Spring 2022 Undergraduate English Courses

01   TTH4  2:00-3:20 PM   CAC   08241   SPELLMEYER  FH-B5 Meter, rhyme and scansion can scare people away, but these are only poetry’s tools. Of course, we should recognize the differences between Shakespeare’s sonnets and the gorgeous sprawl of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” But poetry is much more than its tools--more powerful and transformative. Our words give order to our experience, and so, when poets do new things with words, they put the world back together again in surprising and liberating...

01  TF2  10:20-11:40 AM  CAC   08242  SPELLMEYER  SC-119 Modern novels are society thinking out loud—and also in intimate privacy. They arrived on the scene about four centuries ago with a rising middle class that aspired to create a better world. Older literary forms simply couldn’t compete: novels created a mass audience bigger than anything seen in the past because they were a new kind of “technology”: readers could now visualize in their minds different routes to happiness, love, success,...

01  TTH4  2:00-3:20PM  CAC  08243  JACKSON  SC-119 While literature aimed at young adults is the primary focus of this course, we will initially survey works that cross the line between juvenilia and young adult fiction. As we progress, we’ll explore why such “developmental” categories are anything but stable. A number of questions will govern our foray through young-adult fiction: In what ways has children’s literature shaped development of the young? How has a children’s literary canon attempted to...

01  TTH5 3:50-5:10 PM  08244   GLISERMAN  SC-104 Introduction to the Graphic Novel will explore how graphic novels are built and told—we will learn to use a conceptual vocabulary so we can discuss how the graphic novel achieves its objective of obtaining the reader’s attention and engagement. We will develop our understanding of graphic novels by way of a didactic book about “comics;” by reading a novel about a comic strip; by looking a film version of a graphic novel; and by examining a range of...

 01  T 12:10-1:30 PM  08272 FESTA  HH-A7   TH 12:10-1:30 PM      SC-120 02 T 12:10-1:30 PM 08273 FESTA  HH-A7   TH 5:40-7:00 PM      SC-104 03 T 12:10-1:30 PM  08274 FESTA  HH-A7   TH 5:40-7:00 PM      SC-219 04 T 12:10-1:30 PM  08275 FESTA  HH-A7   TH 10:20-11:40 AM      SC-215 05 T 2:00-3:20 PM 08276 MANGHARAM  AB-2225   W 2:00-3:20 PM      MU-115 06 T 2:00-3:20 PM 08277 MANGHARAM  AB-2225   W  8:30-9:50 AM      SC-102 07 T 2:00-3:20 PM 08278 MANGHARAM  AB-2225   T  7:30-8:50 PM      SC-219 08 T 2:00-3:20 PM 08279 MANGHARAM  AB-2225   W 5:40-7:00 PM      MU-211 10 MW 2:00-3:20...

01   MTH3   12:10-1:30PM   08257   SHOCKLEY   HH-B6

01   MW5  3:50-5:10PM     CAC    08258    WALLACE    SC-216 This course has the double aim of both introducing students to a few of the canonical autobiographical writings in the African American literary tradition and parsing the various forms of autobiographical expression (i.e., formal autobiography, semi-autobiography, as-told-to narratives, false autobiography, memoirs). In doing so, we will aim to cover a broad spectrum of Black historical experiences, from historical slavery to slavery’s afterlife in the...

01   MW6  5:40-7:00PM   CAC   08259   KERNAN   SC-201 19th Century African American Literature and Its International Influences In this class will examine canonical African American literary works in terms of their international inspirations and influences. The course aims to lay bare a genealogy that explores the extent to which African American poetry and prose have always constituted an international literature, even in their most nationalist incarnations. Exploring issues ranging from the impact of...

01  TTH6  5:40-7:00PM   CAC  08260    CLEMONS    MU-210 Black Speculative and Science Fiction from 1920 to the Present One century after the Harlem Renaissance and the boom of Detroit’s Black Bottom, this generation has begun to witness a new era, in which art, innovation, technology, and social consciousness converge. At the helm of this revolution are Black speculative and science fiction writers and cultural producers who summon the spectral and the automated to critique U.S. society and politics...

