Smith College Spring 2018 English Courses
English 203 Western Classics: De Troyes to Tolstoy (200+ English elective) TuTh 10:30-11:15 Instructor: Maria Banerjee Same as CLT 203. Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain; Antony and Cleopatra; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Lafayette’s The Princesse of Clèves; Goethe’s Faust; Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Lecture and discussion.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 206 Intermediate Fiction Writing: Photography (200+ English elective)(creative writing spec.) Thurs 1:00-2:15 Instructor: Russell Rymer A writer’s workshop that focuses on sharpening and expanding each student’s fiction writing skills, as well as broadening and deepening her understanding of the short story form. Exercises will concentrate on using real-world interviewing and reporting to feed one's fictional work. Students will analyze and discuss each other's stories, and examine the work of established writers. Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required. Sample or samples should total approximately 1000 words, of any genre, and are due by the last day of registration. If the applicant has a writing project in mind for the semester, a description of it is also encouraged. This course uses concepts and methods of photography to advance students' fiction-writing abilities and comprehension. Students take photographs as a way of grappling with issues of focus, framing, depth of field, point of view, "flatness," timing, and other precepts of photography that are transferable to writing, and include their photographs in their fictional pieces. The point of the course is not to improve students' photo abilities (and no pre-req skills or special equipment are required), but to use photography to enhance writing skills and understanding. Final product is a publishable short story. Enrollment limit of 12..
Comments: Writing Sample Required. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during all registration periods.
English 207 Technology of Reading and Writing (200+ English elective) MWF 9:00-9:50 Instructor: Douglas Patey Same as HSC 207. An introductory exploration of the physical forms that knowledge and communication have taken in the West, from ancient oral cultures to modern print-literate culture. Our main interest is in discovering how what is said and thought in a culture reflects its available kinds of literacy and media of communication. Topics to include poetry and memory in oral cultures; the invention of writing; the invention of prose; literature and science in a script culture; the coming of printing; changing concepts of publication, authorship and originality; movements toward standardization in language; the fundamentally transformative effects of electronic communication.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 208 Science Fiction? Speculative Fiction (200+ English elective) MWF 9:00-9:50 Instructor: William Oram This course offers a chance to read and think about works of science fiction and fantasy, considering the forms they take, the conventions they play with, and issues they address. We read novels and stories by H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Maureen McHugh, Ian McLeod, Ted Chiang, Andrea Hairston and others. Several films, including Pan's Labyrinth. Prerequisite: one college- level literature course or permission of the instructor. Recommended for nonmajors.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 211 Beowulf (British literature before 1700 or 200+ English elective) MWF 10:00-10:50 Instructor: Craig Davis A reading of Anglo-Saxon England’s most powerful and significant poem, invoking the world of barbarian Europe after the fall of Rome.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 229 Turning Novels Into Film (200+ English elective) TuTh 1:00-2:50 Instructor: Ambreen Hai "Not as good as the book,” is a frequent response to film adaptations of novels. Adaptation studies, an interdisciplinary field that combines literary and film studies, rejects this notion of “fidelity” (how faithful a film is to its source) and instead reads literature and film as equal but different artistic and cultural forms, where the film may translate, transmute, critique, or re-interpret the novel. This course will look closely and analytically at some paired fiction and film adaptations that focus on issues of imperialism, race, class, and gender. We’ll begin with some classics (Austen’s Mansfield Park, Forster’s Passage to India), move to international postcolonial fiction and film (Tagore’s Home and the World, Ondaatje’s English Patient), and end with U.S. texts about non-white, hyphenated citizens (Lahiri’s Namesake, Stockett’s The Help). We will also read some critical and theoretical essays to frame our key concepts.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 238 What Jane Austen Read (British literature after 1700 or 200+ English elective) MWF 11:00-12:10 Instructor: Douglas Patey A study of novels written in England from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen and Walter Scott (1688–1814). Emphasis on the novelists’ narrative models and choices; we conclude by reading several novels by Austen—including one she wrote when 13 years old.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 248 Literature of Blindness (200+ English elective) TuTh 10:30-11:50 Instructor: Andrew Leland The English language is dominated by visual metaphor: students, for example, must bring insight to their readings, inspecting these texts to look for—and illuminate—any blind spots. This course will examine Western culture’s privileging of vision that culture’s attitudes toward blindness, as well as the ways in which disability shapes and defines the way we read. Texts include works by blind authors (Helen Keller, JL Borges); sighted authors (from Sophocles to Saramago); literature made specifically for the blind (such as the first full-length “audiobooks,” recorded for blinded WWI veterans); and readings in philosophy, history, and disability studies.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only. English 256 Shakespeare (British literature before 1700 or 200+ English elective) TuTh 10:30-11:50 Instructor: Naomi Miller Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, and Shakespeare's sonnets. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.
