime story as a way to understand the forces that the genre engages and works out, and to better appreciate the artfulness of the form. (Staff)

ENG 276 Imagining the Middle East This course will examine representations of the Middle East, its geography, its culture, and its peoples in literature and film. The Greater Middle East is a loosely defined geopolitical entity that extends from Pakistani-Indian border to the Northern shores of Africa. Students will learn about the region as seen and imagined through the eyes of both foreigners and natives, Western and non-Western writers, travel journalists, soldiers, bloggers, colonists, refugees, and migrants. The course will explore the stereotypes that define representations of the Middle East in the West; most specifically, we will address Edward Said's claim that the Middle East became trapped in swarm of interrelated notions he defined as Orientalism. Said insists that Orientalism is a fiction produced by the western mind and subsequently used to justify colonial exploration, validate the need for human rights interventions, while also constructing the region as a site of an exotic adventure. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 286 The Art of the Screen Play Screenplays are the blueprints of movies. In this course students read screenplays and study the films that have been made from them. Special attention is paid to such elements as story, structure, character development, and to the figurative techniques for turning written text into moving image. Prerequisite: ENG 200. (Holly)

ENG 287 Jane Austen in Film Because Jane Austen's novels are essentially her own, written creations and films based on them are collaborative and characterized by sound, motion, and visual detail, the two media approach narrative in fundamentally different ways. We will consider to what extent a film version of a Jane Austen novel is an entirely new work that is artistically independent of the original. We will also examine the consequences of viewing such films as translations of Austen's novels both for the filmmakers who approach their projects this way and for critics who read the films from this perspective. While we will certainly take into account the techniques employed by directors and screenwriters to create a coherent and effective narrative that captures the original story—according to their notions of what this means—as they strive to keep the finished film within a reasonable running time, it is important to note that this is not a film course. The focus here is on the interplay between two methods of storytelling that results when novels written by an author who deliberately avoids description are made into films. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 290 Creative Writing This course offers introductory techniques in the writing of both fiction and poetry. The workshop format emphasizes group discussion of the writings of class members. Readings of modern authors supplement discussions of form and technique. This course is normally required as a prerequisite for fiction and poetry workshops. Prerequisite: at least one other ENG course. Not open to students who have taken ENG 190. (Hamilton, Cowles, Staff)

ENG 294 Intermediate Craft of Fiction A workshop devoted to the creation and critiquing of student fiction, this course is suitable for students with some experience with college-level fiction writing. Students are expected to produce a portfolio of polished stories; reading will explore the history of the short story, and the establishment of conventions of craft. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 190/290 is generally required. (Hamilton)

ENG 300 Literary Theory Since Plato This course offers a survey and analysis of major trends in the understanding of literature from Plato to the present. (Cope)

ENG 301 Cultural Theory Course also listed as AMST 301. This course introduces cultural studies as a major area of contemporary theory which has reshaped the way we think and write about literature. Critical cultural studies, historicism, and reception theory have expanded understandings of literary meaning to include production and reception of those texts as well as their ideological content and consequences. Students read theoretical essays by such thinkers as Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, White, Butler, and Baudrillard, as well as examples of scholars applying these ideas to the study of literature and other cultural forms. Students will then become the critics, applying these theories to the contemporary literary, material and popular culture "texts" that surround them - stories, poems, film, photographs, toys, fashion, sports, and music. (Creadick)

ENG 302 History of the English Language The purpose of this course is threefold. First, it surveys the development of English from its earliest forms to its functions and varieties since it emerged as an official language after the decline of French. This history starts with the 5,000-year-old reconstructed Indo-European language; it then moves from the Germanic branch of languages to the Old English literary vernacular in the British Isles and to the interplay of Old English, Norman French and Lahn and the advent of Middle English. It follows the evolution through the "great vowel shift" and looks at the rise of the English literary vernacular as it appears in the works of Shakespeare, in the King James Bible, and Samuel Johnson's dictionary. Second, it explores definitions of language and the theories of language acquisition. Consequently, it familiarizes students with the "scientific tools" of linguistic studies: articulatory phonetics and phonology, the mechanics of language changes, socio-linguistics, and comparative philology. Finally third, this course will also deploy ways to look at language and language change, at the status of standards, at the descriptive or prescriptive roles of dictionaries. It will dismantle Babel by exposing some of the commonly believed myths about language. (Erussard; not open to students who have taken ENG 201)

