Literature Requirement
FALL 2012
Note on the University and College Literature Requirement
Students seeking to fulfill the literature requirement may also take courses offered by other language and literature departments (Romance languages, Asian languages, Classics, etc.). To obtain a complete list of all of these courses go to the class search page, then select the "literature" attribute and press control (on a Mac command) shift and select all departments.
ENGL 20104
Introduction to Poetry
Laura Betz
TR 3:30-4:45
This course will provide an introduction to poetry as a literary art form and develop students' skills of critical analysis and interpretation. The course will address the major poetic genres and a range of literary concepts and devices. We will read a variety of material both past and contemporary, with a special emphasis on poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and particularly the Romantic period.
ENGL 20106
Point-of-View in the Novel
Noreen Deane-Moran
01: MW 11:45-1:00
02: MW 3:00-4:15
This course will focus on the introduction to the novel as a form, a means to view the world of the author/artist and the reader. Literature is an art whereby one consciousness seeks to communicate with another consciousness. One of the artist’s techniques for controlling this flow is the concept of point of view. We will explore various approaches and uses of this “framing” in some nineteenth and twentieth century novels. The goal is to use an understanding of point of view to more fully comprehend, enjoy, and sensitively read this popular genre.
Texts: Henry James, Turn of the Screw; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Edith Warton, Ethan Frome; James Joyce, Dubliners; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime; Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha; and Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. Requirements: regular class participation; two short papers, a mid-term; and a final.
ENGL 20107
Satire
Jonathan Callis
TR 9:30-10:45
While satire might initially appear to be a morally corrective genre, satirists frequently undermine their own moral intentions by creating works of verbal, rhetorical, and political anarchy. In this course we will examine both the purposes (or lack thereof) of satire and its uses in different literary genres and modes, including irony, humor, sarcasm, fables, etc. After a brief introduction to Roman satire, we will discuss a range of authors from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, such as Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Alexander Pope, Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Nathanael West, and Walker Percy. The final part of the course will be devoted to the use of satire in American pop culture. We will look at the films Dr. Strangelove and Network and then conclude by watching excerpts from The Simpsons and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. We will focus not only on the traditional and generic characteristics of satire but also on its historical character, the way that satire speaks to the present.
ENGL 20133
Catholic Fiction and Film
Mary Burgess-Smyth
MW 4:30-5:45
An examination of Catholicism in modern fiction, cinematic adaptations of those works of fiction, and other free-standing stories and films. In this course, as you might expect from its title, we will consider representations of Catholicism in the work of a number of authors and filmmakers. Our central texts are as follows: Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (novel, French, 1937); Robert Bresson (director) The Diary of a Country Priest (1950); Louis Malle (director) Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987); Leo MCCarey (director) The Bells of St Mary's (1945);
Pat McCabe, The Butcher Boy (novel, 1992); Neil Jordan (director) The Butcher Boy (1997); Peter Mullan (director) The Magdalene Sisters; Brian Moore, Black Robe (novel, 1985); Bruce Beresford (director) Black Robe (1991); James Joyce, Dubliners (short stories, 1914); John Huston (director) The Dead (1987); Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (novel, 1943); Elia Kazan (director) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945).
Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Frank Capra, John Ford, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Leo McCarey, Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini - the list of great (lapsed or otherwise) Catholic film directors is staggering. In the films and novels and stories that we will be reading - for we will be reading the films just as closely as we will read the written words - Catholicism emerges in multiple ways. Some of the issues that will be raised for our analysis and discussion will be: iconography; sacrifice; mortality; sin; original sin; violence and religion; religious corruption; the tensions between the individual and the institutions of the Church, and the clergy; the loss of innocence; grace; hypocrisy; censorship; and silence. We will aim, too, to compare and contrast the different treatments of religion and humanity in these films and novels.
ENGL 20154
The Gothic Novel
Noreen Deane-Moran
TR 3:30-4:45
From ghoulies and ghosties/ And long-leggedy beasties/ And things that go bump in the night,/Good Lord, deliver us!” Why do we enjoy being scared out of our wits? Since its inception in the late eighteenth century, generations have loved the Gothic Novel with its grotesque murders and bizarre terror. The course will study a number of the most celebrated Gothic tales from horrors in castles and monasteries (Lewis's The Monk) to mysterious love stories (Brontë's Wuthering Heights) to the eerie stories of the paranormal (Shelley's Frankenstein) to contemporary horror stories. The purpose will be to study the ways in which the Gothic Novel entertains us and what it is about us that loves to be entertained by the Gothic.
ENGL 20160
Literature and Ecology
John Sitter
TR 2:00-3:15
The course will study works of ecological imagination, primarily in contemporary literature but with some attention to classic earlier works. Reading non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, we will explore how ecological awareness figures in various kinds of literature, with a particular emphasis on late 20th- and 21st-century understandings of challenges to sustainability, such as diminishing resources, extinction of species, and climate change. We will attend to the heightened importance of voice, narrative, and metaphor in literary renderings of how to best understand our creative possibilities at what is arguably the “beginning of the most crucial decades in the history of the human species on earth.” Other topics concern how the relation of literature to science and the meanings of “nature” are changing, how to understand current environmental controversies more critically, and how to enter those discussions more thoughtfully.