02   TF1 8:30-9:50 AM  CAC   08261  HARRELL  SC-116 Engendered Histories: Reading History/Reading Self in the Black Atlantic Course Description: Through the theoretical lens of genealogy, this course seeks to unpack the ways in which black women write about their family and how that family history, or lack thereof, gives a larger historical account of black experience in the United States. In a traditional understanding, genealogy is a study and tracing of lines of descent from one ancestor to...

01  TTH5  3:50-5:10 pm   CAC   08269   OWENS   MU-211  City Narratives This course considers depictions of urban life in contemporary African American literature. Reading novels, poems, and critical essays, we will explore shifting ideas about identity, community, and culture in the urban landscape. Depictions of cities in black literature have ranged from jubilant to apocalyptic. Writers explore vibrant cultural exchange as well as conflict across race, gender and class. Forming a vital backdrop for our...

Spring 2022 In these classes, we will be examining different ways in which digital media has contributed to new modes of thinking about topics of social and cultural importance. Through assigned texts and selected videos, podcasts, and other examples of popular digital media we will be meditating on what creativity and communication means in the 21st century. In addition to working with the assigned course texts, students will have the opportunity to develop projects that utilize digital media in...

Spring 2022 Introduction to Creative Writing (351:211 in fall semesters; 351:212 in spring semesters) is the foundational and prerequisite course to all other creative writing courses.  This course satisfies an SAS Core RequirementArea of Inquiry: Arts and Humanities; Critical and Creative Expression [AHr] Practice in creative writing in various forms (fiction, poetry, drama, essay); critical analysis of students’ manuscripts in class and/or individual conferences. Reading other student work, as...

 SPRING 2022 *Prerequisite: Permission of instructor. Please email nigrin@sas.rutgers.edu for a special permission number. Section Instructor Day/Period Building Campus 01 Nigrin F/2,3 SC-116 CAC    Course Description: This hands-on filmmaking course has a two-pronged approach. The first is to give students hands-on filmmaking experience while learning the fundamental components of experimental film production: use of camera, lighting, editing, special effects and other techniques. The second is...

Spring 2022 This course is intended to introduce students to the basics of screenwriting, including: dramatic action, narration, plot structure and character. *Prerequisite: 351:211 or 351:212  or permission of instructor. Section Instructor Day/Period Building Campus 01 Pearlstein W/2,3 MU-002 CAC   Screenwriting for Film focuses on a more in-depth look at cinema scripting as a craft. In addition to learning how to write for film, students will read film scripts and screen selected works...

Spring 2022 *Prerequisite: 351:211 or 351:212  or permission of instructor.     Section Instructor Day/Period Building Campus 01 Votipka T,F/3 MU-001 CAC  02 Duffy M/3, 4 MU-305 CAC   Period numbers/times for all campuses : 1   8:30 AM to 9:50 AM 2  10:20 AM to 11:40 AM 3  12:10 PM to 1:30 PM 4  2 PM to 3:20 PM 5  3:50 PM to 5:10 PM 6  5:40 PM to 7 PM 7  7:30 PM to 8:50 PM 8  9:20 PM to 10:40 PM

Spring 2022 *Prerequisite: 351:211 or 351:212 or permission of instructor.     Section Instructor Day/Period Location Campus 01 Fitzgerald T,Th/5 MU-002 CAC 02 Dalva T,Th/4 MU-003 CAC   Period numbers/times for all campuses : 1   8:30 AM to 9:50 AM 2  10:20 AM to 11:40 AM 3  12:10 PM to 1:30 PM 4  2 PM to 3:20 PM 5  3:50 PM to 5:10 PM 6  5:40 PM to 7 PM 7  7:30 PM to 8:50 PM 8  9:20 PM to 10:40 PM

Spring 2022 *Prerequisite: 351:211 or 351:212 or permission of instructor.  Creative Writing Poetry focuses on a more in-depth look at poetry writing as a craft. Students engage in a variety of modes and genres within poetry, alongside reading non-poetic works. Section Instructor Day/Period Location Campus 01 Fuhrman M,Th/3 MU-002 CAC 02 Hobayan M,Th/3 MU-038 CAC 03 Purkert M,W/5 HC-E128 CAC 90 Miller By Arrangement N/A N/A    Period numbers/times for all campuses : 1   8:30 AM to 9:50 AM 2  10:20 AM...

