Spring Semester 2007
For the most up-to-date and comprehensive course schedule, including course additions, cancellations, and room assignments, visit the Registrar's Schedules website(PDF format).
Spring 2007 - 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 G111: Rhetorical Theory
Shea
Key #23056
TUESDAY, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
(PRC)
This course is a survey-based seminar. We will begin with examples of recent scholarship that highlight the role of rhetoric in contemporary studies of writing, culture, gender, knowledge, and power. We will then return to the sophists of ancient Greece and gradually moved through the ages up to the contemporary moment. We will explore these texts with questions regarding the scope of rhetoric, definitions of rhetoric, prescriptions for rhetoric in civic life, and the place of rhetoric in relation to the production of authoritative knowledge. We will also pay close attention to how our own contemporary concerns influence our study of the past and our understanding of the rhetorical tradition. Major assignments will include an exam and a seminar paper.
ENG G121: Composition Studies
Wall
Key #22454
MONDAY, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
(PRC)
This seminar looks at how "Composition" is constituted as a field of study by the scholarship that produces knowledge about writing. We will note some of the important research topics addressed by Composition scholars-- for example, the connections between reading and writing, the relationship between class, race, and/or gender and writing, and the question of how to define "literacy" in our increasingly visual and postmodern culture-- and ask how we might account for their importance to the field. In the process, we'll also consider the range of methods that have been adopted for the study of writing-- e.g., archival historical studies, autobiographical accounts, classroom ethnographies, and close textual analyses-- and how such inquiries might variously be informed by theory. We will not, however, merely sample short book chapters or articles in the manner of a survey course. Instead, we will read more extensively in the bodies of work produced by a limited number of scholars who have made major contributions to the study of writing. This will allow us both to study Composition synchronically, as a varied field of interests and approaches to the study of writing, and, at the same time, to develop a diachronic sense of Composition's history over the last four decades. For as we come to see how each scholar's research enacts both continuity and change over years and even decades in the field, we'll also understand how a field itself grows, changes, and revises its self-understanding as well as its ways of knowing its central subject. Requirements: weekly analyses of readings, several short reports, and a seminar paper on a major figure.
ENG G233: 19th Century American Poetry
Loeffelholz
Key #23061
MONDAY, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
A survey of poetry written in the United States through the nineteenth century, this course will spend some focused time with the two acknowledged major American poets of the century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. We will also explore the work of New England and New York poets like Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Melville, Larcom, Sigourney, and Holmes; Emerson's contributions, in both prose and verse, to the shaping of poetry in the United States; Poe's counter-Transcendentalist aestheticism; and abolitionist poetry by New England poets and by African-American writers like Frances E. W. Harper. We will consider how American poetry of the nineteenth century took up the ambitions of American literary nationalism; how literary markets for poetry evolved and stratified in terms of class, gender, race, and region, and how different sorts of writers gained access to the means of literary production; and how the national debate over slavery and the carnage of the Civil War both exploited and strained poetic conventions of representation. The course will conclude with a glance toward poetry's role in the emergent pedagogical canon of American literature and developments in American poetry on the brink of modernism. Course assignments will include an archival project and a final research paper.
ENG G275: Milton
Blessington
Key #23467
TUESDAY, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
A seminar in Paradise Lost with supplemental readings in Milton's prose and minor poems. Emphasis upon the writing of literary criticism in the context of the history of criticism. In-class short, oral reports, short paper, and one final paper (20pp.), possibly an extended version of the short paper. A review of a recent Milton book.
ENG G281: Medieval Romance
Kelly
Key #27349
WEDNESDAY, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
"What came first? The music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of cultural violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands of songs, literally thousands of songs, about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" - Rob Gordon (John Cusack) in High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000)
We might ask a similar question about medieval romance: How have its history, deployments, and repetitions contributed to the modern master narrative of heterosexual love? In what ways are masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality performed in medieval romance? To what degree are such performances offered as models, if not tests? And/or, how are such categories of performance undermined or interrogated? Thus we will examine the cultural construction of romantic love as a recognizable emotional state or condition, as a process that shaped social relations through marriage, and as a medical "problem" as well as a legal one. Thus we will also read treatises on love, lovesickness, adultery, marriage customs and laws, and consider some of the classical representations of romantic love that shaped medieval notions. We will also look at the representation of love and desire in historical texts. In essence, we will study what Denis de Rougemont famously called Love in the Western World: the beginnings of a history of desire before Freud and Lacan taught us how to think about desire, and consider how the medieval concept of love and romance has certain continuities and discontinuities with our own. Texts: a selection of lyrics and lais (12th-14th c.), selections from Chrétien de Troyes romances (c. 1150-1190), a compilation of Tristan and Iseult legends, selections from Chaucer's works (c. 1385-1400), the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1390), selections from Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur (completed c. 1470; printed by Caxton in 1485), and other assorted readings that take up such themes as male friendship, East-West relations, and gender identity expressed, and vexed, through cross-dressing. We may be able to fit in a film or two. Texts are either in translation (Old French and Middle High German) or, in the case of Middle English, in the original or in modernization or translation, based on student preference. Requirements: a handful of formal but very brief presentations on the assigned texts and one paper, around 15-17 pages.
ENG G287: Modern British Novel: Empire and Its Ruins
Mullen
Key #27328
WEDNESDAY, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
This course will examine the interconnections between literature and empire. Starting with Karl Marx's famous invocation of "world literature" in the Communist Manifesto, the course will examine both key theorizations of the politics and economics of empire and literary works cast in the dynamics of empire. Rather than simply considering empire or imperialism as a thematic characteristic of novels, we will consider literary production and products as particular facets of the dense historical reality of the period of European Imperialism. We will work towards an understanding of the important cultural aspects of empire and a broader social estimation of the values of literature.
ENG G332/HIST219*: Topics in Film: Soviet Film, Theory, and Culture of the 1920s
Robinson
Key #27312
THURSDAY, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
The work of major filmmakers of the early period of Soviet cinema had a remarkably intense and enduring influence on the development of cinema all over the world. As one of the most accessible manifestations of the culture of the world's first utopian socialist society, the films of such directors as Sergei Eisenstein ("Battleship Potemkin," "October"), Vsevolod Pudovkin ("The End of St.Petersburg"), Lev Kuleshov ("The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks") and Alexander Dovzenko ("Earth") provided models that were widely analyzed and imitated. In the USSR, critics of the Formalist School also turned their attention to the unique construction of films as artistic texts and created some of the fundamental works of film criticism. In this seminar, the films and writings of Sergei Eisenstein (and their impact abroad) will receive particular attention. Although the course will focus primarily on the experimental period of the 1920s, we will also view and analyze films of the later Soviet period to explore how Soviet aesthetic policy both embraced and rejected the revolutionary ideas of the Formalists.
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