FALL 2008
(Click Here for Spring 2008)

ETS 107-1 Living Writers
AND
ETS 107-2 through 7
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 113-1 Survey of British Literature to 1789
TTH 5:00-6:20
Instructor : Elizabeth Porter
This introductory course provides an overview of British literature from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the French Revolution. Throughout the semester we will interpret the texts we read as individual literary artifacts and also situate them historically, since understanding when and how texts are produced is essential to understanding how they were shaped and the role they played in shaping the literature that succeeded them. We'll cover some of the most famous texts written during this period, including titles such as Beowulf , Shakespeare's King Lear , Milton's Paradise Lost , and Swift's Gulliver's Travels , but we'll also attend to the lesser-known (but equally interesting) texts that appeared in-between. Although these certainly are old texts, they are concerned with topics that are still surprisingly relevant to our modern conception of the world we live in. Knowing these texts, then, is not just about knowing history and the literature of the past, but is also a key to understanding and interpreting the present.  

ETS 114-2 Survey of British Literature since 1789
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor : Jessica Kuskey
This course is a survey of British literature since 1789, broadly organized into the Romantic Era, Victorian, and early-Twentieth Century periods. The curse of the albatross; a murdered Duchess immortalized in a painting; goblin men seducing young girls; an Englishman discovering the secrets of darkest Africa; Mrs. Dalloway's party—these are five story threads from fictions and poems we will encounter in our survey. We will read and analyze essays, novels, short stories, and poems with an eye to the period's most influential historical events and social issues: the French Revolution, industrialization, the Woman Question, evolution, and Imperialism. This introductory course is discussion-based, and writing assignments are designed to develop close reading skills.  

ETS 115-1 Topics in British Literature: Modern British Comedy
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor : Sanford Sternlicht
This course is about comedy as drama: literature for stage performance. It will attempt to determine what is modern British comedy through the works of playwrights including George Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward, Joe Orton, Willy Russell, and Caryl Churchill. Comedy theory will be discussed in depth. Romance and Satire will be differentiated. A minimum of seven plays will be read. The historical contexts and the political implications of these comedies will also be addressed. Gender values and treatment will signify in the course. Four essays will be assigned. An attendance requirement will be enforced.  

ETS 115-2 British Literary History: Survey of African Literature
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor : Cecil A. Abrahams
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the writers of Africa and to become familiar with the historical, social, political, and economic imperatives that drive African societies. Books such as Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), God's bits of wood (Ousmane Sembene), Weep not, child (Ngugi wa Thiong'o), Joys of Motherhood (Buchi Emecheta), A Walk in the Night (Alex La Guma), When Rain Clouds Gather (Bessie Head), and Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga) will be read carefully to discover their literary quality and their insights into African societies. Themes such as colonialism, racism, sexism, and the struggle for personal and national liberation from societal and national domination will be studied. 


ETS 117-1 Survey of American Literature to 1865
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor : Charles Robinson
In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, a French immigrant to New York , posed the vexed question, “What is an American”? Some fifty years later, prominent American scholar and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, with similar vexation, prophesied the appearance of the “American scholar.” As Crevecoeur and Emerson show, people living in  North America have long struggled to define, understand, and codify the qualities that make them “American”; this struggle continues today. 

This course will focus on how this struggle is enacted in texts written between 1492 and 1865, from the European discovery of the continent to the Civil War. We will examine scenes of contact and conflict between European colonizers and indigenous American peoples; debates about slavery; struggles over religion, structures of class and rank, and the role of women; the American Revolution and the formation of the new nation; and the Civil War. In the process, we will consider how sermons, poetry, autobiography, short stories, novels, and nonfiction tracked, explained, and struggled to understand American identity. No prior experience with American literature necessary.


