DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.

Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.

In this course we will look at five classic works of fiction, all of which explore in one way or another the problem of the divided self. Whether in the guise of monster, rival, uncanny double, or repressed desire, the fantasy of an "other" self lies at the heart of some of our most archetypal narratives, and some of our deepest ethical, psychological and political dilemmas.

Teaching Methods: 2 lectures, 1 required discussion-section per week.

Evaluation Methods: Midterm paper (15%); midterm exam (15%); final paper (25 or 30%); final exam (25 or 30%); quizzes and class participation (15%).

Texts include:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview 3^rd Edition, 2012), ISBN 978-1554811038.

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin), ISBN 978-0141441146.

• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Oxford), ISBN 978-0199536221.

• Virginia Woolf,  Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt), ISBN 978-0156628709.
• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage), ISBN 978-0307278449.

Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed OR to have a digital version of the texts, so we can all “be on the same page.”

Course Description: When did the myriad people of Latin American descent in the United States— Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Central and South Americans—become Latinx? How has the literature produced by Latinxs in the United States reflected and even produced the historical and political consciousness we associate with being Latinx? Prompted by questions such as these, this course will explore the consolidation of Latin-ness as a political, bureaucratic, and marketing phenomenon. Along the way, students will become familiar with the major genres, writers, and historical contexts of Latinx literature.

Teaching Methods: A mixture of lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Quizzes, two short essays, final exam.

Required Texts: Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (978-0195138252); Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (978-0452273870).

Note: The above course is combined with Latina/o Studies 277.

Course Description: One of the main projects of modern Western culture has been the attempt to conceptualize the realm called Nature and, in particular, to define the relation of the “natural” world to the human one. In the course of the past several centuries, often sharply incompatible versions of Nature have been produced by the sciences, philosophy, religion, and the various imaginative arts. We will trace a series of these competing visions of Nature and the natural, focusing on the arrays of rhetorical and artistic methods that have been employed to promote each one at the expense of its rivals. The guiding idea of the course is that Nature is not so much a definite area of reality as a malleable imaginary construct invented and forever re-invented for historically variable reasons. The focus in this seminar falls on the nineteenth century, where ideologies of Nature took particularly distinct forms, but we will cover earlier and later materials as well, including an experimental video (wild hogs in a supermarket) and at least one film.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Class participation, several short papers.

Texts include: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; sermons of John Wesley; poems by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man (excerpts from each); John Stuart Mill, “Nature”; Edmund Gosse, Father and Son; Jack London, The Call of the Wild; Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (film); Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

Course Description: Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides a stellar example of how, within the liberal and creative arts, we can study “problems” within cultures and how aesthetic, narrative, and generic solutions are applied to express those problems and even intervene in the course of history. When the novel was published in 1852-53 it sparked intense interest in the abolitionist cause, but after the American Civil War it became relegated to juvenile literature then ignominy for stereotypes and racial insensitivity. Yet in stark contrast to this status within the USA, Uncle Tom’s Cabin continues to enjoy a reputation for promoting positively-valenced causes abroad: not only the emancipation of slaves but also temperance, nationalist self-determination, perseverance against inequality. Stowe’s text is Christian yet it has been mobilized to promote Islamist values across North Africa and the Middle East, humanist values in the officially atheist Soviet Union, and Protestantism in the Asian archipelago. Thus transnational history significantly challenges the literary and popular interpretative traditions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This class will examine a range of adapted formats—novels, plays, dance, film, built environments, and fine art—to explore how this varied political reception is equally rich as a history of the book, history of politics, and the transnational circulation of ideas that continues to put glocal struggles in conversation with an American classic.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Short writing assignments, final essay, and discussion participation.

Texts include: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Oxford World’s Classics edition); Poor Paddy’s Cabin; Clara: or, Slave Life in Europe; analytical essays.

Texts will be available at: Norris, Canvas, and on-line.

Pre-1830/TTC

Course Description: Medieval romance famously celebrated “courtly love”—the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite—or perhaps because of—the Church’s misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender phenomena. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women masquerade as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by the bonds of male affection. Texts will include Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, in which two girls fall in love and marry; a pair of transgender saints’ lives; and the stunningly postmodern romance of Silence. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we’ll turn to ambiguous desires, reading The Romance of the Rose, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We’ll end with Chaucer’s “other masterpiece,” the magnificent Troilus and Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation.

