Fall 2018 Class Schedule
Course | Title | Instructor | Day/Time | |
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English 206 | Reading & Writing Poetry | Quesada | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 206 Reading & Writing Poetry[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. | ||||
English 206 | Reading & Writing Poetry | Mehigan | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 206 Reading & Writing Poetry[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. | ||||
English 206 | Reading & Writing Poetry | Mehigan | TTh 12:30-1:50 | |
English 206 Reading & Writing Poetry[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. | ||||
English 207 | Reading & Writing Fiction | Bouldrey | MW 9:30-10:50 | |
English 207 Reading & Writing Fiction[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. | ||||
English 208 | Reading & Writing Creative Non Fiction | Bouldrey | MW 2-3:20 | |
English 208 Reading & Writing Creative Non Fiction[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. | ||||
English 213 | Introduction to Fiction | Law | MW 10-10:50 | |
English 213 Introduction to FictionIn 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:
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.” | ||||
English 234 | Introduction to Shakespeare | Masten | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 234 Introduction to ShakespeareCourse Description: We'll read a range of Shakespeare's plays: comedies, histories, tragedies, and tragicomedies, from early in his career to his final works. The course will introduce the plays by introducing them back into the context of the theatre, literary world, and culture in which Shakespeare originally wrote them. We will think about Shakespeare’s contexts and how they matter: a theatre on the outskirts of ever-expanding Renaissance London; a financially successful acting company in which he played the simultaneous and often overlapping roles of writer, actor, and co-owner; a world of reading and writing in which words, plots, and texts were constantly being re-circulated into new plays; the rich possibilities of the English language around 1600. We will centrally consider the ways in which these theatrical, literary, and cultural questions register within the plays themselves. What do words, plays, stories do—how do they work—in Shakespeare’s plays? Who or what is an audience or an actor in these plays? How do Shakespeare's plays stage issues such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, social class, entertainment and the media -- and how does his approach to these issues continue to speak to our own era? Teaching method: Lecture and discussion, required discussion section. Evaluation method: Essays and exams. Plays will include: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, As You Like It, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen (by Shakespeare and his collaborator, John Fletcher).
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English 270-1 | American Literary Traditions Part 1 | Erkkila | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 270-1 American Literary Traditions Part 1Course Description: What spooks America? From the Puritan “city upon a Hill,” to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, to Emerson’s American Adam, America was imagined as a New World paradise, a place to begin the world anew. And yet, from the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, to the origins of the American Gothic in the Age of Reason, to Melville’s Moby Dick, American literature has been haunted by fantasies of terror, sin, violence, and apocalypse. Why? This course will seek to answer this question. Focusing on a selection of imaginative writings, including origin stories, poems, novels, and a slave narrative, we shall seek to identify and understand the significance of the terrors—of the dark other, the body, nature, sex, mixture, blood violence, totalitarian power, and apocalypse—that haunt and spook the origins and development of American literature. Students will be encouraged to draw connections between past American fantasies and fears and contemporary popular culture and politics, from classic American films like Hitchcock’s Psycho to the television series Game of Thrones, from American blues and jazz to the rap lyrics of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” from the Red Scare and the Cold War to the contemporary war on terror. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion; weekly discussion sections. Evaluation Method: 2 papers; quizzes; final examination. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1820 (Volume A; 9th edition); Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Writings; Edgar Allan Poe, Great Short Works; Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Note: English 270-1 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement. | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Coming to Terms | Grossman | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Coming to TermsCourse Description: This seminar will introduce you to some of terms--and through these terms, to some of the materials, methods, theories, and arguments--that have become central to literary study today. By coming to know these terms, we will begin to come to terms with literary study in other, broader ways--to think about what the study of texts might have to do with reading, writing, and thinking in twenty-first century American culture. The seminar is organized around the following