Winter 2019 Class Schedule
Course | Title | Instructor | Day/Time | |
---|---|---|---|---|
English 206 | Reading & Writing Poetry | Curdy | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
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 206 | Reading & Writing Poetry | Trethewey | T 3-5:50 | |
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 | Quesada | TTh 11-12:20 | |
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. Instructor Bio: Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal and Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. He is currently editing of a volume of essays by contemporary Latinx poets on poetry, Latino Poetics (University of New Mexico Press). With over a decade of practical experience and training, Quesada serves as faculty at Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute, Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches Latinx literatures, literary translation, editing, and poetry writing. Quesada is the founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, which meets annually at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and serves to connect and advocate Latinx and Latin American poets and writers from around the world. Revelations, a chapbook of poetry and translations, is forthcoming in November from Sibling Rivalry Press. | ||||
English 207 | Reading & Writing Fiction | Seliy | 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 207 | Reading & Writing Fiction | Seliy | MW 11-12:20 | |
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 207 | Reading & Writing Fiction | Dybek | W 3-5:50 | |
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 | Biss | MW 11-12:20 | |
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 208 | Reading & Writing Creative Non Fiction | Stielstra | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
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 210-1 | British Literary Traditions Part 1 | Evans | MW 1-1:50 | |
English 210-1 British Literary Traditions Part 1Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the early English literary canon, extending from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. In addition to gaining a general familiarity with some of the most influential texts of English literature, we will be especially interested in discovering how literary texts construct, engage in, and transform political discourse. What kinds of political interventions are literary texts capable of making? What are the political implications of particular rhetorical strategies and generic choices? How do literary texts encode or allegorize particular political questions? How, at a particular historical moment, does it become possible to ignore or overlook the political projects embedded in these texts? In readings of Chaucer, More, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, and Swift, among others, we will consider how important it is to understand these texts from a political perspective, and wonder why this perspective is so often ignored in favor of psychologizing and subjectivizing readings. Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section. Evaluation Method: Regular reading quizzes (15%); class participation (25%); midterm exam (20%); final exam (20%); final paper (20%). Texts include: Beowulf; Mystery Plays; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; More, Utopia; Sidney, Defense of Poesy; Shakespeare, Tempest and selected sonnets; Milton, Paradise Lost; Behn, Oroonoko; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Note: English 210-1 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement. | ||||
English 270-2 | American Literary Traditions Part 2 | Stern | MW 12-12:50 | |
English 270-2 American Literary Traditions Part 2Course Description: This course is a survey of American literature from the aftermath of the Civil War to first decade of the twentieth century. The course will take as a cue how writers experimented with various styles and genres of literature to explore the idea, if not always the realities, of “America.” Our exploration of these writers and their texts will fold into the contexts of social histories about the U.S. and reunification, the rise of capital and the Gilded Age, imperialism, and immigration. Teaching Methods: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required; anyone who misses more than one section meeting will fail the course unless both the T.A. and the professor give permission to continue. Texts include: Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills”; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Henry James, “Daisy Miller”; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”; José Martí, “Our America”; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Selected poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul LaurenceDunbar, among others. Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement. | ||||
English 274 | Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Literatures | Wisecup | MW 11-11:50 | |
English 274 Introduction to Native American and Indigenous LiteraturesCourse Description: Until fairly recently, it was uncontroversial to assert that Native Americans lacked a literary history—because oral literatures did not “count” as literature. These assumptions—guiding canonical texts like James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans—ignored centuries of Native literary traditions, which appear in multiple genres and media. This course challenges such assertions of literary absence by offering an introduction to Native American literatures, surveying key texts from pre-colonial epics to award winning novels published in the twentieth century. We’ll ask how Native writers created and preserved pre-colonial media and how they transformed colonial educational programs like boarding schools to advocate on behalf of their people. How have Native writers used their literary traditions to criticize colonialism and imagine futures for their people? How does our view of American literature, broadly speaking, change when we account for the long histories and multiple media of Native literatures? Teaching Method: Lecture. Texts will include: Key autobiographies, nonfiction, short stories, novels, and multimedia texts such as video games and pictographs. Selected reading list: The Popul Vuh; William Apess, Son of the Forest (1829); Zitkála-Šá (Gertrude Bonnin), “The School Days of An Indian Girl” (1900); Simon Ortiz, from Sand Creek (1981); Louise Erdrich, The Round House (2012); and Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (2017). | ||||
