Click here for Fall 1999 semester Explanatory Notes from the English department

Professors Deiman (on leave, 1998-1999), Turlish, Thompson, and Taylor, Chair; Associate Professors Freedman, Dillon (on leave, 1998-1999), Malcolmson, and Nayder; Assistant Professors Chin and Shankar; Mr. Lawless and Mr. Farnsworth

Through a wide range of course offerings the department seeks to develop each student’s capacity for reading -- the intense, concerned involvement with textual expression. All courses are intended to foster critical reading, writing, and thinking, in which “criticism” is at once passionate appreciation, historical understanding, and the perpetual re-thinking of values. More specifically, the English major prepares students for careers such as teaching, publishing, and writing, for graduate study in literature, or for graduate programs leading to the study or practice of medicine or law. Though we as a department embody a variety of teaching styles and interests, we all believe in the art of patient, engaged reading as both knowledge and pleasure.

Departmental offerings are intended to be taken in sequence. Courses at the 100-level are open to all students. Courses at the 200-level are open to students who have completed one 100-level course and are more difficult in terms of both the amount of material covered and the level of inquiry; they also address questions of theory and methodology in more self- conscious ways. Seminars at the 300-level are for juniors and seniors who have completed several English courses (the latter requirement may be waived at the discretion of the instructor for certain interdisciplinary majors).

Majors must complete eleven courses of which a minimum of seven must be taken from the Bates faculty. Students may receive no more than two credits for junior semester abroad, and, normally, no more than two credits for junior year abroad. Under special circumstances, and upon written petition to the English department, junior year abroad students may receive credit for three courses. In accordance with College policy, two course credits are granted for Advanced Placement scores of four or five, but these credits count only toward overall graduation requirements, not toward the eleven-course major requirement.

The eleven courses required for the major must include one or two courses at the 100 level and nine or ten courses at the 200 level or above. Upper-level courses must include: a) three courses on literature before 1800; b) one course emphasizing critical thinking; c) two junior-senior seminars; and d) a senior thesis (English 457), which may be undertaken independently or as part of a junior- senior seminar (457A with a thesis written through 395A, for example).

Students may count one course in a foreign literature (with primary focus on literature rather than on language instruction) and/or one course in creative writing toward the major.

English majors may elect a program in creative writing. This program is intended to complement and enhance the English major, and to add structure and a sense of purpose to those students already committed to creative writing. Students who wish to write a creative thesis must undertake this program.

Requirements for the focus on creative writing include:

1. Two introductory courses in the writing of either fiction or poetry (291 or 292), or plays (Theater 240).

2. One advanced course in the writing of fiction or poetry (391 or 392).

3. Three allied courses in the English department or in the literature of a foreign language.

4. A one- or two-semester thesis (non-honors) in which the student will write and revise a portfolio of poems or stories.

Students who elect the creative-writing concentration must fulfill all English major requirements but may count toward them one creative-writing course as well as the allied literature courses and thesis.

With departmental approval, students may write a two-semester honors thesis in the senior year. Majors who wish to present themselves as potential honors candidates are encouraged to register for at least one junior-senior seminar in their junior year. Majors who elect to participate in the Junior Year Abroad Program and who also want to present themselves as honors candidates must submit evidence of broadly comparable course work or independent study pursued elsewhere; such persons are encouraged to consult with the department before their departure or early in their year abroad. At the end of their junior year, prospective honors candidates must submit a two-page proposal and a one- page bibliography; those wishing to write a two-semester creative thesis must submit a one page description of a project and a substantial writing sample. Both are due at the department chair’s office on the first Friday after Short Term begins.

Students planning to do graduate work should seek out advice early on concerning their undergraduate program, the range of graduate school experience, and vocational options. Graduate programs frequently require reading proficiency in up to three foreign languages, so it is strongly recommended that prospective graduate students achieve at least a two- year proficiency in a classical (Latin, Greek) or modern language.

121. Colloquia in Literature. Colloquia introduce students to the study of literature from a variety of perspectives, such as author, genre, and literary period. These courses not only delve into their particular subject matter, they also allow a preliminary discussion of critical vocabulary and method that will carry over into more advanced classes. Discussion and frequent writing characterize each section. Prospective majors are urged to take at least one colloquium. Enrollment limited to 25 per section.

121A. Charles Dickens and Victorian Culture. Reading Dickens’s work as a novelist, journalist, and editor in the context of Victorian politics and culture, students consider his reputation as a social reformer and a disciplinarian as well as a literary genius, and focus on his varying representations of class conflict and criminality, gender relations, and empire-building. Works include Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and selections from the periodicals he edited in the 1850s and 1860s, in addition to biographical and critical studies. Enrollment limited to 25 per section. L. Nayder.