Readings will include novels by T.C. Boyle, Margaret Atwood, and Ruth Ozeki; non-fiction by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and Bill McKibben; and poems by Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Denise Levertov, A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, and Pattiann Rogers. Requirements include several one-page response papers, a more ambitious essay, a midterm examination, and a final examination.
This course is primarily for non-majors; it can also satisfy one of the requirements of the minor in Sustainability Studies.
ENGL 20161
The Hero’s Journey: The Quest in British and American Literature
Karrie Fuller
MW 3:00-4:45
In a book geared largely towards undergraduate readers, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster identifies the quest as one of the great themes that recur over and over again throughout the whole of literary history. His first chapter, titled “Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not),” provides an overview of how the quest appears and reappears in literal, figurative, and even allegorical forms from the early medieval period to the present day. Focusing primarily on English and American literature, this course will take up Foster’s discussion of the literary “quest” by examining different representations of journeys and the many types of travel that can occur under this heading, whether real or fantastical, religious or secular, literal or metaphorical, close to home or far away. It will include examples from a wide range of time periods and genres, beginning with a translations of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey and ending with modern texts such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Because the quest can take many forms, the course will consider how the texts represent spiritual, psychological, and cultural journeys. Ultimately, students will be asked to consider what counts as a literary quest and what is its raison d'être. What role do they and did they play in literature and in society? What kinds of audiences do they target? What influences might they have had on history? And, how does the purpose and meaning of a quest change according to its historical context, genre, authorship, and intended readership? In addition to the ones listed above, the course readings will include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
ENGL 20162
Christ and Antichrist in Literature
Katy Wright-Bushman
TR 11:00-12:15
The history of art and expression in the West is filled with representations of two antithetical Christian figures, Christ and Antichrist. Throughout literary history, Christ and Antichrist appear in many different guises: as knights in armor, comic jokesters, tortured individualists, cosmic powers, children, sailors, communists, judges, and even professors. In this course, we will begin with scriptural accounts of Christ and Antichrist and then examine the diverse representations of these figures in English literature, from the oldest medieval English poetry to recent novels, with attention to the aesthetic, theological, and cultural roles such representations play. Why do Christ and Antichrist keep showing up in our literature? How are changing representations of them related to the theological and cultural concerns of the eras in which they appear? What are the effects of representations of Christ and Antichrist on us as readers, on our literary culture, and on our understanding of Christianity and the place of religion more broadly? Among our objectives will be to examine what marks a character as a figure of Christ or Antichrist and to what uses authors put these figures. By examining a wide array of literary accounts of Christ and Antichrist alongside one another, we can begin to answer these questions and sharpen our perception of continuities and shifts across the history of literature, concerned as it ever is with questions of virtue, absolute goodness, suffering, temptation, and evil. We will read texts such as Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Mark Twain’s “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” and Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, as well as excerpts from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.
ENGL 20163
Science Fiction and Literature
Timothy Miller
TR 5:00-6:15
Science fiction. Literature. We often think of these two categories as fundamentally separate, even if the occasional author seems to 'cross over' from one side to the other. But the main theme of this course will be that the best of modern science fiction takes up the same questions that great literature has always taken up. What does it mean to be human? What is our place in the universe? What do life and death mean -- biologically, spiritually, or otherwise? In fact, science fiction seems better equipped to examine some of the newer problems human beings have had to face: for example, what comes next now that we have the power to change our environment irreversibly? This course is not a survey of science fiction, and we will instead read some of its major practitioners -- H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and others -- alongside more mainstream literary texts, including but not limited to Greek tragedy, Romantic lyric poetry, the postmodern novel, and the 20th-century 'literary' short story (Borges, Joyce, Calvino, Rushdie, etc.). As the course will also emphasize the major role science fiction has played in the new media of the last century, we will take some time to consider SF film (including Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), television (such as The Twilight Zone), and even rock opera.
ENGL 20164 / Crosslist IRLL 30114
The Irish Love Poem
Bríona NicDhiarmada
TR 3:30-4:45
This course traces the trajectory of the love poem in Ireland from the Middle Ages to the present day. We will begin with texts such as Liadain and Cuirithir (9th century) continuing through the late medieval genre of the Dánta Grádha as well as considering the corpus of love songs (Amhráin Ghrá) from the oral tradition before looking at the development of the modern love poem in the work of poets from W.B.Yeats to the contemporary Irish language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. All Irish language texts will be read in translation.
