UPDATED: Fall 2020 Spotlight Courses
Below is a sampling of many of the innovative and interesting courses taught by the English Department in the upcoming Fall semester. To see all courses we offer visit Courses. Here is a list of courses being offered Fall 2020.
ENGLISH 247.01 - VICTORIAN LIT
Kathy Psomiades
Victorian literature is both formally experimental and profoundly engaged with the political, social and intellectual changes that made the world in 1901 (the end of Victoria’s reign) so different from the world in 1837 when Victorian came to the throne. We’ll be reading novels, poetry and prose that both changed the things that literature could do, and attempted to imagine and manage a rapidly changing world. We’ll start with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, then move on to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and finally Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In between, we’ll read poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and some of the writers of literary and extra literary prose featured in the Victorian Volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
This course will be a hybrid course: it will be about half to three-quarters on-line and about half to one-quarter in person, should circumstances permit. Everyone in residence will have the option of attending an in-person small group session once a week during most of the semester, but there will also be an online equivalent of that session, for anyone who prefers to attend remotely.
Students will be evaluated on the basis of participation in discussion, six short (2p) written assignments, one 7-10 page paper, and a small group project that results in a presentation.
ENGLISH 276.01 - AFRICAN DIASPORA LITERATURE
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Tsitsi Jaji
Black lives have always mattered to Black people, and literature has been a crucial way to articulate the beauty and power of Black culture within and beyond its bounds. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 crisis police violence, and incarceration call for the study of Blackness from a cultural, historical perspective. The term “Black” has been used in multiple ways since the 15th century, influenced by race-thinking, colonization, and slavery. This course will focus on how diverse Black cultures think with and about each other. Beginning with the 17th century biography of an Ethiopian nun who resisted colonisation, we will turn to writers like Phyllis Wheatly, Mary Prince and Maria Stewart who used their words to call for Black freedom in the 18th and 19th centuries. How did African, Caribbean, and U.S. Black women envision freedom. What are the connections between their work and black women’s leadership in today’s Black Lives Matter movement?
In the wake of emancipation and the struggle for full civil, and human rights involved thinking Blackness in an international framework of solidarity. This was never easy. We will turn to a question first formulated by Countee Cullen, a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance: “What is Africa to me?” For African Americans, the continent beckoned as a site of origin, as we will see inMaya Angelou’s memoir of her years in Ghana, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and Saiydia Hartmann’s moving account of her study trip there, Lose Your Mother. African writers also reflected on what pan-African, nationalist, and later, Afropolitan ideas meant for what “Africa” meant. Chimamanda Adiche warned against a single story. Reading poetry by contemporary African writers, particularly those identifying as non-binary will help us attend to the flexibility literature reveals in Black identity. Similarly, reading Caryl Phillips travel memoir as a Black British man and viewing films by the Black Audiovisual Collective will remind us of how the term “Black” in Britain also included immigrants of South Asian heritage.
This class focuses on literature but also includes film, non-fiction, and scholarly articles. No experience in literary study is expected, and grades are based on class discussion, short reflection papers, and essays. There are no exams in this class. All class discussions will be available asynchronously, and discussions online will supplement extensive office hours.
ENGLISH 290S.01 SP TOP IN LANG. & LIT
MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE
Victor Strandberg
If you are quite certain that you plan to stay in the seminar, it would be an advantage for you to obtain the textbooks now before the term begins. Accordingly, I am sharing with you my decisions concerning the curriculum. A more detailed syllabus will be provided when we meet at our first class.
The first thing to do is to get hold of a Bible. Any version will do, though I favor the King James version, originally published in 1611, because of its immense influence on writers in English during the last four centuries. (Examples: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—titles drawn from the KJ Bible.) Hint: this Bible is usually available for free in any hotel room.
I am now planning to begin the course with a series of assignments in whatever version of the Bible you bring to class, including Genesis, Exodus, The Book of Job, The Gospel of Luke, The Book of Revelation, and assorted brief selections along the way.
To save money, I am asking students to purchase the following books via Amazon.com. It is greatly desirable that we all have the same editions.
1. The Bhagavad-Gita (Signet Classics edition, Introduction by Aldous Huxley)
2. Dante: The Inferno (Signet Classics edition, translated by John Ciardi)
3. Shakespeare: Othello (Signet Classics edition, edited by Alvin Kernan)
4. Greek Drama: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes (Bantam Classic, edited by Moses Hadas)
5. Montaigne: Essays (Penguin Classics, translated by J. M. Cohen)
In addition to Dante's Inferno, two stories by Chaucer will represent the Middle Ages: The Prioress's Tale and The Pardoner's Tale. To save money, I plan to download these tales from the Internet and distribute paper copies to each student.
If it all works out, we will study works from three ancient civilizations (Greek, Hebrew, Hindu), two medieval masters from Italy and England (Chaucer, Dante), and two giants of the French and English Renaissance (Montaigne and Shakespeare). NOTE: All lectures will be on Zoom during pandemic. On campus interviews & office hours will be optional.