121B. Introduction to Narrative Poetry. Reading a broad variety of poetry, students engage in a series of questions about the difference between poems that tell stories in a conventional sense and those that do not. Poets include Wordsworth, Rossetti, Frost, and Rich, among others. The colloquium seeks to foster an understanding of the pleasure and power of poetry through thinking and writing about poetry, reading poetry aloud, and writing poetry. Enrollment limited to 25 per section. A. Thompson.

121E. Introduction to Poetry. An introduction to reading poetry, through the close reading of British and American poems from the Renaissance to the present day. Topics include: authorial intention, literary “meaning,” cultural context, the diversity of traditional forms, and contemporary lyric genres. The course is based around the discussion of one or two poems each class day. Enrollment limited to 25 per section. A. Thompson.

121G. Asian American Women Writers. This course examines fictional, autobiographical, and critical writings by Asian American women including Meena Alexander, Sui Sin Far, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Trinh Minh-ha, Bharati Mukherjee, Tahira Naqvi, Cathy Song, Marianne Villanueva, and Hisaye Yamamoto from a sociohistorical perspective. A study of their issues, with concerns of personal and cultural identity, as both Asian and American, as females, as minorities, as (often) postcolonial subjects, highlights the varied immigration and social histories of women from different Asian countries, often homogenized as “Oriental” in mainstream American cultural representations. This course is the same as Women’s Studies 121G. Enrollment limited to 25 per section. L. Shankar.

121I. Reading “Race” and Ethnicity in American Literature. Race, ethnicity, and gender as analytical categories provide the critical lens to read a range of literary texts, including short stories, novels, and autobiographies by such writers as Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Larsen, Morrison, Cisneros, Mukherjee, and Kingston. Enrollment limited to 25 per section. T. Chin.

121K. Frankenstein’s Creatures. Focusing on the monstrous figures of nineteenth-century fiction, this course explores their cultural meaning for Victorians as well as ourselves, examining their ongoing fascination and purpose -- their relation to changing conceptions of the marginal and other, and to social norms and their violation. Students consider the tie between the monstrous or “unnatural” and the threat of class revolt, sexual “deviance,” and imperial rise and fall. Readings include Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and The War of the Worlds, as well as contemporary revisions of these works in novels and films. Enrollment limited to 25. L. Nayder.

121L. Modern Short Stories. A study of the short story and novella as characteristic twentieth-century genres, with a brief introduction to works in the previous century. The course focuses on both “classic” and contemporary texts by writers selected from among Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Angela Carter, Bernard Malamud, and David Leavitt. Students also have the opportunity to experiment with writing a short story. Enrollment limited to 25. L. Shankar.

121M. Literature and the American Land. This course surveys the development of a distinctive American voice in the nature writing genre in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Authors read include Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Beston, Carson, Abbey, Williams, Snyder, and Berry. Enrollment is limited to 25. G. Lawless

121P. The Love Lyric and Society. Poetry has been used to express love throughout the ages. But is love a form of ideology? Could love poems sustain traditional power relations? This course examines love sonnets written in the age of Shakespeare from two points of view: the celebration of individualistic expression and aesthetic brilliance central to formalism, and the analysis of lyric and society important to historical approaches. Writers include William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Louise Labˇ, John Donne, and Thomas Wyatt. Enrollment is limited to 25. Open to first-year students. C. Malcolmson

141. American Writers to 1900. A study of ten to twelve American texts selected from the works of such writers as Bradford, Mather, Bradstreet, Edwards, Franklin, Cooper, Hawthorne, Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, Jacobs, Melville, Douglas, Stowe, Wilson, Whitman, and Poe. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. L. Turlish.

152. American Writers since 1900. A study of ten to twelve American texts selected from the works of such writers as Dickinson, Twain, Gilman, Chesnutt, James, Adams, Dreiser, Hughes, Frost, Stein, Hemingway, Larsen, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Cullen, Wright, Stevens, Williams, Baldwin, Plath, Albee, Brooks, Walker, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. C. Taylor, L. Turlish.

171. European Literature: European Tradition from Homer to Cervantes. A study of major texts of European literature, read in English, with attention to their importance as both works of art and documents in cultural history. Texts include works by Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Sappho, Vergil, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, and others. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. S. Dillon.

172. European Literature: European Tradition from Voltaire to Sartre. A study of major texts of European literature, with attention to their importance as both works of art and documents in the history of ideas. Texts include works by such authors as Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Chekhov, the French Symbolists, Mann, Proust, Kafka, Brecht, and Sartre. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. Staff.

