Winter 2020 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 2020 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Mehigan	MW 9:30-10:50
English 206 Reading and 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 and Writing Poetry	Mehigan	MW 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and 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 and Writing Poetry	Staff	TTh 5:30-6:50
English 206 Reading and 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 and Writing Poetry	Boyd	WF 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and 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 and Writing Fiction	Martinez	MW 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and 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 and Writing Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 207 Reading and 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 and Writing Fiction	Seliy	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 207 Reading and 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 and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Seliy	TTh 11-12:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction [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 and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Mun	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction [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	English Literary Traditions, Part 1	Evans	MW 12:30-1:50
English 210-1 English Literary Traditions, Part 1 Course Description: This course is an introduction to the early English literary canon, extending from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. While the readings are, by definition, canonical, we will devote substantial attention to questioning the very idea of “canonicity” as an historically and literarily constructed phenomenon. What cultural, literary, and historical ideologies are represented in this canon? How do these texts make rhetorical bids for inclusion? How do they respond to the pressure for novelty and innovation? How do they manage the so-called “anxiety of influence” imposed by their poetic forbears? In readings of Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Behn, among others, we will consider the values inscribed in and by “the canon”: what literary posterity has preserved, and what it has omitted, as the poetic legacy of western culture. Teaching Method: Two lectures and a discussion section every week. Evaluation Method: Midterm exam, Final exam, Midterm paper, final paper, participation. Course Materials (Required): Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volumes A, B, C) Class Notes: English 210-1 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 213	Introduction to Fiction	Law	MW 10-10:50
English 213 Introduction to Fiction Course Description: In this course we will look at works of fiction which explore in various ways the constitution of the self through an “Other.” Whether in the guise of monster, rival, uncanny double, or oppressed social group, the Other challenges our sense of self. Tragically, in real life this process takes place along the borders that constitute and divide us as sexual, racial, and human beings. Literature offers us ways of exploring and talking about this profound existential and political dilemma, and of connecting it to the medium in which all our identities are immersed: language. We will look at five novels, spanning two centuries, two continents, and a wide range of human identities and dilemmas. Teaching Method: 2 lectures, 1 required discussion-section per week. Evaluation Method: midterm paper (15%); midterm exam (15%); final paper (25 or 30%); final exam (25 or 30%); quizzes and class participation (15%). Texts (available at Norris bookstore): Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview 3^rd Edition, 2012), ISBN 978-1554811038. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin), ISBN 978-0141441146. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton), ISBN 978-0393352566. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage), ISBN 978-0307278449. Justin Torres, We the Animals (Mariner), ISBN 978-0547844190. Please note that it is IMPORTANT to acquire the editions listed here OR to have a digital version of the texts, so we can all “be on the same page.”
English 220	The Bible as Literature	Breen	MW 9:30-10:50
English 220 The Bible as Literature Course Description: This course is intended to familiarize students with the most influential text in Western culture, read as a work of literature. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; the Bible as a national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the "Old Testament" (or Hebrew Bible); and the Bible’s overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading of the Bible, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest and/or historical influence. We will look more briefly at traditional strategies of interpretation and at the processes that went into the construction of the Biblical canon. Course texts: John B. Gabel, Charles B. Wheeler, Anthony D. York, and David Citino, The Bible as Literature: An Introduction, 5^th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ISBN 978-0-19-517907-1, plus any standard edition of the Bible. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 211-0.
English 270-2	American Literary Traditions, Part 2	Wilson	TTh 11-12:20
English 270-2 American Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course 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. Texts Include: Levine, Robert S. et al., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C (978-0393264487). Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: The Imaginary History of Nature	Herbert	TTh 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: The Imaginary History of Nature Course Description: One of the main projects of modern Western culture has been the attempt to conceptualize the realm called Nature and, in particular, to define the relation of the “natural” world to the human one. In the course of the past several centuries, often sharply incompatible versions of Nature have been produced by the sciences, philosophy, religion, and the various imaginative arts. We will trace a series of these competing visions of Nature and the natural, focusing on the arrays of rhetorical and artistic methods that have been employed to promote each one at the expense of its rivals. The guiding idea of the course is that Nature is not so much a definite area of reality as a malleable imaginary construct invented and forever re-invented for historically variable reasons. The focus in this seminar falls on the nineteenth century, where ideologies of Nature took particularly distinct forms, but we will cover earlier and later materials as well, including an experimental video (wild hogs in a supermarket) and at least one film. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Class participation, several short papers. Texts include: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; sermons of John Wesley; poems by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man (excerpts from each); John Stuart Mill, “Nature”; Edmund Gosse, Father and Son; Jack London, The Call of the Wild; Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (film); Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore. Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: For the Love of Literature: Don Quixote and his Daughters	Soni	TTh 2-3:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: For the Love of Literature: Don Quixote and his Daughters Course Description: Don Quixote is often considered the first novel ever written. It tells the story of a country gentleman who reads too many chivalric romances, and fancies himself a knight on a quest for glory. The novel poses some of the most profound questions about the value and importance of literature. Why do we read and love literature, and how does that love manifest itself? How is our view of the world shaped by the fictions we read? Where is the line between fiction and reality? What are the dangers of too much reading? Don’t we need fictions to transfigure the world into the beautiful and noble place we want it to be? Don Quixote – this complex novel, which seems to contain everything in itself – is also a reflection on a rapidly modernizing world. As intimate feudal societies vanish into a mere memory, how are individuals left alienated and feeling like they don’t belong? How can the world be made more humane, welcoming, hospitable as a commercial modernity wreaks havoc on the social bonds between people? Don Quixote provides the model for innumerable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, many of them by and about women, and concerned with women’s alienation from a patriarchal culture at odds with the stories they read. After reading selections from Don Quixote, we will read a range of quixotic novels including Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emma, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, to understand how they use the new form of the novel to critique and transfigure the cultures they are confronted with: modernity, patriarchy, enlightenment, print culture, market society, scientific realism and much else. Above all, we will ask why storytelling remains indispensable even in a disenchanted modern world. This class is an introduction to the practice of literary criticism. For each class, we will read short works of criticism alongside the novels, and seek to apply their methods to the analysis of the novels. We will explore a wide range of methods, such as surface reading, distant reading, theory of the novel, genre analysis, cognitive approaches, Marxism, feminism, structuralism, new formalism, and more, to ask what we can learn by studying literature through these lenses. We will find that the novels themselves are highly reflective about novel writing, offering their own theories about the form of the novel, its relation to society, the virtues of realism, and finally, the dangers and possibilities of fiction. Ultimately, this will be a class about how our love of stories both deludes us and gives us hope for a better world. 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	W 6p-8:50p
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing: Fabulous Fictions Course 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	Advanced Nonfiction Writing: The Video Essay	Bresland	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 308 Advanced Nonfiction Writing: The Video Essay Course Description: In this course we will practice a cutting-edge form of nonfiction at the intersection of literature, documentary, experimental film and video art. We will apply literary techniques to the composition of short multimedia essays and explore the many ways in which writing with images and sound differs from writing for the page. Like its print counterpart, the video essay is an attempt to see what one thinks about something. The video essay may engage with fact, but tends to be less self-assured than documentary. Rather, the video essay, writes Phillip Lopate, “wears confusion proudly as it gropes toward truth.” Agnes Varda, the poetic French filmmaker who coined the term cinécriture, or film writing, best described the promise of the form when noting that, for her, writing meant more than simply wording a script. Choosing images, designing sound—these, too, were part of that process. At its best, the video essay leverages the visceral power of sound and image, builds a sympathetic resonance with language, and enlivens the senses. The goal of this course is to better understand how the act of writing with media, while still driven by language, is shaped by visual and sonic elements. We will author our own short video essays and will, in the process, learn to record and edit video, produce layered soundscapes, use our voices as tools of performance, and make our films visible to the world.
English 312	Caryl Churchill: Techniques and Provocations	Davis, T.	MW 9:30-10:50
English 312 Caryl Churchill: Techniques and Provocations Course Description: The New Yorker proclaims that Caryl Churchill “is the greatest playwright alive and one of the most elusive.” Since she came to international prominence in 1979 each new work has rocked expectations: her subjects and theatrical treatments are unorthodox and ever-changing. Many of her scenarios teeter on the brink between farce and catastrophe, utilizing a mixture of realistic and starkly non-realist techniques to pose challenging questions about the timeliest questions of the day (gender identity, rapacious capitalism, environmental degradation, migrancy and refuge, and totalitarianism). This course will provide a systematic introduction to understanding a selection of Churchill’s full-length works and shorter plays in the light of her activism and experimentation, touching also on her major influences from the theatre and philosophy. Teaching Method: Seminar/lecture/discussion Evaluation Method: Participant, written critiques, analytical essay Texts include: Caryl Churchill, Plays One Caryl Churchill, Plays Four Caryl Churchill, Shorts Other texts on Canvas Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore Note: This course is combined with Theatre 340-0.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century Novel (Post 1830)	Law	MW 2-3:20
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century Novel (Post 1830) Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. 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); 2 brief seminar reports; class participation. Texts Include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 978-0141439518), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford, 978-0199577033), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Penguin, 978-0141439594), Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford, 978-0199564095).
English 313	Studies in Fiction: The Arabian Nights (Post 1830/TTC)	Johnson	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: The Arabian Nights (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: In this course we will study the collection of stories known in English as The Arabian Nights orThe Thousand and One Nights. While in the contemporary popular imagination the Nights is often reduced to a few well-known stories, this course will take a wider approach to the collection, and study it as the product of an ongoing process of translation, circulation, and exchange. Over the quarter, we will read the earliest of these stories, as well as follow the collection's history from its evolution in Arabic oral and manuscript traditions to its eighteenth- century "discovery" and translation into European languages. While the collection has been called a “book with no author” because of its long history of oral and textual evolution, it could just as easily be called a book of many authors, who include its anonymous Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic originators and transmitters, its French and English translators, and its modern interpreters. The last third of the course will therefore be devoted to the modern “afterlives” of the collection in novels, film, and theater. We will consider how the Nights has been used in these works as a vehicle for deeply-considered investigations into narrative form and also clichéd and colonially-imbued images of the Middle East. Reading and watching these works next to and against the Arabic versions, we will encounter the vast variety of ways that the Nights has been a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across literary traditions. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Essay exam, short paper, final essay . Texts include: Muhsin Mahdi, ed., The Arabian Nights (Norton Edition); Muhsin Mahdi, ed., Sindbad and Other Stories; Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition. Texts will be available at: Norris. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 301, Humanities 370-6, and MENA 390-6.
