Expanded Descriptions for Spring 2012 Courses
40574 ENG 200A Intro to Literary StudiesProf. Borushko
MW 8:00-9:15
Required for English majors.
This course serves as an introduction to the discipline of literary studies and to the kinds of thinking and writing expected of students majoring in English. We will proceed through three units. In the first we will read a selection of lyric poems from various historical eras with an especial focus on form. The second unit is a relatively brief but representative survey of the history of the short story beginning from its origins in the nineteenth century with Gogol, Chekhov, and Poe, and continuing with some of its best known practitioners in the twentieth century, including Baldwin, Borges, Carver and others. And for our final unit we will read Ian McEwan's Saturday, a novel from our own historical moment. Along the way we'll take a look at some theory and criticism as well.
40575 ENG 200B Intro to Literary Studies
Prof. King
TR 10:00-11:15
Required for English majors.
Introduction to the vocabulary and practices of criticism and the skills of close reading.
40576 ENG 202A Literary History II
Prof. Cohen
MW 1:00-2:15
Required for English majors.
Exploration of literature in the modern period, paying particular attention to the development of genres, the expansion of the British Empire, and the emergence of the British and American literary traditions.
40577 ENG 205A Fiction: Narrating Self and Society
Prof. Gracombe
MW 1:00-2:15
This course counts as an English elective requirement and is open to non-majors as well.
"The more we learn about the history of the novel, the stranger it becomes."-Franco Moretti, The Novel
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."
-Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Is Oscar Wilde, who offered the above definition of fiction (with tongue firmly in cheek), correct? What does "fiction" really mean? This course will investigate the definition and evolution of fiction through close readings of novels and short stories of various genres, from Bildungsromans to ghost stories, Modernist novels to magical realism. Particular attention will be paid to the following questions: What are the defining features of these genres? How do they attempt both to record and to influence the exterior world-the events, spaces, and social dilemmas of their times? How do they reflect changing theories about the interior world, what Virginia Woolf called "the dark regions of psychology," especially the nature of desire and gender? How does each genre (re)define what constitutes reality? Throughout the semester, we will examine the plot structures and narrative techniques writers have invented to translate these realities and "dark regions" to the printed page.
Possible texts include: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea," Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, James Joyce's Dubliners, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Karen Russell's "Haunting Olivia," Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons, and Geoffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot.
40578 ENG 257A Global Detective Fiction
Prof. Cohen
WF 10:00-11:15
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
Over the past decade the detective novel has gone global. The modern detective story was first mastered by Edgar Alan Poe, and over the next 150 years innumerable authors revised and popularized the genre, provided hundreds of thousands of page-turners for a reading public hungry for puzzling plots and ingenious investigators. Many of the best contemporary detective novels reflect and investigate the forces of globalization, from Arturo Perez-Reverte's historical Spain to Qiu Xiaolong's contemporary China, from Henning Mankell's Swedish countryside to Donna Leon's Venetian canals, from Kerry Greenwood's early-twentieth-century Australia to Jose Latour's pre-revolutionary Cuba.
By featuring exotic locales, native investigators, and crimes with international dimensions, the contemporary global detective novel offers a unique twist on a familiar form. This course will examine novels by international authors in order to explore the fictional and real puzzle of globalization, questions of identity and multiculturalism, and the dynamics of history and literature. Reading fiction from every corner of the globe, this course will study the relationship between local crimes and international dilemmas. Paying close attention to critical reading and writing, this course will survey a range of texts that recast the traditional genre of the detective novel as a multicultural and politically attuned literary form.
40579 ENG 280A Shakespeare for Everyone
Prof. Duncan
MWF 1:00-1:50
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
"He was not for an age, but for all time!" This is how William Shakespeare's contemporary, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson, described his friend and professional rival. The course takes Jonson at his word-that Shakespeare does indeed transcend the boundaries of time (and place)-and provides an introduction to "the Bard" for twenty-first-century readers interested in getting (re)acquainted with the most famous writer of all time. We read a sampling of Shakespeare's plays, from the famous to the unfamiliar, asking why a sixteenth-century English dramatist continues to appeal to readers and theater audiences everywhere almost four hundred years after his death.
