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English their place in the literary canon and in our lives. Spring semester. 4 credits ENGL2406 The Rise of the British Novel (AI-L) A survey of the 18th- and 19th-century British novel with an emphasis on its development from the cultural margins to literary preeminence, and the way that this rise intersects issues of class, gender, and empire. Novelists may include Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Dickens and Hardy. Fall semester, alternate years, expected fall 2014. 4 credits
Course Descriptions for Liberal Arts and Sciences
ENGL2408 The Modern British Novel: Empire and After (AI-L) This course surveys major British fiction from the early 20th century to the present with particular emphasis on how the novel and short story give narrative shape to issues of class, gender, race, nationality in the period of the British Empire’s decline and fall. Writers may include James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, V.S. Naipaul and Jeanette Winterson. Spring semester, alternate years, expected spring 2013. 4 credits ENGL2409 The Political Novel (AI-L) The novel has always been political, especially when it claims that it is not. It necessarily reproduces some of the cultural and political ideology that informs it. As a commodity, for example, it advances the priorities of consumer capitalism and contributes to the hegemonic imperatives of the ruling class. How, then, do we read novels that criticize the economic and political system that produces them? Can novels which challenge dominant political assumptions become legitimate vehicles to engender significant social change? If so, what does this capability say about the sociocultural power of subversive Emmanuel Emmanuel College College
texts and the relationship between political ideas and literary aesthetics? This course will consider these questions, along with many others, as it examines several 20th-century American novels that interrogate the complexities of politics and political life in America and abroad. Novels may include Blood Meridian, The Grapes of Wrath, Ceremony, and Under the Feet of Jesus. Fall semester, alternate years, expected fall 2013. 4 credits ENGL2413 African American Literature: A Tradition of Resistance (AI-L) This course traces the African American literary tradition from its origins to the present, focusing in particular on ways that African American narratives have challenged and changed American literary, political, and historical discourses. Readings will include folktales, fugitive slave narratives, and political writings, as well as fiction, poetry and drama from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary moment. Writers may include Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. Spring semester, alternate years, expected spring 2014. 4 credits ENGL2417 Literature of the Black Atlantic (AI-L) This course surveys the literatures and cultures of the Black world—including Africa, the Caribbean, and Black Britain— in the 20th century. Through an examination of representative works of prose fiction, drama, poetry, film, and music by major figures of Black Africa and its Atlantic diaspora (including, for example, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, “dub” poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and reggae musician Bob Marley), the course explores how Black culture and consciousness have been shaped by their engagements with issues of race, class, nationality, and gender in the successive historical contexts of colonialism,