terms: writing, author, culture, canon, gender, performance. Some of these terms are of course familiar. Initially, some will seem impossibly broad, but our approach will be particular, through particular literary texts and critical essays. Throughout the course we will also return to two important terms that aren’t a part of this list: literature (what is it? who or what controls its meaning? why study it?) and readers (who are we? what is our relation to the text and its meaning[s]? what does “reading” entail? what is the purpose of reading? what gets read and who decides?). Teaching method: Mostly discussion. Evaluation method: Mandatory attendance and active participation. Shorter papers, some of them revised, and one longer final paper. No exams. Texts Include: Mostly fiction and poetry, including some of the following: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinson’s poetry; Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III; Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope’s Year; Critical Terms for Literary Study (eds. Lentricchia and McLaughlin; second edition). 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. | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Ideas of Justice | Schwartz | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Ideas of JusticeCourse Description: This course will introduce you to literary studies with a focus on ideas of justice. Library works will include the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Shakespeare, and modern works by Melville, Kafka, and the play, “Inherit the Wind” will be included. Reading closely, we will heed how literature offers elaborations and complications of theories of justice, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will also put literature in dialogue with strands of political thought, showing how literature both reflects and shapes ideas of justice. Teaching method: Seminar 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. | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: American Appetites: Food Writing and National Identity | Fritz | TTh 3:30-4:50 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: American Appetites: Food Writing and National IdentityCourse Description: This seminar will deliciously discuss its central question- how authors cook up national identity in literature- by exploring food culture from early America to the present. Foodways, or the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period, are a powerful lens through which to explore eaters’ national and cultural identities and reveal social inequities. How does what you eat reveal who you are in American life? Beginning with early American Indian cuisine and Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, we will investigate how the “nation” was contested through depictions of food in literature. What kinds of food and eating habits were depicted as “savage”? How “civilized” is the sentimental myth of the First Thanksgiving, memorialized in Lydia Maria Child’s popular poem, “Over the River and Through the Wood”? Travelling through the 19th century, we will examine how foodways define gender, race, and citizenship in the American republic. How can studying nineteenth-century foodways help us to understand who does (and who doesn’t) belong to the nation? Finally, we will arrive in the 20th- and 21st-century to focus on how contemporary writers of color take up foodways to deconstruct dominant national narratives. What can our current foodie moment teach us about how eaters perceive of their national identities today? Teaching method: Discussion. Evaluation method: Close-reading posts; 2 short essays (3-5 pages) and one longer essay (5-7); participation and attendance. Texts Include: Readings may include Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; and selections from works by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, as well as from contemporary cookbooks and food memoirs such as The Sioux Chef and The Cooking Gene. 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. Instructor Bio: Meaghan Fritz’s research and teaching interests concern nineteenth-century American literature and print culture, women’s and gender studies, and legal studies. Professor Fritz has taught courses in the Northwestern English Department and the Northwestern University Writing Program, where she received a teaching award. Her pedagogy is distinctly interdisciplinary, placing historical, cultural, and political artifacts alongside literature to encourage students to think of reading and writing as part of an ongoing and historical conversation. She is also a self-proclaimed foodie, and enjoys teaching courses focusing on food, gender, and national identity. | ||||
English 311 | Studies in Poetry: Contemporary Poetry Communities (Post 1830/TTC) | Feinsod | TTh 3:30-4:50 | |