200. Closely Watched Poems: Investigating the Authority of the Canon. Why do some poems and not others become canonized? Is canonization testimony to greatness or to the conventions of a particular group of readers (a moment in history of fixed cultural agreement)? Students closely examine English and American poems, analyzing metre, form, diction, poetic convention, historical context, gender, and the commonalities and differences of reading communities. Poems of all historical periods are represented, as theorizing about canon focuses scrutiny on some major poems of American and English literatures. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 30. S. Freedman.

201. Old-English Literature. An introduction to Old-English poetry and prose, in the original, with special attention to the cultural backgrounds of early English civilization. Translation and interpretation of such works as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon, and Beowulf (selections). Although no prior knowledge of Old English is required, previous study of a foreign language is recommended. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. (pre-1800) A. Thompson.

205. Middle-English Literature. A study of the literature of medieval England between 1200 and 1500. Representative authors include the Gawain poet, William Langland, Marie de France, Thomas Malory, and Geoffrey Chaucer. All works are read in Middle English. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. (pre-1800) A. Thompson.

206. Chaucer. Reading and interpretation of the greatest work of the fourteenth- century Middle-English poet: The Canterbury Tales. All works are read in Middle English. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. (pre-1800) A. Thompson.

207. Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton's Christian epic, Paradise Lost (1668), which retells the story of man's fall from Paradise, is one of the most influential and interesting works in English literature. Students read this poem twice: once before midterm, with attention to internal form and structure, and then again afterwards, focusing on significant problems from the history of Milton criticism, and on the remarkable influence of Milton's poem in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enrollment is limited to 40. S. Dillon

209. Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Culture. Why study pre-1800 literature? This course seeks to engage students in reading a culture very different from, and yet significantly linked to our own. The course is a study of intersections and development in late medieval and early Renaissance literature from the origins of romance and Christian chivalry to the emergence of secular politics, the Elizabethan theater, and the colonization of the Americas. Writers include Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Petrarch, Machiavel, Anne Askew, and Shakespeare. Prerequisite(s): one 100 level English course. (pre-1800) A. Thompson, C. Malcolmson

210. Medieval Drama. A study of the origins and development of medieval drama in its many and varied manifestations, from the simple liturgical plays which formed part of the tenth century church service, to the elaborate performances of the great mystery cycles whose popularity with the public continued right up until the time of the Reformation when they were finally suppressed. Emphasis on close reading of selected texts in Middle English as well as on the social, civic, and religious functions served by medieval drama. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. (pre-1800) A. Thompson.

211. English Literary Renaissance (1509-1603). A study of major texts of the Elizabethan Age, especially nondramatic works. Writers may include More, Sidney, Spenser, Labˇ, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Raleigh, and others. Attention is given to allied developments in Renaissance politics, society, religion, and thought. Prerequisite(s): one 100- level English course. (pre-1800) C. Malcolmson.

213-214. Shakespeare. A study of the major plays, with some emphasis on the biography of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan background. Students planning to take both English 213 and 214 are advised to take 213 first. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. (pre- 1800) C. Malcolmson, S. Freedman.

215. Walking Around the World. A survey of literature of the natural world from the ground up, drawn from a wide array of regions and cultures. The themes of walking and naming connect the readings chosen for the course, with its emphasis on the literature of direct experience. Readings may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, and works by Virgil, Basho, the Wordsworths, Thoreau, Chatwin, Abbey, and others. Open to first-year students. Enrollment is limited to 40. G. Lawless

222. Seventeenth-Century Literature. A study of significant writers of the seventeenth century. Writers may include William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Attention is given to the intellectual, political, and scientific revolutions of the age. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. (pre- 1800) C. Malcolmson.

232. Eighteenth-Century Literature. A study of Restoration and eighteenth- century British authors, including Dryden, Congreve, Swift, Pope, Fielding, and Johnson. Attention is given to parallel developments in Continental literature and to continuity with Renaissance humanism. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. (pre-1800) S. Freedman.

238. Jane Austen: Then and Now. Students read Austen’s six major works, investigate their relation to nineteenth-century history and culture, and consider the current Austen revival in film adaptations and fictional continuations of her novels. The course highlights the various and conflicting ways in which critics represent Austen, and the cultural needs her stories now seem to fulfill. Readings include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, as well as Emma Tennant’s Pemberley. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40. L. Nayder.

241. American Fiction. Critical readings of representative works by American writers such as Hawthorne, Twain, Howells, James, Crane, Norris, Chopin, Hurston, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Le Sueur, Fitzgerald, Stein, Faulkner, Cather, Steinbeck, Wright, Warren, Baldwin, and Welty. Discussions of individual novels examine their form within the context of the major directions of American fiction. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. C. Taylor, L. Turlish.

243. Romantic Literature (1790-1840). The theoretical foundations of English and European Romanticism, including its philosophical, critical, social, and other backgrounds. Concentration on Rousseau, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Attention also to Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Swedenborg, and other prose figures and critics of the period. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. S. Dillon.