Shakespeare's plays deal with human desire and aggression, with family loyalty and dysfunction, with economics and social status, with race and the politics of empire; their settings are courts and hovels, the taverns and brothels of London, the shores of exotic islands, and the clearings in magical woods. The plays have also given us some of the stage's most memorable characters, lovers and lunatics, martyrs and murderers, heroes and charlatans. We will read our way across this vast theatrical landscape to get a feeling for the scope of Shakespeare's versatility and cultural achievement. Above all, we spend time on learning how to read a dramatic text, paying particular attention to its structure and language.
Note: This course does not fulfill the Early Modern Literature requirement for English majors.
40580 ENG 300 A Critical Theory
Prof. Green
M 2:30-5:00
This course fulfills the critical theory requirement for the English major.
This course will trace the rise of critical theory and cultural studies from their roots in literary-critical discourse to the contemporary theoretical practices of the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools. To refine our understanding of how major critical approaches revise, refute, and rethink prior traditions, we will explore trans-historical permutations of such fundamental theoretical concepts as representation, narrative, language, ideology, power, sexuality, race and gender. We will begin with an examination of the Platonic account of representation in conversation with more contemporary responses to Plato's fear of images. We will then explore three key nineteenth-/ early twentieth -century critical paradigms-Nietzschean genealogy, Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxian historical materialism-before turning our attention toward the theory of the linguistic sign that revolutionized critical discourse in Europe and America. The remainder of the course will investigate the methodologies that comprise cultural studies today, including post-Marxist ideological criticism, semiotics, discourse analysis, feminism, queer theory and race studies. Along the way, readings of short fiction and novels and screenings of films, industrial videos, advertisements and political propaganda will allow us to put theory into action and explore the interpretive possibilities that cultural studies makes available.
Prerequisite: ENG200.
40581 ENG 304A The Faerie Queene in the Archive
Prof. Duncan
MW 2:30-3:45
Please note: this is a 4-credit course
This course fulfills the Early Modern Literature requirement for the English major.
Edmund Spenser wrote his great English epic The Faerie Queene while working as a minor colonial official in Ireland, far away from the glittering court of Queen Elizabeth.
As members of this course you will engage in conversations about research methodologies and knowledge production; in partnership with research librarian Patricia McPherson we will undertake bibliographic studies and training, as a means of evaluating the epic poetry of Edmund Spenser and his project of fashioning Englishness and English nationhood. We will read much (though probably not all) of Edmund Spenser's epic romance The Fairie Queene. This 4-credit course is research intensive; that means we will spend a great deal of time in the (virtual) archives, reading and collecting information on the world in which Spenser lived and worked. The poet spent most of his working and writing life far away from Queen Elizabeth's great court at Whitehall, on the margins of the realm, in Ireland. It is therefore imperative to read The Fairie Queene in its Irish contexts. To get a better understanding of Spenser's achievement and the far-reaching influence of his poem we will engage in archival and bibliographic studies, asking questions about the political, social, religious, and cultural contexts of his work by researching conditions in Elizabethan Ireland. We will also tackle the problem of how the textual practice of literary criticism has shaped our understanding and assessment of Spenser as a poet of nationhood, and thus helped to construct the (early) modern nation. Grounded in an ambitious research agenda which forms the basis of sophisticated readings of The Fairie Queene, this course will introduce its members to the many resources of the Stonehill College library and beyond, through technological tools, information sessions, and (hopefully) several offsite excursions to rare books libraries in the region.
Above all, the course will ask you to work independently and in groups, in an inquiry-based environment, in which the intellectual path traveled will be determined in no small measure by your own archival and library work, by the scope of your imagination, and your resourcefulness as a creative thinker. The course places greater demands on your time outside of class (especially as you immerse yourself in the resources of the library throughout the semester), and it requires that you contribute more vigorously to dialogue in the classroom. After all, it is your own archival, bibliographic, and online research-its usefulness, completeness, appropriateness, and scope-that will be the topic of discussion during our class meetings. In particular, this course asks you to interrogate what constitutes valid knowledge and valid knowledge gathering processes. Finally, the research and critical thinking skills you learn in this course will help you negotiate the complex world of information outside the class.
40582 ENG 306A Fictions of Englishness, 1811-2011
Prof. Gracombe
R 2:30-5:00
This course fulfills Literary and Cultural Studies 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.