English 311 Studies in Poetry: Contemporary Poetry Communities (Post 1830/TTC)Course Description: How do contemporary poets write about ideas of community formation, and how is their work sustained, promoted, and nourished by the communities to which they belong? What kinds of social relationships and activist “social engagements” does poetry hope to perform or to bring into being? These are questions we will ask through our studies of a wide variety of U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American poets, from 1989 to the present. We will learn to describe the forms and rhythms of particular works by major and emerging poets, such as Rosa Alcalá, Daniel Borzutzky, Fred Moten, Allison Hedge Coke, and Claudia Rankine. We will also emphasize the study of organizations and journals in creating poetic community. This course is organized in conjunction with two major events at Northwestern: the digital reissue of the poetry magazines Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas (1991-2013), and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics (1997-2015), and two 1-day conferences devoted to their legacies. The class will therefore include the opportunity to attend readings and conference workshops, to meet with a wide variety of contemporary poets, translators, and editors associated with the magazines, including Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, and Mark Nowak, and to work on digital exhibitions appraising their work and its legacies. Students can expect a mixture of creative and critical assignments, emphasizing both close reading skills and research into the literature and politics of the very recent past and present. Teaching Method: Discussion Evaluation Method: A mixture of creative and critical assignments, emphasizing both close reading skills and research into the literature and politics of the very recent past and present. Texts may include: The anthology American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (2018), eds. Michael Dowdy and Claudia Rankine, back issues of Mandorla and XCP, and a course reader with criticism by Édouard Glissant, Nathaniel Mackey, Maria Damon, Jahan Ramazani, Harryette Mullen, and others. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 313-0-20. | ||||
English 312 | Studies in Drama: The Drama of Homosexuality (Post 1830/ICSP) | Masten | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 312 Studies in Drama: The Drama of Homosexuality (Post 1830/ICSP)Teaching Method: a mixture of lecture and discussion Evaluation Method: based on attendance and discussion; essays. This course is cross-listed in Gender Studies and English. Texts include: Plays: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Philaster, Edward II, The Man of Mode, Sodom, The Importance of Being Earnest, Patience, A Streetcar Named Desire, Angels in America. Films: Tea and Sympathy, The Boys in the Band. Theory: Butler, Dryden, Edelman, Foucault, Halperin, Koestenbaum, Miller, Montaigne, Sedgwick, Sontag, others. | ||||
English 313 | Studies in Fiction: Unreliable Narrators (Post 1830/ICSP) | Marks | TTh 2-3:20 | |
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Unreliable Narrators (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: How can a rewarding relationship be based on manipulation and suspicion? Many of the swerves, shocking revelations, and anti-heroes in television and film have their precedents in the novelistic techniques of Charles Dickens and Vladimir Nabokov. (For example, consider the ways The Walking Dead or Grey’s Anatomy manipulate viewers by limiting information about who lives and who dies at the end of episodes, or how limited omniscience is essentially the point of Momento or Fight Club.) In both visual media and the novel, suspicion can directly fuel aesthetic engagement—after all, a cautious reader is a close reader. In this class, we will examine what conniving, naive, shrewd, or deranged narrative voices ask of readers in texts from Henry James, Herman Melville, Nabokov, Jenny Holzer, and Danzy Senna. One goal of this class will be to address the historical contexts of marginalization in the social sphere—in terms of gender, race, sexuality, age, and disability—to ask how suspicious reading affects our social life. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Essays, Canvas posts, class discussion. Texts include: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno”; short stories from Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Jorge Luis Borges; Jenny Holzer, Truisms and Inflammatory Essays; Danzy Senna, New People; Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex. | ||||
English 335 | Milton (Pre 1830) | Schwartz | MW 9:30-10:50 | |
English 335 Milton (Pre 1830)Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time. Teaching Method: Class discussion and lecture. Evaluation Method: Papers, class presentation, class participation. Texts Include: Paradise Lost by John Milton. | ||||
English 339 | Special Topics in Shakespeare: Other Shakespeares: Postcolonial Adaptations in Literature and Film (Pre 1830/TTC) | Costa | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 339 Special Topics in Shakespeare: Other Shakespeares: Postcolonial Adaptations in Literature and Film (Pre 1830/TTC)Course Description: What does Mustafa Sa’eed, the Sudanese protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s revision of Othello, mean when he claims, “I am no Othello...Othello is a lie”? Why does Caliban 'clap back' to Prospero with “Uhuru,” the Swahili cry for freedom, in Aimé Cesairé’s Caribbean adaptation of The Tempest? In this course, we will explore how multicultural authors, filmmakers, and artists talk back to Shakespeare through reinterpretations and appropriations of his work. We will explore Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Cesairé’s Une Tempête, Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile, and Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha alongside their Shakespearean counterparts: Othello, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. Using post-colonial and critical race theories to structure and guide our exploration of Shakespearean afterlives, we will consider how authors of Sudanese, Caribbean, and South Asian descent revive and revise Shakespeare to assert their own national identities, dismantle colonial logics, and forward strategic political visions. Testing the limits and possibilities of adaptation and appropriation, this course pursues a fundamental question: when does Shakespeare stop being Shakespeare and become something else? Teaching Method: Seminar discussions and occasional short lectures. Evaluation Method: Brief oral presentation, two shorter essays, and one long essay. Texts Include: Shakespeare, Othello, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North; Aime Cesaire, Une Tempête; Derek Walcott, A Branch of the Blue Nile; Welcome Msomi, uMabatha; and Vishal Bhardwaj, Maqbool. Texts will be available at: Norris | ||||
