Fall 2009
(Click Here for Spring 2009 )

ETS 107-1 Living Writers AND ETS 107-2 through 9
W 3:45-6:30
Instructors: Staff
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 114-4 Survey of British Literature since 1789
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Mike Goode
This course will examine over two centuries of Britain 's literary history, covering the literature and culture of the Romantic age, the Victorian age, and the twentieth century. Historical topics will include: political revolution; the industrial revolution; urbanization; evolution; religion; social reform movements; race, class, gender, and sexual politics; nationalism; imperialism; colonialism and its aftermath; the World Wars; and postmodernism. Readings will include novels, poems, plays, and other historical texts, covering writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Derek Walcott, Eavon Boland, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. Assignments will include three five-page papers, short response papers, and a final examination.

ETS 115-1 Topics in British Literary History:
Survey of Global Literatures in English since 1890
TTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Kevin Morrison
This course provides an introduction to global literary studies and to critical writing. Its goal is to introduce you to a range of influential literatures, to enhance your analytic skills of close reading and textual comparison, and to improve your expository writing ability. We will explore representative texts from English-language modernism and its successors: postmodernism and postcolonialism. We will attend to the effects of each tradition on its successors and, reciprocally, the effect of subsequent traditions on our understanding of the implications and deficiencies of previous movements. Colonialism and racism; the powerful desire for literary and social change at the beginning of the twentieth century; cultural responses to World War II; the recovery of previously unspeakable histories; and the creation of new models of liberation are some of the topics we will consider. Readings will include such texts as Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness ; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse ; Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot ; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart ; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name ; Don DeLillo, White Noise ; and a generous sampling of poetry from each literary tradition.

ETS 115-2 Topics in British Literary History:
The Gothic and the Literature of Sensation
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Amy Leal
Before the Gothic was fashion, it was literature. This course will investigate the rise of the Gothic sensibility in the eighteenth century and examine its various permutations over the next two centuries, from Horrid Mysteries to the Romantic mysterium and the Victorian mystery novel. We will begin by indulging in the midnight reading of the eighteenth century, including Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto , Mad Monk Lewis's The Monk , and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho . After reading Jane Austen's brilliant spoof of the genre in Northanger Abbey , we will also examine the second generation of Gothic fiction such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Byron's vampire fragment, Polidori's “The Vampyre,” Coleridge's “Christabel,” and their unholy spawn in the Victorian era: Bram Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's “Carmilla.” Finally, we will take a look at the move from the poets of sensation to the sensation novel, whose motto Wilkie Collins exemplified when he wrote, “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” There will be two long essays, shorter assignments, and a presentation.

ETS 118-1 Survey of American Literature since 1865
MWF 12:45-1:40
Instructor: Rachel Collins
In this course we will examine American literature produced between the Civil War and World War II. During this period increasing urbanization, immigration, and industrialization were shaping American culture and manifesting themselves in American literary production. Our course texts are concerned with urban poverty and growing class conflict, African Americans' "great migration" to the North, contestations over women's social place, and the rapid expansion of a consumer-oriented society. We will pay particular attention to the three major fictional modes of the period—realism, naturalism and modernism–and will place them in their sociohistorical contexts in order to understand how the larger social conflicts and upheavals of the period prompted writers to become dissatisfied with inherited forms of literary representation. In addition to fiction, we will read a sampling of poetry, plays, and nonfiction from this period. Writers will likely include: Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, W.E.B. DuBois, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner, among others.

ETS 119-3 Topics in American Literature:
Modern American Comedy
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht
Tragedy is about dying and death. Comedy is about living and life. Like tragedy, comedy is basically a literary form. Although it is about life, it is not a direct replication of life. The world of comedy is a real place (except in the Theater of the Absurd), but the characters in comedy are generally eccentric. That is why we laugh, and laughter is as cathartic as crying. Inheriting comic traditions from Shakespeare and Shaw, American playwrights have written many fine comedies full of romance and satire, the two basic ingredients of the form. This course will try to determine what exactly is American comedy through a study of plays by American playwrights of different periods. As comedy is often the weapon of minorities, it may be significant that most of the chosen playwrights are or were members of ethnic groups treated unequally by American society in the past and even in the present.

