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CATEGORYClass #CourseSection #Course TitleMeeting PatternInstructor
Recommended for non-majors?
Inst. MethodNotes #1
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Core Major/Minor Course8886ENGL-UA 1011Introduction to the Study of LiteratureTR 12:30pm-1:45pmFeroliIn-PersonThis course will introduce students to a generically and historically diverse set of literary works, and to the critical vocabularies and methodologies that scholars use to analyze them. The course will be primarily discussion-based, though there will be lectures introducing texts and critical concepts throughout the semester. Particular attention will be devoted to developing students' analytical writing skills. Some texts and authors we will discuss are: the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare's sonnets and his history play 1 Henry IV, John Donne's poetry, Toni Morrison's coming-of-age novel Song of Solomon, A.S. Byatt's short story "The Thing in the Forest," Nick Drnaso's graphic novel Sabrina, and Gish Jen's surprisingly funny dystopia The Resisters.
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Core Major/Minor Course8887ENGL-UA 1012Introduction to the Study of LiteratureMW 11am-12:15pmRustIn-PersonTales of Texts - Wherever we find it--in poetry, drama, a novel, even advertisements or notes left on refrigerator doors--that quality of writing we call "literary" springs from and calls upon the human penchant for story-telling. An epic poem like Homer's Odyssey tells a very long story; a minimalist poem like William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say" tells a very short one--and tempts readers to imagine what could come next. Along with the stories they tell overtly--from yarns of high-seas adventure to tales of domestic transgression--many literary texts also tell or allude to stories about texts--the material or imaginative circumstances of their creation, their circulation among readers, the accidents of their preservation, and so on. Williams' poem "This is Just to Say," for instance, works in several ways to conjure an image of the poem occupying a small sheet of paper, perhaps attached by a magnet to a refrigerator door or weighted down by a spoon on a kitchen counter. In turn, the poem invites us to imagine a larger story about that sheet of paper and its writing before and after its evocation in the mini-story in the poem itself: to picture its being written, to see its intended reader finding it, to wonder what he or she will do with it afterwards (tear it up? frame it? write a reply on it?).
This introduction to the study of literature will be loosely organized by a series of such tales of texts. As we'll see, these stories provide a useful lens for bringing the various facets of literary study into focus: from such fundamentals as characterization, plot, and setting to such finer as the terminology for analyzing figurative language. Reading is one half of the course; the other half is writing, and here too "tales of texts" will be a guiding thread, for each of the assignments--ranging from reading response papers to formal essays to more unconventional experiments with texts--is designed to engage you with the "story" of your own writing process.
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Core Major/Minor Course8888ENGL-UA 1014Introduction to the Study of LiteratureMW 3:30pm-4:45pmThakkarIn-PersonThis course, designed for English majors, investigates the specificity of literature and the “literary” as readerly and writerly practices. We will read widely across genres and historical periods to understand the formal elements, textual strategies, and historical developments that make literature a distinctive category of cultural production, capable of creating complex worlds through the medium of language. We will also consider how and why we read, drawing on the resources of literary criticism to consider reading as a creative, historically changeable and socially experimental practice. We will pay close attention throughout to the political life of literature; this will entail asking about the kinds of cultural communities organized by race, nation, empire, and gender/sexuality that shape what we read and what counts as literature. It will also lead us to consider the way that literature represents and mediates the world and--sometimes—seeks to transform it. This course will emphasize skills of close reading and writing-as-revision. You must be a declared English major or minor to take this class. If you need to declare, please do so here: https://forms.gle/JRG1N1wtptgQRH9s7
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Core Major/Minor Course8889ENGL-UA 1015Introduction to the Study of LiteratureMW 9:30am-10:45amKossIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course9912ENGL-UA 1016Introduction to the Study of LiteratureTR 4:55pm-6:10pmTrigosIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course8736ENGL-UA 1111Literatures in English I: Medieval and Early Modern LiteraturesMW 11am-12:15pmArcherYesIn-PersonLiterature in English I is a survey of English literature from its origins in Anglo-Saxon poetry through the later seventeenth century. This course will trace the formation of an English-language community from different ethnic and linguistic strands through the history of the written imagination in the British Isles. The possible origins and early development of concepts such as nationalism, racial difference, and colonialism will be considered. Gender and sexuality will help determine what, how, and who we read. Attention to media (writing, speaking, and eventually print) will also help us enjoy the form and beauty of the imaginative texts we study. Lectures and recitations will encourage close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, aesthetic, and social contexts. Term papers and other regular writing tasks will be assigned. In class mid-term exam and a final exam.
Recitation required: You must be enrolled in a Recitation to receive a grade for this class. You must attend the assigned recitation to pass the class: this is especially notable for late registrants.
Prerequisites: "Writing the Essay" or equivalent.
Students who intent to register close to the Add deadline are urged to contact the professor beforehand for relevant course information and requirements.
Textbook: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Tenth Edition, Volumes A & B. One or two other texts may be assigned.
Works to be read include: Beowulf ; Marie de France; Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales selections, Margery Kempe selections; a medieval play; the sonnet; writings by Queen Elizabeth; Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene selections; poems by Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and Ben Jonson; a Shakespeare play; Katherine Philips; Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World; John Milton, Paradise Lost selections.