English 353 | Studies in Romantic Literature: Frankenstein Redux (Pre 1830) | Finn | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 353 Studies in Romantic Literature: Frankenstein Redux (Pre 1830)Course Description: In the summer of 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein: The New Prometheus . Itwas a hit in its own time. But it faded into relative obscurity – at least in the academy. Frankenstein would rarely if ever be found on Romantic lit syllabi until the mid 1970s when feminist theorists resuscitated Frankenstein and many other texts written by women in the nineteenth century. Soon Frankenstein was on many syllabi. By 2018, ten out of fifteen students in a Northwestern first-year seminar on the novel had read Frankenstein in high school. In this class we will study this trajectory. We will start by studying the novel as paradigmatically “Romantic,” a direct engagement with John Milton’s Paradise Lost and of course the Prometheus myth. We will then focus on the evolution of Frankenstein, from a novel about “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” as seen through the lense of feminist criticism to, as one recent critic put it, “the first novel about the weather.” The title of a very recent study, Frankenstein: The First 200 Years, nods to the novel’s staying power, and its ability to attract new audiences. As we read and analyze the criticism over time, as well as other primary works that are contemporary with or pay homage to Frankenstein, together we will theorize about why this is so. Writing assignments will build incrementally toward a final research paper. Because of the range and sheer magnitude of critical approaches available to them, in doing their research and writing their papers students will be asked to articulate their own “Frankenstein.”
Texts include: All students will need to have a copy of the 1818 edition Frankenstein. (There was also an 1831 edition.) As long as it is an 1818 edition, any published edition will do, used or new, borrowed or owned. Frankenstein is also available electronically. Almost all other required readings will be available electronically through our Canvas site. | ||||
English 359 | Studies in Victorian Literature: Thomas Hardy and the Poetics of Evolution (Post 1830) | Law | MW 2-3:20 | |
English 359 Studies in Victorian Literature: Thomas Hardy and the Poetics of Evolution (Post 1830)Course Description: The concept of evolution enthralled Victorian writers, who understood and probed that concept in a variety of ways, many of them more poetic and philosophical than scientific. What is the nature of instinct? What is sex? Are children fated to be like their parents? What is the relationship between scientific and poetic conceptions of fate? Is character written in stone or alterable? What is the morality of “surviving”? All these questions animate the brilliant novels of Thomas Hardy, and as well continue to dominate our contemporary thinking about change, fate, and character. We will look at two of Hardy’s greatest novels through the lens of evolutionary thought, both Victorian and contemporary. We will also consider the ways in which psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of the mind—also founded on the model of archaeological levels—offer alternatives to evolutionary theories. Teaching Method(s): discussion and some formal presentations. Evaluation Method(s): three papers, plus contribution to class discussion, including brief seminar reports. Texts include: Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin) ISBN 978-0141439785; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Penguin) ISBN 78-0141439594; Darwin, The Origin of Species (Penguin) ISBN 978-0140439120; essays by Herbert Spencer, Jean Laplanche, Erich Auerbach, Richard Dawkins, David Buss, Mark Ridley. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore, though students are encouraged to acquire their texts independently and beforehand. Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed or to have a digital version of the novels, so we can all “be on the same page.” Essays will be available on Canvas. | ||||
English 366 | Studies in African American Literature: Black Paris: African American Writers in the City of Lights (Post 1830/ICSP) | Fritz | TTh 12:30-1:50 | |
