FALL 2002
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
ENGLISH 18: SHAKESPEARE ON FILM. This course is open to both majors and non-majors. We welcome anyone interested in film or Shakespeare or the ironies of war. We will be reading the following texts : Richard II; Henry V; Richard III, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra , and finally Coriolanus. We will be viewing in the classroom and in special screenings one or two films of each text: the BBC versions of Richard II (with Derek Jacobi) and of Coriolanus; Laurence Olivier's and Ian McKellan's versions of Richard III ; Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's versions of Henry V; Marlon Brando as Antony in Julius Caesar ; and Janet Suzman as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra .
We are approaching more rapidly than we think the possibility of a general war centered in the Middle East but reaching everywhere. We should take a look at the thinking as well as the conduct in history that has led to the carnage of war and to war's radical revisions of civilizations.
Ms. Deese. LEC: MWF 4:10-5:00, SCR W 5:10-8:00.
ENGLISH 23A: ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITION. An introduction to the literature of England in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the Anglo-Saxon invasions to shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Lectures will attempt to place major (and some less well-known) literary works in their cultural (and subcultural) settings. We will locate (and question) the literary origins of our apparently modern notions of national identity, race and gender construction as well as our ideas about literary authorship, originality and taste. Authors and works to be studied will include Beowulf , Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Le Morte D'Arthur, The Faerie Queene , Dr. Faustus , Shakespeare and Donne. Course requirements include a midterm exam with an in-class and take-home component; an in-class final exam and a 5-8 page paper; quizzes. Required Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature , Seventh Edition, Volume I. Please note that it is essential to have the Seventh Edition .
Mr. Ganim. MWF 12:10-1:00.
ENGLISH 102-01: CRITICAL METHODS. This course will survey contemporary "new media" culture, arts, and entertainment to acquaint students with the key critical debates and aesthetic paradigms of interactive digital culture. What constitutes a "new medium" and what differentiates the new media from the old? What perspectives and methods of observation and analysis are most relevant to scholars of digital media? What determines the complex relationships between people, technology, and culture, and what ethical issues are involved? How does "digital" change, or not change, who we are and what we can become?
To answer these questions, students will read a diverse range of digital media scholars. Readings and screenings will highlight key debates, and students will become familiar with key essays and issues in these debates. By the end of the semester, students should be able to articulate their own positions on these debates, and will be expected to speak to their own experiences and ethics of emerging digital media.
Textbooks:
- Turkle, Sherry, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
- Pacey, Arnold, Meaning in Technology (MIT Press, 2001)
- Bell, David, Kennedy, Barbara, eds., The Cybercultures Reader (Routledge, 2000).
Mr.Tobias. MWF 8:10-9:00.
ENGLISH 102-02: CRITICAL METHODS. Close analysis of formal features of several genres and an introduction to theoretical and critical approaches.
Ms. Kay. MWF 3:10-4:00.
ENGLISH 117A: SHAKESPEARE-HISTORY. Shakespeare's History Plays are dramatic contemplations of kingship, queenship, nobility, and the nature of tragedy. Their influence on English and American literature (including the imaginations of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman) is perhaps beyond calculation. We will read most of the history plays, and conclude with the Tempest, Shakespeare's complex and controversial portrait of a philosopher king. Shakespeare's age of kings and queens is dead; but it lives in our veins as a vision of the highest and lowest of human possibilities. We are all in a sense monarchs and we cannot put aside our crowns. As the living remnant of thousands of generations and as the progenitors of those that will follow, we exercise a kind of absolute god-like rule over ourselves and the planet - a rule that can imitate, rebuke, ignore, or swerve from divine models of kingship. Shakespeare's history plays map our possibilities.
Mr. Briggs. TR 9:40-11:00.