English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Bad Romance | Costa | MW 9:30-10:50 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Bad RomanceCourse Description: What kind of statement does Lady Gaga make when she proclaims, “I want your ugly. I want your disease…You and me could write a bad romance”? What constitutes “bad romance” today, and has the concept changed over time? In this course, we will track representations of ill-fated unions through stage plays, short stories, poems, and novels. Moving between questions of genre, gender, desire, and violence, we will interrogate the intimacies that bond and the tensions that break renowned pairings like Catherine and Heathcliff, Othello and Desdemona, and Elio and Oliver of Call Me by Your Name. We will take an intersectional approach to issues of racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic difference, applying various critical approaches to interrogate the prescriptive codes that mark certain liaisons as illicit and others as permissible. As we develop our skills in close reading, interpretation, argumentation, and revision, we will consider “badness” in all of its cultural registers--querying the qualities that define “bad” genres, plotlines, or characters. Honing the skills required for advanced work in the humanities, we will engage critical race, feminist, and queer theories to determine what is distinctive and continuous in representations of bad romance and craft our own extended analyses of diverse genres. Teaching Method: Seminar discussions and occasional short lectures. Evaluation Method: Brief oral presentation, two shorter essays, and one long essay. Texts Include: Selections from Ovid, The Metamorphoses; William Shakespeare, Othello and the Sonnets; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Andrè Aciman, Call Me by Your Name; George Meredith, “Modern Love”; and poems by Slyvia Plath, Sappo, and Philip Larkin. Texts will be available at: Norris 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: Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form | Huang | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Contemporary Experiments in Racial FormCourse Description: This quarter, we will examine contemporary Ethnic American literature whose formal experimentation challenges conventional understandings of racial, ethnic, and cultural representation. Rather than situating questions of aesthetics “beyond” race, these texts insist that racial politics and aesthetic evaluation are inextricable from one another, especially in a contemporary United States marked by the gap between promises extended by acts of legal enfranchisement in the Civil Rights era and enduring structures of racial difference and inequality. We will think about these tensions through “postrace aesthetics,” a set of stylistic innovations that literary critic Ramón Saldívar has characterized as deploying: 1) a critical dialogue with postmodernism; 2) genre-mixing; 3) speculative realism; and 4) twenty-first-century American racial thematics. We will build on Saldívar’s list and develop our own interpretive tools for identifying how particular genres, forms, and aesthetic strategies can revise how racial issues are represented and understood in contemporary American literature. In addition, we will explore keywords such as—“identity,” “authenticity,” “representation,” “transnationalism,” “genre,” “form,” “aesthetics,” and “racial formation”—that have been important in the field of Ethnic Studies. Teaching method: Seminar Evaluation method: Regular short writing assignments, final paper, class presentation, active participation. Texts Include:
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: Psychoanalytic Theory, Gender, and Literature | Lane | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Psychoanalytic Theory, Gender, and LiteratureCourse Description: This course serves as an introduction to several schools of psychoanalytic literary theory. It puts literature, gender, and psychoanalysis into dialogue by focusing, among other things, on the question—and art—of interpretation. Taking as our primary interest the scope and force of fantasy, aesthetics and meaning, sexuality, gender, and the unconscious, we’ll study some of Freud’s most intriguing essays on these topics while considering how similar questions and issues arise in fascinating works by Victorian and modern writers also weighing the limits of subjectivity and meaning. Teaching method: Seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments. Evaluation method: Weekly discussion posts on Canvas, one response paper, final essay, and in-class participation. Texts Include: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (ISBN 9780141439761); Henry James, Turn of the Screw (ISBN 0312597061); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer (ISBN 0486275469); Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (ISBN 0140185704); Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ISBN 0393925331); and H. D, Tribute to Freud (ISBN 0811220044). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions. Various essays by Freud, Klein, and Lacan will circulate as pdfs on Canvas. 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 307 | Advanced Creative Writing: Fabulous Fictions | Dybek | T 6-8:50 | |
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing: Fabulous FictionsCourse Description: Fabulous Fictions focuses on writing that departs from realism. Often the subject matter of such writing explores states of mind that are referred to as non-ordinary reality. A wide variety of genres and subgenres fall under this heading: fabulism, myth, fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, horror, the grotesque, the supernatural, surrealism, etc. Obviously, in a mere quarter we could not hope to study each of these categories in the kind of detail that might be found in a literature class. The aim in 307 is to discern and employ writing techniques that overarch these various genres, to study the subject through doing—by writing your own fabulist stories. We will read examples of fabulism as writers read: to understand how these fictions are made—studying them from the inside out, so to speak. Many of these genres overlap. For instance, they are all rooted in the tale, a kind of story that goes back to primitive sources. They all speculate: they ask the question, What If? They all are stories that demand invention, which, along with the word transformation, will be a key term in the course. The invention might be a monster, a method of time travel, an alien world, etc., but with rare exceptions the story will demand an invention and that invention will often also be the central image of the story. So, in discussing how these stories work we will also be learning some of the most basic, primitive moves in storytelling. To get you going I will be bringing in exercises that employ fabulist techniques and hopefully will promote stories. These time-tested techniques will be your entrances—your rabbit holes and magic doorways—into the figurative. You will be asked to keep a dream journal, which will serve as basis for one of the exercises. Besides the exercises, two full-length stories will be required, as well as written critiques of one another’s work. Because we all serve to make up an audience for the writer, attendance is mandatory. Prerequisites: Prerequisite English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance at first class is mandatory. | ||||
