130 English
EGL-233 (216). African American Literature: Beginnings to 1900: Vision and Re-Vision (Not offered 2013-14) Offered twice every four years. This introductory survey course will trace African American movement towards literary and aesthetic mastery beginning with what Henry Louis Gates calls “oral writing.” Readings begin with the first known written poems and progress from slave narratives and autobiography to essays and fiction. Authors include Phillis Wheately, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Solomon Northup, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. CC: HUL, LCC Elective Courses All English majors and minors must take four intermediate electives; consult with your advisor to choose electives that will foster or expand your literary interests. Open to any student who has taken 100, 101, or 102 (unless otherwise noted). These courses are roughly grouped by era or subject matter. All 200-level courses have the same level of difficulty. EGL-236 (229). American Realism and Naturalism (Not offered 2013-14) Offered once every four years. Realism and naturalism were aesthetic movements that emerged in American fiction between approximately 1865 and 1925. This course examines these two literary movements to show how writers of this era explored the trauma created by war (the Civil War and WWI), the moral consequences of freedom and sexual awareness, rapid urbanization and the Great Northern migration, inconsistencies between wealth and poverty, and innovative discoveries in science and technology. The purpose of this course, then, is to investigate how the authors of this period practiced their art both collectively and individually and the ways in which American social life informed the ideologies of realism and naturalism. Possible writers we will study include William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. CC: HUL EGL-237 (219). African-American Literature 1900-Present (Not offered 2013-14) Offered twice every four years. Introductory survey of African-American literature from the 1920s to the present. The involvement of African-American writers in various artistic, social, and political schools of American thought and activism. Readings include novels, short fiction, poetry, short criticism, theory, and drama by writers such as George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Randall Kenan, Soniz Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, among others. HUL, LCC EGL-239 (217). American Literature and Culture: 1900-1960 (Winter, Selley). Offered once every four years. This course will survey American poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and perhaps one play of the pre-Modernist and Modernist periods, putting the works into a cultural and historical context. The course will show how urbanism, psychology, science, secularism, “The Great War” and World War II, consumerism and feminism influenced literature of the period. Writers might include Henry Adams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W.C. Williams, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and/or Adrienne Rich. Poetry of the period will be generously represented on the syllabus. At least one recent film adaptation of a work from the period will be discussed. CC: HUL EGL-240 (218). American Literature and Culture: 1960-Present (Spring, Selley). Offered once every four years. This course will survey American poetry, fiction, nonfiction (including essays and New Journalism), at least one film (probably The Graduate), and perhaps one play of the Postmodern era. Emphasis will be placed on social movements that redefined the American cultural landscape, including Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Women’s Rights. The traumatic impact of historical events— such as assassinations in the sixties, the War in Vietnam, and 9/11—will also be discussed. Nonfiction writers will include Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, and possibly Ryan Smithson. Poets might include Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Billy Collins, Simon Ortiz, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee and others. Fiction writers might include Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Amy Tan, Tim O’Brien, Sherman Alexie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Alfredo Vea. Music, television shows and technology of the period will also be discussed. CC: HUL
English 131
EGL-241 (260). From the Greatest Generation to the Generation Gap: American Fiction, 1900-1960 (Not offered 2013-14) This course will examine major developments in the American novel and short story from the turn of the century to 1960, focusing primarily on the Modernist period. The course will treat such issues as the relationships of science, technology, and religion to the literary imagination, as well as the impact of the World Wars, psychology, urbanism, feminism, consumerism, and racism on literature of the period. Authors might include Chopin, Henry James, Anderson, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Wright, Salinger, and others. CC: HUL EGL-242 (261). Time Travelers, Dark Knights, and Girls with Attitude: American Fiction, 1960-Present (Not offered 2013-14) Offered once every four years. This course will examine short stories and novels (and possibly one film) written since 1960 by U.S. and perhaps one or two Canadian writers, with an emphasis on the various manifestations of postmodernism and the complex relationships between authors and their narrators and protagonists. A few older works that influenced these works might also be studied for comparison. Authors might include Sherman Alexie, Margaret Atwood, John Barth, T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Louise Erdrich, Gish Jen, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ursula LeGuin, Clarice Lispector, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Alice Munro, J.C. Oates, Tim O’Brien, ZZ Packer, Amy Tan, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Tobias Woolf, and others. At least one recent film adaptation of a work from the period will be discussed. CC: HUL EGL-246 (270). Modern Poetry (Not offered 2013-14) Offered twice every four years. Selected poetry from the high modern period (from the turn of the twentieth century to circa 1945) in relation to changing views of the poet’s role in culture and the poet’s contradictory posture as prophet, exile, romantic, outcast. Authors will include W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, others. CC: HUL EGL-247 (294). Studies in Modern Poets: Frost and Stevens (Not offered 2013-14) Offered twice every four years. This course will take a close look at the work and the cultural context of two modern poets. Pairings will include Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, Hart Crane and Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell. CC: HUL EGL-248 (274). Introduction to Black Poetry (Not offered 2013-14) Offered twice every four years. We will explore the development of African-American poetic voices in North America. We will look at poems and poets as they constitute a hybrid and composite tradition. We will read poetry in anthologies; we will also read several full books by individual authors, and will listen to performance poetry on CD and DVD. A partial list of poets we will read includes Wheatley, Harper, Dunbar, Hughes, McKay, Helene Johnson, Brooks, Baraka, Clifton, Sanchez, Cortez, Morris, Mullen, Brathwaite, Komunyakaa, Francis, Dungy, among others. HUL, LCC EGL-249 (272). American Poetry Since 1960 (Not offered 2013-14) Offered once every four years. A course in the development of American poetry from the confessional breakthrough of the Vietnam era to more contemporary experiments with language ,narrative, and the nature of the poet’s authority. CC: HUL EGL-250 (234). The Beats and Contemporary Culture (Spring, Smith). Offered once every four years. An examination of the writers of the Beat Generation (including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Edward Sanders) and of their lasting influence on American popular culture. CC: HUL EGL-253 (254). Narratives of Haunting in U.S. Ethnic Literature (Not offered 2013-14) Offered twice every four years. This course examines the theme of haunting in contemporary US ethnic literature. With this theme in mind, we will investigate the following questions throughout the trimester: Why is haunting such a prevalent theme in ethnic writing? What do we mean when we say that a text is haunted? What are the causes of haunting? What is possession? What are some ways to dispossess or exorcise ghosts? What are the functions of ghosts? Is there such a thing as a good haunting? What are their messages to us? How do we listen to ghosts? Authors include Lan Cao, Nora Okja Keller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, and Leslie Marmon Silko. CC: HUL, LCC