English 322	Medieval Drama (Pre 1830)	Breen	MW 11-12:20
English 322 Medieval Drama (Pre 1830) Course Description: The earliest surviving English drama was performed in honor of the religious festival of Corpus Christi (Christ’s Body). Each pageant was staged on a wagon that was pulled through the city streets, and presented an episode of sacred history, beginning with the Creation at dawn and ending with the Last Judgment, performed by torchlight. Each episode was sponsored by a particular craft guild, and the allocation of these episodes created complicated, and sometimes deliberately comic, relationships between the audience, the actors, and the roles they played. The shipwrights, perhaps predictably, use the York Building of the Ark pageant to advertise their wares. But in the York Crucifixion, the carpenters represent themselves as incompetent woodworkers who compound Jesus’s suffering by being comically bad at their job of building a cross and nailing Jesus to it. When Jesus finally speaks from the cross to say “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he thus refers to their craftsmanship as well as their sin. In the nearby town of Chester, the cloth-makers were responsible not only for the spectacular costume of the Serpent, with a woman’s face, feathered body, and snake’s tale, but also for the clothes Adam and Eve put on after the Fall, marking their loss of innocence. In this course we will read a selection of pageants from the York, Chester, and Wakefield Corpus Christi cycles before considering morality plays such as Mankind and Everyman and topical plays such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Where the cycle plays were civic celebrations using amateur actors, the morality and topical plays seem to have toured as money-making ventures. As such, they sometimes encourage their audiences to choose vice over virtue, even as they worry – sometimes playfully, sometimes solemnly, sometimes gruesomely – that even salvation can be bought and sold. Course Text: David Bevington, Medieval Drama (either the 1975 edition, ISBN 978-0395139158, or the 2012 reprint, ISBN 978-1603848381)
English 332	Renaissance Drama: Playing and Plotting London and the World, c. 1600 (Pre 1830/TTC)	West	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 332 Renaissance Drama: Playing and Plotting London and the World, c. 1600 (Pre 1830/TTC) Course Description: This class considers the impulse to detail the familiar and the strange in relation to each other in the performance cultures of early modern England. Visiting London from Basel around 1599, Thomas Platter observed that “the English don’t much care to travel abroad, but prefer to experience foreign affairs at home, in their plays.” And in fact the playhouses of this time were full of merchants of Venice, massacres in Paris, Spanish tragedies, and places even further from home, the courts of Persia, the markets of Constantinople, and the Holy Land. One play from the same time asks rhetorically, “Had not ye rather, for novelty’s sake, see Jerusalem ye never saw, than London that ye see hourly?” At the same time, though, and often in the same plays, playgoers examined the city of London and its customs with a new care. London and the world, the close and the faraway, were made perspectives for grasping each other as spatial, corporal experiences, through plotting and playing. These plays represent life both close and distant, and map new environments and new experiences linguistically, visually, and physically. We will also make use of digital mapping resources to place these plays for ourselves. Teaching Method: Largely discussion. Evaluation Method: Papers or equivalent projects; some group work on mapping or “plotting” projects. Texts include: Heywood, Four Prentices of London; Chapman, Jonson, and Marston, Eastward Ho!; Dekker and Webster, Westward Ho!; Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, Travels of Three English Brothers, as well as others Texts will be available at: Beck’s. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 303.
English 338	Studies in Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Sexualities (Pre 1830/ICSP)	Masten	TTh 11-12:20
English 338 Studies in Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Sexualities (Pre 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course explores the history of sex and sexualities -- in all their variety -- in English Renaissance literature and culture. Before the homo/hetero divide, before what Michel Foucault calls as "the implantation of the perverse," before genders in their modern forms, what were the routes, locations, effects, and politics of sex and desire? To what extent can we discuss "sexuality" in relation to "identity" in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, gender, etc. in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will be particularly interested in gaining fluency in the seemingly familiar but simultaneously foreign languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. Teaching Method: Participatory seminar with some mini-lectures. Evaluation Method: Papers, preparation for seminar, participation in seminar. Texts include: (tentative list as of 4/19, some texts in required course reader). Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (ISBN: 0679724699); Donne, "Sapho to Philaenis"; Ovid, Metamorphoses (sel.); Marlowe, Hero and Leander; Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis; Beaumont(?), Salmacis and Hermaphroditus; Montaigne, "Of Friendship"; Shakespeare and Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen (978-0671722968); Marlowe, Edward II (0747543798); Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder (0195139259); Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (978-0-7434-8496-1); Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure; Beaumont and Fletcher, Love's Cure; additional historical and theoretical texts. Texts will be available at: Beck's Books Evanston; Quartet Copies. Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 361-0.
English 339	Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare: Global, Local, Digital (Pre 1830/TTC)	Wall and Phillips	TTh 2-3:20
English 339 Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare: Global, Local, Digital (Pre 1830/TTC) Course Description: Performance, Imitation, Interpretation, Adaptation. What happens when Shakespeare’s plays time travel, migrate across the globe, mutate into new forms, and reach audiences through new media? From Renaissance London to 21-st century India, from apartheid South Africa to modern China, readers have remade Shakespeare’s plays to address their own local issues. In this class we will reflect on the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare in cultures of the world across various scales, from the local to the global, and through a range of media—from the latest digital platforms to traditional forms like print, theater, and film. Like Shakespeare’s plays, our conversations will take place in multiple venues and from multiple perspectives, from the traditional classroom to the digital media lab, from the rare books room of the Newberry Library to the stages of Chicago’s theaters. We will consider how Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice have been continually reinvented across the globe in many media, exploring texts like Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Msomi’s uMabatha, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the teen film O, and scenes from films including Throne of Blood and Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti, Te (the Maori Merchant of Venice). Our exploration will culminate with students collaborating to build a digital curation of Shakespeare's works. Teaching Method: Discussion Evaluation Method: Papers, presentations, digital curation Texts include: Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Halio (Oxford) ISBN 978-0199535859 Shakespeare, Macbeth (Oxford) ISBN 978-0199535835 Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Neill (Oxford) ISBN 978-0199535873 Toni Morrison, Desdemona ISBN 978-1849433891 Note: This course is combined with Humanities 325-6.