ENGLISH 121E: POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE. This course will function as an introduction to North African and Arab writing (most of it translated from the French and Arabic originals). We will give our attention to the following questions: Orientalist scholarship and its discontents; nationness and nationalist movements, with a special focus on Palestinian nationalism; colonialism, masculinity, and the making of sexual identities; the politics of language; and Arab feminism over the course of the last century. Our readings will include essays by Edward Said, Fatima Mernissi, Mervat Hatem, Haleh Afshar, Leila Ahmed, Anne McClintock, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Frantz Fanon, in addition to the following texts: Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade ; Nawal al Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero ; Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret ; Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives ; Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love ; Salma Jayyusi, ed. Modern Arabic Poetry ; Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs ; Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land; and Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing . Two papers and a take-home final.
Ms. Roy. TR 12:40-2:00.
ENGLISH 126A: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL. When Thomas Jefferson claimed "all men are created equal," he provided a model for representing the American people as a unified body. We can and have critiqued Jefferson's model along gender, class and race lines. This class will continue to examine the model through a critical discussion of sentimental and domestic fictions. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple and ending with Herman Melville's Pierre, we will explore a set of texts which confront the notions of "equality" in the United States.
Other authors will include James Fenimore Cooper; Catharine Maria Sedgewick; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Susan Warner; William Wells Brown.
Requirements:
- 1 3-5 pages essay;
- 1 10-15 page essay and a final.
Mr. Cohen. MWF 12:10-1:00.
ENGLISH 132: AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO 1914. This course will center on the politics of the American novel during this period, with special emphasis on Reconstruction/Post-Reconstruction issues (the legacies of slavery); rapid industrialization; modernity and the condition of women.
Readings will include the following novels:
- Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
- Mark Twain, Puddn'head Wilson
- Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces
- Rebecca Harding Davis, Margret Howth
- Frank Norris, McTeague
- Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Ms. Doyle. TR 5:10-6:30.
ENGLISH 138T: RACE, SPACE AND THE CITY: PARIS, BERLIN, LONDON, LOS ANGELES. Paris, Berlin, London and Los Angeles represent four central sites for the production of national cinemas and four cities whose recent population shifts have challenged the terms of identity and representation in film. This course begins with an intensive orientation to film theory emphasizing discourses of race and visual culture. Some of the questions that will inform this course will include: How does an identification with particular cities inform our conception of who we are? Does an identification with the city space challenge racial identifications or identifications the nation? Do traditional film studies categories such as "national" and "third cinemas" hold in an era of globalization? How are genre boundaries challenged by the transnational migration of cinematic and stylistic conventions across borders? How does the recent slew of films that implicitly and explicitly challenge national boundaries?
Films will include Thomas Arslan's Geschwister and Dealer , Hanif Kureishi's London Kills Me , Clair Denis' I Can't Sleep , Merzack Allouche's Salut Cousin!, Taylor Hackford's Bound by Honor , Miguel Arteta's Star Maps , John Singleton's Boys in the Hood , and Ridley Scott's Bladerunner among others.
Ms. Ongiri. MWF 10:10-11:00.
ENGLISH 143F: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND VISUAL CULTURE. In every era of mass culture, music has been and continues to be utilized as a path toward experiment, innovation, and renovation of the cultural potentials of time-based multimedia; music is also routinely invoked for its ability to communicate aesthetics and style, cultural and community values, "street credibility," or, conversely, for its ability to underline the exception, the exclusive, or the excessive. In time-based visual cultures of film, video, and interactive, music's combination with image produces particularly powerful meanings.
This course will consider a range of films, videos, and interactive works which point up musical representations and performances of gender and sexuality, tracked through changes in and between media. We will begin by paying close attention to the practices of listening as well as those of seeing, and how these come together in visual presentations of music. Screened works will highlight musical effects, tendencies, genres, or values of audiovisual media with attention to gender and sexuality. Screened works will include the Hollywood musical, the filmic underscore, and the music video; in addition to these often seen forms of music in visual media, we will investigate: the abstract animation form known as Visual Music, dramatic musical biography, concerts for communities, the cinematic appearance of the phonograph record, the city symphony, narratives of musical places, the jazz narrative, performer documentary, the rock opera, musical meta-narrative, dance television shows, and the musical video game.
