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Summer Courses, 2004
Skip down the page to view the following courses offered during the Summer 2004 term:
ENGL 2120-01: Survey of British Literature, Prof. John Sturgis
ENGL 2130-01: American Literature, Prof. Jane Hill
ENGL 3200-01: Creative Writing, Prof. Chad Davidson
ENGL 4106-01: Studies in Genre: Poetry, Prof. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten
ENGL 4125-01: Colonial and Early American Literature, Prof. David Newton
ENGL 4145-01: Victorian Literature, Prof. Angela Insenga
ENGL 4/5180-01: Studies in Regional Literature, Prof. David Newton
ENGL 6115-01: Seminar in British Literature II, Prof. Robert Snyder
ENGL 6385-01: Seminar in Special Topics, Prof. Jane Hill
XIDS 2100-06: Representing American Women, Prof. Debra MacComb
ENGL 2120-01: Survey of British Literature, Prof. John Sturgis
TR 5:00-7:45, HUM 225
Meets third session.Description: This perennial is a swift but concentrated celebratory summertime survey of British literature. Learn how and why certain literary forms (e.g., epic, dream-vision, quest romance, stage drama, sonnet, lyrical ballad, ode, novel, short story, and song lyric) develop and predominate in particular cultural / historical periods and yet persist and still resonate today, flourishing as canonical standards. Given the extreme brevity of Summer Session, we will narrow our focus to the foremost authors from each era, experiencing the literary arts in their purest expression and original effusion: The Pearl Poet, Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson, Marvell, Donne, Milton, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Yeats, Beckett, and Lennon and McCartney.
Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature / The Major Authors (7th edition, with CD-ROM); Bedford /St. Martin's critical edition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Requirements: Active participation in class. Three Weekly Reading Quizzes. An oral presentation. Take-Home Midterm and Final Analytical Essays (three to four pages each).
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ENGL 2130-01: American Literature, Prof. Jane Hill
TR 2:00-4:45, TLC 1200
Meets second session.Description: Using four basic thematic questions to ground our study, we will examine how America and Americans have used our literature to construct and understand ourselves. Those themes are: 1) our encounters with the place, the land that is America; 2) the ways in which individuals shape their identities within the context of America; 3) the process by which individuals merge with the social context within which they exist; and 4) the boundaries that separate (or fail to separate) reality and artifice, as those boundaries are represented in American literature. By the end of the semester, we should understand both literature and America better, and we should be able to decide if the long-standing claim of American exceptionality is legitimate.
Texts: Nina Baym and others, eds., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th Shorter Ed.; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Forrest Gump [film]
Requirements: In addition to regular attendance and informed, active participation, daily reading quizzes, three short response papers, midterm and final essays.
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ENGL 3200-01: Creative Writing, Prof. Chad Davidson
MTWR 6:00-8:55, PAF 308
Meets fourth session.Description: This creative writing course will focus on the explorative act of writing to find a subject to write about. Along the way, we will learn how to make language and, by extension, the world strange again. In Craig Raine's famous coinage, we will "defamiliarize" things. Though this is an introductory level course, expect to read an astonishing amount of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism. Count on engaging in critical discussions regarding aesthetic principles and offering up your own writing for the betterment of the class. Ultimately the aim of the course is to enable you to access your imagination through writing, to judge critically works of literature from the vantage point of the artist, and to come to terms with both the beautiful and the sublime.
Texts: Davis, Break It Down; Komunyakaa and Lehman, eds., Best American Poetry 2003; Poch, Poems; Shapard, ed., Sudden Fiction
Requirements: Daily readings and exercises, memorization of twenty lines of poetry, participation, written contributions to the workshop, a final portfolio of polished writing including critical preface.
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ENGL 4106-01: Studies in Genre: Poetry, Prof. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten
The Nature of Poetry, The Poetry of Nature
MTWR 6:00-8:45, HUM 208
Meets third session.Description: In his essay "Tawny Grammar," poet and wilderness philosopher Gary Snyder writes that "ideas and images of wastelands, tempests, wildernesses, and mountains are born not of abstraction but of experience." By Snyder's explanation, nature poetry is necessarily grounded in the concrete world that we interact with on a daily basis. In this course we will read a range of poetry that engages Nature in a variety of ways. We will begin with excerpts from Ancient and Classical poetry, study Japanese Haiku, explore the British Romantic poets, dive into the American modernists, and conclude with contemporary American Nature poets. Throughout the semester, we will consider the shifting poetics of Nature, the religious and/or philosophical bent of much Nature poetry, the gendering of nature, and the political implications of Ecopoetics.