245. Studies in Victorian Literature (1830-1900). Selected topics in the period, organized by author, genre, and historical connections. Special attention is given to philosophical backgrounds and the critical language of the day. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. S. Dillon.

250. The African American Novel. An examination of the African American novel from its beginnings in the mid-1800s to the present. Issues addressed by the course include a consideration of the folk influences on the genre, its roots in the slave narrative tradition, its relation to Euro-American texts and culture, and the “difference” that gender as well as race makes in determining narrative form. Readings include narratives selected from among the works of such writers as Douglass, Jacobs, Wilson, Delany, Hopkins, Harper, Chesnutt, Johnson, Toomer, Larsen, Hurston, Wright, Petry, Ellison, Baldwin, Walker, Morrison, Marshall, Reed, and others. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40. T. Chin.

252. Literature and Empire. This course examines literary works that have imperialism as their theme. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, readings include Robinson Crusoe as well as Victorian and postmodern retellings of Defoe’s novel: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. Students consider changing representations of empire-building in narratives by Haggard, Kipling, Conrad, and Dinesen; discuss the analogy commonly drawn between racial and sexual conquest; and study the varying ways in which imperial ideologies are justified and challenged. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40. L. Nayder.

254. Modern British Literature (1900 onward). An introduction to the birth of modern literature and its roots, with attention to its social and cultural history, its philosophical and cultural foundations and some emphasis on its relationship to the previous century. Texts selected from the works of writers such as Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Rushdie, and Lessing. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 40 per section. L. Shankar.

260. Literature of South Asia. This course introduces fiction, poetry, and films by writers who are of South Asian descent, or who have considered the Indian Subcontinent their home. Topics include British influence on South Asia, the partition of India, national identity formation, women's social roles, the impact of Western education and the English language, and the emergence of a new generation of postcolonial literary artists. Writers are selected from among Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyatjit Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Kamala Das, Kamala Markandaya, Mahasweta Debi, U.R. Anantha Murthy, Attia Hosain, Amitav Ghosh, Ved Mehta, and Ismat Chugtai. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Open to first-year students. Enrollment is limited to 30. L. Shankar

264. Modern Irish Poetry. A study of the development and transformation of Anglo-Irish poetry in the twentieth century, especially as it responds to the political, social, and gender forces at work in Ireland’s recent history. Beginning with brief but concentrated study of poems by W.B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, the course then examines the work of inheritors of these major figures’ legacies, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, Eavan Boland, Eamon Grennan, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 30. R. Farnsworth.

270. Contemporary British Poetry. The course examines recent trends in British poetry, from the Martian poets to the rediscovery of the narrative poem, to black and feminist poetry. The poems will be scrutinized for any evidence of an engagement with the legacy of W. H. Auden, the Britain of class politics, involvement in Northern Ireland, and antagonism toward the European Community Ideal. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40. R. Farnsworth.

275. English Novel I. A study of the English novel, from its origins to the early nineteenth century. Readings include selections from Homer’s Iliad, and novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Radcliffe, Austen, and Scott. Among the issues addressed by this course are the relation of the novel to the epic, and the social and political orientation of this new genre. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40. (pre-1800) L. Nayder.

276. English Novel II. A study of the English novel, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Readings include novels by Collins, Eliot, Stoker, Ford, Forster, and Woolf, as well as theoretical works by M.M. Bakhtin, D.A. Miller, and Lennard Davis. Special attention is given to the revisionary nature of the novel, and its relation to social change and the status quo. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 40. L. Nayder.

291. Fiction Writing. A course for students who wish practice and guidance in the writing of fiction. Admission by writing sample. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. G. Lawless.

292. Poetry Writing. A course for students who wish practice and guidance in the writing of poetry. Admission by writing sample. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. G. Lawless.

294. Storytelling: Mythic Worlds. This course introduces cross-cultural forms, contexts, and strategies of storytelling in the process of analyzing and practicing how stories are told and interpreted in everyday life. Primary readings include a range of stories characteristic of oral and written traditions; folk, elite, popular, and commercial cultures; and contemporary modes and genres. Secondary readings offer diverse explanations of how stories mean from narratology, cultural psychology, anthropology, and the sociology of literature. Recommended background: introductory courses in literature, anthropology, or the sociology of knowledge. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 20 per section. C. Taylor.

295. Critical Theory. Major literary critics are read, and major literary works are studied in the light of these critics. Critical approaches discussed may include neoclassical, romantic, psychoanalytical, formalist, generic, archetypal, structuralist, and deconstructionist. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 30. (critical thinking) S. Freedman.