Spring 2022 *Prerequisite: 351:211 or 351:212 (Or permission of instructor) Creative Writing Fiction focuses on a more in-depth look at prose writing as a craft. Students will also read non-prose works in order to infuse other genres into their writing.   Section Instructor Day/Period Building Campus 01 Haber T,Th/6 MU-002 CAC 02 Suskewicz M,Th/2 MU-003 CAC 03 Dawson F/4,5 (Young Adult Fiction: "Wonder 101") MU-038 CAC   Dawson F/2,3 (Young Adult Fiction: "Wonder 101") MU-038 CAC 90 Cotsonas By...

 SPRING 2022 *Prerequisite: 351:211 or 351:212 or permission of instructor. Section Instructor Day/Period Building Campus 01 Svich W/2,3 AB-2250 CAC  Students study different playwriting genres throughout the course, and the course features thoughtful reading choices that reflect in-class discussions.Dynamic, visceral, exciting. This is what writing for the stage and live performance are all about. In this class, you will explore, character, setting, site-specific work, and the poetry of writing...

Spring 2022 *Prerequisite:  351:211 or 351:212 or permission of instructor.   Section Instructor Day/Time Building Campus 02 Pearlstein Th/4,5 MU-302 CAC  03 Warren T/2,3 MU-002 CAC  Digital Storytelling teaches students how to use film as a storytelling platform. Through a series of exercises, students will learn how the camera and editing construct a unique cinematic language. Students work hands-on with editing software and digital cameras provided by the Writers House program. The course begins...

Spring 2022   Section Instructor Day/Period Building Campus 01 Hulme Th/5,6 MU=-38 CAC In this course, documentary films are understood to be character driven non-fiction narratives created from the selecting, organizing and presenting of factual material. This course focuses on the importance of story-telling in documentaries and teaches students about the various filmic techniques, elements and choices needed to create their own successful short film.  Students will learn how to conduct an...

Spring 2022  *Prerequisite: One 300-level course in Creative Writing or permission of instructor. Advanced Creative Writing Poetry features a smaller, passionate workshop experience, with a determined drive to learn the craft of poetic writing. Alongside class readings, students will regularly workshop one another's work, and fine-tune their skills as poets. Section Instructor Day/Period Location Campus 01 November T,Th/5 HH-A4 CAC 02 Doty*  M,W/5 MU-001 CAC    *Note: This section requires permission of the instructor and a poetry submission. Send between to...

Spring 2022 *Prerequisite: one 300-level course in Creative Writing or permission of instructor. Advanced Creative Writing Fiction features a smaller, passionate workshop experience, with a determined drive to learn the craft of prose writing. Alongside class readings, students will regularly workshop one another's work, and fine-tune their skills as storytellers.   Section Instructor Day/Period Building  Campus  01 Oates* T/4,5 MU-305 CAC  02 McKeon T,F/2 MU-001 CAC *This section requires a fiction story submission by Dec. 15, 2021. Please send a short story with...

Spring 2022 The independent study allows creative writing minors portfolio to focus in their work on a particular project.  In this independent study, students selectively choose from their body of writing, and revise their work. By the end of the semester, their final portfolio will reflect their growth as a writer over time. Often, students use this concentrated time to work on manuscripts for admission to an MFA program or other graduate school program.  For each Creative Writing Portfolio...

01   09273  LEVAO  MW  2:50-4:10 The course is dedicated to eight major plays written across the second half of Shakespeare’s career. The brilliance and complexity of his earlier, or Elizabethan, works deepened in the Jacobean period, maintaining much of his ingenuity and exuberance while darkening their portrayal of psychological and ethical conflict. We will read a remarkable series of powerful tragedies together with some quirky but ambitious comedies—the so-called “problem comedies” and “late...

01   TTH4  2:00-3:20 PM    08246    LEVAO  HH-A6 The course is dedicated to eight major plays written across the second half of Shakespeare’s career. The brilliance and complexity of his earlier, or Elizabethan, works deepened in the Jacobean period, maintaining much of his ingenuity and exuberance while darkening their portrayal of psychological and ethical conflict. We will read a remarkable series of powerful tragedies together with some quirky but ambitious comedies—the so-called “problem comedies” and...

