SPRING 2008

ETS 107 Living Writers
W 3:45-6:30
This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers' work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers.


ETS 113 Survey of British Literature, Beginnings to 1789
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Jon Singleton
This introductory course provides an overview of British literature from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution (an event that was very important to the English). In one sense, then, it's about very old texts, but in another sense its concerns are much more modern. The study of English literature, as a discipline, did not fully take shape until the nineteenth century—a time when the little island nation of England had become the head of the sprawling British Empire . The texts that those early "English" scholars identified as part of the British literary tradition were, therefore, texts that spoke in one way or another to their own understanding of their place in the world. This is still part of the reason that we study literature today: it helps us feel like we better understand how far we have (or haven't) come in the history of human experience. At the same time, whether we notice it or not, the literature we read is tangled up with the societies that produced it—their religion, politics, nationalism, and everyday life. British Literature I offers a chance to read literary texts from Beowulf to Shakespeare's King Lear to Milton 's Paradise Lost to Swift's Gulliver's Travels , while exploring the social concerns these texts engage—both for their original readers and for us today.


ETS 115 Topics in British Literary History: English Romantics and Victorians
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Peter Mortenson
This course will explore the cultural changes in England following the French Revolution and into the Industrial Revolution. Romantics tended to emphasize the self and subjectivity; the Victorians tended to emphasize the social framework. We will examine how assumptions about the order of things in nature and society and about authorship are formulated in the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Dickens, Mill, Arnold, Browning, and others. Requirements will include short papers and two exams.


ETS 117 Survey of American Literature, Beginnings to 1865
MWF 9:30-10:25
Instructor: Michael O'Connor
This course will examine a range of literary texts produced in the area that is now the United States and written during the period between European contact and the Civil War, 1492-1865. At least since John Winthrop's famous 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity”, with its vision of the new colony as a “City on a Hill,” writers have tried to define what kind of a society America is and what an American is. This course will read many of the attempts to address these issues and place them into their historical context alongside contact and conflict between Europeans and Native Americans, the American Revolution and subsequent nation-building, concerns about industrialization and class, as well as struggles over slavery and servitude. We will explore conflicts about race, ethnicity, religion, and changing gender roles and mores as they impact these literary texts. We will be reading sermons, autobiography, nonfiction, novels, poetry, short stories, and sketches and considering how they manifest, explain, and struggle with the question of what America is and will be.

This course is a writing-intensive course. Assignments will include weekly responses, two short essays, a longer paper written from a submitted proposal, and short oral presentations.


ETS 119-1 Topics in U.S. Literary History:
Savagism and Civilization: Representing Indians
TTH 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Scott Lyons
This course will examine the idea and image of the Indian as it has been produced by European and American writers, scientists, and ethnologists from pre-colonial times to the present. Of particular concern will be the persistence of two connected ideas that have long organized the ways Americans have thought about themselves in relation to others, and especially Native peoples: savagism and civilization . These two concepts are not just opposites; they are intimately linked, and each provides the other with meaning. Further, the ideas of savagism and civilization have not been a stable formation but rather a binary opposition that shifts and changes its meaning over time in order to serve certain interests. We will study the history of these concepts as they have played a significant role in the development of American life, politics, and culture, beginning with European anxieties regarding “barbarians” and “cannibals,” moving through struggles over the “frontier,” and concluding with “postindian” critiques of savagism and civilization in the twentieth century. Authors include Christopher Columbus, Mary Rowlandson, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Lydia Maria Child, Lewis Henry Morgan, Zitkala Sa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and others.


ETS 119- 5 Topics in U.S. Literary History: Fictions of U.S. Regionalism
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course introduces students to various fictions of U.S. regionalism. We will begin with the surge of popular interest in regional fiction in the late nineteenth century and follow the genre through struggles over regional identity and geographic and social place that occurred in the twentieth century. Different sections of the course will be devoted to fiction of New England, the South, the Midwest and the far West. Throughout the course, we will examine how the movements of peoples in and out of regions as well as new forms of trans-regional (and transnational) market and media connection have both solidified and threatened the historical and mythic status of the nation's regional identities. I am still working on the reading list but writers are likely to include: Willa Cather, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Louise Erdrich, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Joel Chandler Harris, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Gloria Naylor, Frank Norris, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright.