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Paris: African American Writers in the City of Lights (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: Performer and activist Josephine Baker famously declared, “I have two loves: my country and Paris.” In this seminar we will examine the works of African American writers such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes who flocked to Paris at the height of 20th-century literary modernism seeking inspiration, relief from racial prejudice and sexual policing, economic and creative support, and greater artistic freedom. Our inquiries will center on the sometimes-dueling allegiances many African American artists felt to the U.S. and their adopted home of Paris. How did visiting Paris free some artists from the racism, social alienation, and restrictive literary traditions associated with writing “American literature”? How did expatriating empower others to reflect anew on American life, politics, and literary forms? Was it possible for authors to escape their American-ness abroad? Did Paris live up to the hype? We will debate national and canonical boundaries, questioning what defines African American literature and authorship in this particularly transnational literary movement. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Close-reading posts; 2 short essays (5-7 pages); participation and attendance. Texts include: In addition to Baker, we will explore the works of novelists, poets, artists, and musicians, ranging from James Baldwin to Chester Himes, Louis Armstrong to Billie Holiday, and Gwendolyn Bennett to Langston Hughes. I will occasionally assign critical or theoretical works in addition to our primary literary texts. Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore Instructor Bio: Meaghan Fritz’s research and teaching interests concern nineteenth-century American literature and print culture, women’s and gender studies, and legal studies. Professor Fritz has taught courses in the Northwestern English Department and the Northwestern University Writing Program, where she received a teaching award. Her pedagogy is distinctly interdisciplinary, placing historical, cultural, and political artifacts alongside literature to encourage students to think of reading and writing as part of an ongoing and historical conversation. She is also a self-proclaimed foodie, and enjoys teaching courses focusing on food, gender, and national identity. | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th Century Literature: Queer Modernisms (Post 1830/ICSP) | Nordgren | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Queer Modernisms (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: What was queer life like when terms such as “homosexuality,” “gay,” and “lesbian” were new, and few people used them or knew what they meant? What possibilities did queer people imagine for how their lives could turn out, with no firmly established vocabularies or role models available? To investigate the sexual and gendered contours of this period, in this course we will explore how authors in the early twentieth century tackled these and related questions in literature, grappling with the political and social challenges and possibilities of the time. The seminar is organized around key sites of literary production – London, New York, and Paris – and the writers who resided in them, thus taking part in new cross-cultural experiments and innovations in literature, art, and film during a period of political and social unrest not unlike our own. Teaching Method: Seminar Discussion. Evaluation Method: Participation, short reading responses, in-class presentation, and a final paper. Texts include: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Also a selection of poetry, short stories, and other writing by authors including E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Marcel Proust, Federico García Lorca, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Texts will be available at: Beck’s Bookstore or through Canvas. Instructor Bio: Todd Nordgren specializes in British and American modernist literature and culture, queer and feminist theories, life writing, and genre studies. At Northwestern, he has designed and taught courses on poetry and poetics, modernist fiction, and life writing in minority communities. His recent work includes a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism on the intersections of autobiography and celebrity culture in the early 20th century. | ||||
English 369 | Studies in African Literature: Africa and Race (Post 1830/TTC) | Mwangi | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 369 Studies in African Literature: Africa and Race (Post 1830/TTC)Course Description: This course uses interdisciplinary and intersectional methods to study the representations of race in African literatures from different linguistic and racial backgrounds. The role of translation (inter-lingual and cultural) in the depiction of race will be central to our discussions. We will read texts originally written in Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese and indigenous African languages to examine how writers come to terms with the idea of race. Who is an African and who is not? Is race biological or socially constructed? How are non-black races (e.g. Arabs, white, Indians etc.) represented in African writing? How is the “black” in Africa different or similar to “black” in other parts of the world? How do “black aesthetics” and “black arts” in Africa differ from similar concepts in black-diaspora cultures? How does racism intersect with other forms of oppression in African societies? How are internal racisms represented in African contexts? How are representations of race in canonical writing (e.g., Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) treated in African translations and allusions to those texts? Performing both distant and close readings of African writers, we will read primary texts in terms of the techniques individual artists use to treat race matters. Theory texts will include excerpts from well-known works on the black race by Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Fanon, Memmi as well as newer African and African-diaspora engagements with these texts by such scholars as Charles Mills, Emmanuel Eze, Achille Mbembe, Toni Morrison, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Stuart Hall. Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, debates, role-play, one-on-one meetings, and small group discussions. Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Readings (May change)
Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 304-0-20. | ||||
English 372 | American Poetry: Historicizing American Poetry (Post 1830) | Grossman | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 372 American Poetry: Historicizing American Poetry (Post 1830)Course Description: 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. 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 Allan Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, Sarah Margaret Fuller. | ||||
English 385 | Topics in Combined Studies: Revolution (Post 1830) | Cutler | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Revolution (Post 1830)Course Description: How have revolutions shaped the modern world? How have artists, writers, historians, and musicians participated in, memorialized, and critiqued revolutionary movements? This course will take a comparative approach to the study of the modern revolution, beginning with the Mexican and Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century, then moving back in time to the American, Haitian, and French revolutions. Drawing from a variety of humanities disciplines, we will seek to understand how revolutionary movements begin, the contingencies of revolutionary action, and what happens when revolutions become institutionalized into state apparatuses. Texts will include Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (The Underdogs) (1915), Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1920s), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938), and selections from Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Washington Irving, and The Federalist Papers. This small-enrollment, discussion-based seminar will travel to Mexico City the week before fall quarter begins (Sept 10-15) to visit a variety of sites associated with the Mexican Revolution. Course enrollment is by application only. Teaching Method: Discussion Evaluation Method: Three essays and an exit interview. Texts:
Note: This course is combined with Humanities 310-6-20. | ||||
English 385 | Topics in Combined Studies: Theories of Comedy (Post 1830) | Davis, T. | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Theories of Comedy (Post 1830)Course Description: Since its origin in Greek civic festivals, comedy (essentially a performative form) has been at the center of philosophical debate. In this course, we will survey major variants of comic theory from the Western tradition and examine instances of comedy, farce, humor, laughter, satire, parody, jesting, and jokes in their historical contexts. We will also consider what constitutes the butt of comedy and how twentieth-century theories of democracy and twenty-first-century theories of inclusivity—from the standpoints of gender, ethnicity, race, and disability—respond to the long history of laughter and the concept of resolvability. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Short papers, midterm exam, analytical close readings. Texts may include: Magda Romanska and Alan Ackerman, Reader in Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2016). Other texts on Canvas. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore, Canvas. | ||||
English 388 | Studies in Literature & Religion: Radical Spirits (Post 1830) | High | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 388 Studies in Literature & Religion: Radical Spirits (Post 1830)Course Description: Recent scholarship on the history of abolitionism has placed renewed emphasis on the importance of religious communities within the early antislavery movement of the eighteenth century. Together, we will explore how the concerns of these religious traditions carry forward into the larger national projects of American abolitionism in the nineteenth century. How does renewed attention to this early period help us bring into focus the contributions of radical Black abolitionists? How do the shifting concerns of these various communities and coalitions compete or collaborate? To answer these questions, we will read from a broad selection of early antislavery writing, while also looking toward Octavia Butler’s genre defying novel, Kindred (1979), as a lifeline to the present. We will explore abolition as a religiously inflected literary genre and will investigate how antislavery work inspired new forms of communication and literary style. Together we will read novels, poems, pamphlets, sermons, and personal narratives, paying attention to these emergent abolitionist forms. Teaching Method: Discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Method: Participation and preparation; two essays (5-7 pages); and a final collaborative project with in-class presentation. Texts include: Readings will move between novels, poems, speeches, journals, and narratives. Voices include: Anthony Benezet, Octavia Butler, Paul Cuffee, Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Lemuel Haynes, Benjamin Lay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, Phyllis Wheatley, John Greenleaf Whittier, and John Woolman. Note: This course fulfills the Area V (Ethics and Values) and Area VI (Literature & Fine Arts) distribution requirements. Instructor Bio: Ean High’s research and writing join ongoing efforts to revitalize critical knowledge of religious life and expression in the study of American literature. His work has been supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Libraries of Haverford College. His commitment to the classroom has been recognized by a teaching award from the Northwestern English Department. | ||||