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Core Major/Minor Course8737ENGL-UA 1112RCTW 6:20pm-7:35pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course8738ENGL-UA 1113RCTW 7:45pm-9pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course8739ENGL-UA 1114RCTF 9:30am-10:45amTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course8740ENGL-UA 1115RCTF 11am-12:15pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7860ENGL-UA 1121
Literatures in English II: Literatures of the British Isles and British Empire 1660-1900
TR 3:30pm-4:45pmHansonYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7861ENGL-UA 1122RCTR 6:20pm-7:35pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7862ENGL-UA 1123RCTR 7:45pm-9pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7863ENGL-UA 1124RCTF 12:30pm-1:45pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7864ENGL-UA 1125RCTF 2pm-3:15pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7865ENGL-UA 1131Literatures in English III: American Literatures to 1900TR 9:30am-10:45amAugstYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7866ENGL-UA 1132RCTR 6:20pm-7:35pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7867ENGL-UA 1133RCTR 7:45pm-9pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7868ENGL-UA 1134RCTF 3:30pm-4:45pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course7869ENGL-UA 1135RCTF 4:55pm-6:10pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course9093ENGL-UA 1141
Literatures in English IV: Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures
MW 9:30am-10:45amTrujilloYesIn-PersonThis course provides an exposure to English language literary production as it expands and diversifies from 1900 onward. Attending to global aesthetic movements such as naturalism, modernism, magical realism, and postmodernism, it focuses on literary interactions with transnationalism, colonial and postcolonial contexts, and the passage from an inquiry into concepts of social order and expectation to the primacy of social change, cultural multiplicity and uncertainty. The course explores the ascendance of globalization as US culture is both transmitted around the world and is increasingly diversified within by the growth of ethnic literatures and their institutional study. Our emphasis is on the changing scope of English-language literature and culture since 1900. The course explores a variety of forms including literature, poetry, drama, film, and graphic fiction. We will read texts as responses to the rapidity of cultural change under the pressure of urbanization, patterns of transnational migration, hemispheric diasporic movements, visual media, and turbulence in gender roles and national identities. It will explore relationships between globalization theory, literary form, and cultural themes.
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Core Major/Minor Course9094ENGL-UA 1142RCTW 6:20pm-7:35pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course9095ENGL-UA 1143RCTW 7:45pm-9pmTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course9096ENGL-UA 1144RCTF 8am-9:15amTBAYesIn-Person
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Core Major/Minor Course9097ENGL-UA 1145RCTF 9:30am-10:45amTBAYesIn-Person
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Elective9517ENGL-UA 1251History of Drama & Theater IT 2pm-4:45pm
Woolf, Brandon
Yes, through DRLIT-UA 110
In-PersonThis course offers a broad survey of theatre, drama, and performance histories from the pre-Classical period through the 17th century, with case studies from Europe, India, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We will not attempt to create a single, continuous narrative spanning many centuries of wildly diverse theatrical projects. Instead, we will examine various global performance forms in their historical contexts in order to question the function of performance in the propagation and negotiation of cultures. In order to study the ever-changing functions of theatre and drama, we will examine the varied ways that social, political, economic, and cultural conditions inform/reflect aesthetic output - and vice versa.
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CWT Requirement or Elective
8914ENGL-UA 2011Reading as a WriterF 11am-1:45pmRow, Jess, F In-Person
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CWT Requirement or Elective
9070ENGL-UA 2012Reading as a WriterW 2pm-4:45pmNoel, Urayoan In-PersonThis course approaches the generative (writing prose, poetry, and their hybrids) from a personally situated creative-critical perspective. While we will study conventional and not-so-conventional poetic and narrative forms, we will seek to understand the texts at hand from a position of creative and critical engagement: what are the stakes (e.g. formal, political) of a given text and what can we learn from these texts that can inform our own writing? We will hear from socially engaged creative writers whose work is informed by critical methods and perspectives, and we will explore modes of writing at the intersection of the creative and the critical. Assignments may include site-specific writing, "expanded field" writing, cross-media exercises, experiments with autotheory/autofiction, and a final dossier.
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CWT Requirement or Elective
9526ENGL-UA 2013Reading as a WriterMW 12:30pm-1:45pm
Freedgood, Elaine, Cara
Online
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Elective9914ENGL-UA 250118th and 19th Century African American LitTR 9:30am-10:45am
McHenry, Elizabeth
YesIn-Person
This course examines the development of black literary expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth century United States by reading a diverse selection of writers and texts (some classic, some not) that have fundamentally shaped what might be called the African American literary tradition. Through slave narratives, poetry, novels, autobiographies and memoirs, and speeches and journalism we will trace the dynamic circulation and transmission of ideas by African Americans, free and slave, as well as the relationship between cultural production and historical phenomena. We will pay particular attention to the ways that African Americans negotiated and troubled the divide between historical and fictional forms, and how their fictions worked to produce alternative understandings of national history and civil liberty than that which had emerged from the “founding fathers.” The second part of the semester will take up post-emancipation literature: why, we will ask, did black authors return their readers to antebellum slavery in the post- bellum years, seemingly at the very moment that they turned their attention to cultivating their image as “new Negroes” and self-consciously creating racially-specific literature with a lasting impact in the twentieth century? How did Black Americans negotiate through language and in literary terms the competing and contested concerns of heritage and historical memory, on the one hand, with the deterioration of race relations and rise of slavery’s legacy of racial violence in the years W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified with the “problem of the color line”? Students will be introduced to the critical questions and paradigms that are central to African American letters, exploring how black literature engages with the politics of cultural identity formation, and notions of freedom, citizenship, and aesthetic forms.