ETS 119- 6 Topics in U.S. Literary History: Post-1945 American Fiction
TTH 3:30-4:50
Instructor: David Yaffe
When the New York Times Book Review recently polled hundreds of writers and critics to determine the "best work of fiction" over the past 25 years, a debate ensued. We will use the resulting controversial list as a starting point for this course, while also looking back further to the beginning of the period after World War II in search of the best. As we do so, we will examine how the "best" is chosen and which texts are likely to remain relevant in the future. Readings may include Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, and Mary Gaitskill. Particular attention will be paid to bringing these novels and short stories to the "way we live now," but we will also put these works in their proper context. We will examine relevant developments in music and film (competing and complementary media in an era like no other) as well as attitudes about race, sex, and politics. How a cultural moment results in a particular literary style will also be important. Two papers, quizzes, and a presentation are required.


ETS 121 Introduction to Shakespeare
MWF 11:40-12:35
Instructor: Rinku Chatterjee
Why do we still read Shakespeare? What is it about Shakespeare that continues to find an audience four hundred years since he wrote? This course will attempt to answer these questions as we meet Macbeth, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Feste and many others while reading the plays of Shakespeare and situating him in his literary and cultural milieu. The only requirement for this course is students' willingness to engage with texts.


ETS 145-1 Reading Popular Culture
MW 11:40-12:35
Film Screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Steven Cohan
Discussion Sections:
145-6 F 9:30-10:25
145-7 F 10:35-11:30
145-8 F 11:40-12:35
145-9 F 11:40-12:35
This course pivots around the question of how to read the media-oriented culture which we inhabit. Using the methodology of cultural studies—which operates on the premise that lived culture and its artifacts are appropriate objects of academic study, as readable as any literary or artistic text—the course will introduce students to critical strategies for thinking about the world in which they live, and for approaching the work of popular culture historically as well as analytically. It will concentrate specifically on film and television—on popular narratives in their dominant mode of circulation, which, for participants and observers alike, comprises so much of the materiality of American culture today both in the US and globally. We will pay close attention to the textual features and conventions that compose a film or TV show as an entertainment form, while also investigating its production (considering the import of the corporate enterprises that produce film and television, for instance) and reception (looking at fan formations on the internet or at YouTube parodies to see what kinds of alternate meanings they construct). The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.


ETS 151 Interpretation of Poetry
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Bruce Smith
The course will consist of discussion of poems from the various traditions of poetry. I'm interested in what makes a poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the emotions. I'm interested too in what provokes and challenges us, what gives a poem its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech.

Students will be asked to write 8 short two-page papers in which they examine closely a single poem by a poet from the text. Students may opt to write more papers (up to ten) and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a contemporary poet and present the work of the poet in class. Attendance at readings on campus is encouraged. Emphasis in discussions is on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.


ETS 152 Interpretation of Drama
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: William West


ETS 153-2 Interpretation of Fiction
TTH 8:00-9:20
and
ETS 153-9
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: William D. West
The course will discuss the nature of narrative (story-telling and plot), fiction and the novel. Having established these boundaries, we shall then study examples from different historical periods and cultural traditions, all of which have as their focus the societal role of women. Novels for study and discussion will include Jane Austen's Emma , Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd , Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , and André Gide's two novellas, The Pastoral Symphony and Straight is the Gate (in English translation ).


ETS 153- 5 Interpretation of Fiction
TTH 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Amy Leal
This course centers around the theme of “Dreams, Visions, and Awakenings” and is designed to introduce you to the art of interpreting fiction as you hone your critical reading and writing skills. Students will learn how authors use symbolism, figurative language, characterization, ambiguity, narrative variation, fantasy, image, and biography to convey meaning. To anchor our inquiry into the shifting realm of dreams and visions, this course will be divided into five thematic units: “Dreams, Writing, and Fantasy,” “The Visual and the Visionary,” “Dream vs. Reality,” “Erotic Dreams and Taboos,” and “Obsessions and Doubles.” Authors will include Jorge Luis Borges, Oscar Wilde, Zora Neale Hurston, Lewis Carroll, Maxine Hong Kingston, Edgar Allan Poe, Tracy Chevalier, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

For each unit, students will be presented with the instructor's topic introduction to the readings; objectives for instruction and critical paradigms for approaching the primary texts; and various web, print, and multimedia resources. Assignments will include short reading question assignments, a presentation, and three longer critical papers.


