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English 104: Creative
Writing
Professor Barbara Henning
In this writing workshop, students will read, study, and write
poetry and short-short fiction, using various forms and approaches.
A writer's notebook will be an ongoing project from which
students will gather material for their assignments.
Part of each class period will be devoted to reading poems
and stories by published authors. The rest of the class period will
be a workshop where students learn how to critique their work. A
final portfolio will include an evaluation of the student's learning
along with revised poems and stories. Books for the class will include
The Handbook of Poetic Forms, and an anthology of short-short
fiction.
English
129: British Literature
II
Professor
Howard Silverstein
This course focuses on the theme of the individual and society
as illustrated in selected works from the 19th and early
20th century. The semester will be divided into the following
topics: (1) The spirit of Romanticism: poems by Wordsworth, Shelley,
Keats, Byron, and Tennyson, (2) The revolt against Victorianism:
Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Wilde's The Portrait of
Dorian Gray, (3) The Irish Rebellion: plays by Synge, Shaw,
and O'Casey. Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, and (4) The Poet's Reaction to the Modern World: poetry
by Yeats, Housman, Hardy, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, and Auden.
English
159: Literature of
the United States II
Professor Michael Bennett
This course will examine works of literature
written in the United States after 1865. We will be going in search
of the Great American Novels published from just after the Civil
War to the present. Ours will be a multicultural exploration as
we range between European, African, Native, and Latino literary
traditions within the United States. As we undertake the search
for the Great American Novel, we will also interrogate each of the
terms of our quest. What is a novel? How do we determine whether
or not a novel is great? What do we mean when we say "American?"
Rather than providing any final answers, we will see if the questions
themselves provide us with some understanding of the complex and
convoluted terrain of American literary history.
Requirements:
class participation and presentations, daily reading quizzes, sixteen
pages of writing, and a final exam. Texts: Mark Twain, Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; William
Faulkner, Light In August; Ralph Ellison, Invisible
Man; Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima; Maxine Hong Kinston,
The Woman Warrior; N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy
Mountain; and Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference.
English
200: Domesticity in
American Literature and Culture
Professor Leah Dilworth
This upper division
undergraduate course will examine representations of "home"
in American culture. We will consider primarily literary representations,
such as Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Thoreau's
Walden, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Yesierka's
The Bread Givers, and Morrison's Beloved, but we will
also look at visual representations such as nineteenth century genre
paintings and films, such as The Stepford Wives and Crooklyn.
In addition, we will read excerpts from contemporary advice
and household reform literature, as well as selected cultural criticism. Of central concern will be the ways that "home" has
been constructed as a gendered space and how conceptions of race
and class have also come to bear on that space.
Students will be required to write a research paper related
to the theme of the course as well as several short, informal papers
responding to the readings.
English
200: African Women Writers
Professor Huma Ibrahim
This course is going to examine three of the most prominent Anglophone
African Women Writers of the 20th century: Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta,
and Ama Ata Aidoo. These
three writers have contributed definitively to the dialogue on female
identity in the postcolonial context.
Their texts range from precolonial times to more modern postcolonial
times. Their characters, mainly female, grapple with issues of nationality
and gender in an increasingly turbulent socio-political milieu while
continuing a dialogue with their male counterparts. We will read the
body of Head, Aidoo, and Emecheta's writing doing exposition of the
texts and stipulating the struggle of African Feminists, a title which
critics have given to all three writers. In addition,
we will examine each writer's relationship to the English language
which started as the colonials' language and later became their own,
often through violent confrontation.
This course is for people who are really interested in the
development of Anglophone African writing and the particular contribution
of women in this field. Students will be required to write
two theoretical papers.
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