Review Course Descriptions

Course Information: Fall 2018

English 100-199, Literature courses above 100

ENG 104-01 Literature of the Middle Ages Fyler, J.

This course offers a survey of some important medieval texts, in translation, focusing on the period from 1100 to the fifteenth century. Among the works we’re likely to read are the Chanson de Roland, Njal’s Saga, two of the Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes, the Carmina Burana and other medieval lyrics, Dante’s Purgatorio, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. This course fulfills the pre 1860 requirement.

ENG 0114-01 Milton Keiser, J.

This course focuses on the work of poet, politician, and revolutionary, John Milton. Completely blind by the age of 46, and forced into hiding for his role in the overthrow and execution of England’s king, Milton still managed to compose one of the most important works in the English language, the epic poem Paradise Lost. The story of Satan’s rebellion against God, and of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise, Paradise Lost attempts nothing less than to “justify the ways of God to men.” We’ll also attend to Milton’s other major works, Paradise Regained, which finds a darkly witty Satan seducing unsuspecting souls, and Samson Agonistes, a searching meditation on cultural difference and religious violence. Milton’s work forces us to reckon with some large questions: the nature of good and evil, the conflict between freedom and fate, the necessity of rebellion and political transformation, the seductions of figurative language, the battle between religious and scientific worldviews, and Christianity’s vexed encounter with other cultures and beliefs. This course fulfills the pre-1860 requirement.

ENG 0123-01 Frankenstein’s Sisters: Austen and Shelley Hofkosh, S.

Between 1811 and 1818 Jane Austen published six books known as domestic fiction, each of which focuses on the love life of a young woman in the proper, provincial world of the English gentry. Starting with Frankenstein in 1818, Mary Shelley wrote books about misshapen monsters, forbidden passions, war, suicide, and plague. What do these two apparently so different authors share? With some attention to context and to recent critical approaches to the early 19th Century novel, and especially to women's writing during that period, we will explore the issues and interests that link Austen and Shelley as ambitious creators of fictional lives or what could be called "the human," from the Gothic fantasies of Austen's Northanger Abbey to Shelley's representation of the end of the world in The Last Man. Open to all students who have fulfilled the English 1 requirement. This course fulfills the pre-1860 requirement for the English major.

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ENG 0131-01 British Modernism Lurz, J.

This course is an undergraduate seminar devoted to a survey of British literature published between the years 1895, the year of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur" whose "sprung rhythm" announces an experiment with form that will characterize many of the writers in this course, and 1951, the year of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, whose drastically pared down style becomes as much a reaction to the experimental excesses of the modernist period as it is itself an extreme investigation of form. By bookending the course with these two works, we will be expanding the temporal boundaries of what is normally considered as "modernism," a move which raises one of the main questions around which we will organize our inquiry: to what extent does modernist literature exceed the analytical categories by which we usually parse literary history? How – and, more importantly, why -- do these categories fail when applied to this literature? To that end, we will be reading widely in the literature of the early twentieth century and looking at the ways these texts cut across the boundaries of period, nation, and genre. We will even wonder how these works might question the category of the literary itself as they respond to the revolutions in media technology that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Possible Texts: Poetry by Hopkins, Hardy, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Auden; Conrad, The Secret Agent; Ford, The Good Soldier; Forster, A Passage to India; Lewis, BLAST; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Isherwood, Berlin Stories; Beckett, Molloy. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

ENG 0136-01 Major Figures of the Irish Literary Renaissance Ullman, M.

In this course, we will consider, and perhaps stretch, the idea of the Irish Literary Renaissance that is generally thought of as occurring in the late 19th century and early 20th century. We shall be looking at major writers: the reading list will include Yeats, Synge, Joyce (Dubliners and Portrait). Others may be Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Moore. I am particularly interested in the interplay of specifically "Irish" culture and politics and literary traditions, and the internationalist leanings of some of these figures. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

ENG 0159-01 Contemporary Jewish Fiction Wilson, J.

A look at novels and stories by authors, both new and established, whose work has reflected, challenged, shaped and altered not only contemporary Jewish consciousness but also the broad shared culture that the writers inhabit. We'll read fiction by Molly Antopol, Rebecca Schiff, Tova Mirvis, Justin Taylor, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and others. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

ENG 0173-01 Literary Theory Litvak, J.

This course, intended as a seminar for advanced students interested in literary theory, will focus on some major texts of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, Afropessimist, and

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“ethical” theory from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We will examine how various theorists conceptualize the relation between language and meaning, with a particular focus on “literariness” as an effect of figure, rhetoric, and the play of signifiers. By considering how structuralist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic modes of analysis unexpectedl ushered in contemporary theory's investigation of of sexuality, identity, terrorism, radical evil, and political ideology, we will approach the question of whether or not “literature” has borders that can contain it. We will move from Barthes' utopian hope of liberating language from the tyranny of the signified to more recent, and far more traumatic, encounters with the negativity of the death drive. Students should be prepared not merely to accept, but also, and more importantly, to revel in, the difficulties of the texts we'll be studying and to engage them with all the passion and energy they bring to reading novels, poems, and films. They should also be prepared to work closely with the other members of the seminar in the protracted, intense, and rewarding project of thinking and conversing with each other. Authors whose works we'll examine may include: Barthes, Saussure, Derrida, de Man, de Lauretis, Lacan, Gallop, Johnson, Žižek, Butler, Judy, Zupančič, and Badiou. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

ENG 0176-01 Earth Matters Ammons, E.