Requirements: Three 1500 word essays and satisfactory attendance and class participation.

ETS 121-1 Introduction to Shakespeare
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Jessica Kuskey
In this introductory course we will read Shakespeare's plays and learn about the world in which he lived and wrote. We will study Elizabethan London, the theater district, the operation and popularity of the theater, and anti-theatrical fear and outrage. We will also consider the kinds of people who populated this world: Shakespeare's literary contemporaries, actors and theater companies, and the diverse audience of theater-goers. A variety of historical documents and film clips will help us to visualize this world. In addition to carefully analyzing the language of Shakespeare's plays, we will learn about their historical and cultural contexts including major cultural paradigms like family and gender roles, racism and hate, authority and power, wealth and social class, marriage and romantic love, and monarchy and sovereignty. Expanding our understanding of Shakespeare's world and reading the plays alongside a variety contextual materials will help us to better understand Katherine's rage in The Taming of the Shrew ; young Prince Hal's slumming in Henry IV, part 1 ; Shylock's abuse in The Merchant of Venice ; the impetuous, hotheaded young men in Romeo and Juliet ; and the topsy-turvy period of licensed misrule in Twelfth Night . This class is discussion based.

ETS 145-1 Reading Popular Culture
MWF 9:30-10:25
Film screening M 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Jonathon Singleton
This course introduces students to theoretical methods for understanding and interpreting popular culture. We will think critically about what counts as "culture," analyze the kinds of meaning that culture produces, and explore different racial, social, and political perspectives on how popular culture shapes our view of ourselves and our world.

Students will learn to apply mass culture, feminist, and Marxist critical theories (among others) to a variety of texts including television, music, film, and internet communities. Assignments will include daily informal writing, two short response papers, and one longer (6-7 page) final essay. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.

ETS 145-2 Reading Popular Culture
MW 12:45-2:05
Film screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Amy Leal
According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “A monster's body is a cultural body” that incarnates a culture's worst fears, fantasies, and taboos. This class will examine the monsters, dreams, and nightmares of popular culture in Britain and America from Frankenstein to Frankenberry cereal, showing how they both inform and are informed by changing conceptions of gender, sex, class, and race. Using theoretical approaches such as feminism, media studies, and cultural studies, students will learn how to read various forms of popular culture critically, including television shows, comics, movies, music, fiction, material culture, and advertisements. In this course, students will examine the literary backgrounds to Anglo-American culture's most ubiquitous monsters—Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the shadowy denizens of nightmares—and then explore their various permutations in popular culture over the years to reveal ideological and aesthetic shifts. As they do so, students will also learn the conventions of academic writing and how to read popular culture critically. Assignments will include a presentation as well as a variety of high and low stakes assignments designed to hone students' critical reading and writing skills, facilitate creativity, and accommodate different learning styles. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.

ETS 145-3 Reading Popular Culture
MWF 11:40-12:35
Film screening M 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Steven Doles
The texts and objects that make up our everyday lives (the popular culture of our everyday lives) are mass produced, mass marketed, and mass mediated. Historically, scholars have been highly skeptical of these texts, seeing them as overly commodified and inferior to high culture. However, within the past several decades a cultural studies model of popular culture has become more prominent, examining the ways people make use of cultural products rather than how cultural products use and exploit them. In this course, we will learn about both sides of this debate, but the emphasis will be on the latter approach. The course will take us from discussions about how to define popular culture and how to recognize the elements that can make a text available for popular appropriation, to looking at actual instances of fandom, including fan fiction and videos. Specific case studies of popular culture appreciation may include such phenomena as comic book fandom or Star Trek conventions, but students will also be encouraged to bring their own experiences and knowledge into discussion and assignments. Assignments will include Blackboard posts every week, short critical papers, and a midterm and final exam. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.