01  09278   BUCKLEY   MW  2:50-4:10 In this course we’ll survey the rich and varied theatre and drama of the nineteenth century, a period during which the stage was transformed first into a modern, popular institution and then into a radical countercultural art.  We’ll explore the development of several of the century’s major new forms and modes, including melodrama, realist and naturalist drama, and the theater of the early avant-garde, and look at their relations to social and political change,...

01  MW7  7:30-8:50 PM   08250   BUCKLEY   FH-B6 In this course we’ll survey the rich and varied theatre and drama of the nineteenth century, a period during which the stage was transformed first into a modern, popular institution and then into a radical countercultural art.  We’ll explore the development of several of the century’s major new forms and modes, including melodrama, realist and naturalist drama, and the theater of the early avant-garde, and look at their relations to social and political change,...

01  09285  KERNAN  MW 6:40-8:00 PM In the Spring of 1998 at Dartmouth College, a plethora of African American theater’s most distinguished scholars and practitioners participated in the National Black Theatre Summit “On Golden Pond.” Chief among their objectives was to grapple with three questions that surrounded the African American stage from its inaugural moments. Does African American theater have a defining aesthetic? And, if so, what are its tenets and how can we account for them? After...

 01  MW5  3:50-5:10PM  CAC  08268   BUCKLEY  FH-B2 From Libertinism to Sentiment: English Drama and Culture, 1660-1737 This seminar takes a close look at one of the most remarkable and consequential periods in the history of English drama and culture--a period, much like our own, during which values, tastes, and conceptions of the self and of society shifted with exceptional speed and became polarized, contested, and re-negotiated in an open conflict of basic values and beliefs. We'll read some of the...

01  MTH3  12:10-1:30   CAC    08291  DIAMOND  HH-A2

01   09324    BUCKLEY   MW 2:50-4:10 PM History and Theories of Melodrama This course will offer an introduction to the history and theory of melodrama, the modern world’s most distinctive and popular dramatic genre, from 1800 to now. The course will include plays, films, television, and new media drama from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. We’ll begin by looking at melodrama’s hybrid origins and rapid emergence in Europe and the United States after the French Revolution, and exploring early attempts to...

01  TTH5  3:50-5:10  CAC  07905   FLITTERMAN-LEWIS  MU-301   This course will develop a feminist analysis of the cinema from the dual perspective of individual films themselves and their social/cultural context.Using examples from both Hollywood and alternative feminist cinema, we’ll trace the development of feminist film criticism and theory, from the landmark articles of Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey to the current work of Ginette Vincendeau and Mary Ann Doane, among others. We’ll consider such...

01  MW4  2:00-3:20   CAC  07435   LAWRENCE  MU-111 This course the same as 01:195:351:01 The Literatures of the Americas This course offers a survey of contemporary literature from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, including several works originally published in Spanish. Our readings will concentrate on recent novels and short stories from the Americas whose imagined geographies traverse the boundaries of nation and region. Authors studied may include Roberto Bolaño, Toni Morrison,...

01  MW7 7:30-8:50PM   LIV    08262   IBIRONKE    LSH-B105 Happiness in African and World Literatures ON DECEMBER 2017, I went to Sierra Leone for the first time in my 24 years of life. Of course, I was met with pure glee by some, for the mere fact that I was connecting with the place my mother calls home. I was also met with confusion by others. Many mused on the safety of the continent and what it means to travel to an African country reeling from an epidemic and natural disaster. Yet, I knew Sierra...

01   MW4  2:00-3:20PM  C/D   19441     SWEET   HCK-213 This course examines a range of literature and texts that provide a window into Native American cultures, histories, and worldviews. Spanning oral histories of creation stories to autobiographical writing in the twenty-first century, this course will analyze the diversity of Native American literature and its evolving relationship to Native American culture and identity. Students will engage with Native American philosophical, cultural, religious, and...

01  MTH2 10:20-11:40 AM    C/D    06414   ISAAC  CI-201 This course same as 050:377:01 Violence and Asian American Literature Violence has the ability both to destroy but also to recreate identities and subjects, both to tear away from and to stake claims to nations and places. How and why is violence a recurring theme in Asian American literature? From the Philippine-American War (1898) and the Pacific wars against Japan (1941), Korea (1950s) to the Vietnam War (1960s) and the War on Terror (2001) in...