Texts: One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, Ed. Kenneth Rexroth; English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology, Ed. Stanley Appelbaum; The Wasteland (Norton Critical Edition), T. S. Eliot; Myths and Texts, Gary Snyder; and selections to be distributed in class.
Requirements: 8 one-page reading response journals, a presentation on one poet, memorization and recitation of one poem, and a 10-12-page research paper.
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ENGL 4125-01: Colonial and Early American Literature, Prof. David Newton
TR 11:00-1:30, HUM 208
Meets second session.Description: While it is often characterized as an era populated by dour-faced Puritans and sermonic texts, Colonial American literature was instead an era of dynamic cultural encounters and transitions, which radically altered Europe and the New World. Our reading will reflect the diversity of literary works and cultural perspectives from this 300-year period and will include exploration narratives by women and men, Native American literature, and women novelists from the early republic. Among the topics we will consider: 1) how early exploration narratives shaped the European vision of the Americas and were used to translate the New World to European audiences; 2) the transforming experience of first encounters with the geographical landscape of the Americas and with people from other cultures; 3) the construction of the New World as a constantly evolving fictional text out of which early explorers and colonists struggled to fashion new personal and social identities; 4) the textual and interpretive challenge of reconstructing early Native American oral narratives; 5) the evolution of gender roles during the Colonial and New Republic eras; and 6) the role of language and writing in the era of exploration and in the formation of the new nation.
Texts: Guiles Gunn, ed. Early American Writing; Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration; Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Franklin, The Autobiography; Brown, Edgar Huntley. Other shorter works will be assigned from electronic (online) editions or placed on reserve in the library.
Requirements: Regular attendance and active and informed participation in class discussion, daily reading quizzes, mid-term and final examinations, class presentations, a research prospectus, and a final 10-page research paper.
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ENGL 4145-01: Victorian Literature, Prof. Angela Insenga
Description: In his text Victorian People and Ideas, Richard Altick claims that "The only human certainties were that everything, in ethics, religion, history, experience, was relative, and that absolutes, if they did exist, were beyond man's grasp; and that since evolution was the basic law of life, all was flux." Out of such a quagmire several social and artistic reactions arose. Some threw themselves headlong into paradigmatic beliefs in religion or science while others reveled in that which was "beyond man's grasp" by creating the fantastic and the terrible, monsters born out of uncertainty. Still others fancied the occult, and sought contact with the ghosts that reminded them of their past or could possibly foretell their future. As a means of entering into dialogue with the era, we'll examine the tropes of the monster and the ghost in Victorian literature.
TR 8:00-10:30, HUM 225
Meets second session.Texts: Our readings will include Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Bram Stoker's Dracula, selected Victorian ghost stories, and several poems from the period. We'll also read and discuss several sections of Altick's text to edify our understanding of this complex period.
Requirements: Major assignments will include four one-page reading responses, one group presentation, and one 8-10 page critical analysis with research.
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ENGL 4/5180-01: Studies in Regional Literature, Prof. David Newton
Southern Literature
TR 2:00-4:30, HUM 208
Meets second session.Description: In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Shreve McCannon (a Northerner) implores his roommate at Harvard, Quentin Compson (a Southerner), "Tell about the South. . . . What do they do there? Why do they live there?" While the American South is the product of specific historical events, economic conditions, and cultural experiences-all of which form a crucial background for this course-we will focus on the region as an imaginative space comprised of storytellers and communities (often contentious ones) of listeners, a place where fictions both mythic and ordinary continue to shape individual and cultural identities. Through an intensive reading of selected works, we will examine how and for what varied purposes writers have described, embraced, at times created, and often harshly critiqued aspects of the idea of the South. We will focus on the South not simply as a monolithic region but as a diverse cultural space-ranging from the plantations of Virginia and Mississippi, to the pineywoods of South Georgia and Florida, to the mountains of Appalachia-where differences in social class, race, gender, language, and religion profoundly shape how writers understand such perennial themes as the Lost Cause (the mythologies/nostalgia of the past), race relations (from slavery and Reconstruction to Civil Rights and beyond), the myth of the plantation (and the agrarian idealism that emerges from it), and gender (conceptions of manhood and the feminine ideal, as well as the value of home and family). We will begin by examining some foundational texts from the nineteenth century before narrowing our focus on the twentieth century, beginning with the Southern Renascence (c. 1920-1950) and concluding with a variety of contemporary works which extend and often complicate the themes enumerated above. We will also explore how writers give shape to these themes in specific literary or aesthetic ways, creating in the process extraordinary innovations in the development of different genres, narrative techniques, and literary styles (humor, the gothic, the grotesque, etc.).