English 308 | The Craft of Environmental Non-fiction | Dimick | TTh 2-3:20 | |
English 308 The Craft of Environmental Non-fictionTeaching Method(s): Seminar discussion and peer workshop. Evaluation Method(s): Two creative nonfiction essays, one essay revision. Texts may include: Lauret Savoy. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. ISBN 9781619028258; Helen Macdonald. H is for Hawk. ISBN 9780802124739; Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. ISBN 978-0618249060 | ||||
English 312 | Studies in Drama: State of the Nation Plays (Post 1830/ICSP) | Davis, T. | MW 9:30-10:50 | |
English 312 Studies in Drama: State of the Nation Plays (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: In post-1945 British theatre, successive generations of playwrights have written "state of the nation" plays to register national preoccupations and political realities. Essentially litmus tests of social feeling, these plays reflect on the slow dismantling of empire, demographic shifts, strained or nascent institutions, and political regime change in brilliant exposés of national character. More recently, this genre has also been used to register the project of cultural pluralism (and its discontents) and Britain's place in the world. Because the plays are staged, they provide outstanding ways to examine narrative and metaphor's reception in a constantly changing political landscape. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Analytical close readings, in-class presentation, final research paper. Texts include: TBA | ||||
English 312 | Studies in Drama: Weimar in America (Post 1830/TTC) | Manning | TTh 2-3:20 | |
English 312 Studies in Drama: Weimar in America (Post 1830/TTC)Course Description: This course follows artists in theatre, dance and film who began their careers during the heady days of experimentation in 1920s Germany and later continued their work in the United States. Whereas some artists emigrated in search of economic opportunity, others sought refuge from Hitler’s Germany, but all found their practice invariably altered by the American scene. Subsequent artists then revisited the lives and works of their predecessors who brought Weimar to America. Artists studied include Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Valeska Gert, and Hanya Holm. This course fulfills the Dance Studies requirement for Dance majors and minors, the History/Literature/Criticism requirement for Theatre majors, and the Transnational and Textual Circulation (TTC) requirement for English majors. Open registration through English [and German]; no permission number required. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: TBA Texts include: TBA Note: This course fulfills the Dance Studies requirement for Dance majors and minors, the History/Literature/Criticism requirement for Theatre majors, and the Transnational and Textual Circulation (TTC) requirement for English majors. Open registration through English [and German]; no permission number required. | ||||
English 313 | Studies in Fiction: Postcolonial Noir (Post 1830/TTC) | Johnson | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Postcolonial Noir (Post 1830/TTC)Course Description: This course looks at crime fiction in colonial and postcolonial contexts, beginning with reading Conan Doyle's stories in their colonial contexts, and then working through several case studies including Anglophone stories set in British India, Francophone novels that portray the Algerian War of Independence and Civil War, and contemporary Egyptian novels and graphic novels that explore the “Arab Spring." In doing so, we will explore the genre’s narrative conventions as keys to understanding the relationships between coloniality, literary interpretation, and political authority. We will also track the social histories of the crime fiction genre as it registers the affective reactions to metropolitan heterogeneity, political oppression and violence, and revolution. | ||||
English 313 | Studies in Fiction: Love and Danger in the Classic Novel | Law | MW 9:30-10:50 | |
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Love and Danger in the Classic NovelCourse Description: Love is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters’ desires entwine in the phenomenon we call “narrative desire?” And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely “plotted” world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as class snobbery, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and vampirism! Evaluation Method: Three papers (3, 5, 7 pages), class participation. Texts Include:
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English 324 | Studies in Medieval Literature: Speculative Fictions: Allegory from Rome to Star Trek (Pre 1830) | Breen | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Speculative Fictions: Allegory from Rome to Star Trek (Pre 1830)Course Description: When your high-school English teacher praised “rounded” literary characters at the expense of “flat” ones, he or she was prising the novelistic over the allegorical, representing the latter as at best a sign of authorial laziness and at worst a vehicle for the heavy-handed transmission of doctrine. This course will approach allegory differently, considering it as a tool for thought. After an introductory unit that examines a number of competing definitions of allegory, we will read (and view) a variety of speculative fictions, pairing the medieval with the modern in order to highlight commonalities as well as differences. In order to explore the conventions of allegorical battle, we will thus read Prudentius’ fifth-century Psychomachia, which recounts a series of gruesome battles between personified Virtues and Vices, in conjunction with selected episodes from Joss Whedon’s teen-focused television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Within the category of allegorical journey, we will consider early episodes of Star Trek alongside the fourteenth-century “best-seller” Piers Plowman, and the medieval morality play Everyman alongside the classic 1957 western The 3:10 to Yuma. In engaging with these works, we will ask ourselves how their personifications are “good to think with.” What kinds of work do they do that mimetic characters do not? In what ways are they more or less “real” than the fictive persons and authorial personae with whom they interact? Finally, is personification itself a relatively homogenous category, or can we distinguish important subtypes? What different reading practices might these subtypes allow or encourage? Teaching methods: Mostly discussion, some lecture. Evaluation methods: Papers and short written assignments, oral presentation, regular and substantive contributions to class discussion. Texts will include: Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed Míceál Vaugham, ISBN 1421401401, a course reader available at Quartet Copies. | ||||