Not open to first-years. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 260 Milton (British literature before 1700 or 200+ English elective) MWF 11:00-12:10 Instructor: William Oram A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for regicide and advocate of human dignity, committed revolutionary and Renaissance humanist, and a poet of enormous creative power and influence, whose epic, Paradise Lost, changed subsequent English Literature. Not open to first-year students.
Not open to first-years. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 264 Faulkner (American literature after 1865 or 200+ English elective) MW 1:10-2:30 Instructor: Michael Gorra The sustained explosion of Faulkner’s work in the dozen-odd years between The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses has no parallel in American literature. He explored the microtones of consciousness and conducted the most radical of experiments in narrative form. At the same time he relied more heavily on the spoken vernacular than anyone since Mark Twain, and he made his “little postage stamp of native soil” in northern Mississippi stand for the world itself. We read the great novels of his Yoknapatawpha cycle along with a selection of short stories, examining the linked and always problematic issues of race, region and remembrance in terms of the forms that he invented to deal with them.
Not open to first-years. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 270 Race and the Graphic Novel (Anglophone/ethnic American or American literature after 1865 or 200+ English elective) MW 9:00-10:20 Instructor: Laura Fugikawa This course engages critical literary analysis through an examination of the construction and reimagining of race through graphic novels. Visual representations of race have long constructed the meaning of race, as well as been a critical tool for people assert new meanings. How have writers used this genre to explore their experiences of racialization and talk about social inequalities and racial difference? What knowledge, ideas and affects emerge from reading the medium of graphic novels, and what makes the form unique? We will employ close reading and analyze the relationship between written narrative and the visual image.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 277 Post-Colonial Women Writers (Anglophone or 200+ English elective) MW 1:10-2:30 Instructor: Ambreen Hai A comparative study of 20th-century women writers in English from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Australia. We read novels, short stories, poetry, plays and autobiography in their historical, cultural and political contexts as well as theoretical essays to address questions such as: How have women writers addressed the dual challenge of contesting sexism and patriarchy from within their indigenous cultures as well as the legacies of western imperialism from without? How have they combined feminism with anti-colonialism? How have they deployed the act of writing as cultural work on multiple counts: addressing multiple audiences; challenging different stereotypes about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity? What new stories have they told to counter older stories, what silences have they broken? How have they renegotiated the public and the private, or called attention to areas often ignored by their male contemporaries, such as relations among women, familial dynamics, and motherhood.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 285 Intro to Contemporary Literary Theory (200+ English elective) TuTh 1:00-2:20 Instructor: Andrea Stone What do we do when we read literature? Does the meaning of a text depend on the author’s intention or on how readers read? What counts as a valid interpretation? Who decides? How do some texts get canonized and others forgotten? How does literature function in culture and society? How do changing understandings of language, the unconscious, class, gender, race, history, sexuality or disability affect how we read? “Theory” is “thinking about thinking,” questioning common sense, critically examining the categories we use to approach literature or any discursive text. This course introduces some of the most influential questions that have shaped contemporary literary studies. We start with New Criticism but focus on interdisciplinary approaches such as structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, postcolonialism, feminism, queer, cultural, race and disability studies with some attention to film and film theory.
Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
English 291 Lakes Workshop: The Other (200+ English elective)(Creative writing spec.) Tues 3:00-4:50 Instructor: TBA An intermediate-level workshop in which writers develop their skills through intensive reading, writing, revising, and critique. Emphasis on narrative writing, broadly defined to include a variety of genres, depending on the interests of the current holder of the Lakes writing residency. Topic changes annually. This course aims to strengthen students' relationship to their own curiosity in the world around them and to equip them with practical, ethical tools to fully engage that curiosity and to render their discoveries in engaging, literary, nonfiction prose. We will consider how to make contact with others whose experiences may be very different from our own, how to respectfully conduct reporterly research; how to listen; how to sustain connection; how to transcribe "data" in order to truthfully convey the meaning of the lives that you are learning about; and how to develop one's ear for "narrative." Writing sample required. Contact [email protected] for details.
