Spring 2005
English 104 section 1: Creative
Writing
Professor John High
Tuesdays & Thursdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
This class is designed for anyone
who has ever wanted to write creatively, yet who is not sure
how to begin or how to move beyond where they are presently
in their own writing. Topics include getting started, establishing
a passionate discipline, making time, focusing on ideas and
feelings and giving them shape through the language of fiction,
poetry, and drama. The course will also zero in on backbone
issues of style and technique ranging from those of characterization
and plot, continuity, and vividness of imagery, clarity of
diction, and use of phrasing and structure in the writing
of our worlds--the various ways that elements of craft inherently
dovetail with content. There will be weekly creative writing
exercises and group discussions, as well as commentary on
the writing process and how to make it come alive for you.
The course offers relaxed, though thorough and individualized
investigation of the participants' work in relation to craft,
theme and content writing. What do we mean when we talk about
issues of style, form, and voice(s)? What is fiction, what
is metaphor, what is the magic of language, the ghost of echoes,
which reflect your own vision of the world, your experience
or part, your dreams or visions? What do we mean when we talk
about the lyric, about experimentations, about taking chances
in writing? We'll look at the work of Modern and contemporary
writers ranging from Baldwin to Akhmatova to Borges to that
of younger writers publishing today. Students will also read
and respond to one another's exercises in an environment that
offers encouragement and direction. Critiques will focus on
motivating the student to tap the undefined territory of his
or her own imagination in order to more fully cultivate and
mature her or his own voice/s and styles. Writing which moves
beyond the so-called boundaries between genres in a spirit
of exploration will also be encouraged. The goal of the course
includes completing a portfolio of your work, and a revised
text for a class anthology, group reading, and party.
English 104 section 2: Creative
Writing
Professor Barbara Henning
Wednesdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
In this writing workshop, students
will read, study, and write poetry and short stories. During
the first half of each workshop, we will discuss examples
of poems and stories. Then I will provide a specific assignment
for the following workshop. The main text for the remaining
class time will be student writing; we will workshop each
poem and story, helping each other improve each others' drafts.
The emphasis will be on form and structure, especially learning
to be particular with writing, rather than general, including
images and detail in both stories and poems. A midterm and
final portfolio will include revised poems and stories, as
well as a review of learning and a self-evaluation. There
will be a packet of assignments and Xeroxed fiction. Recommended
text: The Handbook of Poetic Forms.
English 129: British Literature
II: (Re-) Writing Religion in Modern British Literature
Professor Bernard Schweizer
Mondays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
This course explores the ways
in which works of modern British literature engage issues
of religious belief, worship, and church doctrine. Each of
the assigned texts, drawn from poetry, novel, drama, and essay,
variously celebrates, questions, or subverts fundamental aspects
of religion. For instance, Frankenstein dramatizes
man's desire to create life, like God; Graham Greene puzzles
over the meaning of divine grace, as it appears to be lavished
on a corrupt Mexican priest; Murder in the Cathedral
thematizes the justifications for (deliberate) martyrdom;
Kingsley Amis presents a dystopian world in which the reformation
never took place; and Philip Pullman's fiction turns all major
tenets of Christianity, including divine providence, redemption,
and original sin, upside down. This course does not endorse
any particular religious or anti-religious outlook, nor does
it require students to practice any religion at all. It merely
presumes that while religion is of immense importance to many
people and societies, the specific manifestations and meanings
of spirituality, faith, and doctrine are complex, manifold,
and often contested.
English 137: Shakespeare
Professor Joan Templeton
Thursdays
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
This course will examine Shakespeare's
plays both as texts and as theatrical performances. If possible,
we will attend a Shakespeare production. Plays to be studied
include Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice,
Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King
Lear. Students must have completed English 61, 62, or
63, 64 and the core seminar (or English 17) to register for
the course.
English 150: Introduction
to Caribbean Literature
Professor Rosamond King
Mondays & Wednesdays
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
This course will survey the
diverse tradition of Caribbean literature through texts from
English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries (including
Haiti, Cuba, and Trinidad & Tobago). We will examine major
themes such as slavery, colonialism, racial diversity, and
immigration, and we will discuss what, other than geographic
location, unities Caribbean countries and the Caribbean literature.
English 159: Literature of
the U.S. II
Professor Carol Allen
Mondays & Wednesdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
This is a survey that covers
American literature from the second half of the nineteenth
century to the present. The course will provide general information
about the major writers and texts that have contributed to
the great, diverse tradition of American letters. We will
chart our discoveries by peering through the lens of representation,
asking such questions as who names and describes the newly
unified, post-civil war America, how do turn-of-the-century
and early twentieth-century creative artists revision America
during an age of Western imperialism/expansion/colonialism,
how does literature compete with the new technologies that
produce representation as well (photography, film, television),
what is meant by and what are the politics of "American"
modernism and post-modernism, and finally, how does literature
both document and "undocument" American experience?
We will concentrate on three vital prolific periods: nineteenth-century
regional writing, Modernism (1912-1936), and contemporary,
post-war production.
English 166: Fiction Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
Tuesdays & Thursdays
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm
This workshop will focus on
the way autobiography overlaps with fiction and how the past
is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. The premise
is that the source of most fiction is fading memories, whether
we're aware of it or not. Though Jack Kerouac is the most
obvious exponent of this method, we'll look at other writers
of the last century (Marguerite Duras, Peter Handke, Lydia
Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Georges Perec, Ernest Hemingway,
Virginia Woolf, Laura Riding, Raymond Queneau, Jamaica Kincaid,
James Ellroy, Maurice Blanchot) who struggle to cross the
borders between fiction and life story. We'll concentrate
on the conventions of fiction--plot, character, conflict--with
an eye towards expanding on what's already been done. Our
writing project will include working with secrets, memories,
observations, opinions, overheard conversations--fragments
of everything.
English 169: Nonwestern/Postcolonial
Literature
Professor Maria McGarrity
Tuesdays & Thursdays
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
This class
was cancelled and did not run.
Post-colonialism as a critical
impulse has had a profound impact on literary and cultural
studies in recent years. This course will examine the theories
and fictions that characterize post-colonialism by focusing
on the encounter between the centralized colonial metropolis
and its global peripheries in the twentieth century. The creative
works in this course from the Caribbean include writers from
African, Asian, and European traditions. This diversity of
perspective allows for the examination of the post-colonial
imagination from both the centers and margins of the empire.
These works will allow us to frame our global theoretical
inquiries by using the specificities of particular cultural
experiences. We will attempt to determine what unites the
islands of the Caribbean archipelago and what may connect
or separate them from Latin America. We will explore foundational
texts in the field and complicate the following topics: globalism
and local culture; the psychology of colonialism; resistance/accommodation/complicity;
indigeneity and constructions of the Other; and imagining
nationalisms.
English 190: Senior Seminar
Professor Leah Dilworth
Mondays & Wednesdays
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
This course will guide students
through the process of writing a long research paper (20-25
pages) on topics of their own choosing. Students will use
a range of research resources and write an informal proposal,
a formal proposal, a first draft, and a final draft of the
paper. Students will also read and critique each other's work.
Required reading will include essays on research methods and
writing as well as "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, with selected critical essays.
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