ETS 145-4 Reading Popular Culture
TTh 2:00-3:20
Film screening T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: C.J. Dosch
Many of us live media-saturated lives, but how often do we stop and “read” the ways we engage with and (re)articulate popular texts such as television and film? Through a cultural studies approach, this course will investigate how the production and reception of popular culture texts generate meaning and provide ways of thinking about the world in which we live. Students will become familiar with critical strategies for reading the materials of American culture through historical and analytical approaches. Though emphasizing film and television, the course will also consider music and online sources such as YouTube and fansites as important locations of meaning-making and circulation. Assignments will include weekly discussion board posts, short response papers, and midterm and final exams. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.

ETS 145-5 Reading Popular Culture
TTH 5:00-6:20
Film screening T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Michael Dwyer
As Stuart Hall has argued, popular culture is one of the sites of struggle over cultural power and influence, as well as the stakes to be won or lost in that struggle. So then, how does one read  popular culture, critically and analytically? This class will operate largely within the tradition of cultural studies, which is concerned with the ways popular culture challenges, reinforces, complicates, or transforms the way our society works. This is not simply a course about popular culture—it's a course that explores diverse and overlapping practices of reading .

This course aims to interrogate the way myriad products of popular culture—films, TV shows, music, web sites, stand-up comedy, fashion, advertisements, etc.—interact with “the people” they address. Are consumers mindless drones, sopping up the messages placed before them? Can audiences re-invent popular culture texts for their own purposes in new and complex ways? In pursuit of these questions (and more), we will consider a wide array of popular culture texts, as well as multiple theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture. Assignments will include weekly writing, three short papers, and a final essay. The weekly screening scheduled for this course is required.

ETS 151-1 Interpretation of Poetry
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructors: Bruce Smith & Sarah Harwell
The course will consist of discussion of poems from the various traditions of poetry. We're interested in what makes a poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the emotions. We're interested, too, in what provokes and challenges us, what gives it 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 six 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 and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a poet and present the work of the poet in class. The presentation will be the basis of a longer paper on that poet. Memorization of a single poem will also be required. Attendance at readings on campus is encouraged. Emphasis in discussions will be on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.

ETS 152-2 Interpretation of Drama
TTh 8:00-9:20
and
ETS 152-3
T Th 9:30-10:50
Instructor: William West
Ritual, pageant, mime, dance, vocal display: all have been instrumental in creating drama – a powerful mirror reflecting the lives and customs of a people and of individuals. This course examines this 'mirror' as it has evolved in European and American culture from the Greek Drama of ancient Athens to the present, beginning with a reading of Aristotle's Poetics , and continuing with one of the great 'problem' plays of Shakespeare, Measure for Measure . We will consider the beginnings of modern drama with two plays by Henrik Ibsen ( A Doll's House and Ghosts ), followed by five great twentieth-century American plays: Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night , Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour , Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge , August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, and David Mamet's Oleanna .

ETS 153-1 Interpretation of Fiction
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Rinku Chatterjee
This course will teach you to critically analyze fiction. We will read the texts not only for their style and the formal aspects of their compositions (plot, characterization, language), but also to examine the historical context of their composition, and the manner in which the meanings of texts change in the political context of their readership. We will be reading texts from the eighteenth century to the present. This is a discussion based class and a writing intensive course.

ETS 153-3 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 12:45-2:05
Film screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Lizz Porter
In this class students will be presented with pairs of related works of print, television, and film in order to explore how we read different types of texts, how the reading of one text informs our reading of another, and how, even though we may think we are engaging with a film or television show on purely escapist terms, we are never passive receptors but are always shaping and being shaped by what's in front of us. In uncovering the many interpretive layers inherent in translating a work in print to a work on screen, we must not only learn to read texts but must also learn to read ourselves as readers. To aid us in our close readings and discussions, we will familiarize ourselves with many components of fiction such as plot, character, genre, figurative language and narrative structure. Examples of text pairs to be covered include the television show House and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; the graphic novel and movie The Watchmen ; and various Simpsons episodes based on classic works such as Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven.” The scheduled screening for this course is required.