Many people consider environmental questions the most urgent questions of the twenty-first century. Where are we now? How did we get here? What future will we choose? American literature offers crucial answers. It also offers much-needed vision and hope. In this course we will think about human beings’ relation to the earth, the welfare of all life on the planet, and— above all—climate change. Reading is multicultural, bringing together Native American, African American, white European American, Latino/a, and Asian American perspectives, and texts include novels, poetry, prose, and film. Authors range from Bill McKibben to Gloria Naylor, Rita Wong to Simon Ortiz and Louise Erdrich. Our study will include a field trip and class-discussion forms the basis of the course. The class counts toward the Environmental Studies major and the English major, where it fulfills the post-1860 requirement. It is also open to all students.

ENG 0191-01 Seminar in English: Travel Literature Freedman-Bellow, J.

Have you forgotten what it means to feel an endless road unwind before you, to sleep under open skies, to find yourself alone in an unknown land? If you spend too much time dreaming about that year abroad, this course may be for you. We’ll read literary travel narratives and reignite our passion for adventure. Come climb icy mountain passes, enter war-torn zones and walk along the edge of our continent with guides like Orwell, Strayed, Matthiessen, Doerr and Byrd. How do these writers understand the longing to leave and once home, how do they translate their experience into prose vibrant enough to transport those temporarily landlocked here at Tufts? This course fulfills the post 1860 requirement.

ENG 0191-03 Seminar in English: The Anti-Colonial Mode of Thought Thomas, G.

When current academic theories speak of colonialism at all, they tend to speak of “post- colonialism” or “post-coloniality” and thus help to conceal the current phase of colonial or neo-

3/5/18 3 colonial empire. This course will examine the critical-intellectual politics of ANTI-colonialism – past, present and future-oriented – with a focus on selected figures, positions and movements. We will address a series of questions: What is the relationship here between theory and practice, thought and struggle? What sort of ideas emanating from beyond the West (Europe or Anglo-North America) have been recently and historically suppressed? Why? How does Africa in particular signify in this particular space, globally and internationally? Why? What various affinities and solidarities emerge from continental and diasporic time-spaces of Africa, Asia and the Americas as well as Palestine? Text-wise, we may look at the work of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X and Walter Rodney; Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Trinh T. Minh-ha and H.L.T. Quan; Vijay Prashad, Arundathi Roy and Edward Said; Haile Gerima and Djibril Diop Mambéty; “Che” Guevara, Anibal Quijano, Eduardo Galeano and Cherrie Moraga; Jack Forbes, Ward Churchill, Chrystos and Leslie Marmon Silko; Cheikh Anta Diop, Ifi Amadiume and Ayi Kwei Armah. The “ANTI-colonial mode of thought” will be engaged to think critically about not only the literary culture but geopolitics, economics, psychologistics and body politics of colonial or neo-colonial Western empire. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

ENG 0191-04 Seminar in English: Black Prison Writing Thomas, G.

Nowadays, many in and outside U.S. circles refer to “the prison industrial complex,” a phrase that literally comes from Wall Street imperialism itself. At least one scholar-activist has criticized this formulation for minimizing, even erasing the continued power of the military-industrial complex in its attempt to grapple with the explosion of prisons as an industry, federal and private, national and international. Before imprisonment would be defined according to recent economics, however, it had already been defined by Black Radical Tradition in terms of enslavement and re-enslavement – the material and symbolic reduction of enslaved Africans to “chattel” for a white world capitalist hegemony. The large-scale transfer of Black people from yesterday’s plantations to today’s prisons (where “old,” official slavery remains perfectly legal), this process might be recognized as an “internal slave trade” as opposed to slavery’s actual “abolition.” This course confronts the political problematic of prisons without losing sight of the connection between imprisonment and enslavement, past and present. We will focus on North America as a historic site of struggle for recent Black writing from and about prisons, confinement, incarceration, jailing, lock-up/lock-down, etc. Students should thus develop a critical literacy in the tradition of writing under study and consider how it redefines “reality,” “literature” and “politics” among other things. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

ENG 0191-05 Seminar in English: The Realist Novel Takayoshi, I.

This seminar introduces students to some of the most important novels of all time -- the masterpieces of 19th-century literary realism. The reading list is pan-Western in its scope. The books to be discussed include Madame Bovery by Gustav Flaubert (France), Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (Russia), Middlemarch by George Eliot (England), Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (England), The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (US), and Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Perez Galdós (Spain). Collectively, these novels have come to define the dominant form of the novel as a literary genre. To write a novel, the subsequent generations of authors have had to come to terms with it. The novelist may rebel and experiment, as modernists did. The novelist may cede formal decisions to these masters, as much of contemporary popular fiction does. Or the novelist may creatively tweak the dominant form, as today's inventive novelists do.

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In any case, though, these 19th-century classics continue to set the paradigm. The seminar organizes discussions around formal and rhetorical questions (how is the narrative organized?; how does the author manipulate the reader's responses?) and various historical conditions in the West that gave rise to this literary movement. Many of these discussions will be also informed by an understanding of what came before and after Realism: Romanticism and Modernism. Exactly how can we situate the significance of literary realism in the long arc of the evolution of the novel in the West? Students are required to write two short papers and one 10- page paper. This course fulfills the post-1860 requirement.

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