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Elective20487ENGL-UA 2521Boccaccio's DecameronMW 12:30pm-1:45pm
Ardizzone, Maria, Luisa
In-PersonA study of Boccaccio's Decameron with particular emphasis on themes, conceptual innovations, and influences on French and English literatures.
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Elective9670ENGL-UA 25210Irish Poetry After YeatsTR 2pm-3:15pm
Sullivan, Kelly, Elissa
In-Person
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Elective22844ENGL-UA 25211Helen of Troy and Her GhostsR 2pm-4:30pm
Theodoratou, Helen, L
In-PersonHelen of Troy and Her Ghosts - In Homer's Iliad, Helen, reflecting on her destiny, proclaims that her function is not primarily to be a woman, but to be first and foremost a story. "On us the gods have set an evil destiny," she explains, "that we should be a singer's theme / for generations to come" (Il.6.357-58). Taking its point of departure from the Helen of ancient Greece--the daughter of Zeus and Leda--this course will trace the various Helens whose stories have been told throughout the history of Western literature--from the Helen of Homer to that of Sappho, Stesichorus, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, Pierre de Ronsard, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Jean Giraudoux, W.B.Yeats, Paul Valery, Yannis Ritsos, and beyond. Within this literary trajectory, Helen becomes a means of tracing the story of literature itself. She is composed of all the ideas and desires that have been projected onto her body. In the wording of the modernist poet, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), "Helen is the Greek drama." In each instance, Helen's identity is shattered across an entire history of representations of her relation to literature and poetry and, in the process, she even becomes another name for literature and poetry. Tracing this history will permit us to think about the survival of the past in the present, about the role and place of representation in the establishment of identity in general, and about the way in which the present is haunted by the phantoms of the past.
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Elective22916ENGL-UA 25212Interartistic Genres: Writing and PerformanceT 11am-1:45pm
Sherwood, Normandy
In-PersonInterartistic Genres: Writing and Performance- This workshop course will take a playful approach to writing for performance: we will work towards making new work by experimenting with process and form and cultivating our ability to write things that surprise us. No performance experience is required, you just need a willingness to experiment with writing! - Students will explore writing performance texts in a variety of genres (including but not limited to plays, poems, songs, recipes, oracle cards, performance art and innovative fiction and poetry) with an ultimate goal of creating a new hybrid, inter-genre work as a final project. In class we'll try out hybrid and non-traditional approaches to creating texts that structure performances including devising, cut-ups, OULIPO and Fluxus games, and writing exercises inspired by writers and artists like Erik Ehn, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anne Carson, Lynda Barry, Hijikata Tatsumi, Jenny Holzer (and more). - This is a workshop course, so the major portion of assignments will involve creating and sharing your own writing. The coursework will include readings of creative and critical texts, writing assignments in class and out, and workshops of student projects, all of which are designed to help students write or otherwise devise a new hybrid-genre work. - NO PREREQUISITE. THIS COURSE COUNTS TOWARD ONE OF YOUR WORKSHOP REQUIREMENTS IN THE ENGLISH MAJOR WITH CREATIVE WRITING TRACK.
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Pre-1800 or Elective9915ENGL-UA 4151Colloq: ShakespeareTR 3:30pm-4:45pmPatell, CyrusYesIn-PersonENGL-UA 415 Shakespeare Colloquium: Global Shakespeare and the Idea of World LiteratureThis course introduces students to the theory and practice of world literature by asking the question, "Why and how do some works leave behind their local origins and become pieces of global cultural heritage"? Using the plays of William Shakespeare as a case study, the course considers the playwright both as an exemplar of Western literature and also as a world author whose influence--whether as inspiration or antagonist--can be felt throughout many cultures. We will approach the study of Shakespeare through three different sets of questions: 1) In what ways was Shakespeare a "global" author in his own day, adopting a "worldly" approach that transcends his English context? 2) How does the history of the publication, performance, and criticism of his plays transform "Shakespeare" into a global cultural commodity? 3) What is the cultural legacy of Shakespeare's work throughout a variety of global media forms, including plays, films, novels, operas, and works of visual art? We will begin by looking at four plays -The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, and The Tempest-- that together capture many of the dynamics of the spread of Shakespeare's work through a variety of cultural contexts and genres. We will then devote a number of classes to a closer investigation of the global spread of Shakespeare's most famous play, Hamlet, from 1603 to the present. The course concludes with a creative project inspired by Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio, based on an episode from Cervantes's Don Quixote. An abiding question of the course will be: What does the study of "world literature" add to an "English major"?