ETS 153-2 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 2:15-3:35
ETS 153-7
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Jolynn Parker
In this course we will work to develop an understanding of what fiction is, how it acts upon us, and how we act upon it. Careful examination of plots and masterplots, narration and focalization, characterization, symbol, and figurative language will help us become better critical readers of literary convention and close readers of language. Structured around the topic of marriage and family, readings will include Foster's The Coquette , Austen's Pride and Prejudice , Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , Bechdel's Fun Home , and short stories by Hawthorne, Conan Doyle, Wharton, Faulkner, Walker, and Lahiri, among others. Assignments will include close readings, two short papers, and a longer final paper.

ETS 154-1 Interpretation of Film
MW 2:15-3:35
Film Screening M 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
ETS 154-2 & 3 Discussion section Th 3:30-4:25
ETS 154-4 & 5 Discussion section F 9:30-10:25
ETS 154-6 Discussion section F 10:35-11:25
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interpretation of film. Regarded as the quintessential medium of the last century, cinema has profoundly shaped the ways in which we see the world and understand our place within it. Focusing principally on classic and contemporary English-language cinema, we will investigate precisely how meaning is produced in cinema. The course integrates a close attention to the specific aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of film with a wide-ranging exploration of the social and cultural contexts that shape how we make sense of and take pleasure in films. We shall also devote attention to questions of history: How may one interpret a film in relation to its historical context? How should the history of cinema be written? Film history incorporates not only the films that have been produced over the past one hundred years, but also an understanding of how the practice of moviegoing has transformed over time. No prior film experience is required. The weekly scheduled screening for this course is required.

ETS 181-2 Class and Literary Texts
TTH 5:00-6:20
Instructor: Tanushree Ghosh
In this course we shall analyze literary and cultural representations of class. Through our examination of instances picked from literature, non-fiction, and film, we shall see how class identities are constructed, affirmed, and/or interrogated. We'll focus on the long nineteenth century to discuss how capitalistic modes of production, the rise of consumer culture, and empire impacted the construction of class as a marker of difference. We shall also engage with Marxist and post-Marxist theorizations of class divisions and privilege and use them as critical lenses for the texts we encounter. Some of the texts we'll read as part of this course are: Austen's Emma , Thackeray's Vanity Fair , selections from Mayhew's London Labour and London Poor , Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets , and Forster's Howards End .

ETS 184-1 Ethnicity & Literary Texts
MW 3:45-5:05
and
ETS 184-3
MW 5:15-6:35
Instructor: Meera Lee
This course will seek to understand the historical, cultural, and political representations of ethnicity through the examination of literary texts. In this trajectory, students will investigate to what degree stereotypes and ethnocentric representations come into play in relation to ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, and religion. We will also try to examine the complexity of legal ethnicity-minority relation and the contradictions of the exclusion-inclusion claims in social agendas that promote diversity in order to ask whether ethnicity is a politically constructed notion from a dominant perspective, or a mechanism to encourage political hegemony. Especially given that the current geopolitical circumstances are very complex, the course attempts to explore the narrative of ethnicity not only from the western multicultural perspective, but also from within cultures both inside and outside the west, particularly in the transnational context. The literary texts selected for the course will include a broad range of contemporary ethnic and multicultural novels, films, and documentaries. We will, tentatively, read works by Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, Orhan Pamuk, etc., and watch films including Children of Men , Hiroshima Mon Amour as well as documentaries. There will be some mandatory film screenings on Monday evenings.