ENG 304 Feminist Literary Criticism This course is designed to introduce students to feminist literary theories and critical practices that are considered to be of crucial importance in the field of feminist literary theory today. It focuses on such issues as female sexualization, representations of violence and madness, and subjectivity. During the course of the term we will read and discuss a large variety of texts and methodologies written by some of the most influential feminist theorists today. Students will also become familiarized with the context in which these texts were written and learn how these various methodologies can be applied to the study of literary works. The course is an excellent opportunity to broaden your horizons and learn about new ideas. It is also an opportunity to acquire advanced critical thinking skills through an encounter with very complex and dense texts. As a result of this course, students should be able to have a better understanding of contemporary feminist and post-feminist culture by placing contemporary cultural practices in the context of feminist intellectual tradition. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 305 Psychoanalysis & Literature Aside from its aspirations to being medicine or a science, psychoanalysis constitutes a powerful theory of reading, which, in its emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century, corresponds to the revolution in interpretation which continues into our own time. The aim of this course is to study this theory of reading in order to show how it is the foundation of such interpretive concepts and procedures as close reading, text, and the intentional fallacy, as well as being both the source and critique of the modern handling of such interpretational elements as image, myth, and meaning. (Holly)

ENG 310 Power, Desire, Literature The course uses a sadomasochistic framework to examine the relationship between power and desire as it is represented in literature and popular culture. The term "sadomasochism" (commonly, S&M) collapses two terms, sadism (after the famous French writer, the Marquis de Sade) and masochism (after the famous German writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch). A sadist is one who derives (sexual) pleasure from inflicting pain and/or degrading another. A masochist is one derives (sexual) pleasure from being subjected to pain and/or degradation by another. We will use Nietzschean, Freudian, and Marxist theories to read some of the classic texts of sadomasochism. We will also try to understand its pervasiveness in contemporary culture in texts as disparate as Fifty Shades of Grey, film, television, commercials, and videos by Rhianna, Britney Spears, and others. Some of the readings will contain explicit descriptions of violence and sex. (Basu)

ENG 311 Story and History Fiction writers have long been enchanted with the writing of historians, at times imitating, at times stealing, and even at times attempting to pass their inventions off as legitimate history. Since the 1960s, historians have also considered the role of fiction in their work. To what extent is history fiction? This course examines the evolution of the relationship between history writing and fiction, moments of cross-over such as falsified documents and hoaxes, and the way contemporary writers wrestle with the murky territory between the two. (Hamilton)

ENG 312 Bible as Literature The Bible is a formative text of major religious, political, philosophical, and, in some cases, national significance, but the Bible is also a phenomenal literary project that has influenced generations of readers and writers. This course surveys the main books of the Old and New Testaments through a literary prism by focusing on the rhetorical, formal, narrative, and generic aspects of select biblical stories. Students will be introduced to the historical and theological contexts that allowed the formation of the Bible, but this course aims to look beyond those contexts and read the Holy Scriptures as a literary work. By exposing students to different genres within the biblical texts such as creation myths, poetry, prophecies, parables, and visions, we will try to define a "biblical aesthetic," and explore the relationship between content and form. (Erussard)

ENG 314 The Art of Memoir The memoir is one of the most popular literary forms today, but the form is as old as St. Augustine, and may be considered the first literary art-form. Through discussion, lecture, and exercises, this class will explore a multitude of memoirs, discussing their literary merit, formal qualities, and intricacies. This class will also discuss concepts related to psychology regarding memory, and will use exercises to help students better understand how well their memories (don't) work. (Staff)