Teaching method: Mostly discussion with some lectures.

Evaluation methods: Class participation, three 5-7 page papers (one may be creative). Texts include: Ovid, “Iphis and Ianthe” (from Metamorphoses); Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Love (excerpts); two transgender saints’ lives; Heldris of Cornwall, Silence, ed. and trans. Sarah RocheMahdi; “The Debate between Ganymede and Helen,” trans. John Boswell; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan; Amis and Amiloun, ed. Edward Foster; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Marie Borroff; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. R. A. Shoaf.

Note: The above course is combined with COMP_LIT 313 and Gender Studies 361.

What did it mean for a body to feel pain or pleasure, be exposed to a storm, or fall in love in the English Renaissance? In this course, we will study how Renaissance writers conceived of the body -- often very differently than we do -- by reading Renaissance medical texts alongside drama and poetry. We will explore Renaissance models for understanding connections between psychology and physiology, sex and gender, body and soul, and the body and its environment. As we investigate how poets and playwrights figure the human body and how characters express embodied experience, we will also ask whether the Renaissance body offers alternative ways of thinking about our own relationship to our bodies, the environment, and one another? We will read William Shakespeare's King Lear and The Winter's Tale; John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl; and poetry by Shakespeare, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Papers, Canvas posts, participation.

Texts may include: William Shakespeare's King Lear and The Winter's Tale; John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl; and poetry by Shakespeare, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw.

Texts will be available at: Books at Beck's; Course Reader at Quartet Copies

This course will examine a number of Jane Austen's novels (Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and possibly Sense and Sensibility) in the context of a "crisis of judgment" that plagues the eighteenth-century novel. Working against the seductions of eighteenth-century sentimentality and the romance plot which threaten a reader's capacity for judgment, Austen designs narratives that compel her readers to engage in a sophisticated practice of judgment and evaluation. Some of Austen's most distinctive narrative strategies, such as "free indirect discourse," are in the service of a pedagogy of judgment that is at the heart of her novelistic project. We will begin by exploring the crisis of judgment as it emerges in the eighteenth century, in the writings of Locke, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith and others. Reading examples of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction and romance, where the failures of judgment are clearly on display, will allow us to appreciate in a new light some of Austen's remarkable contributions to the history of the novel. The supple and attentive strategies of judgment she honed in her novels are as relevant today against a reductive scientism and disoriented aestheticism as they were when Austen first penned them.

Teaching Methods: The course will be conducted as a seminar in which all members of the class are expected to participate actively.

Evaluation Methods: Class participation (30%), midterm paper 6-8pp (30%), final paper 7-9pp (40%).

Texts include: Austen, Emma; Austen, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility; Locke, Essay (selections); Shaftesbury, Characteristics (selections); Richardson, Pamela; Fielding, Joseph Andrews.

In this course we will consider Dickens, "arguably second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of English writers," as an analyst of the troubled social, psychological, and spiritual patterns of modern life, trying to see how his innovations in novelistic technique (notably his development of veins of lunatic comedy that can only be called "dickensian") arise from and at the same time give form to his vividly idiosyncratic vision of modernity.

Evaluation Method: Evaluation based on class presentations and participation, quizzes, and a term
paper.

Texts Include: David Copperfield (1849-50); Bleak House (1852-53); and Little Dorrit (1855-57).

Note: The instructor disclaims responsibility for any cases of addiction to reading Victorian fiction
traceable to this course.

An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners' crisscrossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside sources, annotations, and commentaries. In thinking about Ulysses' fictional Dublin, we'll consider such matters as Joyce's transmutation of Homer's Odyssey and his own actual Dublin into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters' conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and "the psychopathology of everyday life" (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress and social power; performance--studied and unconscious--and theatricality; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life and political bite of jokes, comedy, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce's reported remark that women's emancipation is "the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is"; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the powers and pleasures of language; the play of inner and spoken voices amid the chameleonesque narrative styles--interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation, noises, soundscapes from the cat's mrkgnao to a screeching tram; Joyce's worldly, inventive English; and so on. We'll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, deeply rewarding book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, and engage it with serious purpose and imaginative freedom in search of treasure and revelation.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, preparation, participation (20%); Canvas discussions (25%); class presentation (15%); option of course papers and projects or a final exam (40%).