ETS 184-2 Ethnicity & Literary Texts
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant
This course takes a close look at Latino texts that set out to narrate the self, focusing on the question of Latino identity as a subject of investigation, the difficulty that the project of narrating the self poses at the level of form, the sociopolitical background that frames the rise of life-writing as the preeminent writing activity of our times, and the critical problem that any representation of the self entails. Authors will include Norma E. Cantu, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cherrie Moraga, Edward Rivera, Richard Rodriguez, Jose Yglesias, Esmeralda Santiago, Nicholasa Mohr, Gloria Anzaldua, Rafael Campos, Julia Alvarez, and Gustavo Perez-Firmat, among others. Through a close reading of their texts, the course will explore the ways in which Latino and Latina writers deploy autobiographical representation as a cultural metaphor.

ETS 192-3 Gender & Literary Texts
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey
In this course students will read and analyze the portrayal and role of gender in a collection of literary texts, focusing on the ethnic, cultural, racial, sexual, historical, and creative implications of gender in relation to the texts' writers and characters. The selected literature includes novels, poetry, essays, drama, short stories, and a graphic novel by writers from the United States , Great Britain , and the Middle East . Texts will likely include works by Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, David Henry Hwang, and Marjane Satrapi, among others. This course is reading intensive, so students should be ready to handle rigorous reading assignments, accompanied by writing analytical papers that reflect their understanding of the issues raised by the texts. The main focus of this course revolves around three thematic divisions: Gender, Writing, and Creativity; Gender and War; and Gender, Race, and Sexuality.

ETS 192-4 Gender and Literary Texts
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Gohar Siddiqui
In this course we will be analyzing the representation and construction of gender through various cultural texts. In addition to paying attention to how constructions of masculinity and femininity shift through history and across cultures, we will also analyze gender in terms of its intersections with other identity categories such as race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality. Texts will likely include but are not limited to fiction (Bronte's Jane Eyre , Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea , and Austen's Pride and Prejudice ) and film ( Bridget Jones's Diary and Fight Club ).

This class is discussion based and writing assignments are designed to help you develop close reading skills. The assignments will include short papers, one long essay, and weekly Blackboard posts in addition to the midterm and final exam. There will be some mandatory film screenings, mostly during the second half of the semester, to be held on Thursday evenings.

ETS 215-1 Sophomore Poetry Workshop
T 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Michael Burkard
In this workshop we will discuss poems from class members on a weekly basis. There will also be assigned readings of much contemporary poetry. We will also study form and prosody issues. This is a discussion class. Students will conduct weekly presentations regarding the reading we are doing.

ETS 217-1 Sophomore Fiction Workshop
Th 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Phil LaMarche
This course is an intensive workshop in the art and craft of writing fiction, primarily the short story. We will read each other's work, as well as the work of more established contemporary writers. Students are expected to do extensive revisions and to participate in discussion.

ETS 235-1 Classics of World Literature I
TTh 3:30-4:50
OPEN TO HONORS STUDENTS ONLY
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will introduce you to some of the most valued and enduring literary works from cultures around the world. We will begin with some of the earliest surviving texts from Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures ( Gilgamesh and Egyptian love poems), and go on to read sections from the Hebrew Bible (the “Old” Testament), Sanskrit and Greek epics ( The Ramayana and The Iliad ), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucius and Chuang Tze), Greek and Roman lyric poetry (Sappho, Catullus, Horace, and others), The New Testament, Saint Augustine's Confessions , Tang and Song dynasty Chinese poetry (Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and others), and Japanese (women's) lyric (Murasaki Shikibu and Ono No Komachi).

This is an interdisciplinary course that will feature a number of guest lecturers who are distinguished scholars of the books and cultures they will talk about. Each week will feature one lecture period, followed by one discussion period. You may choose to write traditional interpretive essays or more personal (though probing) responses to the readings. There will be a midterm and a final exam.

We will consider these remarkable works with several questions in mind: What is a classic and why have these books attained this status? What are the historical, cultural contexts of these works and their reception over centuries? What moral and religious values do these works impart and are these values relevant to our own? HONORS

ETS 242-1 Reading and Interpretation
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
and
ETS 242-2
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
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.