Texts: William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Bobbie Ann Mason, Spence + Lila; Lee Smith, Oral History; and Stokesbury, ed., The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry. Other shorter works (including some selections from nineteenth-century Southern poetry and fiction) will be assigned from electronic (online) editions or placed on reserve in the library. We will also view (outside of class) several significant films related to twentieth-century southern culture, including A Street Car Named Desire, To Kill A Mockingbird, Forrest Gump, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Requirements: Regular attendance and active and informed participation in class discussion, daily reading quizzes, midterm and final examinations, class presentations, a research prospectus, and a final 10-page research paper.
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ENGL 6115-01: Seminar in British Literature II, Prof. Robert Snyder
Visionary Poetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism
MW 11:00-1:45, TLC 2237
Meets second session.Description: As critics M. H. Abrams, Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich have demonstrated, British Romanticism involved the reemergence of a visionary poetics whose origins lie in such scriptural texts as Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation. John Milton becomes the great mediator of this tradition, of course, as might be inferred from William Blake's proclamation that "The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative" or, with a significantly different valence, from William Wordsworth's lines in The Prelude that "Visionary power / Attends the motions of the viewless winds, / Embodied in the mystery of words" (5.595-97). This seminar will be devoted to tracing what a visionary poetics encompasses from the Romantics onward. We will begin by discussing excerpts from those literary critics and scriptural texts already mentioned, as well as such articles as Peter Levi's "Visionary Poets" (Agenda 24.3 [1986]: 27-50), Kinereth Meyer's "Visionary Poetry and the Breaking of the Tablets" (Religion and Literature 19.3 [1987]: 1-14), and Hyatt H. Waggoner's "Visionary Poetry: Learning to See" (Sewanee Review 89 [1981]: 228-47). From there we will plunge into Blake, followed by intensive study of five other poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. Independent research projects may be focused on any of these writers or their contemporaries while developing a theoretically informed model of visionary poetics.
Texts: William Blake, Selected Poetry (Oxford UP, 1998); T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Harvest-Harcourt, 1971); Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Harvest-Harcourt, 2002); Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (Noonday-Farrar, 1991); Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry (Oxford UP, 1998); Ted Hughes, New Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1982); William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays, 4th ed. (Scribner, 1996).
Requirements: Active participation, two analytical essays (four pages each), oral presentation, research-based paper (18-20 pages in text).
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ENGL 6385-01: Seminar in Special Topics, Prof. Jane Hill
Literary Recycling: Intertextuality and Contemporary Narratives
MW 2:00-4:45, TLC 2237
Meets second session.Description: Postmodern narratives are often characterized by their recycling of previous texts. This intertextuality (a term first used by French theorist Julia Kristeva) offers a variety of approaches for interpretation. Using David Cowart's concept of literary symbiosis as our primary model but also exploring other intertextual models, we will read specific paired texts in order to understand how their relationships work to complicate the reading experience and the critical task, but also to develop a sense of how and why intertextuality has emerged as a central element of the postmodern aesthetic.
Texts: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea; William Shakespeare, King Lear and Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Terry Gilliam, The Fisher King [film]; To Kill a Mockingbird [film] and Sling Blade [film]; A Simple Plan [film] and one of the following three written texts to be assigned-Death of a Salesman, Of Mice and Men, OR Macbeth; The Scarlet Letter and one of the following three novels by John Updike to be assigned-A Month of Sundays, S., OR Roger's Version AND one of the following novels to be assigned-A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Holder of the World, Hester, OR The Scarlet Letters.
Requirements: In addition to regular attendance and active, informed participation, three response papers, two oral presentations with written summaries, and a documented essay of 12-15 pages..
XIDS 2100-06: Representing American Women, Prof. Debra MacComb
MTWR 5:00-6:55, HUM 227
May count for credit in Core Area C
Meets fourth session.Description: Revolutionary Daughters, Republican Mothers, American Girls, True Women, New Women, Flappers and Vamps--all in their time have been offered as ideals of womanhood in the United States. Through the analysis of representations in the literary and visual arts, this course will examine a range of identities, images and ideologies associated with the American woman from the early Republic to the modern period.
Texts: Foster, The Coquette; Fern, Ruth Hall; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Chopin, The Awakening, additional brief handouts.
Requirements: Participation, two midterm exams, and a (group) media report on contemporary images of American women.
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Last updated April 17, 2004