Courses for Summer 2009 - Lit and Crit

Select course name for a detailed desciption.

ENGL 781/881: Research Skills: Teaching Shakespeare - Pre-session I: This one-week workshop will focus on teaching Shakespeare in the classroom. It will offer a balanced overview of Shakespeare’s genius by concentrating on several areas: biography, criticism, film, and performance.

ENGL 753/853, Sec. 1: Literature as a Profession - Pre-session II: Focusing on the practical aspects of literature as a profession, this course will cover a variety of topics including the job market, publishing, defining a field of study, writing in relevant genres, and teaching. The purpose of this course is to provide a space in which students can engage in intensive work on the project or projects of their choice while situating that work within broader scholarly and professional communities.
ENGL 753/853, Sec. 2: Literature as a Profession - Pre-session II: First we’ll focus on the job application process and on how to develop your CV; we’ll also do a mock interview or two. It’s never too early to begin building a professional portfolio. Each of you will practice-present part of a paper, and we’ll work on public-speaking skills and finding the right conference for your paper. Then you will prepare a previously written paper for submission for publication.

ENGL 760/860: Teaching College Literature - Summer I: This is a seminar and workshop course for experienced teachers, in which we'll focus as pragmatically as possible on current approaches to teaching introductory courses in literature--as informed by recent theory as well as the real constraints of the classroom, the institutional setting, and the needs of our students and ourselves.
ENGL 763/863: Topics in British Literature before 1660: Literary Masterpieces of the Renaissance - Summer I: This course will center on this theme of rebirth and trace its pervasive impact throughout many facets of 16th and 17th century life.
ENGL 764/864: Topics in British Literature since 1660: Rewriting the Victorians - Summer I: Beginning with the work of Modernist writers, this course will consider how twentieth- and twenty-first century writers have rewritten the Victorians with particular attention to (re)constructions of gender and sexuality through readings of paired Victorian and Modern/Postmodern texts.
ENGL 772/872: Topics in Women’s Literature - Summer I: This graduate class introduces the unique and dynamic interdisciplinary, multinational, and multiethnic literary tradition of Asian American and Asian diasporic feminist aesthetics and women’s literature by North American women writers of various Asian origins throughout the 20th century.

ENGL 773/873: Topics in Minority Literature - Summer I: This course will examine a number of texts that can be classified as “white life literature” (texts written by African American authors that focus primarily on white characters), with an eye toward understanding what this body of literature adds to discussions of African American literature and Critical Whiteness Studies.
ENGL 955: History of Criticism - Summer I: This course will be not so much a history of ideas as an exploration of those significant cultural conflicts which have produced the society, the disciplines, and the vocabulary with which we describe ourselves and our literature.
ENGL 983: Seminar in American Literature - Summer I: The last decade has seen an explosion of scholarship on the Black Arts Movement, that most provocative tendency in the history of arts activism. In the spirit of expanding our understanding of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic, we will read some of the best recent scholarship.
ENGL 984 Seminar in British Literature: Joyce’s Ulysses - Summer I: For those who have already read the book, there are two points to keep in mind: I know no other book that better rewards rereading, that becomes even more enjoyable every time that I read it again. And the second point, which makes Ulysses ideal for the purposes of this course: It is the ultimate critical “dartboard” of the modern era.

ENGL 761/861: Topics in American Literature before 1870 - Summer II: This course will focus on two major early American authors, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe. We will read Moby Dick and Uncle Tom's Cabin, utilizing a number of critical and theoretical approaches to the texts over the course of the session. Norton Critical Editions required.
ENGL 762/862: Topics in American Literature since 1870 - Summer II: ENGL 762 will survey American fiction, both novels and novellas, from 1945 to the present. Since much of the writing of this period can be classified as either naturalistic or existential or postmodern, we will examine how writers confront the dilemma of existence in a confusing, hostile, or absurd universe.
ENGL 763/863: Topics in British Literature before 1660 - Summer II: This course will focus on the concept of terrorism as it is applied to Early Modern British Literature.
ENGL 765/865: Topics in Literature as Genre - Summer II: In this course, students will receive an introduction to understanding narrative and stylistic elements of film while focusing on issues of Orientalism in films from various cultures and eras. In addition to Orientalism, we will also include considerations of gender, nationalism, and post-colonialism from the silent film era through the present.

ENGL 766/866: Topics in Comparative Literature - Summer II: In this course, we will consider the condition of invisibility and erasure for women as they attempt to write themselves and render themselves and their texts visible in worlds that would prefer not to acknowledge their writings, their voices, or their existence in the world.
ENGL 956: Literary Theory - Summer II: In this course, we will explore major intellectual formations of literary theory and practice from the late nineteenth century to the present. Our survey will examine representative formulations of Formalism, Marxism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism, to more recent developments in Postcolonial Studies, Feminism, Queer Theory, Ecocriticism, and Global Cultural Studies.
ENGL 985: Seminar in Comparative Literature - Summer II: Taking a cue from Linda Hutcheon’s and others’ recent treatments of the subject, this course will explore what happens to literary works when they are adapted for different genres or media, or otherwise appropriated by later authors.