English 340	Restoration and the 18th Century: Sex, Violence, and Consent (Pre 1830/ICSP)	Thompson	MW 2-3:20
English 340 Restoration and the 18th Century: Sex, Violence, and Consent (Pre 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This class will examine foundational articulations of feminine sexual consent and their failings. From the perspective of literary history in the “long” eighteenth century (roughly 1660 – 1820), we will track constructions of sexual violence, coercion, and consent in Britain and its colonies. Social contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke base political power on consent, not force; but they exempt domestic power—the power of husbands over wives, fathers over children, masters over servants and slaves—from contractual reform. The uneven development of liberal patriarchy is distilled in an ostensibly free woman’s agency: she can agree to marry, but become a wife or feme covert, she grants her husband sexual access to her body irrespective of her desire. Even more constitutively repressed by the liberal polis is the intimate violence endured by enslaved African women. This class will also consider pornographic constructions of women’s anatomy as figurations of feminine consent and pleasure; representations of sex work; sexual violence, rape law, and constraint (within and outside slavery); and women’s queer desire and resistance to marriage. As a survey of literature in the period, this class will include poetry, drama, prose fiction, and political philosophy, as well as some contemporary criticism. A tentative, non-exhaustive list of texts includes: anonymous prostitute narratives; Mary Astell, Some Reflections on Marriage; Aphra Behn, “The Rover,” “The Amorous Prince,” “The Lucky Chance,” and/ or “The Dutch Lover”; John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; Daniel Defoe, Roxana; John Dryden, “Amboyna”; Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives (excerpt); Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (excerpt); Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (Chapter 5); Thomas Shadwell, “The Libertine”; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”; Jonathan Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Strephon and Chloe,” “A Beautiful Young Nymph Preparing for Bed”; Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary or Maria.
English 344	18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen Judges the 18th Century (Pre 1830)	Soni	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen Judges the 18th Century (Pre 1830) Course Description: The enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s novels is due in part to the fact that the historical and cultural debates in which she intervened are very much the same ones that confront us today: tradition v innovation, parental authority v filial obligation, customary social bonds v contractual relations, emotion v reason, the role of women in society, the value of the arts. This class will provide an in-depth look at Jane Austen’s development as a writer, in the context of the “culture wars” in Britain in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution. We will begin by reading Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in order to better understand how Austen navigates the treacherous waters of the revolution controversies, and develops her own idiosyncratic solution to these social crises. Arguments abound about whether Austen is a conservative or progressive writer, but we will find that these conventional categories are inadequate to understand her inventive approach to the social upheavals of her day. We will read a range of Austen’s novels, including Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. But we will also have the opportunity to read some of Austen’s precocious juvenilia, selections from her letters, a sampling of her unfinished works (Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon), memoirs, and contemporary criticism. Our goal will be to understand the experimental and fluid nature of Austen’s thought, as well as the way in which she transformed the history of the novel. Throughout, we will focus especially on the problem of “judgment” as it plays out in enlightenment and counter-enlightenment thought. Enlightenment progressives condemn pre-judice and want everyone to judge for themselves, but conservatives understand the importance of custom, tradition and experience for developing judgment. Austen is one of the few in the period to have grasped the full scope of the problem. Working against the seductions of eighteenth-century sentimentality and the romance plot which threaten a reader’s capacity for judgment, Austen designs narratives that compel her readers to engage in a sophisticated practice of judgment and evaluation. Some of Austen’s most distinctive narrative strategies, such as “free indirect discourse,” are in the service of a pedagogy of judgment that is at the heart of her novelistic project. The supple and attentive strategies of judgment she honed in her novels are as relevant today against a reductive scientism and disoriented aestheticism as they were when Austen first penned them. Note: This course will be significantly different from previous iterations of the course I have taught under the same title.
English 358	Dickens (Post 1830)	Herbert	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 358 Dickens (Post 1830) Course Description: In this course we will consider Dickens, "arguably second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of English writers," as an analyst of the troubled social, psychological, and spiritual patterns of modern life, trying to see how his innovations in novelistic technique (notably his development of veins of lunatic comedy that can only be called "dickensian") arise from and at the same time give form to his vividly idiosyncratic vision of modernity. Evaluation Method: Evaluation based on class presentations and participation, quizzes, and a term paper. Texts Include: David Copperfield (1849-50); Bleak House (1852-53); and Little Dorrit (1855-57). Note: The instructor disclaims responsibility for any cases of addiction to reading Victorian fiction traceable to this course.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Feminist World-Making (Post 1830/ICSP)	Mann	MW 3:30-4:50
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Feminist World-Making (Post 1830/ICSP) *Course Description:* Black Feminist World-Making examines the long and rich tradition of world-making in black feminist fiction and non-fiction. It prioritizes and how, why, and when black feminist authors and critics engage in the imaginative practice of world-making to imagine new and altogether different worlds than those we know. It asks students to think about how an archive centering black women’s writing alters, augments, and confounds our very ideas about time, space, and relationality. We will take a long view of these practices, considering the critical work of black feminist writers and theorists who came of age in the mid-century, including Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Barbara Christian, and comparing their world-making practices to those of millennial black feminists, including N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Beyoncé. Teaching Method: Seminar-style discussion Evaluation Method: 2 papers; 1 Oral Presentation Texts include: Texts include Toni Morrison, Beloved; Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; Beyoncé, Lemonade; Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore Note: This course is combined with AFAM 380-0-20.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Passing In/Around American Culture	Jackson	MW 11-12:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Passing In/Around American Culture *Course Description:* This course examines the various modes, methods, and interpretations that fall under the sign “passing” in American culture, from the nineteenth-century to the present. In addition to classic stories of crossing the colorline, we will read art, music, and other media and criticism in which passing poses the ideal medium to discuss social difference. Broad pertinent topics include: enslavement and the afterlives of slavery; performance; class; appropriation; transness; digital cultures; blackness; disability; cartoons. Note: This course is combined with AFAM 380-0-24.