"It just goes to show, you go back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy tale!" -Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2001)
What Zadie Smith calls the "fairy tale" of Englishness has long preoccupied British fiction. Through close readings of English novels, as well as Victorian periodicals, films, and contemporary scholarship, this course will examine that fairy tale. How have writers both reflected and shaped theories of Englishness over the past 200 years? To answer this question, we will trace cultural, territorial, religious, racial, and political aspects of Englishness. Particular attention will be paid to the significant, ongoing tension between a national identity grounded in race/ancestry and a more flexible-if no less contested- Englishness based in culture. To that end, we will analyze representations of England's Others, be they Bangladeshi immigrants (White Teeth), French artists and Jewish mesmerists (Trilby), or vampiric "Eastern" invaders (Dracula). Grappling with these Others both at home and abroad, our texts repeatedly ask whether Englishness can be acquired or only inherited. Can education, habits, and the consumption of cultural products, from books to food, succeed in making one authentically English? Throughout the semester, we will also explore whether novels can imagine Englishness in unique ways because of specific generic conventions. If, as Edward Said declared, "nations themselves are narrations," what narrative strategies and formal conventions have novelists from Austen to Smith developed to write England into-or out of-existence?
Possible fictions include: Maria Edgeworth's Harrington, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, Bram Stoker's Dracula, George Du Maurier's Trilby, Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier, Somerset Maugham's The Trembling of a Leaf, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Dirty, Stephen Frears' Dirty, Pretty Things and The Queen.
Theorists include: Benedict Anderson, Ian Baucom, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Bryan Cheyette, Linda Colley, Edward Said, Gauri Viswanathan, and Raymond Williams.
40707 ENG 315A The Romantic Age
Prof. Borushko
F 2:30-500
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
This course offers a comprehensive study of the literature of the Romantic Age in Britain, spanning roughly the years 1789-1832. Poetry will be our focus, but we'll also consider the novels, drama, and nonfiction prose of the period with special attention to the aesthetic inheritance and historical context. Some of the intellectual and literary trends that will concern us include following: the backdrop of the French Revolution and Napoleon; the upending of an eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetic and moral sensibility; the profound change in poets' sense of their own responsibility to their fellow humans and to society; the new "Romantic" way of looking at and writing about nature; and the rethinking of history and individual agency in the second generation of Romantic writers. Readings from a selection of the following authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Keats, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Austen, Scott, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Clare, and others.
40583 ENG 324A Television Drama
Prof. Goulet
MWF 9:30-10:20
This course counts as an English elective; it also may be taken in fulfillment of the Cinema Studies Minor.
I. From STUDIO ONE to HBO
"It's not TV. It's HBO." But, of course, it is TV in at least one significant respect - its address to spectators in non-theatrical venues, including their homes. This survey of television dramatic genres and technical formats ranges from the early period of "radio with pictures" through the present era of sophisticated long- and short-form storytelling that challenges the presumed hegemony of theatrical releases.
II. Course Activities
A. Class discussion of course texts. [Note: This is not a lecture course. Authority-oriented students
seeking an instructor who "gives good notes" are advised to look elsewhere.]
B. Test on film terms.
C. Critical essay analyzing the use of the three-camera format in a scene from either a play or series
episode not viewed and discussed in class.
D. Critical essay analyzing the use of the single-camera format in a scene from either a film or series
episode not viewed and discussed in class.