ETS 153- 7 Interpretation of Fiction
WF 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Tanushree Ghosh
This course will teach you how to interpret and critically analyze fiction. We will work to identify how techniques like plot, narrative, characterization, imagery, and diction are employed in a literary work to produce meaning. This course encourages you to examine closely how stylistic choices become ideological decisions that attempt to shape our responses to the text. Raising such questions while being aware of your own location as a reader will attune you to how the processes of writing, reading and even critical analysis are culturally constructed. The course will be structured around the topic of “underworlds.” How do underworlds affect the way we imagine ourselves and our communities? Do we depend on certain secret spaces to validate our normalities? Or do these secret spaces sometimes take on a life of their own and interrogate or even endanger the very certainties of our existence? Are "underworlds" just dangerous spaces tucked away in the corners of a known city that you suddenly stumble on or are they psychopathic mindscapes that evoke in us a horror of identification? How have imaginative constructions of such spaces through time contributed to the way we imagine ideas such as the "self," "home," or even "nation"?


ETS 154-1 Interpretation of Film
MW 3:45-5:05
Film Screening M 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Michael D. Dwyer
Nearly everyone is familiar with watching films, but how does one interpret films? This course is designed to serve as an introduction to the skills to identify and interpret the ways in which films produce meaning. Focusing primarily on English-language Hollywood films, this course will introduce you both to the formal aspects of cinema—mise en scene, cinematography, editing, and sound—as well as to the practices of production, exhibition, and reception that guide our understanding of “what movies mean.” Assignments will include weekly Blackboard posts, short response papers, a midterm and final exam, and a final essay. Weekly screenings are mandatory. No prior experience with film studies is necessary. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.


ETS 154-3 Interpretation of Film
MWF 10:35-11:30
Film Screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Cristina Stasia
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interpretation of film. Using films selected because they illustrate certain issues of interpretation, the course combines close attention to the aesthetic, formal, and rhetorical aspects of film with an investigation of the social and cultural contexts that shape how we make sense of and take pleasure from films.

This course is recommended for students wishing to take more specialized and advanced courses in the field of film studies. No prior film experience is required. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.

Films to be screened may include: Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), She Shoulda Said No! (1949), Written on the Wind (1956), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), The Birds (1962), Showgirls (1991), Run Lola Run (1998), Live Free or Die Hard (2007)


ETS 15 4-4 Interpretation of Film
MWF 10:35-11:30
Film Screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Charles Robinson
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interpretation of film. In little more than a hundred years, cinema has radically transformed the ways in which we view and understand the world. In this class, we will be examining films as texts rather than merely watching films for entertainment. Our primary question will be, “How is meaning produced in cinema?” To this end, we will look closely at all the formal aspects of film—mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound, and editing. Meaning, however, does not occur in a vacuum. Hence, we will also explore the various social and cultural contexts that shape our understanding and enjoyment of cinema. This will include units on genre, reception, and ideological criticism. No previous experience with film is necessary. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.


ETS 181 Class and Literary Texts
TTH 11:00-12:50
Instructor: Rachel Collins
What is "class" and how is it represented in American literature and cultural practice? How can we critically interpret representations of class in ways that make visible the cultural assumptions and material realities that fuel them? In this course we will explore various meanings of "work" and "social class" and contextualize these concepts historically, politically, and culturally through close engagement with fiction, theory, film, and television in the United States . As we think critically about the cultural myths of equality and a “classless society," we'll explore the notion of an "American Dream" as a fantasy about the parameters of upward mobility and use it to unpack normative cultural assumptions about class in the United States. We'll read "class transvestism" narratives and probe the rationale for "going undercover" to explore class differences. We'll also read within the genre of "proletarian fiction" from the 1930s and analyze the ways in which various representations of classed experience can constitute protest of, or complicity with, prevailing power structures. As we read historically, we'll regularly return to cultural texts from the present moment in order to assess the continuing relevance of these issues to contemporary life in the United States .


ETS 182- 5 Race and Literary Texts: The critical importance of race
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Michael O'Connor
In Against Race , Paul Gilroy begins from the premise that race is a socially constructed category and goes on to suggest that race should be abandoned as a category of study. He argues that the study of race maintains race as a meaningful category and therefore perpetuates the negative social effects of race. This course will, like Gilroy, begin from the assumption that race is a social fiction. However, this course will operate under the premise that despite its social construction race is central to the workings of American culture and should therefore be central to the study of American cultural production. Race intersects with all the vital political issues in America today. Race is also directly related to the aesthetics of American literary and cultural forms. Close attention to the role race, in all its permutations, plays in the American literary tradition will provide us with greater insight into the various implications of the texts and their mutually informing relationship with American society.

A tentative reading list Sherman Alexie, Frank Chin, Sandra Cisnero, Edgar Allen Poe, and Colson Whitehead.