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Ulysses (Post 1830)	Froula	MW 11-12:20
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Ulysses (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: Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text). Please use this edition even if you already own another. Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (California, 1989). Homer, The Odyssey, Fitzgerald translation or another. Joyce, Dubliners. R. Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982). Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Barry (Oxford, 1991). Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (NY: Vintage, 1952).
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Gender and Horror (Post 1830/ICSP)	Andrews	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Gender and Horror (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: A longstanding source of fascination for feminist cultural critics, horror movies frequently highlight issues of gender and power. How is an audience affected by watching women’s bodies subjected to violence on screen? What forms of femininity and masculinity get depicted as dangerous or monstrous? Who do we perceive as expendable, and with whom do we identify? In our discussions, we will consider these questions as we analyze a selection of classic and contemporary horror movies. Alongside these films, our readings will introduce some of the major debates in feminist cultural studies. We will explore how feminists look at film in relation to issues of embodiment, desire, identity, and violence, and we’ll debate the particular possibilities and pitfalls horror brings to gendered representation. Teaching Methods: discussion, collaborative group work Evaluation Methods: participation, two short analytical papers (5 pages each), final essay (8-10 pages) Texts Include: Halloween (1978), Alien (1979), Slumber Party Massacre (1983), 28 Days Later (2002), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), Get Out (2017). Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 373-0-20. Instructor Bio: Erin Andrews’ research and teaching interests include speculative fiction and sci-fi, American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture studies. At Northwestern, she has taught in both the English and Gender & Sexuality Studies Departments on topics including 20th and 21st century literature, feminist and queer theories, and film. Her courses center interdisciplinary teaching methods, with a focus on creating opportunities for students to make connections between assigned literary and theoretical texts and their larger historical, political, and cultural contexts. Her current book project focuses on post-World War II American science fiction, and it explores the relationships between the sci-fi genre and U.S. military power.
English 372	American Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Democratic Imaginary (Post 1830/TTC)	Erkkilä	TTh 11-12.20
English 372 American Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Democratic Imaginary (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course will focus on the intersections between democratic revolution and revolutionary poetics in Walt Whitman’s writings. We will focus in particular on Whitman’s democratic experiments with the language, style, and forms of poetry, and his daring representation of such subjects as the dignity of labor and the working classes, the body, sex, race, technology, comradeship, war, America, the globe, and the cosmos. We will begin by exploring the sources of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass in the social and political struggles of his time. We will consider the fascinating intersections between personal and political crisis, homoeroticism and poetic experimentation in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. We will also look at Whitman’s attempts to find new forms to give voice to the simultaneous carnage and intimacy of the Civil War as the first modern war in Drum-Taps and Sequel (1865). And we will conclude by reflecting on Whitman’s struggle in his later writings to reconcile the revolutionary dream of democracy with a post-Civil War world increasingly dominated by the unleashed forces of economic expansion, materialism, selfism, and greed. The course will end with readings of poets and writers from Ginsberg to Neruda in the United States and elsewhere who continue to “talk back” to Whitman. Teaching Method: some lecture; mostly discussion. Evaluation Methods: Essay (3-4 pages); essay (8-10 pages); final examination. Texts Include: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Textbooks available at: Norris Book Center.
English 375	Topics in Asian American Literature: Techno-Orientalism (Post 1830/ICSP)	Huang	MW 12:30-1:50
English 375 Topics in Asian American Literature: Techno-Orientalism (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: Techno-Orientalism names a variant of Orientalism that associates Asians with a technological future. This seminar will explore how Techno-Orientalist tropes are used by, played with, and rewritten by Asian American authors. We will study how twentieth-century and contemporary issues of technology, globalization, and financial speculation collide with a history of yellow peril and Asian Invasion discourse, as well as how these tensions manifest in figures and tropes such as robots, aliens, and cybernetics. Texts include poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film. Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method: Active participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay. Texts include: Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution (ISBN 978-0393064841) Larissa Lai, Automaton Biographies (ISBN 978-1551522920) Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (ISBN 978-1594486104) Marjorie Liu, Monstress Vol. 1 (ISBN 978-1632157096) Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (ISBN 978-0307739452) Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at Norris Bookstore. All course readings besides the primary texts will be available in a course reader available at Quartet Copies. Note: Co-listed with Asian American Studies 376-0.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: American Fiction in the 1950s (Post 1830)	High	MW 12:30-1:50
English 378 Studies in American Literature: American Fiction in the 1950s (Post 1830) Course Description: This course reads deeply within the American 1950s, a decade which saw the publication of big books, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat (1957). Focusing on the writings of James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Patricia Highsmith, we will investigate the ways their writing takes up adolescence, race, self-discovery, fear, sexuality, and personal courage in the mid twentieth century. How do the concerns of these authors ignore, redirect, and bear witness to the major public issues of the day? What does it mean to be a critical, cult, or commercial success in the 1950s? To answer these questions, we will read pulp novels, best-sellers, poems, a picture book, and a few short stories, in addition to viewing at least two films. Teaching Method: Discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Method: Two short, exploratory essays; and one longer essay (6-8 pages). Preparation and participation, weekly reading response. Texts include: Readings will include James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain; Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen and Maud Martha; Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt; and E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Texts will be available at: Norris campus bookstore. 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 Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and the Libraries of Haverford College. His commitment to the classroom has been recognized by a teaching award from the Northwestern English Department.