English 393-1 | Theory & Practice of Poetry | Kinzie | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 393-1 Theory & Practice of PoetryThis selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 394-1 | Theory & Practice of Fiction | Donohue | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 394-1 Theory & Practice of FictionThis 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 | ||||
English 395-1 | Theory & Practice of Creative Nonfiction | Stielstra | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 395-1 Theory & Practice of Creative NonfictionAn advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
English 397 | Research Seminar: Literature After the Internet | Hodge | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 397 Research Seminar: Literature After the InternetCourse Description: Literature is dead! Long live literature! Since the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s critics, writers, and just about everyone has freaked out at one time or another about the fates of literature, print, and literacy in the digital age. Turning the volume down on both technophobic and technophilic reactions to this situation, we will start from literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s radically pluralistic vision of the novel in order to think about literature itself as an expansive and elastic category of mediated aesthetic expression uniquely responsive to digital technologies. More concretely, this research seminar is designed to do two things: to introduce students to key issues and developments in literary form and culture catalyzed by the rise of the web; and to teach students research skills in the service of drafting and crafting a self-designed research paper of approximately 12–15 pages. Possible texts include: short stories by William Gibson and Kristen Roupenian, novels by Allie Brosh and Dennis Cooper, and electronic literature by William Poundstone, Frances Stark, John Cayley, Thomson and Craighead, and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Required Texts: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half ISBN: 978-0224095372; Dennis Cooper, The Sluts ISBN: 978-0786716746. | ||||
English 398-1 | Honors Seminar | Mwangi | W 3-5:50 | |
English 398-1 Honors SeminarA two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration. | ||||
English 403 | Writers Studies in Literature | Gibbons | W 2:00-4:50 | |
English 403 Writers Studies in Literature | ||||
English 410 | Introduction to Graduate Study | Evans | M 2:00-4:50 | |
English 410 Introduction to Graduate Study | ||||
English 431 | Studies in 16th Century Literature: Experiments in Renaissance Poetry: Methods and Making Knowledge, with Help from Hester Pulter | Wall | T 2:00-4:50 | |
English 431 Studies in 16th Century Literature: Experiments in Renaissance Poetry: Methods and Making Knowledge, with Help from Hester Pulter | ||||
English 455 | Studies in Victorian Literature: George Eliot: Fiction, Ethics, and the Riddle of Fellow-Feeling | Lane | Th 2:00-4:50 | |
English 455 Studies in Victorian Literature: George Eliot: Fiction, Ethics, and the Riddle of Fellow-FeelingCourse Description: This seminar examines Eliot’s most engaging and intellectually complex novels, poetry, and essays, focusing throughout on several knotty concerns in her work: fellow-feeling and anticommunitarian impulses; positivism and the demand for political reform; marriage and women’s social roles; aesthetics and the impersonal scope of the imagination; providentialism and the limits of tolerance and faith. Teaching Methods: seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments. Evaluation Methods: weekly response papers (one of them a literary analysis), class presentation, research-driven essay, and in-class participation. Primary Texts (available at Norris Center Bookstore and in order of use): George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (ISBN: 0199555052); The Mill on the Floss (ISBN: 9780141439624); Silas Marner (ISBN: 9780141439754); Romola (ISBN: 0140434704); Middlemarch (ISBN: 0141439548); Daniel Deronda (ISBN: 0140434275); Impressions of Theophrastus Such (ISBN: 9781505811810); and Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (ed. Byatt and Warren; ISBN: 0140431489). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions. | ||||
English 471 | Studies in American Literature: Founding Terrors | Erkkila | W 2:00-4:50 | |