ETS 192-2 Gender and Literary Texts
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Sarah Russo
This course is an introduction to gender studies in literary texts. Gender studies examine how gender is imagined and deployed in social life, which includes literary texts. We will trace the historical development of gender—conceived as biological imperative and as a set of social roles and behaviors—in novels, short fiction, and nonfiction. In the readings, we will investigate the role and representation of gender in characters, authors, formal qualities of the texts, and cultural responses to the texts.

We begin with two major nineteenth-century novels of development— Jane Eyre (1847) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). We continue with turn-of-the-century fiction and nonfiction pieces that address gender in relation to new approaches to psychology, sociology, and economics. Finally, we read two twentieth-century novels that re-view gender through the lenses of imperialism, race, and class. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) revisits Jane Eyre from the perspective of England 's colonization of Jamaica . The Bluest Eye (1970) complicates the experience of gender through the legacy of American racism and class stratification. This course is discussion-based and writing intensive.


ETS 192-3 Gender and Literary Texts
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Soumitree Gupta
This course explores how dominant as well as subversive expressions of gender have been understood, experienced, and appropriated in everyday life across various historical and cultural locations. What is “gender?” Is gender biologically determined, or is it culturally constructed? Is gender a fixed, universal set of social norms, or is it a process, a playful performance of those norms? What is the relationship between the body, “sex,” language, and gender identity? How do prevailing differences of class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity in a given space and time intersect with gender identities in that particular historical juncture? Is there a connection between gender, nation, and empire? We will examine these questions across a broad range of cultural texts – including but not limited to fiction, memoir, poetry, creative non-fiction, and popular visual culture, like films, stars, and fashion – selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as contemporary times.


ETS 215 Sophomore Poetry Workshop
TH 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Charles Martin
We will commence, or continue to develop, a lifelong connection with poetry by reading, writing, and discussing poems in a workshop setting. With regard to reading, our goal will be to learn how to read poems better than we do now, with increased understanding and appreciation. With regard to writing, we will explore a variety of different kinds of poetry, old and new, formal and free, aiming first at fluency, then at accomplishment. We will begin each class with a discussion of a poem or two written by poets from outside the class, using them as examples or models for analysis and performance; we will continue by reading and discussing work of student poets.


ETS 217 Sophomore Fiction Workshop
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Phil LaMarche
In this course we will analyze the multiple ways a short story can be written. Although it is impossible to teach you to be a great writer, it is possible to teach you the ways in which published writers have organized their thoughts and ideas onto the page. I will challenge you to value the sentences in a story, not just the characters and plot. Fine writers take the time to sharpen every word.

You will write several short exercises and two longer stories. At the end of the semester I expect each student to revise and resubmit one of the two longer stories that you submitted to the workshop in the course of the semester. You will also analyze and critique your peers' work and published stories. You will be required to write at least 350 meaningful/helpful/important words of feedback for each story we workshop and you will lead a discussion about a published story of your choice. Remember that your writing will be shared and scrutinized—don't turn in anything that you're not prepared to change.


ETS 236 Classics of World Literature II
TTH 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will introduce you to a number of the most highly valued literary works of the past thousand years from cultures around the world. Starting with the Persian poetry and the African Epic of Son-Jara, and moving to the formative geniuses of Early Modern Europe such as Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, the reading will proceed in roughly chronological sequence to include the 17th-century Mexican Renaissance poet Juana de la Cruz, Voltaire, and more recent works such as African and African Americans orature, Goethe, Austen, Dickinson, Ghalib, Tagore, Chekhov, Akhmatova, Borges, and the Chinese writer Lu Xun. Each week you will hear a lecture delivered by a distinguished faculty member on a work related to his or her expertise. Then in seminar you will discuss the lectures and works in greater depth. We will investigate the notion of literary merit in relation to historical context. Social and religious ramifications of the readings will include questions about representations of morality and religious revelation, as well as standards of beauty and ideas about what art is and what it does. Careful attention to the interrelation of works from different cultural systems will help to elucidate the workings of cultural forces such as colonialism and imperialism in the production and reception of literature. Underlying the goals of the course is the belief that a vital part of any education must be the training of sensibility, the enlargement of the capacity for aesthetic experience, and the ability to make judgments regarding the quality of written and oral expression. ETS 235 is not a prerequisite.


ETS 242-1 Reading and Interpretation
TTH 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
and
ETS 242-2
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Erin Mackie
ETS 242 introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it—and the difference that makes. Its goal, in other words, is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one mode or method of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively, and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep, and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways texts mean and the ways readers produce meaning. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation; author/ity, textuality, and reading; subjectivity; and culture and history.