Fall 2013 Courses

ENG 204 001 Literary Journalism
Series S (F 2:30-5:00 pm)
E.C. Osondu
A plus on any resume, magazine journalism gives students practical hands-on experience editing and publishing a literary journal. We will solicit and edit work, design and help produce The Alembic. Students will read literary texts in several genres within a critical context and formulate, discuss, and develop sophistication in critical issues. Comparative essays, close readings, and book reviews will all be part of the course.

Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows more by example than by words. And therefore I am now minded to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily.
-Peter Abelard

It doesn’t always work out. Chaucer’s other great masterwork, Troilus and Criseyde, sets the tragic-yet-comic story of its unlucky, unhappy lovers against the looming backdrop of the Trojan War. Taking as its operating procedure the sophistic maxim “By his contrarie is every thing declared,” Chaucer’s poem argues with itself at every turn. The narrator may offer his poem as a lesson to all young lovers, but the poem itself refuses to resolve its animating tensions: between sincerity and play, truth and artifice, self-interest and self-deception, chance and destiny, reason and passion, and fidelity for better or for worse.

ENG 311 001 Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies
Series J (MWF 1:30-2:20 pm)
Robert Reeder
This course concentrates on Shakespeare’s early plays, primarily comedies and histories, with close analysis of the texts in the light of relevant political, social, and cultural contexts, and with some attention to stage history and film productions.

ENG 312 001 Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances
Series H (MWF 11:30 am-12:20 pm)
Stephen Lynch
This course concentrates on Shakespeare’s later plays, primarily tragedies and romances (or tragic-comedies), with close analysis of the texts in the light of relevant political, social, and cultural contexts, and with some attention to stage history and film productions.

ENG 314 001 Spenser
Series K (TR 11:30-12:45 pm)
Anthony Esolen
This course provides us with the universe according to the great allegorist of Elizabethan English, Edmund Spenser.  He is placed within the context of authors whom he quarried (Vergil, Ovid, Petrach, Ariosto, Tasso, Castiglione, Sidney; two or three of these will be studied each semester) to construct his monumental poem The Fairie Queene.  We will read that poem in its entirety.

ENG 317 001 Seventeenth-century Literature
Series K (F 2:30-5:00 pm)
Russell Hillier
“Be no longer so horridly, hellishly, impudently, arrogantly wicked as to judge what is sin, what not, what evil and what not, what blasphemy and what not.”  
       — Abiezer Coppe

ENG 358 001 Communications Internship
Series X (By Arrangement)
Juniors and seniors may obtain internships at local businesses and agencies to develop and apply skills in writing and analysis, in the workplace. In addition to the 10-15 hours per week of supervised experience, students must compose and fulfill a contractual learning agreement. Pass/Fail credit only.

ENG 364 Modern American Fiction
Series I (MWF 12:30-1:20 pm)
Suzanne Fournier
This course covers American fiction since World War I.  Authors include Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor, Salinger, Heller, Percy, Pynchon, Morrison, and Fellow.  Topics for discussion include the search for identity through tradition, the disillusionment of the ’30s, the Southern Renaissance, and the problematics of mass society.

ENG 366 001 Developments in 20th-Century Fiction
Series F (TWF 9:30-10:20 am)
Eric Bennett
The focus is high Modernist prose fiction--Joyce, Proust, Stein, Woolf, Beckett, and others--with a glance at the predecessors-Balzac and Flaubert--and at the post-Modern followers.

ENG 369 001 Women in Literature
Series E (MR 10-11:15 am)
Jane Lunin Perel
Explores great works of fiction, poetry, and drama by women.  Critical analysis of literature considers differing forms of literary criticism, including psycho-analytical theory, feminist theory, Marxist criticism, and historicism.  Emphasis on the analytical categories of gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, physical condition of writers, and the societies they depict.  Victorian to Contemporary writers.  Sames as WMS 369.

ENG 380 001 Creative Writing in Fiction
Series W (R 4:00 pm-6:30 pm)
Staff

ENG 380 002 Creative Writing in Fiction
Series V (T 4-6:30 pm)
E.C. Osondu
This course helps students learn to write short stories. Exercises are designed to strengthen students’ skill in rendering the elements of fiction. All work is discussed in a workshop situation. An anthology of short stories is read along with students’ work. A folio of exercises, short stories, and revisions provides the basis for the course grade.