360. Independent Study. Upperclass students, and occasionally others, who wish to engage in individual study, writing, or research projects should consult with a member of the staff and the chair. Students are limited to one independent study per semester. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Staff.

365. Special Topics. Offered occasionally by a faculty member in subjects of special interest. Prerequisite(s): one 100- level English course. Staff.

391. Advanced Fiction Writing. Prerequisite(s): English 291. Enrollment limited to 12. Written permission of the instructor is required. R. Farnsworth.

392. Advanced Poetry Writing. Prerequisite(s): English 292. Enrollment limited to 12. Written permission of the instructor is required. R. Farnsworth.

395. Junior-Senior Seminars. Seminars provide an opportunity for concentrated work in a restricted subject area. Two such seminars are required for the English major. Students are encouraged to see the seminar as preparation for independent work on a senior thesis. They may also choose to use the seminar itself as a means of fulfilling the senior thesis requirement. Sections are limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required.

395A. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Narrative. A close examination of eight to ten narratives by writers from the English-speaking Caribbean, with particular attention to questions of colonialism and postcoloniality, nationalism, exile and displacement, cultural identity and affirmation. Readings include narrative fiction by Claude McKay, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Orlando Patterson, Wilson Harris, Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Paule Marshall, as well as a range of critical and theoretical texts that situate the readings in terms of important historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. (critical thinking) T. Chin.

395B. Dissenting Traditions in Twentieth-Century American Literature. This seminar examines literature by or about those who have felt themselves outside the mainstream of American culture. Focusing on issues concerning poverty, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, it places close reading in the context of cultural history and theory. Works include texts by such writers as Anaya, Baldwin, Erdrich, Hurston, Kingston, Naylor, Morrison, Pinzer, Roth, Silko, and Steinbeck. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. C. Taylor.

395C. Frost, Williams, and Stevens. As inheritors of Emersonian slants on poetics and imagination, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams constitute a solid American grain of modernism in poetry. Thorough reading of their work reveals their surprising affinities and differences. How dark a vision of life (social and existential) does each seem to abide? What roles do wit, irony, verbal extravagance, and inherited poetic forms play in the work? What does each take to be the function of poetry in modern American life? The work of tutelary ancestors, competitors, and critics complements the substance of the course: comprehensive reading, writing, and discussion of these poets’ poems and theoretical prose. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. R. Farnsworth.

395D. Victorian Crime Fiction. The seminar examines the detective fiction written by British Victorians, the historical context in which this literature was produced, and its ideological implications. Students consider the connection between gender and criminality, and the relation of detection to class unrest and empire-building. Readings include works by Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Grant Allen. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. L. Nayder.

395F. To Light: Five Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Concentrated study of the poetry (and some prose) of five major American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Marianne Moore, whose various poetic stances and careers illuminate particular dilemmas facing female poets at mid- century -- issues of subject matter, visibility, literary tradition, and ideology. Probable corollary readings from the work of other poets, including Anne Sexton and Denise Levertov. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. R. Farnsworth.

395G. Postcolonial Literatures and Theory. A study of selected contemporary world literatures focused on postcolonial texts and the major critical, theoretical statements. The course interrogates the social and historical imperatives of European imperialism and its aftermath, neocolonialism, transnationalism, and educational, linguistic and cultural hegemony and the “(de)colonizing of the mind.” Focus on works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Anita Desai, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, N’gugi wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri Goodyear. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. (critical thinking) L. Shankar.

395H. George Eliot (Marian Evans). A careful examination of five novels (Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda), with particular attention to biographical context, novelistic structure, questions of gender and the persistently interesting image of the gift. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. S. Dillon.

395I. The Eighteenth-Century Mind. How effectively does the term “century” capture or bind what is common to a period of thinking? And do similar presuppositions of thought fall across different disciplines? The course studies the poetry, novels, philosophy, and writings of late seventeenth- and eighteenth- century figures, Locke, Condillac, Pope, Johnson, Sterne, Burney, Diderot, Radcliffe, and Hume. The interpretative methods of such modern historians and philosophers as Braudel, Foucault, Stone, Castle, Hacking, Mackie, and Derrida offer differences of explanation, affording the opportunity to investigate closely eighteenth-century concepts of representation, the sublime, the theory of ideas, and natural philosophy. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. (pre-1800) (critical thinking) S. Freedman.

395J. The Gothic Tradition. This seminar traces the Gothic tradition from its European origins in the mid- eighteenth century to its current use by African American writers, and considers the subgenre from various critical perspectives. Particular emphasis is placed on the politics of the Gothic: on its relation to revolutionary movements, on its representations of intimacy and violence, and on the ways in which Gothic novelists both defend and subvert prevailing conceptions of sexual and racial difference. Writers studied include Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bront‘, Wilkie Collins, Harriet Jacobs, and Gloria Naylor. Prerequisite(s): one 100- level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. L. Nayder.

