Department of English

University of Notre Dame

Spring 2010 Course Descriptions

Please be aware that changes in course offerings, including times and locations, may occur. Please consult the class search page for the most recent updates.

ENGL 43409

Seminar: Woolf and Bloomsbury

Barbara Green

TR 3:30-4:45

The modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf lived and worked with a loose collective of writers, painters, and social thinkers that we now call the “Bloomsbury Group” (though many members of the group disliked the phrase).  We will look at the novels, essays, art, interior design, and political writings of some of the members of Bloomsbury–including works by Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell–to explore the complex moments of cross-fertilization, critique, and revision that define their encounters. In addition, we will attend to a few areas that have dominated discussions of Bloomsbury modernism: ideas of nation, “civilization,” and critiques of Empire; the formation of literary modernism’s often tense relation to mass culture; the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the relationship between literature and the modern metropolis; and explorations of women’s “experience” of modernity. Because members of the Bloomsbury Group worked in a number of fields beyond the literary–painting, economics, social thought, publishing, and interior design to name a few–students often find that they can easily develop projects that engage more than one area of interest and that combine skills developed in a second major with those that belong to literary criticism. Requirements include one seminar paper (written in stages in consultation with me) of at least 20 pages, participation in one group presentation.

ENGL 43506

Seminar: Irish Fiction: 1914-1945

Maud Ellmann

TR 12:30-1:45

It was during the years 1914-1945, which encompass the two World Wars, that the twenty-six southern counties of Northern Ireland, which have remained loyal to the British crown. In this course we investigate how Irish fiction of the period responds to these historical events, as well as to the draconian censorship imposed on film and literature in the Irish Free State. Reading will include novels and short stories by James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, Eimar O’Duffy, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Kate O’Brien, Seumus O’Kelly, Kathleen Coyle, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bowen. Requirements consist of class presentations, regular postings to Concourse, and a final research paper of 15 pages.

ENGL 43515

Seminar: Contemporary British and Irish Fiction

Mary Burgess Smyth

TR 2:00-3:15

This course will focus on the contemporary fiction of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, as well as some of the best recent Black British fiction. Some of the authors whose work we will read are: John Banville, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Andrea Levi, Irvine Welsh, James Kelman and Pat Barker. These writers will be read in the context of ‘the Break-up of Britain’ and a concomitant sense of the changes in British and Irish identity in the past twenty years or so.

ENGL 43755

Seminar: California Culture at Mid-Century

Stephen Fredman

MW 3:00-4:15

This course explores how poetry took a leading role among the arts in California at mid-century, creating a California culture that through the Beats and the Hippies became a national and international phenomenon. We begin by looking at collage, the dominant form of the arts in California, and then consider how collage meets up with four main elements of the California aesthetic: Surrealism, mysticism, jazz, and anarchism.  The primary poets we read and hear are Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and D.J. Waldie.  Alongside these poets, we will look at Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, artists like Jess, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Joan Brown, and Jay DeFeo, and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage.  Students will gain the ability to do interdisciplinary work in the arts, to read complex contemporary poetry, and to relate art movements to the culture that surrounds them. You will be urged to write your research paper on an interdisciplinary topic.