E. Participation in a panel presentation on a course text.
III. A Sample of Course Texts Under Consideration:
A. Episodes from Series:
The Range Rider ("The Buckskin," 1951)
Make Room for Daddy (1954)
Your Show of Shows (From Here to Eternity parody, 1954)
The Goldbergs (1955)
The Outer Limits ("Zzzzz," 1963)
The Prisoner (1968)
Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969)
Mary Tyler Moore ("Chuckles Bites the Dust," 1975)
M*A*S*H ("The Interview," 1976)
Fawlty Towers ("Basil the Rat," 1979)
Miami Vice ("The Prodigal Son," 1985)
Thirtysomething (1987)
Twin Peaks (1990)
Northern Expoure ("Cicely," 1992)
Homicide: Life on the Street (1994)
My So-Called Life (1994)
E.R. ("Mother's Day," 1995)
OZ (1997)
Sports Night ("Thespis," 1998)
Freaks and Geeks (1999)
The Sopranos (1999)
The West Wing (1999)
Sex and the City ("Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl...," 2000)
Six Feet Under (2001)
Arrested Development (2003)
Deadwood (2004)
The Wire (Season 4, 2006)
Mad Men (2007)
Breaking Bad (2008)
Friday Night Lights (2008)
Dexter (Season 4, 2009)
In Treatment (2010)
B. Limited Series:
The Forsyte Saga (1969)
Elizabeth R. (1971)
Love Among the Ruins (1975)
Holocaust (1978)
Brideshead Revisited (1981)
Heimat (1984)
The Jewel in the Crown (1984)
The Singing Detective (1986)
Gaudy Night (1987)
Traffik (1989)
House of Cards (1990)
Brides of Christ (1991)
Prime Suspect (1991)
Band of Brothers (2002)
Cambridge Spies (2003)
The Corner (2003)
The Best of Youth (2004)
Casanova (2006)
State of Play (2007)
Generation Kill (2008)
Sherlock (2010)
C. Films:
Trudy (1955)
Double Indemnity (1973)
In this House of Brede (1975)
Who Am I This Time? (1981)
Genghis Cohn (1992)
Boycott (2001)
Live from Baghdad (2003)
D. Plays:
Marty (1953)
Patterns (1955)
Days of Wine and Roses (1958)
What Makes Sammy Run? (1959)
The Missiles of October (1974)
A Visit from Miss Prothero (1977)
A Woman of No Importance (1982)
40584 ENG 325A Film & Ideology
Prof. Itzkovitz
W 2:30-5:00
This course counts as an English elective; it also may be taken in fulfillment of the Cinema Studies Minor
This class will explore the work of ideology in cinema, with a special focus on the films of Israel and Palestine. We will trace the brief history of both Palestinian and Israel film, examining the complex conversation between politics and popular media into the present day. We will be joined during one class period by the founder of the Boston Palestinian film festival.
40585 ENG 327A European Cinema
Prof. Goulet
R 2:30-5:00
This course counts as an English elective requirement; it also may be taken in fulfillment of the Cinema Studies Minor
I. If It's Thursday, This Must Be Romania
No passport is necessary, but some knowledge of the (film) language would be useful. After a brief survey of works by European directors who defined the cinematic experience for the "film generation" of the sixties and seventies, the class will analyze contemporary texts from several countries - Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Spain, Sweden. Some discussions will focus on the representation of immigrants as (non-)threatening "others."
II. Course Activities
1. Class discussion of course texts. [Note: This is not a lecture course. Authority-oriented students seeking an instructor who "gives good notes" are advised to look elsewhere.]
2. Two tests on film terms.
3. Critical essay (4-5 pages) analyzing the use of a specific cinematic device in a scene from a film not viewed and discussed in class.
4. Participation in a panel presentation on a course text.
5. Research report on the national industry represented in the panel discussion.
6. Three or four questions about each of the film texts to be discussed by panels other than than your own (to be submitted on the eve of the class meeting).
III. Course Texts Under Consideration: L'Enfant, After the Wedding, Brothers, In a Better World (Haevenen), Fish Tank, Red Riding 1974, Orlando, Human Resources, Under the Sand, Swimming Pool, 35 Shots of Rum, Son Frère, The Class, The Father of My Children, Mademoiselle Chambon, Caché, Look at Me, The Taste of Others, The Lives of Others, Edge of Heaven, Soul Kitchen, The White Ribbon, Run Lola Run, Hunger, Vincere, Gomorrah, Il Divo, Heaven, I Am Love, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Police/Adjective, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Embraces, Pan's Labyrinth, Let the Right One In
40586 ENG 328A Film & Gender
Prof. Peek
M 2:30-5:00
This course counts as an English elective; it also serves to fulfill the Cinema Studies minor and counts towards the major and minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies.
Topics of discussion include:
Old Comedy:
The Philadelphia Story
Ball of Fire
My Fair Lady
Rear Window
New Comedy:
Rushmore
Groundhog Day
Knocked Up
Sideways
The Green World
The Lady Eve
It Happened One Night
Lost in Translation
Screwball Economics:
Irrational Exuberance
Ninotchka
Palm Beach Story
My Man Godfrey
Desperately Seeking Susan
Neoliberal Nookie:
The Shop Around the Corner
You've Got Mail
New in Town
This course will study romantic comedies on film, focusing on the genre as a case study in ideologies of gender. We will also investigate the genre of romance, a type of literature that walks the tightrope between tradition and innovation, in some ways following conventions thousands of years old, in other ways re-shaping those conventions to respond to contemporary concerns-in particular the changing social roles of women and men.