English 331 | Renaissance Poetry: Love in the Age of Shakespeare (Pre 1830) | Wall | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 331 Renaissance Poetry: Love in the Age of Shakespeare (Pre 1830)Course Description: Fantasy, confusion, seduction, despair: these burning topics flourished in the famous love poetry of the English Renaissance. Why did people serving in the court of Queen Elizabeth become obsessed with writing sonnets about frustrated desire? How did poets link tortuous love with other experiences–– the torment of writer’s block, disappointments of ambition, anguish of religious doubt, or simple fear of not being in control? How did love and sex become hopelessly entangled with politics, religion, race, nationalism, and gender? When did love poetry cement the status quo, and when was eros an unruly force that seemed to unravel the very fabric of the self or the community? We’ll tackle these questions by reading amazing poems by Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Marvell, Wroth, as well as some recently discovered “new” voices. We will dive into topics such as early modern religion, politics, colonialism, science, same-sex desire, medical theory, portraits, gender theory, and the natural world; and perhaps include a trip to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Teaching Method(s): discussion, student reports. Evaluation Method(s): papers, student experiments with poems. Texts include: All readings will be on Blackboard except for this book: Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems: The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford World's Classics) ISBN-10: 0199535795 ISBN-13: 978-0199535798. Texts will be available at: Amazon. | ||||
English 339 | Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Tragedies (Pre 1830) | Sucich | MW 2-3:20 | |
English 339 Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Tragedies (Pre 1830)Course Description: This course will examine the dynamics of Shakespearean tragedy in four plays: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. What specific ideas and questions impelled Shakespeare’s exploration of evil in Othello, King Lear and Macbeth? How does Coriolanus differ from these earlier plays? What specific physical, psychological, and intellectual challenges do Shakespeare’s tragic characters confront as they negotiate cultures and a cosmos that often militate against the idea of individuality? Finally, why do Shakespeare’s plays continue to resonate so powerfully with modern audiences, and how do modern adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy reflect the relationship between literature and culture? Teaching Method: Seminar with discussion and some lectures. Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on several critical response papers (10%), one midterm essay (25%), one research assignment (30%), and participation (25%). Texts include: McEachern, Claire (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William, Four Great Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. Ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1998), and Coriolanus, eds. Sylvan Barnet & Reuben Brower. (New York: Signet, 1998). | ||||
English 339 | Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Sex (Pre 1830) | Masten | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 339 Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Sex (Pre 1830)Course Description: What was Shakespeare’s sex? We will read intensively a set of plays and other texts by and about William Shakespeare in order to think about sex, sexuality, gender, and desire in his time and ours. How can we “translate” the foreign-yet-familiar languages and intensities of human interaction and emotion we read in Shakespeare into our own understanding? What acts, affections, emotions, and identities counted as “sex” in Shakespeare’s time? How can we begin to understand the “sex” of a writer one of whose central skills was continually to cross-voice himself as a variety of women (and sometimes women as young men)? What intersections do the plays and poems propose between sex, gender, race, and other important categories of analysis? What do the texts say about sexual consent? Alongside our close reading, discussion, and writing about Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Venus and Adonis, Othello the Moor of Venice, and Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, we will sample biographies (Shakespeare in Love) and feminist and queer criticism and theory that attempt to answer the question of Shakespeare’s sex. | ||||
English 353 | Studies in Romantic Literature: Poetics of Stone (Pre 1830) | Wolff | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 353 Studies in Romantic Literature: Poetics of Stone (Pre 1830)Course Description: What happens when we learn to see the world in deep time? What has changed, in our ideas about human life, when we acquire a sense of our “finitude” in contrast with the vastness of geological timespans? What new forms of worldly attention are demanded by a “poetics of stone”? Today, in a moment of intense ecological concern, these questions have special force. But in hindsight, we can see clearly that such questions have long preoccupied poets, scientists, and philosophers of the past. Behind literature’s greener shades, the overlooked figure of inanimate stone looms surprisingly large. In the Romantic era, around the same time that key texts by architects of the modern study of geology James Hutton and Charles Lyell were being published (1780s-1830s), the Revolutionary Age at the close of the 18th century put the cosmic notion of “revolution” to new use — and great poets were busy giving new resonance to the strange processes of slow inhuman transformation, like petrification, erosion, fossilization, and sedimentation. This course examines the fertile ground where philosophy, science, and poetry met, at the turn of the 18th century and onward; towards the end of the class, we compare the Romantic era’s use of geological forms with 20th- and 21st-century poets who have adapted and updated this poetic tradition. Teaching Method: Brief introductory lectures, seminar-style discussion, group exercises, possible field trip. Evaluation Method: Attendance & Participation; Short Assignments/Presentation; Midterm Paper & Final Paper/Project. Texts include:
