Spring Semester 2006

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 at: www.registrar.neu.edu/course_schedules.htm

Spring 2006 - 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 G112: Rhetorical Criticism

Shea
Key #74647
TUESDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC, PRC)

As rhetoric scholarship has expanded its critical sights and critical tools to examine a broad range of texts--pop-cultural, scientific, literary, visual, material, historic, and ephemeral--its methods and tools have also been taken up by scholars from a broad range of disciplines. This course surveys contemporary approaches to rhetorical criticism within and around the field of rhetoric. The texts for the course include (a) readings about methodology and criticism and (b) examples of rhetorical criticism--examples produced by scholars who self identify as rhetorical critics as well as examples produced by scholars in overlapping and neighboring fields, such as cultural studies and history. The purpose of the course is (a) for students to develop an understanding of the range of approaches to rhetorical criticism, the theoretical and historical influences shaping those approaches, and the consequences and implications of those methods; and (b) for students to develop skills as rhetorical critics. Students will be assigned to review works of criticism and to produce a critical rhetorical analysis.

ENG G207: American Literature and Culture 2

Ryan
Key #74306
TUESDAY, 3:00-6:30
(MAC, PLC)

We will examine some core debates in American culture from the revolution down to the present. We will be especially concerned with the debates between liberals and conservatives regarding democracy, human character, the nature of community, the role of government, the place of religious morality in public life, individualism, ecnonomic justice, and the like. After initially considering a cluster of revolutionary era writers (Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Hamilton), we will turn to such literary figures as Irving, Hawthorne, Fern, Howells, Chestnutt, Fitzgerald, and Rand. We will also study the way Hollywood film processes public debates from the silent era to the present and consider such films as "A Fool There Was", "The Gold Rush", "The Gold Diggers of 1933", "Die Hard" and "Fight Club".

ENG G214: Topics in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Loeffelholz
Key #72071
WEDNESDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC)

class canceled

This course will survey pre-Civil War U.S. fictions of national origins; works of fiction, autobiography, and poetry produced during the years of constitutional crisis around slavery and its extension in the United States; some poetry of the Civil War; and works of fiction assessing the new American racial and constitutional order in the wake of post-war Reconstruction and its eventual foreclosure. Works studied will likely include Cooper, The Pioneers; Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables; Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Melville, Benito Cereno; Douglass, Narrative of the Life; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson; Harper, Iola Leroy; Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition.

ENG G224: Major Figures in African American Literature: Toni Morrison and John Wideman

TuSmith
Key #74631
MONDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC, PLC)

"There's a call-and-response between my writing and Toni Morrison's," John Edgar Wideman once said in an interview. As two of the most artistically accomplished and intellectually challenging American writers today, both Morrison and Wideman deserve sustained, in-depth study. This course will cover 3-4 full-length works by each writer, incorporating prominent contextual and direct scholarship on each work. We will also devise a strategy for "sampling" additional works to get a fuller sense of each author's oeuvre to-date. Graded assignments include one-page critical responses, a class presentation and write-up, brief annotations of critical articles, and a final paper. Note: There will be a reading assignment for the first meeting. Please pick up handout at 431 Holmes one week before class.

ENG G283: Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature: Jacobean Drama

Howlett
Key #87881
THURSDAY, 6:00-8:30
(MAC, PLC)

This course examines the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries during the reign of James I of England. The Jacobean period marks a sea-change in both comedy and tragedy of the English Renaissance. Comedy shifts its emphasis from a celebration of the festive values of carnival found in Elizabethan Romantic Comedy to a satiric critique of commercial urban society found in Jacobean City Comedy. Ben Jonson's Epicoene, Volpone, and The Alchemist are examples of plays that we will read that scrutinize the dissociations and contradictions in the period's sexual ideology and dramatize the complex process of conducting economic and social relations in a newly forming urban environment. On the Jacobean stage revenge drama reaches its zenith of popularity, and tragedy becomes a "Theatre of Punishment" with the tortured, raped, or mutilated body of the aristocratic female its central symbol. Our readings will include Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton's Women Beware Women, and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Required Text: English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington (2002).

ENG G294: Victorian Novel - Green (MAC, PLC)

Green
Key #88985
THURSDAY, 3:30-6:00
(MAC, PLC)

In this class, we will give the Victorian period's exemplary literary form, the novel, its broadest formal and thematic outline. In addition to the stream of Great Obvious Suspects - Charlotte Bronte, Villette; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield*; William Thackeray, Vanity Fair; George Eliot, Middlemarch; and Thomas Hardy, Tess of the Durverbilles, - we will explore its tributaries: the condition-of-England novel (Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton); the sensation novel (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White); and possibly (if there's room) "minor" domestic comedy (Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks). We will also read contemporary criticism within Victorian studies. Formal requirements include one oral presentation of theoretical or historical material and one research paper due at the end of the semester. *Jane Eyre and Great Expectations are not on the reading list because I assume that people have read them and have a working recollection of them. If you haven't, you might want to do so before the class begins.

ENG G396: Composition Pedagogy

Kellogg
Key #89449
WEDNESDAY, 3:00-6:30
(MAC, PRC)

This class aims to provide students with the critical tools to develop their own approach to writing pedagogy through reading, writing, and deliberation. Readings will focus primarily on books rather than articles so that students might encounter comprehensive approaches to the teaching of writing. Possible readings are still being decided, but they may include works by Judith Goleman, James Moffett, Bruce McComiskey, Donna Qualley, Jeffrey Berman, John Bean, David Bleich, Christopher L. Schroeder, and others. Book-length readings will be supplemented by classic articles in the field and other materials to sharpen distinctions among perspectives and to provide a guide to the "nuts and bolts" of pedagogy. Class will consist mainly of deliberative discussion in response to readings as well as frequent in-class writing and learning exercises. Assignments include a critical paper on one of the readings (8-10 pages), a complete syllabus for a hypothetical writing course taught at a college other than Northeastern, oral presentation of an assignment sequence, and a reflective essay (6-8 pages) connecting theory and practice.