ETS 118-3 Survey of American Literature since 1865
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor : Soumitree Gupta
In this course, we will examine a range of US literature produced between 1865 and now. This period has seen multiple and continual shifts in the definitions of “Americanness” and the “American way of life,” stirred by major events in US history. Some of these are rapid industrialization and urbanization at the turn of the twentieth century paving way for corporate globalization at the turn of the twenty-first; changing patterns of mass migration and immigration within and to the nation; US imperialist ventures; and organized social and political movements throughout the period. This course will survey, from a postcolonial vantage-point, how social-political discourses of “Americanness” have been taken up and/or contested in both “canonical” and “marginal” US literatures of the period. The readings will range across the major literary genres of the period – fiction, poetry, drama, and even “Para-literature” (like Spiegelman's graphic memoir, Maus ). Along the way, we will also examine the cultural politics embedded in the formations of canons and institutions like American Studies, African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Literary Studies et al.

This is a writing-intensive course. Assignments will include close textual readings, a final long paper, and journal entries on Blackboard throughout the semester.

ETS 119-1 Topics in U.S. Literary History: Modernity and Place in American Fiction
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor : Rachel Collins
Between 1890 and 1940 the physical world in which Americans lived was dramatically transformed. The United States completed its shift from a largely rural to a self-consciously urban society, the American frontier was declared “closed,” and new technologies like plate glass, coupled with an increasing reliance on automobiles, transformed experiences of both urban and suburban streets. This course will focus on Progressive Era and New Deal Era fiction that foregrounds the varying experiences of American geography and space during a time period that was experienced by many Americans as distinctly “modern.” Specifically, we will explore how writers depict the relationship between self, place, modernity, and society. To do so we will read extensively around our primary fictional texts, giving special attention to literary criticism, spatial theory, and historical archives in order to flesh out our understanding of the fictional worlds depicted in early twentieth century American novels .

Primary texts will likely include Willa Cather's My Antonia , Mike Gold's Jews Without Money , Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie , Richard Wright's Native Son , Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt , and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth .


ETS 119-2 Topics in U.S. Literary History: Irish-American Literature
MWF 9:30-10:25
Instructor : Mike O'Connor
“Everybody is Irish on St. Patrick's Day” is seen and heard throughout America in the month of March. Irishness has moved from a threat to an identity so seamlessly integrated into American culture that anyone can try it on. How has this happened? From the Irish that formed the earliest ethnic groups to arrive in the U.S. through the huge numbers of Irish immigrants after the famine of 1847, Irishnness has redefined what it means to be American. Throughout American history, struggles over race and class have been negotiated around Irishness. Contemporary re-tellings of Irish-American history, such as Far and Away or The Gangs of New York , continue to use Irishness to explore what it means to be American. This course will explore the history of Irish-American literature and attempt to unpack how it has explored, defined, and mobilized the complicated sign of Irishness. Beginning with early American texts and working our way through the famine generation and up to the contemporary moment, we will consider the continuities and ruptures in Irish ethnic and cultural identity .

We will likely read Charles Cannon, Mary Anne Sadlier, James T. Farrell, Elizabeth Cullinan, William Kennedy, and Colum McCann.


ETS 121-1 Introduction to Shakespeare
MW 2:15-3:35
ETS 121-2 Discussion Section
F 9:30-10:25
ETS 121-4 and 5 Discussion Sections
F 10:35-11:30
Instructor : Dympna Callaghan
This course offers an intensive introduction to the dramatic works of arguably the world's greatest writer, William Shakespeare. In this class, we will read six of his major works as well as some of the historical and critical writings that inform and elucidate them. We will pay particular attention to the historical, literary, and theatrical contexts of Shakespeare's plays. You need to be committed to careful and sustained critical reading because you may find the readings difficult largely because the English language has changed since the 16th-17th centuries. Every effort will be made to make both the plays and the contextual documents accessible to you, but please be ready for a reading and learning experience that could be challenging, as well as rewarding and exciting.

Lectures will be held on MW; Discussion groups will be held on Friday.


ETS 145-2 Reading Popular Culture
MW 12:45-2:05
Film Screening W 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, and its study involves a consideration of 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 how our society works.

This course aims to interrogate the way products of popular culture—films, TV shows, music, web sites, fashion, advertisements, etc—interact with “the people” it addresses. 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, 3 short papers, and a final essay.