ENG 316 Hearts of Darkness This course explores the European encounter with the non-Western world; in the encounter with that which is alien, an exploration of Western culture and the Western psyche takes place. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the archetype of this encounter. In the 100 years since it was written, Western and non-Western writers have constructed versions and counter-versions of it. Colonialism, identity, love, religion, freedom, justice, the nature of the self, and the complex character of western civilization itself are all subjects. Students read each fiction by the light of its own structure and intent as well as in dialogue with Conrad. Authors may include V.S. Naipaul, Norman Rush, David Malouf, Peter Matthiessen, Tayeb Salih, Barry Unsworth, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene and others. (Weiss)

ENG 317 Shakespearean Adaptation Shakespeare's plays are not isolated and fixed points, but instead exist within a broad textual continuum: he almost always adapted his material from earlier texts and, in turn, his plays have often been adapted into other works of fiction, poetry, drama, music, dance, film, and television. In this class, we will pay some attention to Shakespeare as an adapter, but mostly we will explore how Shakespeare plays have been appropriated and repurposed over the past 400 years. For example, we might compare stage versions of King Lear from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries with Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Ran and Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres. What makes Shakespeare so adaptable? How can we determine where "Shakespeare" stops and where "adaptation" begins on this continuum? And how do different cultures and different eras make their mark on Shakespeare by means of adaptation? (Carson)

ENG 318 Cultures of Medicine This course investigates concepts of health and illness through literature and linked readings in criticism. We will consider the topic from a comparative cultural standpoint, looking at medicine in North and South American and the Caribbean, with emphasis on indigenous and diasporic cultures. We will begin by critically examining the origins, features, assumptions, and social organization of Western biomedicine. Then, departing from this perspective, we will investigate forms of illness and healing within some cultures of the Western hemisphere, paying attention to different narrative constructions of body/mind, self/community, and illness/wellness in communities of:Haiti, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Hmong Americans, the African American Sea Islands, U.S. American Indian (Pueblo), and colonial Latin America. We will situate the assumptions, beliefs, and experiences of illness and healing of these communities within their complex histories and traditional literary or story telling forms, including oral tales, revisionist history, magical realism, and modifications of European genres such as the bildungsroman. The course will end with a postmodern novel that offers auto-critique of biomedicine. By the end of the course, students will have a breadth and depth of understanding of the ways in which health and illness (both somatic and psychic) reflect diverse cultural values and histories as well as how literary narrative enacts/intervenes in historical struggles with other cultures. (Staff)

ENG 319 Health and Social Justice Through reading among multiple genres (fictions, drama, memoir, journalism, public policy), this course examines the social determinants of illness and care from a discourse analysis perspective. We will study the impact of language on the perception of disease and healthcare distribution among people of different socioeconomic classes, races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and abilities. We will also consider the role of language and distinct discourse communities in actuating the legal, ethical and public policy dimensions of health and healthcare. Four units juxtapose nonfictional and fictional narratives of health issues with U. S. policies in order to examine major U. S. health issues. Units include: 1) Race and Gender in Medical Research; 2) AIDS, Sexuality, and CARE; 3) disability and the Right to Self-Determination; 4) Current Healthcare Reform and Class. In each unit, we will consider relationships among discourse, social power, and health by asking. (Staff)

ENG 330 Male Heroism in the Middle Ages This course studies a broad array of ideals of heroic masculinity in a variety of medieval cultural contexts. Examining questions of epic violence, heroic extravagance, dramatic sainthood and impetuous love, this course follows heroes of legend, romance and history from the battlefield to the woods, from the bedroom to the hermitage. The cast of characters will include Beowulf, Guthlac, El Cid, Siegfried, Amadis of Gaul, Perceval, the outlaws of Icelandic sagas, Saint Francis and many more. (Erussard)

ENG 331 Iconoclastic Women Since the last third of the twentieth century, feminist literary criticism has paid attention to the realm of medieval women which, for diverse reasons, had "previously been an empty space" (Showalter) This course looks at a variety of unconventional female lives in hagiography, fiction, history and legend from Perpetua, the 3rd century saint, to Joan of Arc, the fifteenth century warrior. Though this is not an historical survey, we will respect the chronology in order to recognize evolutions and evaluate influences as we read the story of Silence and the writings of Hrotsvit, Hildegard, Marie de France, Eloise, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan and others. Most texts will focus on medieval Europe, but we will also explore the point of views of some Asian female writers. This will allow us to compare and contrasts the views of educated, court women in different parts of the world, during the same historical period. (Erussard)

ENG 336 Shakespeare: Topics Course material varies with the topic presented.

