SPRING 2017 S.I. UNDERGRADUATE FLYER

S.I. UNDERGRADUATE FLYER

SPRING 2017

 ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (12504)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Rachel Hollander
As an introduction to literary studies and a sampling of global culture, this course will read a range of texts from a variety of historical periods and national origins. We will focus particularly on “contact zones” of colonialism and slavery in Africa, the United States, India, and the Caribbean, exploring how literary works represent relationships of power, oppression, and especially resistance. The class will also spend significant time learning to write (more) effectively  about literature. The goal is to give you a productive overview of the pleasures and challenges of reading and writing critically, and to whet your appetite for more in depth study of both literary and non-fiction works.

 

ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (12979)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Melissa Mowry

This class examines literature’s contribution to the rise and dominance of the British Empire through the iconic novel Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. We will begin by reading some of the works that Defoe drew on, read the novel, and engage with its effects on the post-modern novelist J. M. Coetzee. 3 short papers and 1 long paper.

 

ENG. 1100C: Literature in the Global Context (14401)
Courtship, Children, and Tradition
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Brian Lockey

In this course, we will consider how the traditions of courtship, romance, and marriage have transformed over the past four centuries, and we will consider a number of prominent works of literature as the lens through which we may view historical change. We will consider the following questions as we read: to what extent are courtship rituals and traditions determined by biological factors and to what degree are they determined by cultural forces? To what extent have traditional courtship and marriage rituals empowered men and to what degree have they empowered women? How has the so-called “Sexual Revolution” transformed or even eliminated traditional courtship rituals, and what has the overall effect been of such dramatic historical transformation? How have perspectives on the rearing of children transformed throughout the centuries and what effect has this transformation had on Western life in general? We will attempt to address these and other questions as we read five works of fiction during the course of the semester.

 

ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (11994)
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Melissa Mowry
A requirement for all English majors and minors, this class introduces students to the major schools of literary and cultural theory of the twentieth century. From formalism to new historicism to cultural studies, students encounter a wide range of writers and intellectuals focused on the question of cultural authority, including, race, gender, and colonialism and read theorists and philosophers, including but not limited to Heidegger, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, and Rubin.

 

ENG. 3130: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Plays (14965)
Analogies of the Family and the State in Shakespeare
DIV I
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Brian Lockey

At least since the Middle Ages, the European political imagination had been driven by the belief that the family was a diminutive state, in which the father was a king and his family were his subjects. Among other things, this comparison served to naturalize political relations by presenting the king as a father to his people, analogous both to a father’s relationship with his spouse and children and to God’s relationship with the world. Towards the end of the Renaissance, however, the culture that sustained this set of analogies came under pressure from new ideological forces within both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation and from Renaissance humanists who viewed human nature, rather than the divine, as the proper subject of scholarly inquiry. This course will consider how a number of Shakespeare’s plays engaged with, presented, and challenged this traditional political ideology. In particular, we will consider how Shakespeare’s plays sometimes resisted and sometimes confirmed this complex set of analogies.

 

ENG. 3330: African-American Literature to 1900: BEYOND THE VEIL (14699)
DIV IV
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi

The field of African-American literary studies came into being in order to recognize the literary achievements of enslaved people.  Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, two of the most celebrated nineteenth century American authors, turned their personal experience of oppression, resistance, and triumph into gripping narratives that proved once and for all the equality of African Americans.  Our course, however, takes us beyond the ideal of equality in search of the unique imaginations that created new visions and alternative worlds so foreign to nineteenth century white readers that the sociologist and civil rights leader W. E. B. DuBois would refer to them as “beyond the veil.”  In addition to the classic slave narratives, we will read the supernatural fictions and melodramas of Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper as well as the alternative American histories of Williams Wells Brown, Martin Delany, and Charles Chesnutt.  How much like our world today are the fictions and fantasies of the African-American literary imagination?  Our class culminates with DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, a unique work of history and sociology that showed African-American life “beyond the veil” through music, religion, and art.

ENG. 3590: Literature & The Other Arts (14404)
DIV IV
W. 1:50 – 3:40 PM
Dr. Stephen Miller

The course will examine an “inter-textuality of the senses” in several ways. We will study interdisciplinary forms like songs, musicals, and graphic novels; interdisciplinary artists like William Blake; and transformations from novel to film such as the novel and film versions of The Manchurian Candidate.

ENG. 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (14402)
Poetry Workshop
W. 10:40 – 1:30 PM
Dr. Stephen Miller
Using several poetic models such as O’Hara, Ashbery, and Loy, you will learn how to write poetry “on nerve” and insight.