ETS 145-5 Reading Popular Culture
TTH 11:00-12:20
Film Screening T 7:00-9:50
Instructor : Tanushree Ghosh
In this course, we will examine a broad range of popular culture artifacts that proliferate in the world around us and analyze how they influence/inform our socio-cultural definition. We will begin by asking questions like: Who produces pop culture? What is the difference between mass culture, subculture, and pop culture? How does our conception of popular culture change through time? Does the popular ever become canonical? We will then go on to complicate our understanding of popular culture by looking at its negotiation of issues like class, gender and ethnicity. In addition to U.S. popular culture, we will also examine the forms pop culture takes in the global context and examine whether the meaning of cultural artifacts changes when they cross boundaries. The final aim of this course is to sensitize you to the many ways we are not only passive receptors of culture but also active contributors in the process of cultural production. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory.


ETS 145-7 Reading Popular Culture
TTh 2:00-3:20
Film Screening
T 7:00-9:50
Instructor : Gohar Siddiqui
Cinema, TV and the Internet—vehicles of popular culture—are the main objects of study for this course. We are surrounded by media-oriented popular culture which affects and inflects our social and cultural identities. In this course, you will learn how to read, interpret and analyze the various texts of popular culture as texts that negotiate the issues of class, gender, race and sexuality and develop the ability to critically analyze them. 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 you to critical strategies for thinking about the world in which you live, and for approaching the work of popular culture historically as well as analytically.

While I hope that this course will be enjoyable, it is by no means simply about watching and discussing your favorite shows. You will be expected to read critical material which might be a little dense and you will be expected to bring a spirit of inquiry and a serious commitment to the course.


ETS 151-1 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 the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the emotions. I'm 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 4 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 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 151-2 Interpretation of Poetry
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Harvey Teres
In this course we're going to read dozens of amazing poems from many times and places: ancient Egypt , Greece , Rome , and China ; classical Japan ; Persia ; early modern and modern Europe; Africa; the Americas . We'll read poems of love and of struggle, of political passion and quiet intimacy, of fear and joy. The goal will be to get you to relax, slow down, and pay attention to the particulars so that you'll be better able to understand and take pleasure in the powers of poetry. You'll learn about the elements of language that are typically concentrated in this art form—voice, sound, rhythm, metaphor, syntax, image—whose shaping at the hands of skilled poets will, if you give them the chance, evoke some of your subtlest thoughts and intensest feelings. Lastly, we'll consider poetry's importance: in the words of William Carlos Williams, “Look at / what passes for the new. / You will not find it there but in / despised poems. / It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”


ETS 151-5 Interpretation of Poetry
TTh 8:00-9:20
Instructor : Jonathan Singleton
This course gives students an introduction to a broad range of American and British poetry. Our classes will center around discussions of the poems—what makes them (and “poetry” in general) unique, powerful, moving, or provocative; what makes them different from other kinds of literature; why they have come to be appreciated as they have; and how we can understand their “meaning.” We will study the mechanics of poetry, things like form, meter, diction, imagery, symbolism, and tone. We will also learn how to read a poem closely and how to write interpretive essays that help others appreciate a poem's significance. Poetry is an acquired taste, but you don't have to already love poetry to enjoy this class. Expect to explore—and gradually come to love—a very diverse and thought-provoking poetic territory.


ETS 152-1 Interpretation of Drama
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor : Rinku Chatterjee
Comedy is arguably the most complicated and the most subversive of all genres. Its purpose is to instruct while it evokes laughter. In this course we will study comedy on the Early Modern stage and read the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Middleton, and Beaumont with a historical awareness while tracing their aesthetic precedents. We will find that comedy takes different forms—moving from slap-stick to dark humor—and enjoy its popular appeal. Students should be prepared to closely engage with texts.