395K. African American Literary and Cultural Criticism. This seminar examines some of the crucial theoretical questions that have fueled the recent debates within African American literary and cultural studies. Much of this debate stems from and revolves around the contested status of “theory” itself, the question of its alleged relevance/irrelevance to African American concerns, and the attempt to posit vernacular or “black” forms of theory. Central to these debates also are the important questions and challenges that black feminist critics have posed in their insistence on the necessity for a specifically gendered analysis of representational forms. In addition to a range of literary texts and theoretical formulations (in various formats), our “readings” are drawn from the realm of the visual and the popular as well. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. T. Chin.

395L. Feminist Literary Criticism. A study of current modes of feminist literary theory, including materialist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic approaches. The course considers theories of the contribution of literature to the social construction of gender, class, race, and sexuality. It analyzes how particular approaches imply models of the family, society, uses of history, and attitudes toward the position of women writers. (critical thinking). L. Shankar.

395M. Lawrence, Forster, and Mansfield. Opinions regarding these three early twentieth-century writers have shifted dramatically over the past thirty years. Once seen as unarguably “canonical,” D.H. Lawrence has been attacked for his sexism and E.M. Forster stands accused of “liberal humanism” and “imperial ideology.” Katherine Mansfield, long marginalized as a woman writer who “does small things well,” has recently garnered a more favorable press, but continues to be criticized for being the wrong kind of feminist. This seminar seeks to enter the late twentieth- century critical debate by letting the writers speak for themselves as well as by reading their critics. In this way students try to see round all sides of the issues rather than taking a simple “either/or” approach to three artists whose work, while arguably flawed, remains among the most interesting and innovative the century has produced. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. A. Thompson.

395N. Joyce's Ulysses. A study of James Joyce’s novel as both a mimetic and self-reflexive fiction. Emphasis is given to the biographical and social contexts of the novel. Students consider the influence of such figures as Ibsen, Flaubert, and Krafft-Ebing on the novel. Recommended background: English 254 or 264. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. L. Turlish.

395P. Pre-1800 Women Writers. The seminar considers the conditions that obstructed and supported writing by British women from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics include changing accounts of gender difference, the possibility of a self- conscious female tradition, elite versus non-elite genres, and the emergence of the professional woman writer. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. (pre-1800) C. Malcolmson.

395Q. Reading Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s long narrative poem tells of two lovers whose personal drama is played out within the larger theater of the Trojan War. Seen by some critics as the first sympathetic treatment of secular love and by others as an ironic tribute to the fatal consequences of earthly lust, Troilus and Criseyde explores the complex interrelationships of desire, loyalty, deceit, and betrayal. This seminar approaches Chaucer’s poem in a variety of ways: through its sources, its fourteenth- century cultural context, its interpretation (especially by feminist and cultural materialist critics) and, not least, through close reading of the text itself. Recommended background: at least one course in medieval English literature or history. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. (pre-1800) A. Thompson.

395R. Ut Pictura Poesis. This course concerns the relation between poetry and the visual arts. How do temporal and spatial arts relate? What can theories of image and imagination reveal about this relation? After initial theoretical study, beginning with Aristotle and Horace, the course attends to poet painters such as Blake and Rossetti, Romantic landscape poets and painters, Pre-Raphaelite explorations of narrative and symbol, and to poems of Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Baudelaire, RiIke, and Yeats, with attention to the painting and sculpture related to their work. Students also investigate modern developments in the work of Williams, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Ashbery, Dobyns, and Boland, as well as recent poetic experiments in visual art and video poetry. Recommended background: at least two 200-level English courses, as well as art history courses. Written permission of the instructor is required. Enrollment is limited to 15. R. Farnsworth

457. 458. Senior Thesis. Students register for English 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both English 457 and 458. Staff.

Short Term Units

s12. Autobiographical Acts. This unit explores autobiography both as a literary genre and as a narrative strategy that writers use in order to produce a variety of literary effects. In addition to exploring the conventions that govern the genre, the unit interrogates the uncertain boundary that separates autobiography from fiction by considering texts that seem to deliberately blur the line between the two. The unit examines the centrality of such autobiographical acts to the literary traditions of women and ethnic writers by focusing on texts selected from both these groups. It also includes a practical component whereby students produce in one form or another their own autobiographical act. Works considered may include texts/films by Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Sandra Cisneros, Hilton Als, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janet Frame, Raoul Peck, Marlon Riggs, and Claire Denis. Open to first-year students. Enrollment is limited to 15. T. Chin