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Pre-1800 or Elective23160ENGL-UA 4201The English RenaissanceMW 2pm-3:15pm
Archer, John, M
In-PersonEnglish Renaissance Drama - In this broad survey of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century English drama exclusive of Shakespeare, we will read a range of plays within their generic and social contexts. In the introductory weeks, we will study two exemplary Elizabethan dramas that both define, and defy, common conceptions about tragedy and comedy and the differences between these genres. The first section of the course includes five lively comedies. We will emphasize their city settings and their often satirical depiction of middle class life, gender, and sexuality. In the second part of the course, we'll refine our definition of tragedy by pitting the code of revenge that drives many of these tragic plays against the aristocratic and romantic ideals that also possess their male and female characters. The course is roughly chronological in its choice of plays. Thus, the development of each genre from Elizabethan to Jacobean times will guide our reading, but we will also consider how comedy and tragedy were often mixed together throughout the period from the 1580s through to the 1620s. Plays include: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday; Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam; and John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi. We will read about one play a week and the introductory essays in the anthology; assignments include two term papers and two exams. The textbook is: David Bevington, ed. English Renaissance Drama (Norton, 2002).
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Pre-1800 or Elective9937ENGL-UA 5111Jane AustenF 11am-1:45pm
McDowell, Paula, J
YesIn-PersonREADING AUSTEN READING - Most of us know what Jane Austen wrote, but how many of us know what (and how) she read? To borrow the title of a series of courses in the English Department, how did Austen "read as a writer"? We will focus on Austen as a reader, as well as writer: one who was deeply read in eighteenth-century literature and who incorporated her reading in her works. Along with texts by Austen, we will read texts that she drew on, alluded to, or mentioned in her writing, and that she expected her contemporaries to recognize. When Marianne Dashwood assesses her suitors according to how they read William Cowper's poetry, for instance, what is Austen trying to tell us? When Mr. Collins reads James Fordyce's Sermons to the Bennett sisters, or Henry Tilney lectures Catherine Moreland on the "picturesque," does Austen expect us to listen? What did Austen know (and not know) about the slave trade, and how did this shape her works? Readings include novels, poems, plays, essays, political writing, and conduct books by authors such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, John Gay, William Cowper, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Samuel Johnson, John Gregory, and Mary Wollstonecraft. (We may also read selections from Matthew Lewis, whose "wicked" novel The Monk, is one of very few works the boorish John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey declares "tolerable" and claims to have read. Along the way, we will consider how we too "read as writers": how our reading shapes us, serves us, and sometimes, liberates us: in short, becomes the stuff of which we're made.
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Elective19405ENGL-UA 59120th Century Korean Lit In TranslationMW 11am-12:15pm
Oh, Yoon Jeong
In-PersonEAST-UA 611: 20th Century Korean Lit In Translation
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Elective21451ENGL-UA 592Latina Feminist StudiesT 6:20pm-9pm
Saldana, Maria
In-PersonLatina Feminist Studies
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Elective22878ENGL-UA 593The Novel in AntiquityTR 12:30pm-1:45pm
Barchiesi, Alessandro
In-Personthe novel in antiquity
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Elective22917ENGL-UA 594
Popular Performance: The Black Artist on Stage Since the beginning of American performance traditions in the nineteenth century, Black artists have had a particularly complicated relationship to the stage. Dominated by white male actors in blackface, the concept of Black performance has changed dramatically through the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. "The Black Artist on Stage" investigates how Black actors, comedians, musicians, and dancers navigate the complexities of their art and craft with audience expectations and the Black-body-as-spectacle. Key questions in the course include, how do the legacies of blackface minstrelsy affect the creation and maintenance of Black performance traditions? How do stages and audiences change with or against performers? How do new technologies bring the artist closer to their audience and yet, perhaps, also create new barriers of connection? Beginning with the Black Shakespearean, Ira Aldridge, the course investigates the transatlantic performance of Josephine Baker, the comedy of Richard Pryor, the fat activism of Lizzo, and the role others have left on the stage and Black performance.
W 11am-1:45pmTBAIn-PersonPopular Performance: The Black Artist on Stage Since the beginning of American performance traditions in the nineteenth century, Black artists have had a particularly complicated relationship to the stage. Dominated by white male actors in blackface, the concept of Black performance has changed dramatically through the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. "The Black Artist on Stage" investigates how Black actors, comedians, musicians, and dancers navigate the complexities of their art and craft with audience expectations and the Black-body-as-spectacle. Key questions in the course include, how do the legacies of blackface minstrelsy affect the creation and maintenance of Black performance traditions? How do stages and audiences change with or against performers? How do new technologies bring the artist closer to their audience and yet, perhaps, also create new barriers of connection? Beginning with the Black Shakespearean, Ira Aldridge, the course investigates the transatlantic performance of Josephine Baker, the comedy of Richard Pryor, the fat activism of Lizzo, and the role others have left on the stage and Black performance.
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Elective22918ENGL-UA 595Drama and the NovelW 2pm-4:45pm
Osburn, John, Powers
In-PersonDRAMA AND THE NOVEL At a key point in Mikhail Bulgakov's Black Snow, subtitled "a theatrical novel," the narrator sees the figures in the novel he has written "moving about" in a "little box" with "light streaming through the lines on the page." Soon music and voices are heard, until "after three nights playing around with the first scene, I realized I was writing a play." Following Bulgakov's cue, we will traverse the liminal zone between novel and play in both directions: novels that poach the theater for characters, settings, episodes, metaphors, and techniques; dramatic texts adapted from novels; authors who write both plays and novels; the novel as theater historical document. Concepts such as "the dramatic novel," "modern tragedy," "the reality effect," the (questionable) drama/narrative binary, novelistic anti-theatricalism, and theatrical novel-envy will be encountered, along with writers as diverse in time and background as Jane Austen, Theodore Dreiser, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Lisa Klein, Haruki Murakami, and Emily St. John Mandel.