English 383	Studies in Theory and Criticism: Cultures of Information: Neoliberalism, Affect, and Global Media (Post 1830/TTC)	Hodge/Noonan	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 383 Studies in Theory and Criticism: Cultures of Information: Neoliberalism, Affect, and Global Media (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: What does the information age feel like? This course traces the rise of hyper-modernized cultures of information that developed in Japan and in the Western world and shaped so much of contemporary culture since the late twentieth century. It does so not only by attending to the advent of new technologies that define this period, but also to "neoliberalism": an economic and political paradigm prizing the creation of new markets and a focus on the productivity and care of the self. Evolving unevenly in different contexts, neoliberalism values market exchange as, David Harvey writes, “an ethic in itself,” which has come to shape certain forms of the political, affective, and aesthetic experience of the contemporary moment. In this course we will attend to a variety of aesthetic texts in literature, film, and games that will allow us to follow the history of neoliberalism in its global, national, and aesthetic contexts. Note: This course is combined with Humanities 370-6-20 and Asian Languages & Cultures 390-0-20 and is co-taught by Professors Hodge and Noonan (Asian Languages and Cultures).
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: Tales of Oil and Water (Post 1830/TTC)	Wolff	TTh 2-3:20
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Tales of Oil and Water (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: What can a dystopian film like 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road tell us about how to change our actions, today? How can we recognize urgent questions from our own world in such a surreal cinematic assault on the senses? How do such imaginary prophecies of near-future worlds "memorialize" the present? As interlocking narratives of globalization, resource competition, and ecological crisis collide in the news, the natural resources on which human lives and social relationships depend have increasingly preoccupied recent fiction, film, and criticism. Whether it’s a question of “too much” or “not enough” — of deluge or scarcity — the tales we will read and watch together in this course depict resource wars and dystopian imaginaries through everyday, intimate events and encounters. They zoom in, in other words, from geopolitical power struggles caused by oil and water, to their effects on a human scale — helping us see how our actions count in both distantly mediated and effectively immediate ways. Featuring stories composed of fast-paced action, futuristic sci-fi, film noir mystery, devastating satire, and the aesthetics of the surreal, these works cannot be captured by a single mood. Instead, they collectively intensify our awareness of the ecological path we are on, as if to say: remember this tomorrow. Our discussions of essays, novels, stories and films will be guided by how each represents pressing problems of compromise and control, agency and activism, competition and coexistence, in a "now" viewed as the future's past. Required Texts (available at Beck’s Bookstore or online): Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus (ISBN 978-1594634246) Helon Habila, Oil on Water (ISBN 978-0393339642) Recommended Texts (available at Beck’s Bookstore or online): David Lewis Feldman, Water (ISBN 978-0745650333) Gavin Bridge & Philippe Le Billon, Oil (ISBN 978-0745649269) Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 302-0.
English 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This 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 and Practice of Fiction	Martinez	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-2 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-2	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Biss	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-2 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An 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: The Age of Imperialism: Theory, History, Literature	Gottlieb	MW 12:30-1:50
English 397 Research Seminar: The Age of Imperialism: Theory, History, Literature Course Description: Nothing marks the modern world so much as the devastating and disruptive effects of imperialism. An understanding of this complex phenomenon is vital not only for an understanding of modern history and geography, but also for modern literature. Lenin and Arendt draw diametrically opposed interpretations of Hobson’s original theory of imperialism: while Lenin understands imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, Arendt believes it is the first stage of rule by the bourgeoisie. At stake in this debate, at least for Arendt, is the ability of an interpretation of imperialism to explicate works of literature written under imperialist conditions. With a focus on the “Age of Imperialism” (especially the “scramble for Africa” and “the Great Game”), we will begin the class with an examination of some of the central theories and interpretations of European imperialism (those of Marx, Hobson, Lenin, and Arendt); continue with an exploration of the historical conditions of certain imperialized regions (India, Congo Free State, and Nigeria); and make use of both inquiries as we confront some of the most lucid and powerful literary encounters with imperialism in this century, including works by Kipling, Conrad, Achebe, and Desai. Teaching Method: Brief lectures and discussion Evaluation Method: Two in-class presentations (one collaborative, one independent); research dossier developed over the course of the quarter; final research paper. Required Texts: Texts will likely include theoretical writings and novels by Hobson, Lenin, Arendt, Kipling, Conrad, Achebe, and Desai. Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students must successfully complete 5 300-level English courses before taking English 397.