s13. The "Fin-de-si¸cle" in American Literature. Henry Adams echoed Matthew Arnold's poem when he described America in the 1890s as "caught between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." This unit considers the American 1890s, especially in the light of our own "fin-de si¸cle" in 1998. Themes include cultural exhaustion, apocalypticism, "decadence," and aestheticism. Authors include Henry Adams, Kate Chopin, and Stephen Crane. Open to first year students. Enrollment is limited to 15. L. Turlish

s14. Exploring Poetic Forms. This unit explores the development of poetic forms, starting with the epic and including the elegy, ode, pastoral, ballade, terza rima, sestina, sonnet, villanelle, renga, haiku, pantoum, ghazal, and others. Students are encouraged to experiment with each form, and see examples of past uses of these forms, combining theory with practice. Open to first-year students. Enrollment is limited to 20. G. Lawless

s15. Lifestories. How do beliefs about the real and the imagined, the fictional and the nonfictional shape life as a narrative? Students undertake experiments in writing a life and study in a range of genres that others have used to preserve or order a life’s experience. Both primary and secondary sources inform the comparative study of the narratives, strategies, and conventions of such cross-referential genres as autobiography, memoir, diary, letters, personal essay, and autobiographical fiction. Enrollment limited to 20. Written permission of the instructor is required. C. Taylor.

s18. Elvis Godard: Topics in Experimental Writing. An introduction to a range of contemporary experimental literature in America, focusing especially on poetry, criticism, and short fiction. Topics include theory of the avant-garde, history of experimental literature, small press versus mainstream, political experimentalism, attacking the academy, and postmodernism. Readings include experimental texts themselves along with description and theory of such writing; expect also brief gestures toward art and film. Daily assignments, some of which encourage “creativity,” others of which may nonetheless seem stridently academic. Enrollment limited to 20. S. Dillon.

s19. Introduction to Film Analysis: Formalism and Beyond. The unit breaks into three: 1) an introduction to languages of cinematic description through the viewing and discussion of clips and films. Reading consists of theoretical essays in, for instance, formalism, narratology, deconstruction, and feminism; 2) an intensive reading of a single film, first in terms of its own structure and elements, then in light of various methodological contexts; 3) a substantial critical writing project. Directors studied may include Scorsese, Renoir, Hitchcock, Wells, and Stone. Enrollment limited to 15. S. Freedman, S. Dillon.

s20A. The Formal Tradition: Claiming and Using an Inheritance. If, as poet Stanley Kunitz has said, “the function of [poetic] form is the conservation of energy,” how is that energy created, conserved, transformed, and released in a poem? Seeking the answer practical experience may offer, the unit requires students to write ten poems in and through an array of received metrical forms. The unit informs this practice with reading aloud, with detailed discussion of exemplary poems from Wyatt to Wakoski, and with study of various essays, ancient and contemporary, about matters of prosody, convention, and poetic form. Recommended background: English 292 or 392. Enrollment limited to 12. Written permission of the instructor is required. R. Farnsworth.

s21. Cultural Production and Social Context, Jamaica. Although Jamaica’s artistic and popular culture enjoys an internationally acclaimed reputation, it is at the same time often misunderstood. This unit affords students an opportunity to investigate a range of Jamaican cultural practices within the context of the specific social, historical, and political matrices in which they are generated and received. The unit begins with a preliminary introduction/orientation in Lewiston. In Jamaica, regular seminar meetings are supplemented by guest speakers and visits with writers and artists. In addition, each student carries out an individual research project using both textual and ethnographic methods of inquiry. Recommended background: previous course on the Caribbean or in African American studies. This unit is the same as Anthropology s21. Enrollment limited to 18. Written permission of the instructor is required. T. Chin, C. Carnegie.

s22. Glenn Gould: Musician and Muse. A poetry writing workshop that takes inspiration -- both directly and indirectly -- from the recordings, writings, and films of Glenn Gould (1932- 1982), the Canadian pianist. No technical knowledge of music is required, although a willingness to listen to “classical” music (i.e., Bach, Webern, Sibelius) is necessary. Students may prepare for this unit by listening to Gould’s rendition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier ten times. Recommended background: English 121E. Enrollment limited to 12. S. Dillon.

s23. Beatniks and Mandarins: A Literary and Cultural History of the American Fifties. An examination of established and adversarial culture in the American 1950s. Readings are in the literature and social commentary of such representative figures as Lionel Trilling, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. Some attention is given to film noir as the definitive fifties cinematic style and to the phenomenon which wed the recitation of poetry to American jazz. Open to first- year students. Enrollment limited to 25. L. Turlish.

s24. The Once and Future Middle Ages. Working with historical source materials as well as with historical fiction, students create their own fictional representations of some aspect of the medieval world. Prerequisite(s): one of the following: English 201, 205, 206, 210, 395Q, History 102, Art 251, 252, Philosophy 270, or Religion 242. This unit is the same as Classical and Medieval Studies s24. Enrollment limited to 12. A. Thompson.