ETS 153-1 Interpretation of Fiction
MWF 9:30-10:25
Instructor: Bob Gates
This course takes up the subject of fictional characters who are in some way or another trying to “interpret” the “fictions” of their lives. We will look at characters who confront the experience of a “self” that is expressed, revealed, or acted out but is felt to be “other” than the already known experience of self—characters who think they “are” their constructed fiction of a “self.” The notion that an "other," previously unknown, self may become known to us by speaking or acting through us derives from Freud's discoveries that the "self" of every person is not simply our conscious thoughts, ideas and self-perceptions, but includes a vast area of unconsciousness of which we are unaware. We will read novels and short stories in which such characters try or fail to come to terms with the expressions, verbal or otherwise, of these unknown "other" selves. These expressions will range from memories and dreams to compulsive behaviors, lies, fantasy figures, artistic expressions, seeing "aliens," and spontaneous speech. What these "self-expressions" all have in common is that they are initially strange and incomprehensible (i.e. "unreadable" or “fictional”) to the very people who would seem to be their "authors."


ETS 153-3 Interpretation of Fiction
TTh 3:30-4:50
and
ETS 153-7
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: William D. West
The course will discuss the nature of narrative, fiction, and the novel; also the point of view of the narrator, characterizations, and language style. Having established these boundaries, we shall study examples from different historical periods and cultural traditions, all of which have as a focus the societal role of women. Regarded as masterpieces of English and French literature, the novels we'll read are drawn from three different periods in English history, from Austen's Emma ( 1816) and Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd ( 1874), to E. M. Forster's Room with a View ( 1908). The Great Gatsby (1925) brings insight into that inter-World War period of the 192Os, often known as the Jazz Era or Flapper Age. Gide, meanwhile, removes us to a rather different world with Straight is the Gate (1909) and La Symphonie Pastorale (1919), a French and French-Swiss world of extraordinary intimacy as the author grapples with aspects of romantic and sexual motivation and behavior. Indeed, all of these texts are ultimately concerned with deep human relationships in which love, romance, and the complications thereof play a central role. And quite naturally, the author's own character, personality, and circumstances will sometimes intrude, more so with some writers than others.


ETS 153-4 Interpretation of Fiction
TTh 5:00-6:20
Instructor : Mi Ditmar
This course will utilize contemporary flash-fiction, short stories, and a novel as opportunities for students to evaluate and interpret texts with an emphasis on close-readings of narrative voice and narrative structure. Writing assignments will include an in-class midterm and final; a short, 3-4 page paper and a long, 6-10 page paper; and will meet the requirements of a writing-intensive course.


ETS 154-1 Interpretation of Film
MW 11:40-12:35
Film Screening
M 7:00-9:50
ETS 154-2 and 3 Discussion Sections
Th 3:30-4:25
ETS 154-5 and 6 Discussion Sections F 9:30-10:25
Instructor: Roger Hallas
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. Attendance at weekly screenings is required.

ETS 182-2 Race and Literary Texts:
Race in Critical Theory and (Post) Modern Literary Texts
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor : Meera Lee
Drawing on Foucault's hypothesis that we should historically examine the relation between power and sexuality instead of producing another repressed discourse of sexuality alone, the quintessential question concerns how the concept of race is “operationalized” or “deployed,” rather than “Does race exist?” or “Is race fictional or socially constructed?” Therefore, this course examines how race is politicized in the form of racism, especially in relation to the formation of the (post) modern state. Given that the current geopolitical circumstances are very complex, the course discussion will also broadly engage students in a constructive criticism of race in relation to notions of ethnicity, class, sexuality, diaspora, empire, and terror(ism). The course will introduce the student to a broad spectrum of writings, from the critical theories of Foucault, Fanon, Gilroy , and Said, to contemporary ethnic literature, including works by Toni Morrison, Karen Tei Yamashita, Michael Ondaatje, Chang Rae Lee, Amitav Gosh, and David Henry Hwang. We will also view the films Hiroshima Mon Amour and Heading South in class.


ETS 182-4 Race and Literary Texts: Studies in Imperialism and Nationalism
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Michael Echeruo
Race has always been real and material in Euro-American discourse and especially so in its literary texts. Contemporary accounts of “race” and racially-charged literary texts attempt a revisionary account of this presence in ways that appear politically/ culturally sensitive but actually mask the deeper currents of racism which gave substance and authority to those representations.