ENG 338/438 Milton: Paradise Lost This course will devote itself to reading Paradise Lost. Our work will be to understand Paradise Lost, its poetics, its structure, its story, its political, theological and sexual ideas; its historical moment of the English revolution. To do this we will read some criticism and history, some of Milton's prose, in the Norton, which he devoted the middle years of his life to writing before Paradise Lost, and we will read some sonnets and early poems to familiarize ourselves with Milton's style and more generally, how a poem makes its meaning. (Staff)

ENG 340 The Architectural Novel This course focuses on how Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Ainsworth, and Alexandre Dumas use fictional narrative to make sense of the realities of their age. From about 1792 to the late 1840s, when revolution was again in the air in Europe, the last remnants of feudalism in England and France, in particular, were swept away by the tides of political unrest, technological advances, and economic change. These novelists supply architecture, history, legend and landscape as the basis for understanding the events of their own present. In their novels, the gothic building becomes a point of reference for exploration of the nature of the novel itself, the relevance of medieval architecture in post-feudal societies, the vanishing of ancient buildings, landscapes, and traditions in the face economic change and industrial revolution, as well as the idea of a national art - and of nation itself. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 342 Modernist Experiments Poems with footnotes, portraits in prose, characters in search of authors, manifestoes praising plastic surgery and the demolition of museums, translations from the Chinese (redacted by editors who don't know the Chinese language): these are some of things modernism is known for. In the first half of the twentieth century writers working in a variety of genres, visual artists, and musicians were convinced that the available forms of artistic expression were outmoded. Our focus: the ways they experimented with language and literary form to represent a distinctly "modern" experience, one that needed to accommodate the realities of world war, the "discovery" of the unconscious, advances in transport and communication technologies, mass production and consumption, and the rise (and fall) of empires. (Cope)

ENG 344 Joyce This course consists of a sustained and in-depth reading and analysis of the early fiction of James Joyce. We will supplement our readings of Joyce's stories and novels with readings of his dramatic and poetic writing as well as his literary and political essays. Additionally, we will attend to the ways in which Joyce's biography provided material for his writing. Our topics will be varied, but we will pay particular attention to the ways in which the formal and aesthetic dimensions of Joyce's experimentalism intersect with his critical representations of race, class, gender, religion, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, economics, and colonialism. Students should expect to gain an informed appreciation of Joyce's importance to the development of twentieth century literature and intellectual thought, to sharpen their critical and analytical reading and writing skills, and to develop a working knowledge of Irish history and the literary, cultural, and political dimensions of both Irish and European Modernity. (Cope)

ENG 345/445 Ulysses Often considered the greatest novel of the twentieth century (and considered by some the greatest novel in history), James Joyce's Ulysses is also among the most difficult novels to read. At once thrilling, edifying, frustrating, baffling, bemusing, seductive, repulsive, compassionate, confounding (the list could go indefinitely), few novels have commanded the scholarly attention of James Joyce's penultimate novel. In this class, we will read the novel in terms of some of the question that have animated Joyce criticism over the past half-century: is Ulysses exemplary of cosmopolitan Modernism or is it a post-colonial novel? Is it an exercise in misogyny or a proto- Feminist intervention? Elitist or populist? Because the book is so relentlessly allusive, it will be necessary for us to refer to some of the literary, philosophical, and historical materials Joyce incorporated into his novel, including Irish history, Jewish history, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the geography of Dublin, and Thomist philosophy. Although it is not necessary, students who have not already done so might wish to familiarize themselves with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the Odyssey and Hamlet, as these are all important foreground materials for Joyce's experiment. (Cope)

ENG 346 20th Century Eastern European Fiction This course explores the modernist reinvention of the novel that occurred in those countries of Europe that until recently were part of the Soviet Bloc: Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The course begins with Franz Kafka and his harrowing dreams of the modern world, and the place of the individual in it, which anticipate many experiences of this century. The works read register the historical experiences of the first and second World Wars and of the totalitarian states that emerged after 1945. (Weiss)