01  MTH2  10:20-11:40  CAC  08245  NOVACICH  HH-A6 This course considers a number of texts composed by women in medieval England and France (Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe). We will investigate constructions of gender and authorship; the relationship between women and different kinds of textual communities; and the various public and private roles permitted to or otherwise taken up by women in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. We also will consider how...

01  TF2  10:20-11:40 AM  CAC  07437  SERRANO  MU-111 This course same as 195:388:01  and 667:388:01  

01   MW4  2:00-3:20 PM  08266   SCANLON   MU-211 The Middle Ages, Then and Now This course will examine the continuing presence of medieval literature in modern and contemporary literature and culture. It will focus on two major 14th century English poems, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a wide variety of 20th and 21st century works which draw upon those two poems. Individual Chaucer tales will be paired with: Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden; Top Girls by the...

01  TTH5  3:50-5:10 PM  CAC  08249  GALPERIN  FH-A1 This course will concentrate on several different types of British literature all written during the “Age of Revolution,” which began at the time of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and continued through the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The “Early Romantics”—William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them--were the first “modern” poets in their preoccupation with imagination and inwardness and in...

01    T 4,5  2:00-5:00PM   CAC 18689   PRICE   MU-302 Nineteenth-century Britain saw farmers migrate to brand-new factories; suburbs spring up along the world’s first train lines; empire expand across the globe. To make sense of those changes, Britons turned to new technologies of representation. Along with photography and mass-market newspapers, they invented forms of fiction that reached a wide swathe of the literate public. The novels that we will read in this course are emotionally gripping,...

01  MW7  7:30-8:50 PM   08250   BUCKLEY   FH-B6 In this course we’ll survey the rich and varied theatre and drama of the nineteenth century, a period during which the stage was transformed first into a modern, popular institution and then into a radical countercultural art.  We’ll explore the development of several of the century’s major new forms and modes, including melodrama, realist and naturalist drama, and the theater of the early avant-garde, and look at their relations to social and political change,...

01   MW6  5:40-7:00PM   CAC   08259   KERNAN   SC-201 19th Century African American Literature and Its International Influences In this class will examine canonical African American literary works in terms of their international inspirations and influences. The course aims to lay bare a genealogy that explores the extent to which African American poetry and prose have always constituted an international literature, even in their most nationalist incarnations. Exploring issues ranging from the impact of...

01   TTH4  2:00-3:20 PM    08246    LEVAO  HH-A6 The course is dedicated to eight major plays written across the second half of Shakespeare’s career. The brilliance and complexity of his earlier, or Elizabethan, works deepened in the Jacobean period, maintaining much of his ingenuity and exuberance while darkening their portrayal of psychological and ethical conflict. We will read a remarkable series of powerful tragedies together with some quirky but ambitious comedies—the so-called “problem comedies” and...

02    MW7  7:30-8:50 PM  CAC  08247  CRUZ    FH-B5 Race and Gender in Late Renaissance Tragedy Early modern critical race theory shows that race-thinking in the Renaissance was not strictly limited to visible differences of body type and skin color, but also involved religious differences, notions of geographic origin, and adherence to ideals of sexual and gender normativity. But in what ways do the articulating concepts of race and gender on (and off) the English stage illuminate our understanding of...

01  TTH5 3:50-5:10 PM    CAC  08267  LEVAO  MU-210  Doubled Selves in Shakespeare The doubling, mirroring, and twinning of the self in Renaissance texts represent some of the strangest but most provocative ways writers tested what is often call “Early Modern Individualism.”  The doubled self pivots antithetical yet complementary impulses:  a turning back into solipsistic isolation or a revolving outward to acknowledge some "other"; competitive, self-affirming aggression and the dream of self-completing...

01  MW5 3:501-5:10 PM  CAC  18541   COIRO    SC-205 This course focuses on writers who were marginalized, even forgotten, for centuries but who are now central to our understanding of the English Renaissance. And what amazing things they wrote. We’ll read, for example: a play where a woman demands a divorce long before divorce was legal; a poem claiming ownership of London by a woman who owned nothing; a mind-blowing science fiction prose romance about an alternative world that connects with ours...