Writing Sample Required. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during all registration periods.
English 293 Art & History of the Book (200+ English elective) MW 1:10-2:30 Instructor: James Wald Will books as material objects disappear in your lifetime? Or will the book, a remarkably long-lived piece of communication technology, continue to flourish and develop alongside its electronic counterparts? This course surveys the history of books from the ancient world through medieval manuscripts, hand press books, and machine press books to the digital media of today. We discover how books were made, read, circulated and used in different eras, and explore the role they have played over time in social, political, scientific and cultural change. The course involves extensive hands- on work with books and manuscripts from across the centuries and sustained engagement with current debates about book, print and media culture. Admission limited to 20 by permission of the instructor. Instructor Permission: Permission is required for interchange registration during all registration periods.
English 295 Advanced Poetry Workshop (English 356 equivalent course; 300+ English elective)(creative writing spec.) Tues 1:00-4:00 Instructor: Arda Collins Taught by the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet in Residence, this advanced poetry workshop is for students who have developed a passionate relationship with poetry and who have substantial experience in writing poems. Texts are based on the poets who are reading at Smith during the semester, and students gain expertise in reading, writing and critiquing poems. Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required.
English 296 Advanced Fiction Workshop (English 355 equivalent course; 300+ English elective)(creative writing spec.) Tues 1:00-4:00 Instructor: Ruth Ozeki The goal of this workshop is to help more advanced fiction-writing students become stronger writers in a supportive context that encourages experimentation, contemplation and attention to craft. The workshop will include all the traditional elements of a fiction writing workshop, focusing on writing skills and technique, close reading and the production of new work. In addition, the workshop will include instruction in mindfulness meditation to help students cultivate their powers of concentration, observation, imagination and creative expression on the page. Students will submit manuscripts for discussion in class, revise and edit their work, keep a process journal about their writing practice and complete occasional writing exercises focusing on aspects of craft.They will also read fiction by established authors in a range of genres and lead a class forum discussion on a published short story of their choosing. “Reading Like A Writer” by Francine Prose, is the required text.
Comments: Writing Sample Required. Permission is required for interchange registration during all registration periods.
English 308 One Big Book: Middlemarch (300+English elective) Tues 3:00-4:50 Instructor: Michael Gorra This capstone course offers an intensive research-based study of a single important work of literature in English, seen in its social, historical, and intellectual context on the one hand, and in terms of its reception history on the other. Course may be repeated once for credit with different topic and instructor. Permission of the instructor required. Enrollment limited to 12.: Prerequisites: two 200-level courses in either the reading of fiction or in 19th-century British literature, or a combination thereof.
English 312 Print Culture of Africa Diaspora (Anglophone/ethnic American or 300+ English elective) Thurs 3:00-4:50 Instructor: Andrea Stone This seminar explores the varied publications produced by people of African descent, America, Canada and England, including early sermons and conversion narratives, criminal confessions, fugitive slave narratives and the black press. We consider these works in terms of publishing history, editorship (especially women editors), authorship, readership, circulation, advertising, influence, literacy, community building, politics and geography. We examine their engagements with such topics as religion, law economics, emigration, gender, race and temperance. Smith’s manuscript and periodical holdings offer us a treasure trove of source materials. Permission of the instructor is required. Enrollment limited to 12.
English 384 Writing About Society: Audio (300+ English elective)(creative writing spec.) Tues 1:00-2:50 Instructor: Andrew Leland Topics course.: Same as AMS 351. This course focuses on audio as a narrative technology. How are stories told in sound? How does writing for the ear differ from writing for the eye? What can the history of narrative audio, from Golden Age radio drama to European “features” tell us about the work being produced amid the current explosion of interest surrounding podcasting? This course features extensive listening and readings in these and other aspects of audio; students also produce (and workshop) pieces of their own, exploring sonic forms including short documentary, essay, oral history, fiction and sound installation. (No previous technical knowledge is required.) Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required.