ENG 351 Archives of American Literature Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that "language is the archives of history." This course will explore early American history through literature. In addition to reading historical fiction, autobiography, epic poetry, and other genres that revisit and revise the past, we will investigate how researchers come to know it. In other words, we will study the theory and practice of archives. What do these literary examinations of the country's past say about its present? How is the historical record created and preserved for, and how will it be accessed in, the future? Who and what gets left out, and why does it matter? Our authors, who may include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Marie Child, and Pauline Hopkins, will use writing to reckon with the past. And so will we. (Black)

ENG 352 Shakespeare History We begin by reading three history plays that Shakespeare used for source material and inspiration, and then move on to consider his five most important English history plays, arguably the most impressive work from the first half of his career. We will read the plays with a great deal of attention to their relationship to early modern political theory, to early modern historiography, and also to the remarkable dramaturgy Shakespeare employs to extract such compelling stories from the raw fabric of history. These plays have fared better on screen than most of Shakespeare's plays, and so depending on class interest, we may well schedule regular screenings to accompany our readings. (Carson)

ENG 353 Media in Early America Scholars of early American media take printed matter and other cultural objects as artifacts of the lives of Americans. Before the twentieth-century, Americans used letters, journals, books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines to express themselves and to communicate with each other. They were also informed and entertained by paintings, sculptures, panoramas, plays, demonstrations, lectures, sheet music, hymnals, and songsters. Literature, in other words, was one medium among many others. Writers like Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson used language like other artists use their tools. In this course we will primarily study literary language as it was manifested on paper, though we will also examine how other cultural forms, like art and music, were mediated through print. We will interest ourselves in every stage of text's production: from how it was written to how it was read. In addition to exploring technologies of representation before the photograph and the phonograph, we will investigate the ways that digitization changes what we can experience and what we can know, of early American culture. (Black)

ENG 360 Sexuality and American Literature This course focuses on the literary production of sexuality and subjectivity in America. It considers the works in light of Michael Foucault's theory of the deployment of sexuality and feminist discussions on the politics of sexuality, and looks at the relationships between sexuality, power, and resistance both within novels and within their respective cultural contexts. (Creadick)

ENG 362 Body, Memory, Representation We begin with a slave narrative from the nineteenth century, and we then turn to a twentieth century narrative form that has been called the neo-slave narrative. Black women writers have initiated an important line of inquiry in these reconstructions of slavery in fiction. In these texts, they represent the desires of slaves, and, at a fundamental level, the course examines the relationship between power and desire and the suggestion that desire itself cannot be evacuated of power relations. We will compare these narratives to sadomasochistic narratives and end the semester by comparing them to Masoch's Venus in Furs. (Basu)

ENG 370 Geographies of Nowhere This course examines representations of the frontier, its structure, its role in our collective imagination, and the part it played in Western colonial expansion by focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century world literature and film. A frontier is usually imagined as a place that is far away from the "center": it is where civilization meets wilderness and humans face nature. The frontier is thus usually a contested space, a place of tension and uncertainty. In this course, we will focus on spaces that can be called global frontiers, among them the High Arctic (Alaska and Northern Canada), the Global South (interior Africa), and the Mysterious East (Afghanistan). All these spaces are fantasy locations that we view as either uncharted territories where nothing goes on (such as the Arctic) or as all- too-chaotic locations where too much goes on (such as Afghanistan). (Ivanchikova)

ENG 375 Nabokov, Borges, Calvino In this close examination of the works of these three most important modern writers, special attention is paid to parallels between their works and movements in the visual arts, and to the implications of self-conscious narrative. (Holly)