We will begin by exploring the differences between what critics have named New Comedy and Old Comedy and changing representations of what has been called "the green world," the magical place of romance where the hero and heroine will be transformed into lovers. Later in the course, we'll investigate the representation of economic relationships in romantic comedy.
Assignments include a presentation with paper, essay answers to three viewing questions, various quizzes, and a final exam.
40587 ENG 342A Topics in Creative Writing: PoetryProf. Ross
W 6:30-9:00
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
The goal of this course is to help students strengthen and re-imagine their poetic voices and to consider aspects of the craft of writing poetry through reading, writing and revising poems, as well as participating in writing workshops. In pursuit of this goal, we will engage in peer and instructor critique in the workshop model, in-class writing, and take-home exercises. We will also read poets such as Dickinson, Bishop, Larking, Brooks, Heaney, Komunyakaa, and Lorca (among many others) whose poems will serve as examples of the type of work that we are striving to create. The analysis of the work of their peers and of other published poets will enable students to hone their critical faculties and turn this same analytical eye on their own work. In addition, students will attend at least one poetry reading during the course and write a critical review of it, complete a critical written annotation of a poem, and compile a final portfolio of their work.
40588 ENG 343A Topics in Creative Writing: "Flash Fiction"
Prof. Green
WF 2:30-3:45
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
This intensive creative writing workshop is designed to help the beginning and intermediate writer develop his/her voice through a focus on what has come to be known as "flash" or "sudden" fiction. Flash fiction is an emerging and increasingly popular genre of very short (1-3 pp.) narrative. By focusing strictly on reading and producing very short forms (flash fiction stories, as well as haiku, 3-line "novels," prose poems), we will work on the essential elements of the writer's craft, including plot, setting, characterization, dialogue, and narrative tension. The workshop format will balance spontaneous, energetic writing exercises with careful revision and thoughtful, constructive critiques that will assist each author in realizing the full potential of his/her work. Students will produce a series of very short prose pieces and a longer final story. Readings will include prose by Baudelaire, Joyce, Kawabata, Hemingway, Kafka, Eggers, Wallace, Jin, Munro, Barthelme, and Kincaid, among others.
40589 ENG 349A Topics in Irish Literature: Importance of Being Irish
Prof. Piggford, C.S.C.
TR 1:00-2:15
Note: This course is one component of LC274 (Ireland: The Literature of a Nation, the Quest for a Nation).
This course will examine late nineteenth and twentieth century Irish literature in English, with an emphasis on Irish identity, nationality, ethnicity, tradition. We will inquire into the significance of being Irish over the last century or so in relation to postcolonial theories and the concept of a "minor literature." Literary texts will provide a focus, but we will attend also to historical narratives of colonization, revolt, nationalism, partition, religious violence, and decolonization in secondary sources. Those enrolled will compose three relatively brief essays and will help facilitate class discussion.
Over the course of the semester we will likely consider short fiction by George Moore, James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Neil Jordan, Desmond Hogan, and William Trevor, and we will assess the poetic work of W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Eavan Boland. In addition, we will read and view the following plays: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895); W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902); J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903); Brendan Behan, The Hostage (1958); Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape (1958); Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996).
40590 ENG 350A ChaucerProf. Kane
TF 11:30-12:45
This course fulfills the Medieval Literature requirement.
Geoffrey Chaucer is widely regarded as the first "major" author writing in English, yet he was hardly known as a poet in his lifetime. In this course, we will examine Chaucer's most ambitious works in their social, conceptual and historical contexts, as well as consider more recent techniques of literary assessment and their usefulness in reading pre-modern texts. A recurring concern across most of Chaucer's works is the relation between gender, sexual expression and language; this nexus will form the focus of our readings and discussions. Likewise, medieval conceptions of authorship and authority will receive our critical attention.
Students will produce two papers of 5-7 pages each and a final research paper of 12-15 pages. In addition, while we're becoming comfortable reading Middle English, there will be short translation quizzes for the first few weeks of the course.
40593 ENG 356A Topics in English and Continental Literature
Prof. Goulet
MWF 10:30-11:20
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
-- André Gide
I. Imaginary Voyages
Plunging in the cosmos, climbing up the social ladder, sailing across the Atlantic, floating down the Thames, leaping out of a closet, darting behind a screen, escaping to an exotic place, rambling around the neighborhood, hopping from island to island, bouncing from bed to bed - all these travels can be found in this critical survey of texts representing the period that has been variously called the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Augustan era, the Neoclassical period, and the Age of Exuberance.