ENGLISH 290S.02 SP TOP IN LANG. & LIT
ASIAN AM GENDER & SEXUALITY
Ryanson Ku
Asian Americans are often represented as either the model minority, the immigrant whose successful assimilation serves to discipline other minorities, or the yellow peril, the eternal foreigner threatening to invade from within. How are these figures not only racial but also gendered and sexual? And how do gender and sexuality transform the figures—e.g., into the highly desirable and “domestic” female body and the hardworking but racially “castrated” man—or undermine representation altogether? Exploring the intertwined constitution, and contradictions, of race, gender, and sexuality, this course focuses on Asian American gender and sexual representation and performance in the context of the social structures—white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity—they both reinforce and resist. We will start by recounting the history of Asian men in America, and how women and queers are a part of this history. Through literary and filmic renderings that we will compare with a sociological study, we will then contrast how Asian American masculinity is questioned and asserted as well as how Asian American feminine sexuality is a privileged object of colonization and thus a site of both complicity and an intimate kind of defiance. Inserted in US racial hierarchy and enclosed in Western frames, Asian Americans also look back: at the subject looking, who may also be sexually betrayed; and at places outside the US, but, as betrayed by race, gender, and sexual relations, still in America. In following these dynamics in the diaspora, we will encounter the queer, the child, and the other—figures through which Asian Americans have been represented. We will end the course by looking at Asian American queers, children, and outsiders and seek in the doubling of the literal and figurative the signs of the fraying, and threats to the reproduction, of representation and the social order.
Texts include Bruce Lee film clips, The Chinaman Pacific, “Happiness: A Manifesto,” The Book of Salt, Dogeaters, M. Butterfly, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Charlie Chan is Dead 2, and historical, sociological, and critical texts. Assignments include weekly response papers, literary analysis, comparative analysis, and class participation. This course will be taught entirely online. Students are highly encouraged to "attend" the course virtually through Zoom, but sessions will also be recorded. Additional instruction and participation may take place through Sakai forums, small group sessions, and/or virtual office hours.
ENGLISH 290S-4.02 SP TOPICS IN CREATIVE WRITING
PLAYS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD
Faulkner Fox
Online. The goal of this creative writing course is for aspiring playwrights to think deeply about what—exactly—they are trying to do, and avoid, in their writing. What causes a play to be heavy-handed and propagandistic, as opposed to impassioned? How can students who believe deeply in a particular issue write artful drama about that issue? In what ways is theater similar—and dissimilar—to social protest in the streets? Students will be encouraged to experiment, question, and revise, at every turn.
This course will closely examine a diversity of plays that have had a marked impact on their cultures—an impact beyond an excellent and meaningful theater-going experience. Recent examples we will study include Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu and The Talk by local playwright Sonny Kelly. We will also watch and study more traditional plays like The Crucible and Angels in America.
Over the course of the semester, students will read—and watch—excellent political plays as well as write their own. They will write and develop their own full-length script, in addition to doing weekly shorter, more informal creative exercises and reading responses. Class discussion—which will be recorded—will be divided between focus on student work-in-progress, produced plays, and playwriting craft. Students will also work in small groups, meet individually with one another, and meet individually with me. In addition, they will interview the director, producer, and/or playwright of a recent production and report back on how these professionals view the line between artful moral suasion and propaganda.
All work for this course can be done asynchronously. We will be using ZOOM, Sakai forums, Sakai dropbox, email, as well as other platforms suggested by students. There will be multiple forms of interaction. Grading will be as follows: 50% development and revision of the student’s own creative work, 25% written commentary on professional plays and classmates’ work, and 25% participation in other aspects of the class such as one-on-one discussion with me and with peers, small group run-throughs of scenes-in-progress, and interviewing a theater professional.
ENGLISH 390S-1.01 SINGLE AMERICAN AUTHOR
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Nathaniel Mackey
Online. A study of the major works of poetry and prose by William Carlos Williams, from Kora in Hell (1920) to Paterson (1963), with particular attention to formal innovation, linguistic change and cultural diagnosis.
ENGLISH 390S-7.02 SP TOPICS IN LANG & LIT
LIT & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Leonard Tennenhouse
Online. Together, we will try to figure out how the religious promise of heaven as the fulfillment of life and self, plenitude and perfect love, continues to operate in modern secular society: How did the pursuit of happiness become the driving force of a world organized by capitalism, one in which human life must seek and find self-transcendence in the world? This is powerful stuff!
To help us identify this elusive and deeply contradictory secular myth, we will consult a few of the major intellectual arguments that proposed and/or challenged it, including those by Locke, Marx, Weber, Marcuse, and Coetzee. But to understand where these arguments break down or fail to deliver on their promises, we will rely on such works of fiction as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the film version of The Wizard of Oz , and Colson Whitehouse’s Underground Railroad among other texts.