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English 357 | 19th Century British Fiction: Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Post 1830) | Herbert | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 357 19th Century British Fiction: Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Post 1830)Course Description: In this course, which might be titled “The Golden Age of British Popular Fiction,” we will read representative works by major British novelists of the nineteenth century other than Dickens, focusing on their analysis of modern social and psychological conditions and on the artistic innovations that these themes generated. Of particular interest will be the ways these writers use the vehicle of popular fiction to explore issues of gender roles and sex relations in a period of rapid cultural change that was fraught with self-contradiction. Sometimes such issues give rise in these novels to scalding satire that contemporary readers found shocking and distasteful; sometimes to a mood of paralyzing depressiveness; sometimes to subtly hilarious comedy; but in all its different modulations, the preoccupation with volatile issues of sex is rarely absent here, and this is where the special accent of the course will fall. Evaluation Method: Assigned work in the course includes class presentations, quizzes, and a term paper. Texts Include: Readings include some of the most original (and most entertaining) novels of the times: W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847-48); Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853); Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1864-66); and Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895). | ||||
English 363-1 | 20th Century Fiction: Modern British Fiction & the First World War (Post 1830) | Lane | TTh 3:30-4:50 | |
English 363-1 20th Century Fiction: Modern British Fiction & the First World War (Post 1830)Course Description: This course explores recurring motifs in Edwardian (1901-10) fiction and beyond, providing a clear introduction to British modernism and to the “setting” of the First World War (1914-18). We’ll study the cultural and literary shift from naturalism to post-impressionism, as well as other formal changes in British fiction that writers tied to the immediate aftermath of the war and its catastrophic effects. We’ll also trace comparable arguments and shifts in painting and aesthetics, and examine related social and cultural preoccupations, among them: changing conceptions of privacy, psychology, and gender; and widespread concerns about rural change, urban decay, national cohesion, military conflict, and the ends of imperialism. Teaching Methods: seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments. Evaluation Methods: Weekly canvas posts, one short analytical paper, final essay, and in-class participation. Texts may include (available at Norris Center Bookstore and in order of use): Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (ISBN 0141441585); E. M. Forster, Howards End (ISBN 0486424545); James Joyce, Dubliners (ISBN 978-0143107453); Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ISBN 0393925331); D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (ISBN 0486424588); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (ISBN 0156628708); and selected poetry in George Walter (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (ISBN 9780141181905). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions. | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th Century Literature: Roadside Oddities: American Novels of the 1950s (Post 1830) | Martinez | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Roadside Oddities: American Novels of the 1950s (Post 1830)Course Description: How odd was Lolita? How odd was the world that produced it? To answer these questions, we will look at salient figures from postwar American fiction and their relationship to some of the stranger, most pervasive myths and narratives of the 1950s: the rise of the teenager, the contested space of middlebrow culture, the encroachment of suburbia, and the celebration of the outsider and its concomitant critique of the conformist. The reading list will range from the well-known and the celebrated to works that are just as intriguing but a bit more obscure, so we'll read from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but also his less well-known Pnin, as well as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. We will also look at media that reflect, contest, or complicate these narratives: movies by Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and others, exploitation and health films, rockabilly and country songs, sitcoms, and Mad Men. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: An individual research paper and a collaborative wiki. Texts include: Lolita, Pnin, Giovanni’s Room, The Moviegoer, The Dud Avocado, The Haunting of Hill House. | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th Century Literature: Joyce's Ulysses: Poetics & Politics of the Everyday (Post 1830) | Froula | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Joyce's Ulysses: Poetics & Politics of the Everyday (Post 1830)Course Description: 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). | ||||
English 368 | Studies in 20th Century Literature: The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s (Post 1830) | Savage | TTh 12:30-1:50 | |
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s (Post 1830)Course Description: In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. “ During the cultural crisis of Modernism, when a variety of intellectual revolutions and the unprecedented carnage of the Great War suggested that Western civilization was either a sham or doomed, writers and other artists created new literary forms. Their aesthetic innovation often depicted art and love (or sex) as parallel (or contradictory) ways to create meaning the wasteland of Modernity. In this class, we will read and discuss canonical, lesser-known, and popular texts of ‘20s in order to explore how these revolutionary writers saw love and art in their own time and, maybe, in the future. Teaching Method: Lecture & Discussion. Evaluation Method: Participation in class discussion; short one-page responses to each text; plus a variety of options for critical papers, ranging from several short argumentative essays to one long research paper. Texts include: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, Boyle’s Plagued by the Nightingale and The First Lover and Other Stories, Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Dos Passo’s Manhattan Transfer, as well as Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. | ||||