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Elective22919ENGL-UA 596Black Women Playwrights R 2pm-4:45pmTBAIn-PersonBlack Women Playwrights - This course will explore the wide-ranging contributions of black women playwrights to the dramatic tradition of the United States. Spanning from African-American women dramatists of the early 20th century to our current moment, we will trace the impact of black women authors on national and transnational notions of black identity, black life, black feminisms, black aesthetics, and major social movements. While we will not attempt to cover a comprehensive survey, we will engage a range of texts including plays, theory and criticism on black expression, archival materials, as well as local events and resources. This course will move chronologically, investigating the continuum of African-American women’s voices in the theatre, tracing emerging thematic and aesthetic directions along the way, and also recognizing radically divergent interventions. Couched within more broad questions of how to define and where to locate the tenets of African-American drama, this course will ponder how black women authors have distinctly confronted questions of representation, marginality, genealogy and familial systems, and political mobilization.
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ElectiveENGL-UA 597Media and the EnvironmentMW 2:00-3:15PMGorin, AndrewIn-Person
Media and the Environment - This interdisciplinary course examines the ways environments, both natural and human, have been shaped by media representations and technologies. The course focuses particularly on issues of representation surrounding the climate crisis: on how anthropogenic climate change can be understood as a cultural phenomenon, and how cultural workers might therefore be able to intervene in trajectories of environmental degradation. Students will encounter key texts in a variety of disciplines and media formats, including cinema, television, literature, philosophy, visual and performance art, journalism, architecture, photography, and the internet. They will analyze these materials in order to track the history of ideas of “nature,” the shifting roles that distinct media have played in representing natural environments, and the various genres and rhetorical trends that have emerged within modern environmental discourse, including apocalypse and proxy-disaster narratives, nature documentaries, eco-comedies, solar punk, greenwashing, techno-utopianism, alternative ecologies (indigenous, Black, queer, trans etc.), and climate misinformation and denialism. We will also become familiar with thought about the public sphere and media ecology as theoretical lenses through which to view cultural objects and communications structures that have facilitated or attempted to address environmental problems. Course content may include films such as Don’t Look Up, The Tomorrow War, Merchants of Doubt, and Avatar; novels such as Octavia Butler’s Parables of the Sower, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior; artists such as Robert Smithson, Agnes Denes, Mierle Ladermen Ukeles, and Amy Howden-Chapman; and authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson, Naomi Klein, Julian Brave Noisecat, Andreas Malm, Donna Haraway, Jedediah Purdy, Lucy Lippard, McKenzie Wark, and Walter Benjamin.
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ElectiveENGL-UA 598
Giacomo Leopardi: Poetry, Archaism and Revolt. The Deep Voice of the Self in 19th Century Italy.
MW 2:00-3:15PM
Ardizzone, Maria, Luisa
In-PersonGiacomo Leopardi (Recanati, 1798 - Naples, 1837) is one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time. He is also a prose writer, philosopher and philologist with a deep knowledge of the ancient and classical world. His poetry, which has exerted a great influence, is shaped by an extraordinary capacity for reflection, in which thought and imagination interpenetrate and blend. The tone of Leopardi's poetry is unique. Its roots are in the archaic strata of the self that emerge as a voice that is primordial and modern at once. Life and death, truth and nothingness, revolt and tradition, despair and melancholy but also desire and hope are part of his inner experience and of his poems.The course reads a selection of Leopardi’s poetry and prose that includes Cantos, Zibaldone, Moral Works, and Thoughts. It explores the relationship between biography and work, between the space-time in which Leopardi lives and the utopian dimension in which he takes refuge. Love, nature, primitivism, pain and pessimism, brotherhood and human solidarity are among the themes that his work addresses linking them to the European intellectual debates of his time. The crisis of Western culture and the inevitable destruction of the values on which it rests, as they manifest themselves in the poetry and prose of Leopardi, are part of the topics that the course considers and discusses.
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Elective9671ENGL-UA 6251JoyceTR 11am-12:15pm
Waters, John, P
YesIn-Person
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Critical Theory or Elective9719ENGL-UA 6751Literature and the EnvironmentT 11am-1:30pm
Athanassakis, Yanoula
In-Person
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Critical Theory or Elective8594ENGL-UA 7121Major Texts in Critical TheoryM 4:55pm-7:40pmTBAIn-Person
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Critical Theory or Elective9466ENGL-UA 7122Major Texts in Critical TheoryTR 12:30pm-1:45pmTBAIn-Person
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Critical Theory or Elective9467ENGL-UA 7123Major Texts in Critical TheoryMW 3:30pm-4:45pm
Shaw, Lytle, D
In-PersonConsidering poets from Virgil to Lisa Robertson, and philosophers and theorists including Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, De Man, and Latour this class will zoom in on poetry’s possible relationships to theory. But rather than just use the poems to illustrate the theory, we will open up a wider discussion of what theory is, where it comes from, what authority it has, and who gets to perform or embody it. Our readings will proceed under three at times overlapping headings: epics and coteries will address the historic relationship between epic and lyric and propose the idea of coterie as a way to reenergize this relationship; alternative tours will consider the poet as docent or guide, and take up a range of models of fieldwork developed by poets; other urbanisms will continue this thinking within the domain of the city.