ENG 376 Who Am I? Identity in World Literature Can stories shape our understanding of who we are and help us find our own unique place in the world? By engaging with a variety of contemporary narratives from around the globe, students will examine how personal and collective identities are constructed, expressed, and transmitted. We will talk about identity in its relationship to desire, power, asceticism, consumption, faith, and nihilism. We will consider the ways in which narratives of identity shed light on one of life's greatest mysteries - the mystery of the self. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 388 Environmental Nonfiction Writing Workshop In this class we'll look at individual essays, full-length essay collections, and narrative nonfiction books related to the natural world. We'll learn how to incorporate research to make compelling narratives with surprising insights and arguments. In addition to discussing what separates and intersects environmental and nature writing, students will advance not only their creative writing ability through exercises and written papers, but also their research ability in choosing environmental topics to research. Students will develop a facility in a variety of nonfiction writing modes over the course of the semester. For models, we'll read writers such as Terry Tempest Williams, E.O. Wilson, Joyce Carol Oates, Gretel Ehrlich, Paul Kingsnorth, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, and Pam Houston. This class is designed for any student interested in furthering her/his/their skills in creative writing. (Staff)

ENG 390 Trias Topics Workshop The Trias Workshop is an intensive, practice-based studio course based in the resident's genre. Students are expected to read assignments in contemporary literature, complete writing exercises, read and critically respond to other students' work, and produce a portfolio of polished, original writing. Students will be expected to attend all Trias events in the fall and to engage with the work of visiting writers. Admissions to the workshop is by application only. (Trias Writer-in-Residence)

ENG 391 Advanced Poetry Workshop For students highly motivated to write poetry, this course offers the opportunity to study, write, and critique poetry in an intensive workshop and discussion environment. Students will produce multiple poems, write critically in response to contemporary works of poetry, and produce, workshop, and revise a chapbook-length collection of poems as a final project. Class time is divided between discussions of contemporary poetry and workshops on student writing. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 190/290 is generally required. (Cowles)

ENG 392 Small Press Book Publishing: Book Contest and Acquisitions Editing In this course, students will help publish a book. We will focus on small press acquisitions editing through the facilitation of Seneca Review's first biennial Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Contest. The editors of Seneca Review will have narrowed down manuscript submissions to approximately 15 semi-finalists. Over the course of the semester, students will have the opportunity both to learn about and to engage in the acquisitions editorial process by reading, discussing, and evaluating each of the semi-finalist manuscripts and by ultimately helping select five finalists. The TRIAS resident will meet with the class several times and serve as the contest judge. Students will work in small groups to pitch one of the finalist manuscripts to the judge. By engaging in the book publishing and acquisitions process, students will grapple with such questions as: How do lyric essays and hybrid texts work in conjunction with one another in a book-length manuscript? What makes a creative manuscript good and how do we weigh it against competing manuscripts with different strengths? And how can we distinguish between manuscripts that cross the threshold into the realm of literary excellence and those that do not? (Babbitt)

ENG 393 Fiction Workshop II: Theory of Fiction Writers represent a loose theoretical camp which addresses issues like the creative process, experimental writing, and the relationship between art and politics, in a way that other areas of literacy criticism do not. In this course, we will use writing and readings in theory and cutting edge experimental fiction in order to explore some of these issues. This course is suitable for students strongly committed to fiction writing. Fiction I and Fiction II may be taken in either order. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 260 is generally required. (Hamilton)

ENG 394 Workshop: The Craft of Fiction An intensive workshop devoted to the creation and critiquing of student fiction, this course is suitable for students strongly committed to fiction writing. Students are expected to produce a portfolio of polished stories. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 190/290 is generally required. (Hamilton)

ENG 396 The Lyric Essay HWS is the birthplace of the lyric essay. It was in the introduction to the Fall 1997 issue of Seneca Review that esteemed HWS professor Deborah Tall and Hobart alumnus John D'Agata gave the lyric essay its most seminal and enduring definition, which begins by characterizing the new hybrid form as "a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem, give[s] primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, [and] forsake[s] narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation." We will begin our course examining the essays of Tall, D'Agata, and writers published in Seneca Review. And in order to gain an appreciation of the lyric essay as an inherently innovative, ever-evolving, genre-busting art form, we will proceed to study a wide range of essayists. Students will both create their own lyric essays and respond critically to each other¹s creative work in regularly held workshops. (Babbitt)

ENG 397 Creative Nonfiction Workshop This is a writing course in creative nonfiction designed for English majors or others seriously interested in working to develop their own voices in the medium of the personal essay. Students read and discuss essays by major contemporary American essayists. They also read and discuss each other's essays in a workshop with an eye toward revision. Participants should be prepared to write one essay a week. Prerequisite: permission of instructor, based on a writing sample. (Babbitt, Staff)