English 371 | American Novel: Major Authors: James Baldwin (Post 1830/ICSP) | Biondi | MW 2-3:20 | |
English 371 American Novel: Major Authors: James Baldwin (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: This course description will be available at a later date. | ||||
English 371 | American Novel: Race and Politics in Major Novels of Faulkner (Post 1830/ICSP) | Stern | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 371 American Novel: Race and Politics in Major Novels of Faulkner (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: This course will involve the close reading of Faulkner's four great tragic novels of race and identity: The Sound and The Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light In August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Until very recently, these works have been considered central to the canon of modernist fiction and read as meditations on the tortured consciousness of the artist (TSATF, AILD, AA!) or the dilemma of the outsider adrift in an alienating world (LIA). Saturating Faulkner's novels are images of the anguished history of race relations in the American South from the 19th century to the Great Migration and Great Depression. Yet the tragic legacy of slavery, Faulkner's abiding subject, has been understood by critics as a figure for more abstract and universal moral predicaments. Our investigation seeks to localize Faulkner's representation of history, particularly his vision of slavery and the effects of the color line, as a specifically American crisis, embodied in the remarkable chorus of narrative voices and visions that constitute his fictive world. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: During the quarter, you will write two take-home close reading examinations of two pages each, as well as a final paper of 8-10 pages on a topic of your choice that you have discussed with me. All written exercises are due over email in the form of Microsoft Word attachments. One quarter of your grade will be based on your participation in class discussion. Anyone who misses a class will require the professor's permission to continue in the course. No late papers will be accepted. Conflicts with deadlines must be discussed with the professor and any extensions must be approved in advance. | ||||
English 375 | Topics in Asian American Literature: Memory + Identity in Asian American Literature (Post 1830/ICSP) | Huang | TTh 2-3:20 | |
English 375 Topics in Asian American Literature: Memory + Identity in Asian American Literature (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: How do writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost in the passage of history? How is this question doubly fraught for Asian American authors who contend with obstacles stemming from diaspora, linguistic difference, and minoritization? In this class, we will explore how comics, novels, and poetry function as receptacles of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting narratives, and as the imagining of alternative histories and futures. Teaching Method: Seminar Evaluation Method: Regular reading responses, two short essays; one longer essay; class presentation; active class participation. Texts may include:
Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available online and in a course packet. Note: This course is co-listed with Asian American Studies 376-0-20. | ||||
English 378 | Studies in American Literature: Confederate Monuments and Union Memory (Post 1830/ICSP) | Swanner | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Confederate Monuments and Union Memory (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: It may seem from today’s headlines that memorializing the Civil War has only recently become an explosive challenge for American identity. In fact, however, the problems of remembering the Civil War—obscuring slavery as a cause, overly glorifying the antebellum South, or smoothing over postwar difficulties—have been present in the American imagination since the last shot was fired. This course will analyze literature that confronts both the necessity and the shortfalls of American memory, exploring texts that struggle to remember (or forget) the Civil War. Why, for instance, is the Civil War such a glaring absence in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? Is this absence a willful forgetfulness of the war’s horror, or is it a complex confrontation with the problems of national memory? And in what ways do these problems comment upon American conceptions of race? Why, for example, did Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind skew the cultural memory of Civil-War-era whiteness more than any other text of the twentieth century? By studying these works and more, students will learn that (mis)remembering the Civil War is a problem that extends beyond the conspicuous statues of Confederate figures. Indeed, remembering this national trauma is a challenge that has been—and will likely continue to be—with us in ways both headline-grabbing and subtle. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion and some lecture. Evaluation Methods: Two papers, class participation, and one presentation. Texts may include: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Texts will be available at: Norris Campus Bookstore or through the Canvas website. Instructor Bio: Seth Swanner (Ph.D. Northwestern University) specializes in early modern English literature, environmental criticism, seventeenth-century theories of governance, and book history. His recent work includes a forthcoming article analyzing the shifts in formal posture across several editions of George Herbert's The Temple (Studies in Philology, 2018). As an instructor at Northwestern in 2016, he received the student-nominated Graduate Teaching Excellence Award. He has taught courses on an array of topics, including Shakespearean adaptation, the environments of horror literature, and the politics of form. His current book project, "Quartering the Wind: Early Modern Nature at the Fringe of Politics," explores the seditious political values that undermined seventeenth-century arguments for what was "natural" in human governance. By analyzing literary treatments of early modern ruptures in the “natural” order of things—including the Gunpowder Plot, the 1625 plague, and the English Civil War—he discovers political visions of the natural world that seemed to legitimize subversive political categories like treason, tyranny, and rebellion. | ||||