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Elective9468ENGL-UA 7161Asian-American LiteratureMW 12:30pm-1:45pm
Parikh, Crystal, A
In-Person
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Elective9917ENGL-UA 7211History & Literatures of The South Asian DiasporaMW 8am-9:15amSandhu, SS In-Person
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Critical Theory or Elective19622ENGL-UA 73510Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Performance EthnographiesTR 11am-12:15pmTBAIn-PersonPerformance Ethnographies This course explores the interrelated and ever-evolving methodologies that draw together ethnography and performance studies theories and practices. Through rhetorical inquiry, qualitative study, introduction to “fieldworking” as a practice, and close attention to the ethical dimensions of studying human experience as performance, we will investigate texts that employ ethnography in understanding performance as well as performances drafted or devised through ethnographic processes. This course will, naturally, consider varied literary and performance forms, decentering the canonical and finding grounding in works that employ postcolonial and decolonizing approaches. Students will not only read ethnographic texts, but will also engage in the practice of ethnographic and “embodied” writing. This will include autoethnography as well as positioning oneself as researcher while delving into the benefits, challenges, and shortcomings of this field. We will concern ourselves with issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality presented through performance modes that include everyday life, folk and vernacular performance, and ceremony and ritual.
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Critical Theory or Elective22745ENGL-UA 7801Intro to Postcolonial StudiesMW 8am-9:15am
Hofmeyr, Isabel
In-PersonSouth Africa has always been a country that raises global questions. The anti-apartheid struggle spawned an international movement that grappled with questions of race and justice. The term apartheid itself has become a potent and portable sign to stigmatize extreme forms of oppression in different parts of the world. South Africa hence offers an ideal site from which to approach key postcolonial questions. This course will survey a range of media and genres: in addition to novels and poetry, we will examine photography and stand-up comedy. The course will include at least two skype interviews with writers whom we will be studying.
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Elective19623ENGL-UA 8001
ALIENS IN BRITAIN
This is a class about modern Britain and its encounters with others - pogrom-fleeing Jews, insurrectionary anarchists, Chinese seafarers during the period of the Yellow Peril, Indian students seeking to topple Empire, Irish migrants, deracinated Roma, colonial subjects from Africa and the Caribbean, pornographic Australians. These others include viruses, angry ghosts, invasive plants, extraterrestrials. These others stoke fears - but also fantasies - of social change and cultural contamination. Material examined will include pulp fictions, experimental music, and underground cinema.
MW 12:30pm-1:45pmSandhu, SS In-PersonALIENS IN BRITAIN - This is a class about modern Britain and its encounters with others - pogrom-fleeing Jews, insurrectionary anarchists, Chinese seafarers during the period of the Yellow Peril, Indian students seeking to topple Empire, Irish migrants, deracinated Roma, colonial subjects from Africa and the Caribbean, pornographic Australians. These others include viruses, angry ghosts, invasive plants, extraterrestrials. These others stoke fears - but also fantasies - of social change and cultural contamination. Material examined will include pulp fictions, experimental music, and underground cinema.
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Elective19624ENGL-UA 8002BLACK BRITAIN IMW 11am-12:15pm
Freedgood, Elaine, Cara
OnlineBLACK BRITAIN I
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Elective19625ENGL-UA 8003Blindness and Insight from King Lear to Jane EyreT 11am-1:45pmGodin, LeonaIn-PersonBlindness and Insight from King Lear to Jane Eyre
"Out, vile jelly!" cries the villain Cornwall in Shakespeare's King Lear as he plucks the second of Gloucester's eyes, which provokes the gullible father's journey to understanding and insight. The trope of exchanging physical sight for spiritual sight draws on a long tradition from the legendary Homer and the tragedy of Oedipus to the Biblical blind man made to see. Blindness enters the Modern Era with renewed vigor as the microscope and telescope extend human vision into new realms and medical "miracles" offer "restored" sight. In this course we'll read literary, philosophical, and scientific texts of the 17th through 19th centuries by authors including Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Swift, and Bronte, alongside critical, theoretical, and autobiographical texts on blindness and disability by authors including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges, Lennard Davis, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in an effort to investigate and interrogate the metanarrative of blindness.