s25. Sociocultural Approaches to Children’s Literature. This unit studies some of the “classics” in British and American literature written to educate and entertain children, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Louisa May Alcott, R.L. Stevenson, A.A. Milne, E.B. White, Mildred Taylor, Robert McCloskey, Dr. Seuss, and Jean Fritz. By employing the tools of sociocultural and psychological analysis, students examine the formation of gendered, racial, cultural, and social class identities through childhood literary experiences. Some attention will also be given to film versions of children’s stories. Open to first-year students. L. Shankar.

s27. Framing the Postcolonial. This unit examines the “postcolonial condition” through selected cinematic works as well as various literary and theoretical texts. In addition to investigating the multiple and even conflicting definitions of the postcolonial, the unit explores questions of home, exile, displacement, cultural hybridity, and diaspora as key concepts for comprehending the postcolonial moment and its artistic productions. Screenings include films such as Mississippi Masala, My Beautiful Laundrette, Chocolat, Daughters of the Dust, and Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. Readings include literary/theoretical texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest (and its contemporary “postcolonial” revisions), Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and short stories by Bharati Mukherjee. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 30. T. Chin.

s30. Feminist Literary Criticism. A study of current modes of feminist literary theory, including materialist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic approaches. The unit considers theories of the contribution of literature to the social construction of gender, class, race, and sexuality. It analyzes how particular approaches imply models of the family, society, uses of history, and attitudes toward the position of women writers. Prerequisite(s): Women’s Studies 100 or English 170. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 25. C. Malcolmson, C. Taylor.

s31. “Letters from Tasmania”: Writing an Epistolary Novella. Students read an epistolary novel, and collectively write a novella of their own. They are presented with a specific historical context for their novella -- the colonization of Tasmania by the British. They study historical source materials, and each assumes a different fictional “persona” -- the cast includes both Tasmanian and British correspondents. Each student is required to contribute at least ten letters to the novella, with a minimum of twenty-five pages. This unit enables students to put into practice concepts they have studied in literature courses, and encourages them to make connections among politics, history, and literature. Recommended background: at least one course in the study of fiction, British or American. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. L. Nayder.

s33. Editing Medieval Manuscripts. The South English Legendary, a thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, forms the basis for a unit that gives students hands-on practice in reading and editing medieval manuscripts. Since many of the narratives found in the legendary have never been printed, students experience the thrill (as well as the frustration) of working with texts that are otherwise inaccessible. Prerequisite(s): one of the following: English 201, 205, 206, or 210. Enrollment limited to 12. A. Thompson.

s35. Constructing Catherine Dickens. Combining literary and biographical study with archival research, this unit focuses on the neglected figure of Catherine Dickens, wife of the novelist, who was forced from her home in 1858 after twenty years of marriage and ten children. Reading conflicting accounts of Mrs. Dickens as well as her own unpublished letters and book (a cookbook), students examine her family life in the context of Victorian gender norms and marriage law, consider how and why she has been represented by critics and biographers, and construct their own portraits of her. Prerequisite(s): one English course. Enrollment is limited to 15. L. Nayder

s37. Representing Labor in Fiction and Film. This unit explores how workers in the twentieth-century United States have represented their own lives and struggles, and how writers and directors have transformed personal narratives into fiction and film of often epic sweep. Diverse storytellers contribute to what is remembered and forgotten as the story of labor becomes public history, from the slave system to the factories of the north, from the dust bowl's westward migration to the migrant labor moving across borders and sometimes back again. Works studied include Solomon Northrup's slave narrative and Gordon Parks, Sr.'s Half Slave, Half Free: Solomon Northrup's Legacy; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and William Duke's The Killing Floor; John Steinbeck's and John Ford's Grapes of Wrath; Tom‡s Rivera's and Severo Pˇrez's ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Gregory Nava's El Norte; and Harriet Arnow's and Daniel Petrie's The Dollmaker. Prerequisite(s): one English course. Enrollment is limited to 15. C. Taylor

s43. Shakespeare in the Theater. A study of Shakespeare’s plays in performance, intended to acquaint the student with problems in the interpretation of the plays that are created by actual stage production. Students see Shakespearean productions in various locations, including London and Stratford-on-Avon, England. Prerequisite: English 213 and 214. Usually offered in alternate years. Enrollment limited to 15. Written permission of the instructor is required. Staff.

s50. Individual Research. Registration in this unit is granted by the department only after the student has submitted a written proposal for a full-time research project to be completed during the Short Term and has secured the sponsorship of a member of the department to direct the study and evaluate results. Students are limited to one individual research unit. Staff.

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