Texts include: 1) Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text). Please use this edition even if you already own another. 2) Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (California, 1989). 3) Homer, The Odyssey, Fitzgerald translation or another.

Recommended: 4) Joyce, Dubliners. 5) R. Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982). 6) Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Barry (Oxford, 1991). 7) Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (NY: Vintage, 1952).

This course will focus on the intersections between democratic revolution and revolutionary poetics in Walt Whitman's writings. We will focus in particular on Whitman's democratic experiments with the language, style, and forms of poetry, and his daring representation of such subjects as the dignity of labor and the working classes, the body, sex, race, technology, comradeship, war, America, the globe, and the cosmos. We will begin by exploring the sources of Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass in the social and political struggles of his time. We will consider the fascinating intersections between personal and political crisis, homoeroticism and poetic experimentation in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. We will also look at Whitman's attempts to find new forms to give voice to the simultaneous carnage and intimacy of the Civil War as the first modern war in Drum-Taps and Sequel (1865). And we will conclude by reflecting on Whitman's struggle in his later writings to reconcile the revolutionary dream of democracy with a post-Civil War world increasingly dominated by the unleashed forces of economic expansion, materialism, selfism, and greed. The course will end with readings of poets and writers from Ginsberg to Neruda in the United States and elsewhere who continue to "talk back" to Whitman.

Teaching Method: Some lecture; mostly discussion.

Evaluation Method: Essay (3-4 pages); essay (8-10 pages); final examination.

Texts Include: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose.

Textbooks available at: Norris Book Center.

Utopia, anarchy, pastoral idyll: how have myths of a "green world" spurred us to think that language can sometimes be natural -- or that it can be precisely what separates us from "Nature"? How do our ideas about language impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules, on humans, animals, and the worlds around them? Learning about theories of culture and language alongside literary forms from the pastoral of Shakespearean comedy to Romantic and recent poetry, from ethnographic fieldwork and nature writing to the outlandish imaginary of science fiction, students in this course unearth the unexamined grounds of "green" thought as it appears in literary environments (and as it finds other forms in film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students a critical introduction to new ideas in what is now being called the "environmental humanities," while offering a broad background on classic literary themes of wilderness, innocence, knowledge, and freedom.

Texts Include: William Shakespeare, As You Like It (any edition); William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford UP, ISBN 0192810898); Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (Tor Books, ISBN 0765324644); H. D. Thoreau, Journals (NYRB, ISBN 159017321X).

Other readings to include: Theocritus, A. Marvell, J. G. Herder, J.-J. Rousseau, F. Schiller, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Harryette Mullen, Alice Oswald, Ed Roberson.

Films to include: Truffaut, The Wild Child; Herzog, Grizzly Man.

Texts will be available at: Beck's.

Note: The above course is combined with Comp Lit 304-0.

"My grandmother puts her feet in the sink of the bathroom at Sears," writes the poet Mohja Kahf, "to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer." Kahf's ensuing description of "respectable Sears matrons [who] shake their heads and frown ... a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom" offers a productive springboard for considering contemporary zones of AngloIslamic interaction -- a theme that the hit Showtime series, Shameless, develops in a different direction through its depiction of the romantic liaison between a married Muslim business owner and his Irish-Catholic employee. In this course, we will take literary representations of Christian-Muslim encounters as our focus, tracing the long and involved prehistories of interfaith conflict and coalition and considering their abiding relevance today. We will situate complex narratives of warfare, religious 63 Return to Calendar conversion, and amorous desire against the historical backdrops of the Crusades and the sixteenthcentury development of international commerce, investigating how medieval and Renaissance writers incorporate social, political and theological exchanges between Christians and Muslims into popular poems like The Canterbury Tales and canonical plays like Othello. Putting earlier formulations of religious, racial, cultural, sexual, and gender difference in frank conversation with more recent treatments of Christian-Muslim interaction (like Diana Abu-Jaber's "Lamb Two Ways"), we will reflect on the discontinuities as well as powerful through lines between 'then' and 'now.'

Teaching Method: Seminar discussions and occasional short lectures.