ENGL 20409 / Crosslist IRLL 20120
The Irish Short Story
Brian Ó Conchubhair
TR 11:00-12:15
This course introduces students to the themes, motifs, approaches and various forms common to the Irish short story as well as the critical debates associated with the genre. We begin with a survey of the literary history and cultural politics of Ireland in the nineteenth and the emergence of the Irish short story and compare it to the American and French story, before considering the relationship between folklore and literature and the origins of the modern short story form. Having discussed various theories of the short story, we proceed to examine the interactive relationship between orality and print culture, tradition and modernity, native and foreign, natural/authentic and artificial/other. Among the authors we read in detail are: George Moore, P.H. Pearse, James Joyce, Pádraic Ó Conaire, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Liam Ó Flaithearta/Liam O’Flaherty, Seamus Ó Grianna, Seosamh Mac Grianna, Angela Bourke, Samuel Beckett, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Pádraic Breathnach, Seán Mac Mathúna, Micheál Ó Conghaile, Alan Titley, Dara Ó Conaola and Eilís Ní Dhuibhne. Stories are read primarily as literary texts that shed light on evolving cultural, political and social conditions and provide incisive insights into the Irish literary and cultural tradition. This course is an ideal introduction to literary criticism and cultural studies. No prior knowledge of Irish or Ireland is required. All texts will be available in English.
ENGL 20527 / Crosslist IRST 30362
Introduction to the Irish Song Tradition
Cathal Goan
TR 9:30-10:45
The music, the metres, the magic of the Irish song tradition in both the Irish and English languages will be explored in this course spanning, the known history of the most enduring songs; their transmission and migration in oral, written and sound-recorded form; the sources from which they draw inspiration and their influence on writers and performers as diverse as WB Yeats and Sinéad O'Connor. Using recordings, live performance and close textual analysis the course will aim to chart the journeys of these songs through the centuries and offer insights into their lasting appeal.
ENGL 20607
Religious Imagination in American Literature
Thomas Werge
01: MWF 11:45-1:00
02: MWF 12:50-1:40
A critical study of the religious and philosophical dimensions of selected American literary texts with a focus on literary forms, the history of ideas, and cultural and interpretive currents both traditional and modern. Students will be expected to write a series of brief, incisive critical papers.
ENGL 20627
Violent Modernism
Jesse Costantino
MW 1:30-2:45
Ezra Pound’s battle-cry to “make it new” encapsulates one of the defining features of Modernism in the early 20th century. The hope was to tear down the old ways of writing, painting, building, and thinking, and to erect in their place something entirely new. As a result, violence—whether political, social, or artistic—constitutes the subject matter and artistic philosophy of many authors and artists at the time. For this course, we will think through the purpose of violence in aesthetic practice and attempt to understand its usefulness on its own terms. Readings will include works by canonical Anglo-American Modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway. We will also consider the legacy of “violent Modernism” and its impact on authors in the broader Modernist tradition who similarly feel the need to “make it new.”
ENGL 20712
Caribbean Women Writers
Abigail Palko
MW 3:00-4:15
A sampling of novels written by Caribbean writers, with a particular emphasis on such themes as colonization, madness, childhood, and memory.
ENGL 20724
Class and Mobility in Latino Cultural Expression
José Limón
TR 3:30-4:45
The continuing social marginality of Latinos in the United States has understandably led artists from these communities to emphasize this marginality in their representations cast chiefly in the imagery that the cultural theorist, Hayden White, has called the “Wild Man” and the “Noble Savage.” We will revisit these representational strategies in writers, painters and film makers such as Cesar González, Tomás Rivera, Piri Thomas and Edward James Olmos among others. However, we shall also examine newer representations that are charting the mobility of these communities into the middle class such as the work of Oscar Hijuelos, Oscar Casares and the non-Latino film maker, John Sayles.
ENGL 20904
Introduction to African Literature: Writing the Colonial Encounter
Z’étoile Imma
TR 12:30-1:45
In his essay “African Literature and The Colonial Factor” literary critic Simon Gikandi asserts, “Colonialism, especially in its radical transformation of African societies, remains one of the central problems with which writers and intellectuals in Africa have to deal . . . the colonial situation shaped what is meant to be an African writer, shaped the language of African writing, and over-determined the culture of letters in Africa.”
In this introductory course, we will grapple with the important postulations put forward by Gikandi as we read significant works in the modern and contemporary African literary tradition. We will consider how African writers, many of whom themselves were colonial subjects, have rewritten and re-imagined the colonial encounter from the perspective of the colonized in the language of the colonizers. We will explore how African literature has become a primary venue through which intellectuals have complicated colonial discourse and sought to historicize the violence, contradictions, ambivalences, and limits within the cultures of British and French colonialism. We will reflect on how colonialism was, in Gikandi words, the “imperial catalyst” for modern African literature even as African literature became a fundamental means to articulate protest against Eurocentric imperialism. We will find that issues and themes which continue to challenge and frame postcolonial studies, such as language, education, modernity, hybridity, gender, and resistance, will be central to our reading and analysis. Texts may include Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono, Death and King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta, A River Between by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembéne and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.