01  TF3  12:10-1:30 PM  CAC  08248  ZITIN  SC-101 Defoe and Wheatley Phillis Wheatley and Daniel Defoe, two writers active in the 1700s, have almost nothing in common except for their outsized legacies. One was a white man, the other a Black woman; one is known primarily as a novelist, the other as a poet; he died (in London) twenty years before she was born (in West Africa). But taken together, their works offer something like a survey of eighteenth-century literature in the English-speaking world. In...

 01  MW5  3:50-5:10PM  CAC  08268   BUCKLEY  FH-B2 From Libertinism to Sentiment: English Drama and Culture, 1660-1737 This seminar takes a close look at one of the most remarkable and consequential periods in the history of English drama and culture--a period, much like our own, during which values, tastes, and conceptions of the self and of society shifted with exceptional speed and became polarized, contested, and re-negotiated in an open conflict of basic values and beliefs. We'll read some of the...

01   MW4  2:00-3:20 PM  08266   SCANLON   MU-211 The Middle Ages, Then and Now This course will examine the continuing presence of medieval literature in modern and contemporary literature and culture. It will focus on two major 14th century English poems, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a wide variety of 20th and 21st century works which draw upon those two poems. Individual Chaucer tales will be paired with: Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden; Top Girls by the...

01  TTH5 3:50-5:10 PM    CAC  08267  LEVAO  MU-210  Doubled Selves in Shakespeare The doubling, mirroring, and twinning of the self in Renaissance texts represent some of the strangest but most provocative ways writers tested what is often call “Early Modern Individualism.”  The doubled self pivots antithetical yet complementary impulses:  a turning back into solipsistic isolation or a revolving outward to acknowledge some "other"; competitive, self-affirming aggression and the dream of self-completing...

01  MW5 3:501-5:10 PM  CAC  18541   COIRO    SC-205 This course focuses on writers who were marginalized, even forgotten, for centuries but who are now central to our understanding of the English Renaissance. And what amazing things they wrote. We’ll read, for example: a play where a woman demands a divorce long before divorce was legal; a poem claiming ownership of London by a woman who owned nothing; a mind-blowing science fiction prose romance about an alternative world that connects with ours...

 01  MW5  3:50-5:10PM  CAC  08268   BUCKLEY  FH-B2 From Libertinism to Sentiment: English Drama and Culture, 1660-1737 This seminar takes a close look at one of the most remarkable and consequential periods in the history of English drama and culture--a period, much like our own, during which values, tastes, and conceptions of the self and of society shifted with exceptional speed and became polarized, contested, and re-negotiated in an open conflict of basic values and beliefs. We'll read some of the...

01  TTH5  3:50-5:10 pm   CAC   08269   OWENS   MU-211  City Narratives This course considers depictions of urban life in contemporary African American literature. Reading novels, poems, and critical essays, we will explore shifting ideas about identity, community, and culture in the urban landscape. Depictions of cities in black literature have ranged from jubilant to apocalyptic. Writers explore vibrant cultural exchange as well as conflict across race, gender and class. Forming a vital backdrop for our...

01   MW5     3:50-4:10 PM   CAC   08270     MILLER, R.    MU-115 In this senior seminar, we will read three novels and a collection of interconnected short stories by William Faulkner. The focus of the seminar will be on Faulkner’s language, how he structures his stories, and how we are to read him productively in the 21st century. The challenge Faulkner poses for us is reckoning with the legacy of the Southern States’ embrace of the narrative of The Lost Cause to explain their defeat in the Civil War. Some of...

01   TTTH  2:00-3:20    CAC   08295    MATHES   FH-A4  Sound Studies in Theory and Practice How has our experience of sound changed throughout history and particularly in our rapidly evolving present--as we move for instance, from the drum and piano to the personal computer, and from the phonograph to the mp3 (and back)? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we (choose to) listen to, how we listen, and how we imagine and write about the sounds around us? Engaging with these...

01  TTH5  3:50-5:10  CAC  07905   FLITTERMAN-LEWIS  MU-301   This course will develop a feminist analysis of the cinema from the dual perspective of individual films themselves and their social/cultural context.Using examples from both Hollywood and alternative feminist cinema, we’ll trace the development of feminist film criticism and theory, from the landmark articles of Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey to the current work of Ginette Vincendeau and Mary Ann Doane, among others. We’ll consider such...