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Mwangi	W 3-4:50
English 398-2 Honors Seminar Course Description: Part of a 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	Bouldrey	W 6p-9p
English 403 Writers' Studies in Literature Course Description: Where does writing come from? Previous topics in Writers Studies in Literature have considered writing and its roots in the body and the mind. This class will move the conversation to its roots in speech. By looking at examples of literature that were initially meant to be spoken aloud, we will explore how they were placed, elegantly and not, onto the page. How does this happen? The bardic boom, the pulpit pitch, the mad futurist with a megaphone—so many of the great works of literature were first delivered orally, then spelled out and called literature. Speeches, psalms, slams, rants, anecdotes, manifestos, declarations, sermons, lectures, yarns, ballads, brags, jeremiads, prayers, incendiary instructions for the coming revolution—we’ll investigate as many as we can of these in the readings, considering, as writers, how we can get performative narratives of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the stage to the page. We will discuss, too, the instructive aspect of art and literature, the difference between voice and style, and how oral culture differs from written culture, with a serious take on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. We will consider formal prosody, rhetoric, and poetic forms, and original and amusing methods inventive writers come up with to interpret the sound of speech. Readings may include sermons by John Donne, Toni Morrison, and Herman Melville; prayers and suras from Adam Zagejewski and the Koran, Brags from Beowulf, Beastie Boys, Sharon Olds, and Shmuel HaNagid, anecdotes from Ivan Turgenev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Olga Tokarczuk, murder ballads from Cole Porter, Jake Adam York and Dolly Parton, speeches and declarations from Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass, and jeremiads by Jamaica Kincaid, Valerie Solanis, and Joy Williams, for starters. Note: Northwestern graduate students in programs outside the English Department are welcome to apply for a space in English 403: Writers' Studies in Literature with Professor Bouldrey, scheduled on Wednesdays 6-9, winter 2019. If you are seeking to count this course as an elective in your own program, you must seek approval from your home department or program. Click here to fill out and submit the application. Application Deadline: November 11, 2019.
English 434	Studies in Shakespeare & Early Drama: Early Modern Sexualities	Masten	Th 2-4:50
English 434 Studies in Shakespeare & Early Drama: Early Modern Sexualities Course Description: How can we practice the history and analysis of sexuality in early modern Europe? Is sexuality best described by a continuity of models, or alterity and historical difference? To what extent can we discuss “sexuality” in relation to “identity” in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, gender, etc., in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will be particularly interested in gaining fluency in the languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. We will centrally engage recent critical controversies in the field over the utility of historicism in sexuality studies. Texts: plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Fletcher; erotic-narrative poetry by Beaumont, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ovid; sodomy trial of the Earl of Castlehaven; selected essays of Montaigne; sonnets by various writers; theory and historical work by Bray, Butler, Edelman, Foucault, Goldberg, Halperin, Loomba, Masten, Menon, Rambuss, Shannon, Traub, others. Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 490-0-21.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form	Cutler & Huang	Tu 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form Course Description: This seminar surveys literary experiments in contemporary Ethnic American poetics and narrative that expand notions of what constitutes “ethnic literature,” a category historically denigrated as insufficiently imaginative or aesthetically minded. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of these literary traditions, our goal in this course is to track evolving referents for racial formation in a “postracial” era defined by the gap between ostensible cultural tolerance and the persistence of structural inequality. Responding to the contradictions of racial representation, scholars of African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American literatures have redoubled critical engagement with form, genre, and aesthetics. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do experimental texts by writers of color destabilize conventional modes of understanding ethnic and racial representation? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of the avant-garde? And to what extent do these literary experiments suggest that race itself can be understood as a cultural form or generic object? Possible authors include: Gloria Anzaldúa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sesshu Foster, Myung Mi Kim, J. Michael Martinez, Salvador Plascencia, Claudia Rankine, Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, Layli Long Soldier, and David Treuer. Possible critics include: Phillip Brian Harper, Walter Benn Michaels & Sean McCann, Fred Moten, Anthony Reed, Christina Sharpe, Ralph Rodriguez, Ramón Saldívar, Dorothy Wang, and Timothy Yu.