II. Course Activities
A. Class discussion of course texts.
B. Critical analysis of a specific scene or passage from a dramatic text not discussed in class.
C. Individual PowerPoint presentation on a work by one of the following artists -Boucher, Canaletto, Chardin, David, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, Guardi, Hogarth, Lancret, Reynolds, Rowlandson, Tiepolo, Watteau, Blake.
D. Critical analysis of a specific scene or passage from Choderos de Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses
E. Panel presentation on one of the cinematic adaptations of Les liaisons dangereuses:
Roger Vadim, Les liaisons dangereuses (1959)
Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Milos Forman, Valmont (1989)
Roger Kumble, Cruel Intentions (1999)
Je-yong Lee, Untold Scandal (2003)
Josée Dayan, Les liaisons dangereuses (2003)
III. Course Texts Under Consideration
Drama:
Molière, Tartuffe and The Miser
Jean Racine, Phèdre
William Wycherley, The Country Wife
Aphra Behn, The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers
Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate, Dido and Aeneas
John Gay, The Beggar's Opera
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal and The Rivals
Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Marivaux, The Triumph of Love
Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro
W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le nozze di Figaro
W. A. Mozart and Pietro Metastasio, La clemenza di Tito
W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Cosi fan tutte
W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni
Epic and mock-epic poetry:
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 1-26; Book II, ll. 871-1056
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
... and a bit of mock-pastoral:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "The Bride in the Country"
Satiric fiction:
Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Voltaire, Candide
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses
Rudolph Erich Raspe, The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen
Prof. Green
WF 11:30-12:45
This course fulfills the Literary and Cultural Studies 1900-present area requirement for the English major.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, aesthetic challenges to tradition were paralleled in the spheres of political and social theory by the revolutionary forces of anarchist thought, igniting a literally explosive strain in British culture that culminated in the 1894 bombing of the Royal Observatory (an event later fictionalized in Conrad's The Secret Agent). We will begin our exploration of the tumultuous birth of British modernism by examining influences from France, Italy, Russia and Germany (including the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche). Moving forward to the turn of the century, we will examine the British aesthetes, decadents, anarchists and "New Women" who transplanted these radical influences to the United Kingdom. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between movements in literature and the visual arts, including symbolisme, impressionism, and post-impressionism, along with early cinema. Key texts will include Joris Karl Huysman's Against Nature, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salomé, and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," George Bernard Shaw's, Candida, E.M. Forster's Howards End, and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Additional authors to be considered may include: Nordau, Mallarmé, Symons, Beerbohm, Pater, Harrison, Rame, and Paget.
Prof. Scales
W 2:30-5:00
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
Why are we compelled to tell stories? How do we construct meaningful tales out of our lives? This course will introduce the basic concepts of narrative theory, using a range of genres from novels and autobiography to comic books and hypertext. We will look at how narratives are structured (beginnings and endings, plot twists and denouements,), how their personae (author, narrator, character, reader) interact, and how these conventions persist and shift across different modes of representation. Primary texts will include Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, As I Lay Dying, Patchwork Girl, Kyle Baker's Nat Turner, and Maus.
Prerequisite: ENG200
40595 ENG 422A Seminar: Race, Gender and Reform in Nineteenth Century America
Prof. Scales
T 2:30-5:00
This course fulfills the capstone requirement for the English major.
The nineteenth-century United States saw the rise of dozens of reform movements which interrogated-and sometimes also relied upon-established notions of gender and race in looking for new definitions of human rights, responsibilities, and behaviors. This course will examine questions of personhood, both political and literary, in some of the major texts of nineteenth-century reform. How does the work of the imagination construct itself in relation to the "real" and the "practical"? How do these movements imagine the relationship of public to private, of human to divine, of citizen to nation? We will give most of our attention to the major works of the abolitionist and women's movements in the antebellum period, but we will also look at utopianism, marriage reform, clothing reform, the temperance movement, workers' reform, health reform, the Jim Crow era, and urban reform. Writers include, among others, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, and Jacob Riis.
Prerequisites: ENG200, ENG300
40596 ENG 422B Seminar: Are We Post-Racial Yet?
Prof. Itzkovitz
M 2:30-5:00
This course fulfills the capstone requirement for the English major.
Roots, Culture and the Rise of Identity in Contemporary America.
Prerequisites: ENG200, ENG300
40636 GND 200A Postmodern Sexualities
Prof. Piggford, C.S.C.