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Elective19626ENGL-UA 8004TBAT 4:55pm-7:40pmTBAIn-Person
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Elective19627ENGL-UA 8005TBAM 4:55pm-7:40pmTBAIn-Person
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CWT Requirement9118ENGL-UA 9101Creative Writing Capstone ProjectDoes Not Meet
Row, Jess, F (11249445) [Primary Instructor, 100%, Evaluate, LMS]
Independent Studies
GET PERMISSION CODES HERE: https://forms.gle/eQ3FXAokesyJyFseA
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CWT Requirement9325ENGL-UA 9102Creative Writing Capstone ProjectDoes Not MeetTBA
Independent Studies
GET PERMISSION CODES HERE: https://forms.gle/eQ3FXAokesyJyFseA
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CWT Requirement9119ENGL-UA 9111Creative Writing Capstone ColloquiumR 12:30pm-1:45pmRow, Jess, FIn-PersonGET PERMISSION CODES HERE: https://forms.gle/eQ3FXAokesyJyFseA
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CWT Requirement9326ENGL-UA 9112Creative Writing Capstone ColloquiumR 12:30pm-1:45pmTBAIn-PersonGET PERMISSION CODES HERE: https://forms.gle/eQ3FXAokesyJyFseA
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English Honors Program7870ENGL-UA 9251Senior Honors ThesisDoes Not Meet
McLane, Maureen
Independent Studies
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English Honors Program7871ENGL-UA 9261Senior Honors ColloquiumW 4:55pm-6:10pm
McLane, Maureen
In-Person
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Senior Seminar19628ENGL-UA 9621The American Political NovelT 2pm-4:45pm
Hendin, Josephine
In-PersonThe America Political Novel
The American political novel tracks both the concerns of American society and the literary forms used to capture changing American experience. Opening with brief selections from the Federalist papers and Henry Adams' classic Democracy, the course focuses on the growth of the contemporary political novel from Robert Penn Warren's classic, All the King's Men to contemporary works that engage radicalism, conservatism, feminism, racism and changing visions of social crises. Focusing on a formally varied fiction often reinterpreted in films for a mass audience, political fiction and key films define changing visions of crises in American democracy.
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Senior Seminar9925ENGL-UA 9641Literature of the Civil Rights MovementW 2pm-4:45pm
Posmentier, Sonya
In-PersonLiterature of the Civil Rights Movement- This course looks at the literature of the long Civil Rights movement in the United States with an emphasis on alternative sites of struggle and knowledge production. Turning our attention from streets and courthouses to farms, freedom schools, and kitchen tables, we will ask what happens to our understanding of the movement (and of “civil rights” conceptually) when we re-map its geography in this way. What forms of literary culture emerged from agricultural resistance organizations like the Freedom Farm Workers’ Collective and the United Farmworkers? What did poetry and “citizenship training” have to do with one another in the curriculum of the Mississippi Summer Project Freedom Schools? While our focus is on twentieth century Black freedom movement in the US, we will identify necessary connections to other US-based and global liberation movements. Key Texts may include works by Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara; the text of the Brown V. Board of Ed and Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decisions; anthologies, statements, manifestos; and recorded sound, song, poetry, performance and speech in the movement archives of SNCC, Mississippi Summer Project, Freedom Farm Cooperative, and United Farm Workers (El Teatro Campesino). We will also seek opportunities to interact with and learn from contemporary literary events, publications and social movements. Students will practice various forms of literary research (analysis of primary texts, archival research, responding to literary criticism and theory) and complete a final research essay on a topic of their choice related to the movement.
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Senior Seminar9926ENGL-UA 9701Reading FanonT 2pm-4:45pm
Young, Robert JC
In-Personreading fanon - In recent years, Frantz Fanon has increasingly become recognized as one of the most important and formative activist and philosophers of the mid-twentieth century. Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) was one of the first books to analyze the experience of race and questions of Black being in a racialized society from the subjective point of view of the Black person. With his The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon became known as "the voice of the Third World", or, as we would say today, the Global South. The book provided the most searing critique of colonialism whilst offering the means to achieve both decolonization and survival as an independent nation. Notwithstanding his political activism in Algeria, Fanon himself was a psychiatrist, trained in the tradition of French psychiatry which draws widely not only on medical psychiatry but also from psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and literature. A new collection of his psychiatric writings, together with two previously unpublished surrealist plays, allows us to understand how probing were his analyses of the cultural conditions of the psyche in the twentieth century. In this course whilst we will read widely across Fanon's writings we will also be spending time looking at "the unknown Fanon", that is his other writings beyond his two most famous books. We will also be situating him by considering related work by his contemporaries such as the Martinican surrealists Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, the controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty, and the Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles whose radical disalienating psychiatry practiced at Saint Alban in France forged connections with philosophers, writers, and the artists of "art brut".
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Senior Seminar9927ENGL-UA 9721Novels of Kazuo IshiguroR 2pm-4:45pm
Gilman, Ernest
In-PersonThe Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro -Few novelists since Dickens have been accorded the honor of a college course devoted entirely to their work: who besides Henry James, James Joyce, and sometimes Faulkner? The criteria for a "single author" course are demanding. The author must have produced not only a substantial and enduring body of work, but one that sustains the critical assumption that the whole is greater than its parts. Thus the focus is on the significance and interrelation of individual books within the contours of a developing literary career--an approach in which the concept of "development" is itself at issue. That said, our nominee for this recognition is Kazuo Ishiguro. Others may put forth a different list of candidates on the scene today, including, in no particular order of merit, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, or Julian Barnes--all of whom have garnered major literary prizes. Amon these, Ishiguro has won the Booker Prize and, in 2017, the Nobel Prize for literature. The link to his Nobel acceptance speech is https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ishiguro-lecture_en.pdf - In order to display the range and brilliance of the novelist's accomplishment--his imagination takes us to wartime Japan, to an English manor house, to a dystopian future and to the middle ages in Britain. In this course we read all of Ishiguro's eight novels (so far), and view "The Remains of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go," the two acclaimed adaptations of Ishiguro's novels.