English 378 | Studies in American Literature: Female Dissent: Women’s Literary Protest in the 19th Century & Today (Post 1830/ICSP) | Fritz | MW 2-3:20 | |
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Female Dissent: Women’s Literary Protest in the 19th Century & Today (Post 1830/ICSP)Course Description: In 1830 Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and infuriated women revolted. Diplomat Nancy Ward (Cherokee) made at least two moving speeches, activist Catharine Beecher organized the first national women’s petition campaign, and writers such as Lydia Maria Child penned novels and short stories advocating for the protection of Native peoples. This course examines the vast genre of protest literature written and spoken by women during the tumultuous nineteenth century. Exploring activist works by notable women writers such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Beecher Stowe, we will ask: How are histories of protest, literature, and women’s political voices interconnected in the nineteenth century? How have women’s protest strategies changed between the nineteenth century and today? What is the current role of literature in political and social activism? How can we view contemporary movements such as #noDAPL, the opioid epidemic, prison abolition, and #metoo as descendants of nineteenth-century protest movements? Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Close-reading postings; participation and attendance. We will not only be examining the genre and characteristics of women’s protest literature, but learning to write it ourselves. This course will require 3 short writing assignments (3-5 pages) ranging from more traditional close-readings of literary texts, to an archival research and writing component, to an op-ed on a current issue of your choice. Texts include: Authors for this course will include writings by women activists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Lydia Maria Child, Susan B. Anthony, and others. 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 385 | Topics in Combined Studies: GIFs, Selfies, Memes: New Networked Genres (Post 1830) | Hodge | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: GIFs, Selfies, Memes: New Networked Genres (Post 1830)Course Description: This course examines the aesthetics and culture of always-on computing. More specifically, it surveys the varieties of audio/visual discourse native to and sustained by always-on computing—the technologies, habits, forms, and cultures emerging alongside smartphones, social media, and pervasive wireless networks in the mid-2000s. Topics may include animated GIFs, memes, selfies, supercuts, podcasts, vaporwave, ASMR videos, memes, etc. While "sharing" and "connection" typically rule discussions of what networks do or enable, our aim will be to analyze how web-based genres promote a variety of affects, e.g. boredom, anxiety, ambivalence, and cuteness but also new idiomatic expressions of LULZ, facepalming, dead, A E S T H E T I C, etc. We will proceed by pairing readings in new media studies alongside artworks. Readings by Berlant, Ngai, Scheible, Jodi Dean, Aria Dean, Massumi, Milner, Phillips, Richmond, and others. Artworks to be analyzed may include GIF works by Faith Holland and Lorna Mills; selfie projects by Vivian Fu and Mary Bond; supercuts by Benjamin Grosser and Elisa Giardina Papa; and much else. Evaluation will include analytical essays as well as experimental digital projects. | ||||
English 386 | Studies in Literature and Film: Celebrity Culture | Nordgren | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Celebrity CultureCourse Description: In 2007 Stephen King opined “I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy…I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their f------ Congressmen are.” This course will ask students to take up King’s call, discussing seriously the origins of celebrity culture in America and its recent proliferation in a variety of media in the 20th and 21st centuries. To this end, we will read novels and watch films about the pursuit of fame and watch films that address the often dire consequences of intense media scrutiny and expectations for celebrity lives, exploring how American ideals of self-reliance, self-making, financial success, and physical beauty drive and direct our complex desires for particular celebrities and celebrity culture in general. Recognizing that the divisions between celebrity culture, politics, and other media forms have long been blurred, this course will also prompt students to delve into the dark sides of American culture, asking questions about our obsessions with crime, corruption, and Hollywood glamour. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Participation, short writing assignments, weekly reality TV journal, presentation and final paper. Texts include: James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work; Willa Cather, Song of the Lark; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Jacqueline Susan, The Valley of the Dolls. We will also watch and analyze a range of films on celebrity culture, possibly including The Aviator, dir. Martin Scorsese; I’m Not There; dir. Todd Haynes; Sunset Boulevard, dir. Billy Wilder; and Drop Dead Gorgeous; dir. Michael Patrick Jann. Texts will be available at: Beck's 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 388 | Studies in Literature and Religion: Science Fiction and Social Justice | King | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 388 Studies in Literature and Religion: Science Fiction and Social JusticeCourse Description: This course will examine major utopian and dystopian texts and films in relation to social justice issues in the twentieth century and beyond, while following the stories of artists, organizers, and communities that have used speculative world-building to imagine livable, sustainable futures. We will focus on how feminist, anarchist, LGBTQ, and Afrofuturist art and activism have contributed to a substantial critical discourse on the intersections of science, technology, ecology, war, race, gender, sexuality, health, and ability. This course will further examine how artists and activists have understood religion as both impediment and partner to social justice work, while alternatively embracing, subverting, and defying religious authority. We will also attend to how religious myths and imagery are sampled and remixed by science fiction authors to plot an alternative course for world history. Counts towards the Religion, Law & Politics (RPL) and Religion, Sexuality & Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration. Teaching Method: Discussion, presentations, readings, writing assignments. Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, writing assignments. Texts include:
