Schedule of Classes

This writing-intensive introduction to literature written in English may include a selection of formal verse, fiction, drama, and at least one play by Shakespeare. The course is designed to develop the student’s imaginative understanding of literature along with the ability to write and speak with greater clarity. It is intended to be of interest to students at any level of preparation.

An examination of several masterpieces of Western literature, including Homer's Iliad and Dante's Divine Comedy. Some sections are writing-intensive.

This course features a range of dystopian literature in the young adult category. What can be learned from books written for those aged 16-25? What is the political potential of this demographic and how can dystopia incite them? “Young Dystopia” takes on these questions and more while surveying subgenres of dystopia that span but are not limited to monster apocalypse all the way to oppressive governments. Dystopian literature presents important questions and warnings that open up wider conversations about the contemporary world and how to protect it.

An examination of poems from British and American literature selected by the instructor. Writing-intensive some semesters.

A course which examines texts in various genres and which may focus on a particular theme chosen by the instructor.

This course explores the contemporary Anglophone novel since 1989, a period that coincides with the increased pace of globalization. Written largely from transnational perspectives that defy traditional national boundaries, the novels in this course share a common concern with capturing global experience and analyzing the cultural and economic impact of globalization. Potential readings include works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, and Ruth Ozeki.

A study of literature written in Middle English (1100-1500), including instruction in the reading and pronunciation of Middle English. The course thematically examines the explosion of literature in late medieval England, which includes Geoffrey Chaucer, the Pearl Poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, William Langland, and Thomas Malory. The course also explores the history and context of late medieval Britain, including its relationship to literature of the Continent.

This course explores a selection of Shakespeare's plays through a critical framework chosen by the instructor. These approaches may include a focus on specific genres, the investigation of common themes, or the examination of performance tradition and cinematic adaptation.

A study of several plays after 1600.

A study of the major seventeenth-century poets, concentrating on such poets' redefinitions of genre, mode, and source. Readings emphasize works by Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Herrick, Milton, and Marvell.

A study of the poetry and poetic theory of British romanticism. Included is an examination of such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

A study of several major Victorian authors, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde.

Like Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of “a new birth of freedom” in the Gettysburg Address, the American literature covered in English 378 struggles to articulate, then problematize, American freedom in the era surrounding the Civil War and emancipation. What is freedom? To whom does it extend? What are its blessings and its costs? Nobody has ever thought more profoundly about these issues than the American writers who emerged before, during, and after the war America fought with itself: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others.

This seminar ranges across the diverse, innovative, playful, and provocative works of British modernist author Virginia Woolf. Readings include a selection of Woolf’s short fiction, novels, and nonfiction writing, as well as secondary scholarly works that situate Woolf in her historical and cultural milieu and illuminate the threads of aesthetics, feminism, and what we now call “modernism” in her work. Woolf’s writing opens up timely and important questions about the role of form and voice in writing, the conventions of both literary and academic writing, and how and when to play at the edges of those conventions.

The most innovative American novelist of the twentieth century is also the writer we need to make sense of the twenty-first. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner said. “It isn’t even past.” But why isn’t it? Why can’t we, as so many Americans ask, “just move on”? Faulkner’s novels keep asking this plaintive question, his characters yearning for the freedom of the fresh start but caught by a tragic past that doesn’t want to let go. This class focuses on the major novels Faulkner wrote, in blindingly quick succession, between 1929 and 1942, what he later called his “matchless time.”

A study of the major traditions of African-American writing from the nineteenth century to the present, including Frederick Douglass, Linda Brent, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove.

A study of criticism from classical times to post-structuralism and contemporary approaches to literary and cultural analysis, students will read closely and discuss major critical documents in the literary tradition of the West. Emphasis is placed on practical application of critical theory as well as on its history and development.

Schedule of Classes

English

Environmental Sciences