01  MW4  2:00-3:20 PM  CAC   08290   DENNIS   HH-A6 Over the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has invoked pressing questions about how we perceive the ailing body and how we should care for one another. But, as we will see, these questions are hardly new. In this course, we will explore how authors strategically narrativize pain and reimagine care in fiction and nonfiction texts from the early nineteenth century into our contemporary moment. As a class, we will investigate changing perceptions of...

01  MTH3  12:10-1:30   CAC    08291  DIAMOND  HH-A2 This class explores multiple approaches to the concept and practice of performance:  1. performance as the carrying out of an action, as opposed to the script that precedes it or the critical judgment that follows it. 2. performance as a creative, constructed, and collaborative form of human interaction, as well as the times and spaces of such interactions. 3. performance as expression of identity, whether racial, sexual, cultural, or national. 4...

01  TTH5  3:50-5:10 PM  CAC   08292   GROGAN  SC-221 Queer Literature Before Stonewall In this course we will read queer literature written before Stonewall—that is, before the event typically celebrated as the birth of the gay liberation movement. How were sexuality and gender delineated in law, medicine, psychology, and literature? Was queerness understood to mean an identity, a set of desires, an action, a perversion? What kind of liberationist movements existed, and what role did art and...

01  MW4  2:00-3:20 PM  CAC   08293  MILLER, R.  /  JURECIC   HH-A4 The Literary Uses of Epidemics, Plagues, and Pandemics Epidemics have long inspired stories. Soon after the bubonic plague reached Florence in 1348, Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, where ten characters sheltering outside the city pass the time by holding a story competition. In the 1660s in London, Daniel Defoe was inspired to write Journal of the Plague Year, which appeared to be a witness’s detailed account of living through the Great...

01   TTTH  2:00-3:20    CAC   08295    MATHES   FH-A4 Sound Studies in Theory and Practice How has our experience of sound changed throughout history and particularly in our rapidly evolving present--as we move for instance, from the drum and piano to the personal computer, and from the phonograph to the mp3 (and back)? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we (choose to) listen to, how we listen, and how we imagine and write about the sounds around us? Engaging with these...

01  MW4  2:00-3:20   CAC  07435   LAWRENCE  MU-111 This course the same as 01:195:351:01 The Literatures of the Americas This course offers a survey of contemporary literature from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, including several works originally published in Spanish. Our readings will concentrate on recent novels and short stories from the Americas whose imagined geographies traverse the boundaries of nation and region. Authors studied may include Roberto Bolaño, Toni Morrison,...

01  TTH4. 2:00-3:20 PM  CAC  08253  GROGAN  FH-B6 This course surveys the varied landscape of American poetry written since the end of the Second World War. It reads poetry against the backdrop of social change and unrest, and asks questions about the lyric poem, formal experimentalism, race and poetics, feminist poetic practice, and the relationship between poetry and history. Some poets we will read include Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, The New York School poets,...

01 TTH5 3:50-5:10PM   08254   JACKSON  SC-202 Under the rubric “Issues and Problems in 20th Century Literature and Culture,” we will study some of the best fantasy novels of the last one hundred years, including works by T. H. White, Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, J. K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman, among others. Some key questions will guide us: How do fantasy works reflect broader historical and cultural trends? How and why has fantasy fiction captured so much literary market share,...

02. MTH3   12:10-1:30 PM  08255   KITZINGER   MU-208   This course same as 01:840:340:01 and 195:397:01 This course explores the world and works of the Russian and American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). As Nabokov taught his students, “great novels are great fairy tales.” We will read his novels with an eye to the spells they cast and how they cast them. The course begins with short stories from Nabokov’s Russian-language Berlin period and selected chapters from his luminous autobiography,...

01   MW5     3:50-4:10 PM   CAC   08270     MILLER, R.    MU-115 In this senior seminar, we will read three novels and a collection of interconnected short stories by William Faulkner. The focus of the seminar will be on Faulkner’s language, how he structures his stories, and how we are to read him productively in the 21st century. The challenge Faulkner poses for us is reckoning with the legacy of the Southern States’ embrace of the narrative of The Lost Cause to explain their defeat in the Civil War. Some of...