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Past and Future Humans in the Archives of American Literature	Wisecup	M 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Past and Future Humans in the Archives of American Literature Course Description: In pre-1900 America, questions about who counted as human and why circulated at the intersection of science and literature, as people worked through the question of the continent’s ancient and recent past and its future forms of belonging by experimenting with scientific methods, theories, and representations. Scientific genres—natural history, ethnology, exploration reports, evolutionary description, specimen illustrations, to name a few—offered a vocabulary and set of orientations through which to examine and discuss the repercussions of chattel slavery and settler colonialism and to speculate about the continent’s future. Key voices in these debates were African and Native American writers who—while often said to be the objects of science—in fact created their own models of the human and theories of the past and of human difference. What we now call American literary history emerged as a contested category and object of study during this time, in conversation with proto-anthropological texts, illustration, display, and theory. This course examines this set of interdisciplinary conversations and their import for American literary studies today by taking up the multivocal, interdisciplinary nature of the early American archive and its capacious geographies, and by developing methodologies for reading its texts in their cultural and geographic diversity. What are the ongoing consequences for literary studies of literary-scientific debates about personhood and the past? In what ways does our sense of both “American” and “literature” need to shift to account for the range of voices contributing to these conversations? This course aims to introduce students to a wide-ranging set of writers and genres; to engage with transatlantic, hemispheric, and culturally specific methodologies; and to instigate conversations about American literary studies and its futures. Along the way, we’ll gain experience working in literary and historical archives while also critically examining the formation and current configuration of those archives. Readings will illuminate key debates about the course terms, pairing canonical texts with less well known writers and recent scholarship. Course assignments will ask students to write for multiple audiences and to experiment with various forms for conveying scholarly research. Primary Texts to include: Hans Sloane, Voyage to Jamaica (1707) Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) Benjamin Banneker, Copy of a Letter from Benjamin Banneker, to the Secretary of State, with his Answer (1792) Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799) Phillis Wheatley, selected poems John Ridge, “Letter to Albert Gallatin” (1826) James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans (1826) William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1827) William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” (1833) Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, introduction to Algic Researches (1839) Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, selected poems Fredrick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” (1854) John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas… (1854) Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855) Sarah Mapps Douglass, lectures (1859) Martin Delany, “The Attraction of Planets”; Blake (1859) Simon Pokagon, The Red Man’s Rebuke (1893) Scholarly Texts to include: Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2011) Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2012) Robert Allen Gunn, Ethnology and Empire: Languages Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands (2015) Christopher Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (2012) Justine Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2011) Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (2017) Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom and Early African American Culture (2017)
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Theories of Comedy	Davis, T.	W 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Theories of Comedy Course Description: This course has two key objectives: to survey comedic theory from antiquity to the present while enabling each student to delve deeply into the period, genre, and/or theoretical concerns of their intended specialty. Common readings 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, thinking comparatively about past and present. 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. A writing assignment will address these representational traditions comparatively. Students will also develop individual reading lists—for example, drawn from the English Department’s qualifying exam lists—and the other writing assignment will be tailored to these text and traditions. Note: This course is combined with Theatre 545-0-20.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Curdy	M 10:00a-12:50p
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: This creative writing and creative reading workshop will explore a particular fascination of American poets with the portrait. In addition to close readings of poems, we'll also look at portraits by artists, considering the ways in which poets adopt strategies from the visual arts. We'll consider ekphrastic and dramatic modes in poetry, as well as the relationship between the literary portrait and various stylistic revolutions and experiments in American poetry around questions of subjectivity and representation, all of which are intended to enrich the sources and materials for our own poems. Northwestern graduate students in programs outside the English Department are welcome to apply for a space in English 496: MFA Poetry Workshop with Professor Curdy, scheduled for Mondays 10-12:50pm. Click here to fill out and submit the application. Application Deadline: November 11, 2019
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Dybek	T 6p-9p
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: The primary text for English 497, the Fiction Workshop, is the work written by the people in the class. Writing is the only art with an abstract medium: language. But like every other art, writing is about making something. Musicians make music, potters make pots, painters make paintings, and writers make stories and novels. One learns to make pots through the trial and error of making pots. The analogy holds for writing; one learns to write by doing: writing and rewriting. It is the craft of each art that can be learned, and it is craft that the artist relies on to make and improve a piece. And so the writing workshop is craft oriented. Because the medium, language, is an abstraction, the tools of writing stories--which are central to human thought--are not pens or typewriters or computers, but abstractions: scenic construction, dialogue, etc. That’s what governs improving one’s in-process work and that is what we come together to discuss in each class. The stories that people in the class are working on will organically lead to discussions about the craft of writing that will apply not just to that particular story, but to the art of writing in general--to all our stories. In critiquing a fellow writer’s story, one is also, on the deepest level, engaged in articulating a personal aesthetic. The idea of a workshop is to then harness the clarity of those personal articulations back into one’s own writing. Northwestern graduate students in programs outside the English Department are welcome to apply for a space in English 497: MFA Fiction Workshop with Professor Dybek, scheduled for Tuesdays 6-9 pm. Click here to fill out and submit the application. Application Deadline: November 11, 2019.
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Bresland	T 6p-9p
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: Shortly after the invention of the telephone in 1876, the increasing concentration of electrical lines crisscrossing the American landscape caused a problem: audio quality was dropping everywhere. Electrical interference—noise—turned out to be the cause. Alexander Graham Bell found that when he bound two copper lines loosely together, the twisted pair greatly improved the ratio of signal-to-noise. That discovery led to the balanced circuits in place today, connecting billions of people to zettabytes of imbalanced data. Our nonfiction workshop takes inspiration from the twisted pair by reading essays that coil loosely and at times haphazardly around one another, as when Ginger Strand channels and ultimately furthers John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” (1977) with her essay “Why Look at Fish?” in 2005. When Teju Cole rereads and reconsiders James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” (1953) with his own written attempt in 2014, a reader can’t help but feel as though one is eavesdropping on a master class. Another essay pair finds resonance in the use of extended metaphor, as in “The Last Vet” (2010) by Aminatta Forna and “Driving as Metaphor” (2019) by Rachel Cusk. Both “Stop Blaming Jaws” (2013) by Heather Havrilesky and “F/X Porn” (1998) by David Foster Wallace find congruence in the cinema as subject matter, each drilling down to one blockbuster in particular, one attacking as the other defends. Every week we will read some new pairing of essays that focuses our inquiry on the craft of essay-making. This being a workshop, we will take inspiration from these readings and filter them through our own biases and blind-spots, producing new written work intended for audiences of the literary essay. One of the main goals of this course will be to assemble a library of formal tools that can help us recognize and respond to varied aesthetic demands. Note: Northwestern graduate students in programs outside the English Department are welcome to apply for a space in English 498: MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop with Professor Bresland, scheduled for Tuesdays 6-9 pm. Click here to fill out and submit the application. Application Deadline: November 11, 2019