Evaluation Method: Participation, occasional reading quizzes, oral presentation, and two essays.

Texts Include: Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Man of Law's Tale"; The Sultan of Babylon; Mandeville's Travels (selections); William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse (selections); William Shakespeare, Othello; Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk; Diana Abu-Jaber, "Lamb Two Ways"; Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran; Mohja Kahf, E-mails from Scheherazad; and excepts from the Showtime series Shameless.

Note: This course fulfills the Area V (Ethics and Values) and Area VI (Literature & Fine Arts) distribution requirements.

This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get.

Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops.

Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback.

Texts Include: TBA

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only

Nineteenth-century American poetry has frequently been reduced to the study of two poets--Whitman and Dickinson--who stand apart from the rest by virtue of their eccentricity and extraordinary ambition. This selective account of poetic inheritance has produced the unusual circumstance of a canon that needs to be opened not only to culturally marginal but also to culturally dominant poets and poetic forms. This course integrates the study of Whitman and Dickinson with the study of a vastly expanded canon of American poetry. The course also reads theoretical and critical texts that raise questions about canonization and the formation of literary historical narratives. In its attention to the historical and cultural contexts that poetry variously inscribes and defers, the course repeatedly returns to the oscillation that that word always-already enacts in relation to the texts that lie within it.

Teaching Method: Mostly discussion.

Evaluation Method: Mandatory attendance and active, informed participation. No exams, but possible quizzes. The major work of the course, as in all Research Seminars, is the research and writing of a 15-page research paper that takes as its subject a nineteenth-century book of poetry found in the NU Library stacks or in Special Collections.

Texts Include: Poets may include Joel Barlow, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, William Cullen Bryant, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, Sarah Margaret Fuller.

Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students must successfully complete 4-6 300-level English courses before taking English 397.

Medievalists are in the habit of distinguishing sacred from secular texts, but some of the most vibrant and interesting cultural production lay on the borderline, in the terrain of "crossover." Courtly love lyrics could be indistinguishable from devotional poems to the Virgin, while motets interwove liturgical phrases with the melodies of popular songs. Bawdy fabliaux might return with tweaking as miracle stories. Bestiaries, originally a genre of moralized natural science, could be put to erotic or political use. The hybrid genre of hagiographic romance represents virgin martyrs as erotic heroines and the sorcerer Merlin as a parodic saint, while the Grail romances turn chivalry on its head to promote ascetic chastity and eucharistic piety. What did medieval audiences make of such ambiguities? What textual markers enable us to distinguish respectful homage from tongue-in-cheek parody, or audacious sacrilege from the sincerest form of flattery? In this seminar we will read medieval texts in a range of genres (lyric, romance, beast allegory, pseudohagiography, and mystical dialogue), exploring as many variants of crossover as our brief quarter permits. Middle English works will be read in the original, French texts in translation, but I am happy to offer tutoring in Old and Middle French for those who are proficient in the modern language.

Evaluation methods: class participation, one oral presentation (accompanied by a 5-page paper), term paper of about 15 pages

Texts: Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart; The Quest of the Holy Grail; Amis and Amiloun; Sir Gowther; English bestiary (Oxford, MS. Bodley 764), ed. Richard Barber; Richard de Fournival, Master Richard's Bestiary of Love, with the Lady's response; John C. Hirsh, ed., Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads, and Carols; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose; Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls.

American Women Auteurs centers around five novelists -- Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen. That is, we move from the exquisite local color realism of Jewett's spinster-filled Maine to Chopin's "creole Bovary" set in fin de siecle New Orleans to Wharton's anthropological vision of Old New York's tribal mores for women, to Cather's enabling Nebraska prairies and historical ante-bellum Virginia to Larsen's Renaissance Harlem, Tuskegee, and rural black belt South. The seminar pairs both Jane Campion's The Piano and an all-star set of Bette Davis's greatest classical Hollywood films with these novels: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Deephaven with The Piano; Jezebel with The Awakening; Dark Victory and Now, Voyager with The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with Sapphira and the Slave Girl and My Antonia; In This Our Life with Quicksand and Passing.

Augmenting this relatively heavy reading list will be theoretical essays on authorship by Foucault and Barthes; star theory; essays on spectatorship; and genre criticism on melodramatic, gothic, and sentimental forms.