The course will do three things:

1. Read in general about "Race" formations and theorizations in earlier Judeo-Christian cultural and literary documents;

2. Read a selection of recent re-theorizings of "Race" in the Euro-American academy;

3. Read or re-read a selection of primarily literary texts in the light of the above. A list of three novels and two plays is being developed.

Students will be required to keep an annotated journal of their readings and make one presentation each in the course of the semester. A term paper (which will include an annotated journal of readings), two short (3-page) papers, and response paper will be required. There will be no end-of-course examination.


ETS 184-1 Ethnicity and Literary Texts
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor : Meera Lee
This course is an invitation to critique and understand the historical, cultural and political representation of ethnicity through literary texts. Students will be first encouraged to critically think about how we define ethnocentrism as being different from racism, as well as how the notion of ethnicity is different from constructions of race. We will, accordingly, explore the notion of ethnicity and ethnocentrism not only from the western multicultural perspective, but also from within cultures outside the west. Our discussion will also concern the political employment of ethnicity in multicultural immigrant societies, especially in relation to the constitutional definition of minority, which automatically leaves the white and certain ethnic groups out. We will try to examine this complexity of legal ethnicity-minority relations and the contradictions of the exclusion-inclusion claims in social agendas that promote diversity. The texts selected for the course will include a range of ethnic novels, critical essays, films and TV shows, possibly Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake , Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters , and the theoretical writings of Bhabha.


ETS 184-2 Ethnicity and Literary Texts: Reading Across US Ethnicities
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor : Carol Fadda-Conrey
This course will offer students a survey of literary texts from various US ethnic traditions, including African-American, Arab-American, Latino/a, Asian-American, and Native American literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will build on the course's comparative framework by creating links between the various texts, focusing on thematic depictions as well as theoretical approaches that connect these ethnic writers and their works to a common minority experience in the US . The course also aims at helping students delineate the various historical, political, religious, and cultural factors that distinguish these ethnic groups not only from a white majority, but also from each other, at the same time emphasizing the variety of voices and experiences that diversify the makeup and cultural identity of each ethnic group as represented through its literature. Some of the writers included on the syllabus are Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Mohja Kahf, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sandra Cisneros, Cherrie Moraga, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Edwidge Danticat , to name a few.


ETS 192-3 Gender and Literary Texts
TTh 5:00-6:20
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 192-4 Gender and Literary Texts: Governesses and Nannies
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Jolynn Parker
This course will examine some of the major concepts, thinkers, and debates that have made gender an important category for literary and historical analysis.  To give our examination coherence, and to assist us in comparing different conceptions of and approaches to gender, the course's literary texts all focus on the figure of the governess (and her later incarnation, the nanny).  The governess provides a useful entry point into our analysis of gender because she has historically occupied such a vexed social position, challenging traditional ideas about women's relationship to education, employment, sexuality, and domesticity.  Thus, as we investigate the liminality of the governess figure at different moments in history, we'll also necessarily explore the way the concerns about gender that surround her intersect with questions of social class, sexuality, race, and colonialism.  Texts will likely include Fielding's The Governess , C. Bronte's Jane Eyre , A. Bronte's Agnes Grey, James's The Turn of the Screw , Leonowens's The English Governess in the Siamese Court, Travers's Mary Poppins (the book and the Disney film), Kincaid's Lucy , Columbus's film Mrs. Doubtfire, and the TV show Supernanny .  We will contextualize primary texts with theoretical texts on gender and sexuality, relevant literary criticism, and historical background. 


ETS 215-1 Sophomore Poetry Workshop
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor : Sarah Harwell
This is an introductory poetry studio that focuses on the art and craft of reading and writing poems. We will read essays and poems by working poets (both historical and contemporary) in order to find a common language in which to discuss poetry. Students will participate in writing exercises and will bring in their own poems to be workshopped with the class.


ETS 217-1 Sophomore Fiction Workshop
Th 12:30-3:15
Instructor : Creative Writing Staff


ETS 242-1 Reading and Interpretation
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Donald Morton
AND
ETS 242-2 Reading and Interpretation
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Amy Lang
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.