WF 11:30-12:45
This course counts as an English elective requirement.
Postmodern Sexualities will explore the literature, film, theory, and legal discourses of sexuality, and particularly what Jonathan Dollimore has termed "sexual dissidence," in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will examine plays and films including Angels in America, Orlando, Paris Is Burning, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Ma Vie en Rose, and XXYY, as well as literary texts including memoirs, poems, and short stories. Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler will inform our interpretation of these works, and we will also examine legal, political, and religious debates over AIDS, the criminalization of sexual behavior, Proposition 8 in California, and the transgender rights movement in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Students in this course will write two papers, participate in facilitating discussion, and blog, and will be strongly encouraged to consider the inevitable interplay between identity and communal action.
Internship in English
Prof. Estrin
March 9, 2009 . . . excerpted from "Behind the Curve" By PAUL KRUGMAN
President Obama's plan to stimulate the economy was "massive," "giant," "enormous." So the American people were told, especially by TV news, during the run-up to the stimulus vote. Watching the news, you might have thought that the only question was whether the plan was too big, too ambitious.
Yet many economists, myself included, actually argued that the plan was too small and too cautious. The latest data confirm those worries - and suggest that the Obama administration's economic policies are already falling behind the curve.
To see how bad the numbers are, consider this: The administration's budget proposals, released less than two weeks ago, assumed an average unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for the whole of this year. In reality, unemployment hit that level in February - and it's rising fast.
Employment has already fallen more in this recession than in the 1981-82 slump, considered the worst since the Great Depression. As a result, Mr. Obama's promise that his plan will create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 looks underwhelming, to say the least. It's a credible promise - his economists
used solidly mainstream estimates of the impacts of tax and spending policies. But 3.5 million jobs almost two years from now isn't enough in the face of an economy that has already lost 4.4 million jobs, and is losing 600,000 more each month."
Why quote The New York Times in a course brochure? The reason is obvious: the vista for graduates is bleak. The bad news is that it's going to be difficult in 2010 to get a new job when so many Americans, currently employed, are losing theirs. Yes, you can retreat from the job market by going to graduate school, but what happens then? On February 25, 2009, The New York Times reported that 5 per cent of American colleges have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 per cent have imposed a partial freeze.
So what's the good news? It's easier than ever to get an interesting internship-at a museum, a hospital, a non-profit, a bank, the district attorney's office, a television station, a ballet company, a food magazine, a publishing company, an online career planner (really useful), an inner-city service organization, a public relations company, a newspaper, a magazine, a law firm, a toy manufacturer: the list is infinite. Of course it's easier because all these companies are letting lower echelon people go and using interns to fill the void. The further good news is that you'll be able to prove your worth-and perhaps even get a job in that company as the economy improves-and you'll give yourself skills of all kinds to make yourself marketable. Most important, you'll be ready to hit the pavement running with real experience under your belt. As an English major, you have the requisite critical thinking, reading, and writing skills necessary for any number of occupations and, with an internship on your resumé, you'll be able to demonstrate that your insights into Shakespeare and Derrida, Hitchcock and Zizek, will stand you in good stead.
Internships are open to junior, as well as senior, English majors. ***A three-credit internship requires one free day, and a six-credit internship requires two free days, for the practicum.
Required reading-daily New York Times
Students will keep a journal weekly and send me three articles (with the journal) from The New York
Times or, if more relevant, The Boston Globe, with a brief summary of their relevance to your job. Finally, at the semester's end, students will write a paper about their experience targeted for future interns who might what to work at the site. The paper will include a one-page description of current practices and problems in the particular field of the internship.
That section of the paper will involve some research and some knowledge developed from hands-on experience derived from the internship itself. All students will be required to complete a satisfactory cover letter and resumé that includes your internship experience.
Students will meet with the instructor in the fall semester (shortly after pre-registration) to work on resumé writing, cover letters and to set up the internship for the following spring. Students will also be able to access potential internship sites in the Career Services Office (across the hall, right in Cushing-Martin) by making an appointment to see the director of internships.
Important news: the requirements have been changed and you can now do your internship in the summer (or use your summer job for internship credit) and get course credit for it in the fall. You can do the field work in the summer, attend the seminars in the fall and write your paper at the end of the fall semester.
If you have a double major, you may be able to do a six-credit internship and get credit for both subjects. Art history, political science, business, and communications majors have been particularly successful in combining their internships.