ENG 381 001 Creative Writing: Poetry
Series P (M 2:30-5:00 pm)
Jane Lunin Perel
ENG 381 002 Creative Writing: Poetry
Series W (R 4-6:30 pm)
Chard deNiord
This course helps students learn to write poetry.  Exercises are designed to sharpen students’ skill in rendering the elements of poetry. All work is discussed in a workshop situation. An anthology of poetry is read along with student work. A folio of exercises, poems, and revisions provides the basis for the course grade.

Series L (TR 1-2:15 pm)
William Hogan
An intensive examination of major works of literary criticism, from Plato to the present. Students will learn to write theoretically about literature and will be asked to apply specific critical methods to literary works. Readings may include Plato, Aristotle, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Foucault, Nussbaum, and Cixous. Prerequisite for students writing a senior thesis.

 

Grasmere, by Francis Towne

Nature and the Arts is an interdisciplinary look at the British fascination with nature and rural life during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  We will begin by looking at the continental and classical models for art and literature of rural life, and then examine the changing attitudes towards nature that occur in the British isles between roughly 1720 and 1850, looking at such writers and painters as Virgil, Claude Lorraine, Rubens, Gray,  Constable, Turner, and Wordsworth.  This course fulfills a pre-1800 requirement. 

Most of our modern ideas about nature and the environment have their origins in this period, as Britain transformed itself from an agricultural economy into the world’s leading industrial nation.  The effects on rural life were staggering: what was once farm and grazing land became cities and factories, rural estates that once produced food were transformed into vast pleasure gardens, and families that for centuries had worked the land suddenly found themselves displaced, and either took jobs in factories or migrated to British colonies overseas.  At the same time, industrial wealth created leisure time for the wealthy, which they spent traveling through rural Britain, leading to the development of modern tourism. 

All of these matters are treated by poets and painters of this period.  I would argue, in fact, that writers and artists taught people how to value and appreciate the natural world, even as so much of it was being permanently changed.  They made possible the modern environmental movement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

This class includes a number of fieldtrips: to the Hay Library at Brown to view their splendid collection of illustrated books on 18th-century landscape gardening, to the RISD Museum to view their British landscape watercolors (since these are not on exhibit, I arrange a private showing—and they include some fabulous Turner drawings), and to the Yale Center for British Art, to view the finest collection of Constable and Turner landscapes in this hemisphere.

So come and learn about Claude glasses, Capability Brown, and Constable Country, find out who Jethro Tull really was (think seed drill), and take a virtual tour through the English Lakes, with watercolors, photographs, and maybe even a deluxe stereoscope with plenty of slides.  This is my favorite class to teach, and I promise to bring in all kinds of toys for show-and-tell.

Lago Maggiore, by John Robert Cozens

Course assignments will include a weekly journal, one short paper, and a term project.
There will also be a midterm and a final.                                                                                                                                                                                          

Series Q (T 2:30-5:00 pm
Brian Barbour
Much of High Modernism was influenced by Nietzsche and took its bearing from his theme that “God is dead.”   Dostoevsky, on the other hand, was a powerful counter-influence with his argument, “If there is no God, then all things are possible.”  These two points of view basically set the boundaries within which great writers explored the travails of religious faith under modern conditions.  This course will explore four distinct ways of being both Modernist and Christian, of presenting the Christian drama and the drama of being Christian in poetry and in fiction.  The course will examine the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and William Faulkner and will take its theological bearings from Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery. Readings will also include the following: Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. Hopkins, Poetry and Prose. Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind. Eliot, Collected Poems, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Selected Essays, Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

ENG 441 002  Studies in Literature: Irish Drama
Series N (TR 2:30-3:45 pm)
Stephanie Boeninger
Prior to the late 19th century, many educated Europeans would have considered Ireland little more than an uneducated and backwards colonial outpost of the British Empire. Playwrights delighted in mocking the uncouth Irish, so much that the “stage Irishman” became a wildly popular comic figure on the British and American stage. Drunken, fiery-tempered, and full of blarney, the stage Irishman became a popular and enduring stereotype of what it meant to be Irish.