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Senior Seminar9465ENGL-UA 9731Public HumanitiesR 4:55pm-7:40pm
Hanson, Lenora
In-PersonIn this course, we will review some of the foundational concepts and histories of what has come to be called the Public Humanities over the last 20+ years. These include notions of the public sphere, audience, circulation, representation, and history. At the same time, we will consider the relevance and adequacy of what has been called the Public Sphere to address conditions of social inequality, unequal access to resources, racism, misogyny, ableism, etc. In contrast to the public, we will pursue what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “alternative nouns,” including, but not limited to, the Underground, the Commons, the Black Radical Tradition, the Global South, Social Movements, Emergent, Transformative, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Colonial, and Anti-Imperial. Over the course of the semester, we will meet with practitioners of more and less traditional Public Humanities projects. And we will create a more developed sense for ourselves of who we think “our” public is and imagine what kinds of sustainable projects might flourish there.
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Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
7872ENGL-UA 9801Internship
Deer, Patrick, H
Independent Studies
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Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
9934ENGL-UA 9951The Contemporary Literature LabM 6:20pm-7:35pmTBAIn-Person
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Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
10327ENGL-UA 9952The Contemporary Literature LabT 3:30pm-4:45pm
Regaignon, Dara
In-PersonSerial Fiction. This course immerses students in the experience of nineteenth-century readers, who engaged with long stories over an extended period of time through serial publication. In this two-credit class, we will read one novel over the course of the semester, considering how this changes the reading experience; how it draws our attention to different elements of the novel; and how the pauses between serial installments generate suspense and anticipation.
Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White was first published in 40 weekly installments in the magazine All the Year Round from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860. In other words, instead of binging the novel the moment it came out (or the moment they could get it from the library), many of Collins' original readers read the book bit by bit, waiting eagerly for the next installment while discussing possible twists and turns for the plot with friends, neighbors, and relatives. In this course, we will approximate that reading experience, paying attention to the ways in which reading serially - with enforced pauses - changes how and what we pay attention to in a novel. The focus will be on the text itself, but we will also read and reflect on contemporary historical events, other major texts published over the course of those seven months, and select pieces of literary criticism.
Arguably one of the first detective stories, The Woman in White has influenced generations of crime writers (including Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle). By reading it in serial installments, we'll not only be able to understand a bit more about the reading experience of its original readers, we'll also be able to analyze how the mystery genre works and to think about some of its key features--including the generating and sustaining of suspense and the impact of multiple narrators. We'll also think about the novel's immediate print context: the weekly magazine All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens and including stories, poetry, and commentary on current events.
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Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
19629ENGL-UA 9953The Contemporary Literature LabM 8am-9:15amIn-Person
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Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
7873ENGL-UA 9971Independent StudyDoes Not Meet
Independent Studies
77
Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
10328ENGL-UA 9991Mentorship Program: FreshmenDoes Not MeetIn-Person
78
Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
10329ENGL-UA 9992Mentorship Program: SophomoresDoes Not MeetIn-Person
79
Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
10330ENGL-UA 9993Mentorship Program: JuniorsDoes Not MeetIn-Person
80
Other/Does Not Count Toward Maj/Min
10331ENGL-UA 9994Mentorship Program: SeniorsDoes Not MeetIn-Person
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Other/Pre-1800ENGL-GA 1060
Introduction to Old English: Tolkien’s Origin (GRAD LEVEL, YOU WILL NEED A CODE FROM mm8370@nyu.edu)
W 4:55-7:40PMMomma, HalIn-Person
This course has two purposes: first, to introduce students to Old English language and literature and also to the culture and history in which this language thrived; second, to use Old English as an entry point to explore J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, both academic and creative. It will be divided into three parts. In the first part, we will go over basic Old English grammar and read, with the help of translations, passages from Old English prose. Since Old English is noticeably different from its descendant Modern English, it needs to be approached almost as a foreign language: students will therefore be encouraged to memorize basic grammatical endings and core vocabulary (but not as intensely as Tolkien did). We will use Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English along with original materials but will occasionally turn to Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Anglo-Saxon Reader, two textbooks that Tolkien used to study Old English as a student. In the second part, we will read shorter Old English poems while studying somewhat more advanced grammar, syntax, and versification. We will be reading Tolkien’s writing related to these poetic texts: for instance, we will read The Battle of Maldon, a poem about the English army’s defeat by the Viking invaders, side by side with Tolkien’s The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, which is a fascinating dramatization of the poem; we will read some of the Advent Lyrics and discuss Tolkien’s use of one of the lyrics in The Lord of the Rings (and elsewhere: e.g., Fall of Gondolin). In the last section we will read excerpts from Beowulf together with Tolkien’s translation of the poem, his well-known lecture entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and excerpts from The Hobbit. Throughout the semester we will explore Old English vocabulary and especially poetic words, since Tolkien often used such words in his creative writing. We will also consider Tolkien’s work in the light of feminist criticism and critical race theory, since he has received some criticism in recent years on these fronts.
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