ENG 398 Screenwriting I This course offers a workshop in the fundamentals of writing the motion picture. Weekly writing assignments move students through a process of script development - from brainstorming and the movie in a paragraph to the treatment/outline, beat sheet, the creation of a scene, and the first act. Students share work and engage in a variety of exercises designed to help each tell his or her stories. Prerequisites: ENG 286. (Holly)

ENG 399 Hybrid Forms Workshop New publication methods and technologies change art. From the printing press, to the typewriter, the record player, the camera, or the film reel, artists have used new technologies to expand our notions of art and to skirt borders of genres and media. In the advent of the internet and digITA technologies, the possibilities for expansion and experimentation have again exploded, and contemporary artists are involved in a renaissance of hybrid forms that has become bigger than the technologies that started it. Poets are using cameras and bullhorns, musicians are using kitchen utensils, translators are using languages they don't actually speak, artists are using old books and exacto knives, sculptors are using live (and not live) human bodies, film directors are using colored pencils and moth wings, dancers are using dirt and armchairs. In this creative writing workshop, the focus will be on hybrid texts that include language in some form. We'll track a strange vein of precedent for contemporary hybrid texts across decades and even centuries, we'll explore what artists and writers are producing right now, and we'll create and workshop our own hybrid texts. We'll learn new critical language for talking about such texts, and we'll participate in collaborative and guerilla art projects. Artists from outside the English Department who are interested in working with language in some way are encouraged to ask for permission, even if they have not taken ENG 290. Prerequisites: ENG 190/290 or permission of the instructor. (Cowles)

ENG 432 Malory: Morte D'Arthur In the fifteenth-century, as the Eastern part of the Roman Empire collapsed and as England suffered the consequences of the plague and strained under the repeated threats of multiple wars, Sir Thomas Malory found himself in prison and wrote his monumental Le Morte d'Arthur. This course centers on the development of the Arthurian story in Mallory's fiction. The text of Le Morte d'Arthur will be read in its original fifteen century prose and in relation to its specific historical, political, and cultural contexts. It will also be read as prison literature and as an example of derivative literature. Because students will be reading and comparing different accounts of similar narratives, this course will emphasize close readings and source studies research. The first printing of Malory's work was made by Caxton in 1485. Only two copies of this original printing are known to exist and one of them can be seen in the collections of the Morgan Library & Museum. We will try to organize a trip to NY City to look at the original 15th century edition. (Erussard)

ENG 437 The Faerie Queene Has anyone ever written a poem that is more awe-inspiring the Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene? A rollicking adventure story, a powerful national epic, a searching philosophical meditation and guide for moral conduct, a profound exploration of renaissance theology, a pointed critique of traditional attitudes toward gender and class, a widely imaginative work of fantasy, and, not least, a deeply beautiful poem unto itself: this is surely one of the most fascinating works in all of English literature. We will read the whole poem, top to bottom, paying special attention to historical questions about gender, class politics, and religion. (Carson)

ENG 441 Writing Women This course will reconstruct the social and legal conditions under which British women lived in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Together, we will use research skills and techniques learning in previous English coursework to examine the work and lives of women writers who used the print medium to construct a new femininity in this age of increasing female presence in the work force, increasing discontentment with legal and economic disadvantage, and restrictive social mores in a rapidly modernizing and more urban age. In our investigations, we will look at journals and read letters written by women living in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain with a view to understanding their concerns as they understood them. Through close reading and analysis of their writings, we will also explore the ways in which they reproduced and struggled against the discourses that enabled economic and political disadvantage and the simultaneous silencing and exploration of their creativity by a largely male literary establishment. In addition to such writers as Virginia Woolf, Sarah Grand, and Olive Schreiner, we will also examine the male writers such as John Stuart Mill who lent their more audible voices to the causes of gender equality and women's suffrage and George Gissing, who so intimately depicts the lives of ordinary people navigating rapidly changing times. In addition to primary source material and as part of the capstone to the English major, we will also be reading and discussing modern investigations of the New Woman and discussing the approaches and methodologies of the various scholars whose work we will encounter. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 450 Independent Study

