Course Bulletin Fall 2017 and Summer 2017
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English Department Course Bulletin Fall 2017 and Summer 2017 Note to Majors: We are delighted by your interest in our upper level classes, and we look forward to studying and working together. One word of advice: Upper level classes are challenging, with strong reading and writing requirements. Please ask yourself how many upper level classes you can really take well in one semester, without throwing the course reading overboard or writing hastily and regrettably. The department, in general, recommends no more than two upper level English courses in a given semester. Also, we have observed in past semesters the custom of students registering for a number of upper level classes, only to drop them at some point “later” in the process. This practice can clog up registration and create enrollment headaches for your peers and our waitlists. As Hamlet counsels, “Pray you, avoid it.” In any event, we wish you the best on your intellectual growth, and we look forward to sharing our love of great literature with you. Students interested in a great humanities elective are welcome as well. Note to Future Majors: We are happy that you are interested in the English major, and we welcome you to join our community of teachers, thinkers, and writers. If you choose to major in English, please be sure to declare your major with the Registrar and transition to a major advisor in the English department. If you have any questions about the English major, feel free to make an appointment with the department chair. For those starting out on the English major, the best course of action is to make your way through the 300s (the core of our major) to the 400s (our seminars), with good and deliberate order and planning. You will note, for example, that many 400s have a specific 300 as a prerequisite. Your major advisor will help you choose a good path through the major program and beyond. Welcome! Note to Rising Sophomores: We look forward to introducing you to the love and glory of studying great literature in the Fall English 105 core class. As you know, English 105 is our required core course, which all students must take in the Fall semester of their sophomore year. Please be sure to register right away in an open section of 105; those who choose not to register will be placed in open sections later by the Registrar. English Department Fall 2017 Offerings English 201-01: T/Th 2.30-3.45pm Dr. Ellen Condict English 201-02: Tuesdays 7-10pm Dr. Brent Cline This course, which satisfies the Western Literature core requirement, introduces the student to Great Books of European literature from the Renaissance to modern times. Some emphasis will be placed on the literature in the context of general historical and artistic periods and movements: Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism. When appropriate, the function and form of literary works (for instance, the lyric, the novel, the short story) will be discussed. Authors studied may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, Cervantes, Voltaire, Goethe, Rousseau, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and Solzhenitsyn. 300 Level Courses English 310: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval British Literature Dr. Patricia Bart T/Th 6-7:15pm Readings will run from Caedmon's hymn though the Canterbury Tales, with Beowulf, Judith, "The Battle of Maldon," "The Dream of the Rood," "Wanderer," "Seafarer," Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman as ports of call along the way. You will gain an Old English vocabulary useful for understanding the social, theological and philosophical aspects of the Anglo-Saxon works that are unfamiliar to us today, and you will also come to appreciate how even the words familiar in the Middle English texts will often have changed profoundly in meaning over the intervening centuries. There are no prerequisites for this course besides discipline and ambition, two virtues common to those whose strength rejoices. CCA-SA 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Gen, 2.0 Gen., 1.0 Gen. 2005 by Odejea Course ReQuirements: Two papers, one of them an annotated bibliography leading to insightful interpretation of a text, which constitutes the second; a midterm and final. 2 English 320: Renaissance British Literature Dr. Benedict Whalen MWF 1:00-1:50 This course examines English literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a period that reaches from the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation to the English Civil War, and includes, among other things, the glories of Elizabethan theatre, the heyday of the English sonnet sequences, several great English epics, and the flourishing of English devotional verse. Complete works covered in this course include Thomas More’s Utopia, plays by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, and John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. We will study selections from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, as well as a large assortment of lyric poetry, including works by Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Mary Wroth, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and, of course, Robert Herrick. Hence, reading will include prose narratives, stage plays, epic poems, and lyric poetry. Course ReQuirements: Two papers, midterm exam, final exam, poetry memorization. Course Texts (tentatively): The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. B: The Sixteenth Century/The Early Seventeenth Century. 9th Ed. ISBN: 978-0393912500; Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques. Ed. Richard Harp. ISBN: 978-0393976380 English 330: Restoration and Romantic British Literature Dr. Lorraine Murphy MWF 2:00 – 2:50 pm Our study extends from the Restoration of Charles II in the mid- seventeenth century to the apex of the Romantic Movement in the early nineteenth century. These are some of the most transformative years in British literature as authors subject the traditional conventions of verse and prose genres to scrutiny and radical revision. Indeed, the status of language itself—its power to communicate meaning and sustain human relationships—is called into question. Our task is to imagine, experience, and evaluate this aesthetic revolution by immersing ourselves in the period’s greatest works. Course ReQuirements: Two essays, an annotated bibliography, mid-term and final exams. ReQuired Texts: Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., Volumes C and D; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Norton Critical, 2nd ed.; Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, Oxford World's Classics. 3 English 340: Victorian and Modern British Literature Dr. Dwight Lindley T/Th 9.30-10.45am This course provides an introduction to the men and women who have thought our thoughts before we ever did so. In the last two centuries, the Victorians and Modernists (~1830-1940) bravely faced the same religious, philosophical, and social upheavals we face today, only with fresher eyes and greater immediacy. The writings they have left us are among the most beautiful in the language, but also strikingly relevant to our own concerns. Through close readings of their essays, stories, novels, plays, and poems, our goal will be to see the challenges of late modernity through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century eyes. The result, I hope, is that you befriend our Victorian and Modernist ancestors, understanding just how much we share with them, but also how much we differ from them. All we read together will provide both a window into the past—our history—and a reflection on questions, themes, and ideas that transcend any one time. Course readings include: 1. Black, Joseph, et al., eds. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 6A: The Twentieth Century and Beyond: From 1900 to Midcentury. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008. ISBN 978-1551119236. 2. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. Penguin Hardcover Classics. New York: Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0141196893. 3. Trilling, Lionel & Harold Bloom, eds. Victorian Prose and Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. ISBN 978-0195016161. 4. Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 2012. ISBN 978-0316216449. 5. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Robert Mighall. Penguin Hardcover Classics. New York: Penguin, 2009. ISBN 978-0141442464. 4 English 350: American Literature: Colonial-1820 Dr. John Somerville MW 2:00-3:15pm Opening the term with an examination of the promotional writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we will give further, particular attention to the literature of Puritan New England, the emerging national consciousness and political writings of the eighteenth century, and the literature of the Federalist period. Among the writers we will read are John Smith, William Bradford, Edward Taylor, Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Charles Brockden Brown, and William Cullen Bryant. Course ReQuirements: An array of written assignments, a midterm, and a final exam. English 360: Romanticism, American Renaissance, and Realism – 1820-1890 Dr. Franklin T/Th 1:00-2:15 PM The American nineteenth century produced some of our culture's greatest and most influential (and experimental) writers. During the excitement, upheavals, and violence of Westward expansion, the Civil War, and the post-war era, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and countless other great American writers worked to articulate their experiences in literary form. This course will explore the development of American literature from 1820-1890, moving from American Romanticism, through the mid-century flourishing of the "American Renaissance" and concluding with an investigation of American Realism. Course ReQuirements: 15-20 pages of written work, Midterm and Final exams. ReQuired Texts: Norton Anthology of Literature, 9th Edition, Vols. B and C. 5 English 370: Naturalism and Modernism – 1890-present Dr. John Somerville MW 11-12.15pm A survey of American literature since 1890. We will read selections from Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Course ReQuirements: A fair amount of writing.