Examples of both dominant and marginal medias will be screened for their musical presentations of affect, corporeality, and collectivity. Clips and interactive works will be demonstrated in lecture, as we canvass and compare a variety of musical techniques for synchronizing media streams; together, we will explore the aesthetic effects and cultural references that result.
Mr. Tobias. LEC: MWF 11:10-12:00, SCR: W 3:10-6:00.
ENGLISH 143G: QUEER VISIONS: GAY AND LESBIAN FILM. Currently, gay and lesbian characters populate the big and the small screen in record numbers. This course returns to a time period before this process of normalization and introduces students to the historical conditions of queer cinema. Thus, the course emphasizes subversive aesthetic practices such as camp, allegory, coded language and imagery, and fantasies of cross-dressing and gender bending. In addition, the course introduces students to traditions of other national gay and lesbian cinemas. Films might include: The Celluloid Closet, Queen Christina, Suddenly Last Summer , Paris Is Burning, Okoge , The Children's Hour , Rock Hudson's Home Movies, Looking for Langston , Psycho, Watermelon Woman, Star Maps, Boys Don't Cry , and Happy Together .
Ms. Ongiri. LEC: MWF 1:10-2:00, SCR: M 5:10-8:00.
ENGLISH 149: OLD ENGLISH . RIDDLES, RUNES AND TALKING OBJECTS. Hwæt! This class is an introductory course in Old English. You will learn the basics of the language, read important background texts in translation, and discuss slides of the amazing manuscript art and jewelry produced in the British Isles before the Norman Conquest. We will read riddles, poems written in runes, an Old English charm, and The Dream of the Rood. If you sign up for this class, expect to work hard; there will be weekly tests and a term paper. This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance to learn the English language of the earlier Middle Ages, and with it the truly different culture and mentality of the period. If you enjoy the off-beat and have a good attitude to study, you will love it. Find out why you should aim to become "snottor on mode".
(English graduate students: this qualifies for one of your language requirements. Ask Cara Cardinale, Michael Manous, Deena Mauldin, Drennan Spitzer or Ryan Winters about it: they took 149 in the Winter of 2000. There will be a graduate seminar in Old English in the Winter of 2003, in which you can make use of your newly acquired skills.)
Books:
Reader from Reprographic services; Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson, A Guide to Old English. (5th ed. 1992) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ms. Elder. TR 11:10-12:30.
ENGLISH 166A: THE BRITISH ROMANTICS-THE FIRST GENERATION. Close readings of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with an emphasis on their poetry. With Blake we will consider his pictorial works as well as his texts; with Wordsworth we will concentrate on his self-fashioning in relation to nature; with Coleridge we will trace his philosophy of mind. Class text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period , volume 2A.
Class assignments:
Blake quiz, mid-term exam, final in-class essay exam.
Mr. Essick. TR 3:40-5:00.
ENGLISH 176A: EARLY TO HIGH MODERNIST LITERATURE. In this course, we will read closely five "early" modernist texts, followed by two samples of the "high" modernism that they paved the way for: Ibsen's A Doll House (Signet Classic Edition); Freud's From the History of the an Infantile Neurosis (often refered to as The Case History of the Wolf Man [Collier Edition]); Freud's "The 'Uncanny'" (available as a coursepack at Printing and Reprographics); Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Edition); Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Edition with Notes by Seamus Deane); four chapters of Ulysses (1986 Vintage Edition); and Woolf's To the Lighthouse (Harcourt Brace Jonovich Edition). We will be exploring what is often called "the inward turn" of modernism and the emergence of the psychologized subject. Influenced by Victorianism and moving away from it, these writers share an interest in interiority that led to rearticulations--in drama, theory, and fiction--of human subjectivity. We will be exploring issues such as the reevaluation of infantile and childhood experiences; identity as constructed under various gender imperatives; selfhood organized around the schism created by unconscious knowledge and impulses; the role of the gaze in the evolution of the human subject; and "characters" as they are traversed by various complexes, drives, and desires. Students who are not diligent about reading assignments and attendance should not consider taking this course, as I give brief but regular in-class written warm-up exercises that constitute a considerable portion of your final grade.
Ms. Devlin. MWF 12:10-1:00.