ENG 456 1/2 Credit Independent Study ENG 495 Honors

ENG 458 The American 1850's The 1850's was a period of unprecedented artistic production in the history of the United States, one that's arguably been unmatched since. In the SPN of ten years, writers like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe published major works of prose and verse that experimented with literary conventions and responded to the times. In addition to attending to issues of form and context, this course will consider the relationship between literature and culture and politics and history. Along the way, we will read foundational works of scholarship, revisit classic debates, and participate in current conversations. As part of this process, students will write and present a research paper, as well as collaborate on other critical and creative projects. (Black)

ENG 465 Reading Faulkner William Faulkner (1897-1962) sits comfortable atop a hierarchy of Great American Writers. Famous for his modernist prose experimentation in such classic works as The sound and The Fury or Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner also boldly explored dark and disturbing themes of race and place in America through works like Light in August, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust. But Faulkner also wrote Hollywood screenplays, wrote short stories for cash, and wrote other sorts of novels--works of picaresque comedy, doomed romance, and potboiler noir criminality. Faulkner himself "read everything," from pulps to classics, and that reading, inevitably, shaped his own writing. In this course we will "read Faulkner" by investigating a broader range of his literary production, from the most canonical works to the more marginalized ones. We will situate his works by incorporating a book-length critical biography of Faulkner into our reading, as well as exploring an array of literary criticism. (Creadick)

ENG 470 Representing 9/11 Wars Representing 9/11 Wars will interrogate the corpus of cultural texts (novels, film, memoirs, drama, travel writing) about Afghanistan that was published in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. By examining the frames of cultural reference, images, themes, and aesthetics that emerge in these texts, students will gain a richer understanding of the post-9/11 global novel and the place mediated wars in the global post-9/11 imaginary. Students will learn how the global novel recasts, reframes, and remediates scenes of war-induced suffering we are already exposed to 24/7 in a hypermediated world, positioning the reader as a witness to wars that are, paradoxically, both distant and close. The post-9/11 global novel exhibits a specific aesthetic sensibility that is a sedimentation of its historical context: it registers the global state of war and the proximity of distant suffering; maps cartographies of casualties; tackles the issues of scale (close-ups of the suffering body versus the large scale of the world); grapples with understanding the extent of militarization of ordinary lives as well as new configurations of power in today's world; and addresses the issues of empathy, developments in critical theory. Students will be required to write an extensive research paper on one of the topics discussed in the course.

ENG 489 Capstone: Medieval Outlaws This course examines the concept of outlawry in the medieval cultures of England, France and Scandinavia. It defines the concept of 'outlaw' as a leader of some rebellion who breaks the law, is exiled from it, is pursued, tracked, and imprisoned or killed. If imprisoned, the outlaw usually escapes and represents an alternative system of social or personal order that is superior to the accepted order. The course identifies coherent groups of outlaw and categorizes their lives according to their environments and relationships to society, to the Church and to authority in general. It surveys texts originally written in Latin, old French, Old Norse and Middle English (some Middle English texts will be read in the original). This capstone will be an opportunity for students to review and examine more deeply the characteristics of many literary genres they encountered during their studies: popular ballads, historical accounts, chronicles, satire, autobiography, romance, literary complaint or 'song,' fable, mock-epic, hagiography, Icelandic saga.

ENG 490 Trias Tutorial Under the direction of the Trias Writer-in-Residence, students will work towards the production of a full portfolio of creative writing, suitable for publication or submission as a writing sample to graduate school in the field. Students will pursue individualized reading lists, produce new work on a bi-weekly basis, and complete substantial revisions of their efforts.

ENG 493 Jr/Sr Seminar Theory of Fiction Course also listed as ENG 315. Writers represent a loose theoretical camp, which addresses issues like the creative process, experimental writing, and the relationship between art and politics, in a way that other areas of literacy criticism do not. In this course, we will use writing and readings in theory and cutting edge experimental fiction in order to explore some of these issues. This course is suitable for students strongly committed to fiction writing. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 190/290 is generally required. (Hamilton)