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Founding TerrorsCourse Description: This course will read against the accepted tradition of the American Revolution as an essentially rational, Lockean, and non-terroristic Revolution. We will examine American Revolutionary writing as a rhetorical battlefield in which a multiplicity of voices and a plurality of forms—history, letters, notes, autobiography, novel, epic, lyric, pamphlet, and journalistic piece—struggled over the cultural and political formation of America and the American. We shall pay particular attention to the rhetorics of Revolution—the language, images, myths, and forms through which the American Revolution and the American republic were imagined and constituted in and through writing. We shall focus in particular on sites of contest, contradiction, resistance, and taboo in Revolutionary writing: the representation of “citizens” and “others”; conflicts between reason and passion, liberty and slavery, civilization and savage, progress and blood; anxieties about nature, the body, gender, human psychology, race, and madness; the terrors of democracy, mob violence, slave insurrection, and political faction; and debates about the excesses of language, print, and representation itself. We shall read relevant political and cultural theory—from Locke and Kant to Nancy Fraser, Gilroy, and the Frankfurt school—and consider various past and recent contests about the meaning of the American Revolution. Evaluation Method: Book review/oral presentation on a major critical, historical, or theoretical work (3-4 pages); critical essay on a subject of the student’s choosing (10-12 pages); Canvas postings; class participation. Readings Include: Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence and selections from Notes on the State of Virginia; Phillis Wheatley, Poems; Samson Occom, Selected Writings; Thomas Paine: Common Sense; Abigail and John Adams: Selected Letters; Benjamin Franklin Autobiography; Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay: The Federalist Papers; Charles Brockden Brown: Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker; Royall Tyler: The Algerine Captive; selected critical and theoretical essays. | ||||
English 481 | Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Queer Theory & Cinema | Davis, N. | Th 2:00-4:50 | |
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Queer Theory & CinemaCourse Description: “Queer theory” and “New Queer Cinema” were two neologisms born of the same early-1990s moment in Anglophone academia, artistry, and activism. Both saw themselves as extending but also complicating the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological parameters of prior formations like “gay and lesbian studies” or “LGBT film.” These new and spreading discourses stoked each other’s productive advances. Scholars developed and illustrated new axioms through the medium of the movies, while filmmakers rooted their stories and images in changing notions of gender performativity, counter-historiography, and coalitional politics. Still, queer theory and queer cinema faced similar skepticisms: did their ornate language and conceptual novelty endow dissident sexualities with newfound political, cultural, and philosophical stature, or did they retreat too far from daily lives, mainstream tastes, and ongoing public emergencies? Did “queer” enable elastic identification and coalition among subjects with a wide range of sexual and gendered identities, or did the term reproduce the demographic and discursive hierarchies it claimed to deconstruct? Was the lack of fixed definitions, consensus ideals, or shared aesthetic practices a boon or a harm in sustaining a long-term movement of art, action, or thought? This class will explore some decisive shifts as critical theory and narrative film reclaimed “queer” as a boundary-breaking paradigm, in the pivotal era of Gender Trouble, Epistemology of the Closet, Tongues Untied, and Paris Is Burning. We will recover scholarly and cinematic trends that laid indispensable groundwork for these queer turns and will also track the subsequent careers of “queer” in the way we perform readings, perceive bodies, record histories, imagine psyches, form alliances, enter archives, and orient ourselves in space and time. Diversities of race, class, and gender identity will constantly inflect our understandings of “queer” and even challenge the presumed primacy of sexuality as the key referent for that term. Participants will develop skills of close-reading films as films and engage nimbly with the overarching claims but also the curious nuances, anomalies, and paradoxes in the scholarship we read. (This seminar satisfies a core requirement toward the Graduate Certificate in Gender & Sexuality Studies.) Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method: Mid-quarter essay (7-8 pages); final essay (15-20 pages); shorter writing assignments along the way, including reading and viewing responses; graded participation in seminar.
Assigned films will likely include Mädchen in Uniform (1931), Laura (1944), Born in Flames (1983), Looking for Langston (1989), Tongues Untied (1989), Paris Is Burning (1990), Edward II (1991), The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Brother to Brother (2004), Tropical Malady (2004), The Aggressives (2005), Shortbus (2006), The Ornithologist (2016), and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017). Texts will be available at: All course readings and films will be available on Canvas. Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 490-0-24. | ||||
English 493 | Elements of Craft | Curdy | M 2:00-4:50 | |
English 493 Elements of CraftClass time will be divided evenly between close and creative reading of weekly assigned texts and the writing workshop, in which students attend to the work-in-process of their peers (poetry, non-fiction, or fiction). As this is a graduate seminar vigorous participation in class discussion and workshop is assumed. |