Note: This course is combined with Religious Studies 379. | ||||
English 392 | The Situation of Writing | Webster | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 392 The Situation of WritingThe present situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas gleaned from readings by Virginia Woolf, Martha Nussbaum, Lewis Hyde, Adrienne Rich, Ta Nehisi Coates and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with an interview with another writer; a service learning assignment; and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Many of our Thursdays will be enhanced by the "Return Engagements" series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern's Writing Program who have gone on to forge careers in the literary arts. We will read their writing and open time for you to talk with them about continued education, publishing, agenting and editing. This course is designed especially for students who hope to forge careers as writers, and it will challenge all participants to think creatively about the space of literature in our changing society. Note: ENGLISH 392 is a requirement for all senior creative writing majors. Other students may enroll with department consent. | ||||
English 393-2 | Theory & Practice of Poetry | Webster | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 393-2 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 394-2 | Theory & Practice of Fiction | Martinez | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 394-2 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 395-2 | Theory & Practice of Creative Nonfiction | Stielstra | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 395-2 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: Middlemarch | Roth | MW 4-5:20 | |
English 397 Research Seminar: MiddlemarchCourse Description: Virginia Woolf famously called George Eliot’s 1872 novel Middlemarch “the magnificent book which for all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.” In Middlemarch, as Woolf suggests, Eliot wishes to create complexity in order to develop readers’ sympathy and to quell their self-satisfaction. Both in scale and in depth, Middlemarch achieves this complexity: it is, in some sense, the biography of a town as a whole, investigating deeply into the psyches of its many and varied inhabitants and asking us to recognize ourselves and our towns. Unsurprisingly, this complexity rewards not only the reading but the examination, making it an ideal source text for literary research. In this course, we will not only explore Middlemarch through a quarter-long series of rich discussions, but also use Eliot’s wide-ranging novel as an entry point to various ways of researching the novel, specifically and as a genre, as well as literature more broadly. How do we pose questions about such an object, and how begin to investigate the answers? With Middlemarch as a lens, we will engage with and seek to activate a variety of scholarly approaches and literary-historical categories, including (but, never, limited to) Marxism, feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, ecocriticism, realism, liberalism, and narrative. Teaching Method: Seminar-style discussion. Evaluation Method: Class participation, class presentation, short response papers, final research paper. Texts include: George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin 2003); Canvas course reader. | ||||
English 397 | Research Seminar: Shakespeare's Books | Masten | TTh 3:30-4:50 | |
English 397 Research Seminar: Shakespeare's BooksCourse Description: In the film “Shakespeare in Love,” Shakespeare’s manuscript is the star of the show, but with one possible exception, Shakespeare’s texts survive only in printed books. In this seminar, we will read, research, interpret, and write about those earliest versions, in order to consider how the publication, circulation, and reading of Shakespeare’s books in his own time matter for a reading of his texts in ours. What is a book for Shakespeare and his readers? Do plays count as books, and when? Who read Shakespeare, in what forms, and how? What are the differences between texts printed around 1600 and Shakespeare texts as they appear in our modern editions? These historical and cultural questions will lead to big-picture questions, for example: How many Hamlets and Othellos are there? How do our answers to that question change the plays? How do our understandings of current questions about, for example, race, gender, and sexuality change when we read Othello or the Sonnets in their earliest formats? We will use digital research resources to help us access and understand “Shakespeare’s books,” and we will also work with rare materials in Northwestern Special Collections and Chicago’s Newberry Library, including some versions of books Shakespeare read and used in his writing. Together we will learn to turn the questions raised by our reading into substantial research papers, moving from topic, to annotated bibliography, prospectus, rough draft, and final version. Earlier course-experience with Shakespeare, or Renaissance or medieval writing, will be especially helpful for our work in this course. Likely primary texts include: Hamlet, Henry V, Othello, Shakespeares Sonnets (1609) and Poems (1640), Sir Thomas More, The Tempest; a range of critical, historical, and theoretical essays. | ||||
English 398-2 | Honors Seminar | Mwangi | ||
English 398-2 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 | Abani | T 2:00-4:50 | |
English 403 Writers Studies in Literature | ||||
English 422 | Studies in Medieval Literature: The Theory and Practice of Allegory | Breen | M 2:00-5:00 | |
English 422 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Theory and Practice of Allegory | ||||
English 461 | Studies in Contemporary Literature: Modernism and Empire | Froula | T 2:00-4:50 | |
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Modernism and Empire | ||||
English 481 | Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Ordinary Media | Hodge | Th 2:00-4:50 | |
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Ordinary Media | ||||
English 496 | Poetry Creative Writing | Trethewey | M 2:00-4:50 | |
English 496 Poetry Creative Writing | ||||
English 498 | Non-Fiction Creative Writing | Biss | W 2:00-4:50 | |
English 498 Non-Fiction Creative Writing |