Fall Semester 2005

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For the most up-to-date and comprehensive course schedule, including course additions, cancellations, and room assignments, visit the Registrar's Course Schedules and Room Assignments Web page (PDF format)

Fall 2005 - Course Descriptions

Abbreviations: MAC = Satisfies MA Core Requirement;
PLC = Satisfies Program in Literature Core Requirement;
PRC = Satisfies Program in Rhetoric and Composition Core Requirement

ENG G101: Critical Issues

Loeffelholz
Key #35379
WEDNESDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC)

This course provides an introduction to the range of critical approaches and debates that currently shape the study of literature. After several weeks of historical overview, from Greek aesthetics to mid-twentieth-century formalisms, we will focus on Anglo-American criticism and theory from the second half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, including New Historicism and materialism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and queer theory, ethnic studies and post-colonial studies. We will look not only for the grand intellectual genealogy of present-day literary theory but also at the structure and style of significant essays, asking how different theoretical approaches influence the framing of critical writing. Students will write three short essays over the semester applying methods to literary texts (or in some cases other kinds of texts) and write a take-home essay examination at the end of the semester.

ENG G102: Key Concepts in Rhetoric and Composition

Britt
Key #26705
THURSDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC)

This course has two aims: one, to provide an introduction to the fields of rhetoric and composition for all MA students; and two, to help students in the Program in Rhetoric and Composition develop the vocabulary and frameworks needed for subsequent coursework in these fields. We’ll begin by considering narratives that scholars tell about the development of these fields and their relationship to each other and to the disciplines of communication and literary studies. We will then spend two weeks looking at each of five concepts central to both fields. Our readings on these concepts — knowledge, context, discourse, authority, and genre — will highlight points of contention about the concepts themselves and will serve as an overview of important issues, theories, and themes in rhetoric and composition. Assignments include a mid-term project, a presentation, and a seminar paper.

ENG G243: Modern American Drama

Bernstein
Key #35407
TUESDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC,PLC)

***CLASS CANCELLED***

In this course, students will explore work by several playwrights. Among the materials we will examine will be plays by O’neill, Miller, Williams, Hellman, Albee, and Wilson. This study is intended to provide students with a basis for understanding the contributions of these playwrights to American drama. Through analyses of primary works and related materials, students will also confront some of the principal aesthetic elements that underlie and inform the modern American drama broadly considered.
Each student will write a 15 page critical/scholarly paper and present a 10 minute report to the class on a facet of American drama.

ENG G282: Topics in Renaissance Literature: The Culture of Crime

Leslie
Key #30757
MONDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC, PLC)

This course will embrace the seeming oxymoron evoked by the phrase "culture of crime". Our readings in a variety of dramatic and prose texts will attempt to tease apart the intersecting discourses that link the aesthetic (e.g. high vs. low culture), the political (e.g. theories of social contract), and the social (e.g. gender and sexuality) in representation(s) of criminality in the early modern period. We will read canonical works like Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl; Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders alongside contemporary documents that responded (and contributed) to the increasingly voracious popular appetite for "true crime" narratives from the criminals themselves. Readings from Foucault and his critics will help us outline a theoretical and historical context for the shifting attitudes about discipline and punishment in the 16th to early 18th centuries.

ENG G292: Romantic Poetry

Peterfreund
Key #41870
WEDNESDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC, PLC)

***CLASS CANCELLED***

This class surveys the six "major" English Romantic Poets: William Blake; William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; and John Keats. The course also incorporates writing by prominent female poets of the period, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans, and Elizabeth Laetitia Landon. All of these poets wrote during the English Romantic Period (1789-1832), a period of important social and intellectual change, although this change was not without its turbulence, confusion and, on too many occasions, its violence. The period was one in which English culture moved beyond traditional modes of knowledge, social organization, and belief and into an intellectual, sociopolitical, and religious milieu in which the only certainty was uncertainty and the only constant was change. We will read closely and carefully in order to study the impact of the era on the individual and the artistic response of that individual to the era. While my approach to the material tends toward the eclectic, making of use of the best critical tools for a given critical context, students are welcome to approach the material from virtually and critical or theoretical perspective. Grades in this course will be assigned on the basis of one in-class presentation, one research proposal, and a twelve-to-fifteen page research paper.

ENG G311: Linguistics

Randall
Key #35390
TUESDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC, PLC, PRC)

This courses introduces students to a new way of thinking about language. Normally using language is an unconscious activity: when we speak and understand sentences, we are unaware of the complex mental activities going on at each moment. In this course, we will have an opportunity to look carefully at our unconscious knowledge of sentence structure (syntax), meaning (semantics), word forms (morphology), and sound patterns (phonology). These lead to related issues: "talking" computers, the nature/nurture controversy, and sociolinguistic debates about language standards, sexism in language, and language change. A weekly problem set or essay plus a take-home final exam will be required.

ENG G351: Topics in Literary Study: Classics

Blessington
Key #30762
MONDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC)

Readings in Greek and Roman Literature in order to provide a wider range of chronological and normative generic reference both for teaching and research, e.g., for theses, dissertations and articles. Discussions of myth, genre, the historical beginnings of Western literature, and classical theories of literature. Readings: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylos’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Euripides’ The Bacchae, Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Aristotle’s Poetics, Virgil’s Aeneid. Selected Latin and Greek lyrics and satires. Selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Plautus and Terence.

ENG G361: Modern Poetry

Rotella
Key #30741
THURSDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC, PLC)

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," Yeats famously wrote about the modern moment. This sounds like disaster, but modern poets celebrated as well as mourned the loss or multiplication of cultural centers, felt freed as well as shattered by accelerating change in everything from suffrage to science. This course explores modern British and (especially) American poetry by examining a range of technical and thematic responses to cultural "fragmentation." Poets to be considered include Yeats, Frost, Moore, Eliot, Stevens, H.D., Hughes, and Williams. Requirements include a reading journal and an essay.

ENG G332: Topics in Film: Film, Narrative,Memory

Hedges
Key #30778
THURSDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC,PLC)

The seminar will focus on the way that films become the agents for cultural and historical memory. We will differentiate between the politics of memory (What is memorialized and why?), the work of memory (How does the film viewing experience imprint the memory of individual and collective viewers?), and the representation of memory (How do particular films address the issue of memory? What are the discursive strategies employed?) Particular attention will be paid to the way that film form articulates meaning by guiding the viewer’s interpretive strategies. The course will focus in particular on the German occupation of France (1940-45) and the way that period has been memorialized in film. We will also be reading philosophical writings on the theory of memory.