Despite, or perhaps in part as a result of, these negative stereotypes, the tiny island of Ireland has become home to one of the world’s most vibrant theatrical cultures. This course will examine how Irish playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries have created their own versions of Irishness: sometimes by accepting (or cashing in on) the popular stereotype and sometimes by challenging it. We will read a wide selection of plays by authors ranging from the well-known figures of the Irish Literary Revival—W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge—to popular playwrights of the present day like Marie Jones, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and Gary Mitchell.  Along the way we will examine the relationship between representations of national identity and nationalism, both during the years when Ireland was fighting for its status as an independent nation and more recently in the violent years of the Northern Irish Troubles. Besides keeping an eye out for reincarnations of the stage Irishman, we will also consider the frequent use of the Irishwoman as a nationalist icon.

This course will examine works of utopian and dystopian fiction of the last one hundred fifty years, as well as relevant literary criticism.  This fiction will comprise "texts" from a variety of different media, including literature, film, television, and video games.  As we analyze these texts, we will be considering the various social and political movements that form the historical contexts of each of these texts, including feminism, Christianity, communism, capitalism, and fascism.  We'll also be thinking about the dizzying rate of technological advance in the 19th and 20th centuries and the dreams (and nightmares!) these advances engendered.  Students will be asked to participate in seminar discussion, co-write a course blog, and conduct a final research project.  Possible authors include Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, Wells, Zamyatin, and LeGuin.

ENG 442 001 Prose Poem
Series L (TR 1-2:15 pm)
Jane Lunin Perel
Designed to be both a literature and a creative writing course.  Introduces students to prose poetry, and traces the development of its tradition both here and abroad.  Scrutinizes this hybrid form and traces its enigmatic history.  Students will also write some prose poems.

We will read Marlowe’s 5 major plays, a few plays by his contemporaries, and several key texts that were major influences on Renaissance literature (Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe, Plato’s Symposium, Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, Montaigne’s Essays, Machiavelli’s The Prince). The course will require a series of short essays along with a major research paper. The class is limited to 15, so we will have plenty of discussion. Given the nature of Marlowe’s plays, we will spend most of our time talking about Scythian megalomaniacs, sociopathic infidels, royal sodomites, and over-educated practitioners of the dark arts. In other words, we’ll have a blast.

ENG 481 001 Seminar:  Toni Morrison (Cross-listed with American Studies, Black Studies, and Women’s Studies)
Series T (M 4-6:30 pm)
Tuire Valkeakari
In this seminar, we will study eight of the ten novels that Toni Morrison has published so far: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and A Mercy. We will also read contemporary Morrison scholarship. We will study Morrison as a literary author who, while writing about history and society, creates memorable portraits of individuals who are caught in swirls of social currents beyond their immediate control and find themselves responding, willingly or unwillingly, to such vicissitudes. As we examine Morrison’s representations of African American history, memory, trauma, and healing, we at the same time investigate her strategies as a creative writer. Morrison’s multivoiced and multilayered lyrical prose offers endless opportunities for discussions of literary style.

ENG 481 002  Seminar:  Whitman & Dickinson
Series D (R 8:30-11:15 am)
Chard deNiord
This seminar will concentrate on the works and lives of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, focusing in particular on their respective “meter making arguments” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) as radical American departures, in both form and content, from the English prosodic tradition of their time. We will examine the very different but complementary arcs of these two poets’ groundbreaking careers, paying particular attention to the verbal nature of their transformative power as America’s first iconoclastic  poets.  In the course of our study, we will explore Whitman’s paradoxical use of the first person as a transpersonal self in contrast to Dickinson’s epigrammatic, often runic speaker who ventures singularly into interiority. The conclusion of this seminar will focus on the question of just how the dramatically different conceits and styles of these two poets established an American poetic sea change that not only presaged modernism, but gave memorable voice to two equally transcendent post Puritan visions that continue to resonate today with enduring social, religious and existential relevance. In addition to reading selected poems from each poet, concentrating in particular on Whitman’s 1855 version of Leaves of Grass and Dickinson’s seminal output between 1861 and1865, we will also read biographical and critical essays. Required texts include: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W.  Franklin, Walt Whitman, edited by Gary Schmidgall, The Passion of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr, and Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds.  

ENG 498 - Senior Thesis
Designed for seniors wishing to undertake a significant research project. Students work with a faculty advisor who will guide them from the planning stages of the thesis to its completion. A written proposal must be approved by a faculty advisor and department chair before registering. The thesis will be evaluated by the advisor and a second reader. Prerequisite: ENG 400.