English Department Course Descriptions Spring 2009

Spring 2009 Undergraduate (for graduate courses click here)

AMS 101-1 American Studies Core Course - Introduction to American Studies
Thomas Fahy
This course introduces the major to the shape of the discipline today­to its central conversations and methodologies. Students will approach American cultural, political, intellectual and day-to-day experience, both past and present, through a variety of texts. The secondary sources come from a range of relevant fields, including social and intellectual history, biography, ethnography, material culture studies, and the cultural analysis of science and technology. Students will work in part with primary materials, addressing class themes through examination of works of fiction, poetry and philosophy, Census surveys, Supreme Court decision, journalism, works of art, cinema and music. They will thereby develop skills as critical thinkers and readers of cultural text, while gaining insight into American thought, environment, identities, and experiences.

Pre-requisites: Taken by students with at least sophomore standing or with permission of American Studies faculty advisor or instructor

AMS 102-1/ENG 100-2 American Studies Capstone Course - American Modernism and the Art of Making It New
Thomas Fahy
Something radical happened in the early twentieth century. Painters moved toward abstraction. Composers embraced atonality. And writers created a new literary aesthetic through fragmentation, stream of consciousness, and other experiments with language. So what were some of the social, cultural, and political forces that brought about these changes? How were twentieth-century artists rejecting the practices of the Victorian era? How were they responding to drastic changes in technology and science? And how were they challenging audiences to be new readers, viewers, and listeners? This class will examine this period (1907-1929) in American literature, art, and culture. We will read fiction, poetry, and drama, study visual art (Duchamp, Balla, Boccioni, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne), listen to music (Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ellington), and do research on historical and social context, including topics such as lynching memorabilia, nineteenth- and twentieth-century etiquette manuals, World War I propaganda, and Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes. This interdisciplinary approach will not only provide a richer understanding of the writings of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, but it will also challenge us to think critically about the social and cultural changes shaping modernism.

ENG 6-1 Writing in Business (WAC)
Hugh Patterson
The course emphasizes the communication skills necessary for success in the workplace. Written assignments include e-mails, memos, letters, and a resume. Oral and interpersonal communication activities engage students in the interview process, workplace problem-solving, interacting with colleagues and supervisors, conduct of meetings, etc. The course culminates with a report on a subject selected by each student in a particular field or area of interest.

ENG 19-1 Early English Literature: From the Beginnings to 1485
Margaret Hallissy
“And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.” Thus did Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) describe his ideal student, the Clerk of Oxford. In the interest of learning and teaching gladly, the course will involve reading and discussion of the works of medieval writers, both in the original Middle English for scholarly integrity and in modern translation for ease and pleasure. Do not be overly concerned about mastering Middle English; if you have read Chaucer’s words at the beginning of this paragraph, you have begun the process already.

The course is organized around the various literary genres popular in England and Ireland from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries: myths and sagas, ballads and lyrics, fables, plays, romances. Course requirements include a research paper; a final exam; a pass-fail translation exercise; class participation; and regular attendance.

ENG 12-1, -2 Survey of English Literature: Romantic Period to Twentieth Century
Deborah Lutz
By the time the 20th century rolled around the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, in his poetic history of the novel, found himself left with the melancholy supposition: “defeat is the precondition of subjectivity.” How did Modernism and then Postmodernism arrive at this nihilistic historical moment? Why did individuals seem to be imprisoned in their own tormented selfhoods, unable to commune with others? In this chronological survey of the three British literary periods of Romanticism (1785-1830), Victorianism (1830-1901), and Modernism and its “Posts” (1901- ?), we will read canonical texts and trace varying understandings of the “self” and its relationship to nature, society, and language. Starting with the rebellious outcast and artist of Romanticism, we will then move through the Victorian idea of the self as always running up against society, community, and religion and finally end with the fragmentary, isolated selfhood, caught up in language, of the Modernist and Postmodernist period. We will read most of the major Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats; some Victorian poetry by women—Rossetti, Brontë, Browning; a Victorian novel by Dickens, Eliot, or Gaskell; Modernist works by T.S. Eliot, Joyce and Woolf. The class will be centered on serious discussion: all are required to take part.

ENG 22-1 Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances
James P Bednarz
This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare’s later career and focuses on the two important genres—the tragedies and romances (or late comedies)—he perfected during his second decade of involvement with London’s thriving commercial theater. Its sequence of readings (which consists of seven plays) is arranged chronologically to demonstrate the continuing evolution of his dramaturgy from the late Elizabethan to the Jacobean period. Its broadest aim is to provide students with a theatrical, literary, philosophical, historical, and social framework for understanding Shakespeare’s tragedies and romances in relation both to their original Renaissance context and to our own contemporary perspective as readers. It will explore, on its most abstract level, how Shakespeare became relevant both to his age and for all time by analyzing the complexities of human identity and the forms theater employs to represent it. To this end, not only will readers be invited to examine closely the brilliant nuances of his language, characterization, and plot, but they will also, more importantly, be challenged to come to terms with his richly ambivalent conception of experience, with a “Shakespearean” worldview that defies ordinary logic and reason and examines with startling subtlety the basic contradictions in the human condition.

ENG 22-2 Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances
Edmund Miller
Shakespeare is justly celebrated as the greatest writer not only in English literature but in world literature as a whole. Because he worked primarily as a dramatist for the public stage he had to write works that were accessible to a broad range of the public, but because he was a sensitive artist he also gave us both subtle depictions of character and beautiful language. The difficulty some readers have with reading his works today is usually the result of unfamiliarity with the conventions of his language. Well acted, Shakespeare is never difficult to understand. So one of the goals of this course will be to understand how to read Shakespearean language so that it reveals its essential clarity. Some attention will be given to theatrical conventions of Shakespeare’s day to show how the plays were originally performed although they can be and often are performed in a variety of other ways. By contrast with his language, Shakespeare’s plots are easily understood and followed by modern readers as well as by modern audiences in the theater. The plays studied in this course have two sorts of plots. This course will explore Shakespeare’s work in the dramatic genres of tragedy and romance, looking at the changes that occurred in his style over the course of his career and the relationship between the texts of the plays and the dramatic conventions of the theater in Shakespeare’s day.

ENG 23-1 Milton
Edmund Miller
John Milton, one of the greatest writers of the language, has had an influence on later writers surpassed only by Shakespeare’s. The author of beautiful lyric poetry and of the great epic poem of the language, Paradise Lost, Milton also holds a unique place in the political and religious history of the age as a propagandist for the revolutionary government of Oliver Cromwell.

ENG 30-1 Grammar and Usage
Marlene San Miguel Groner
This course will examine the systematic nature of the rules of grammar, using both prescriptive and descriptive grammars. Topics will include defining grammar, sentence patterns, expanding sentence patterns and style, word classes, parts of speech, usage, and diction.

ENG 31-1 Theories of Academic Literacy
Belinda Kremer
Intended for undergraduate students working in the Writing Center and as fellows in the WAC Program, this seminar focuses on alternative theories of reading, writing, and literacy to prepare writing tutors. The course will also examine definitions of intellectual work in various disciplines as well as the literacy needs of students from a range of cultures, language backgrounds, and life experiences.

ENG 44-1 Non-Canonical Writers - Gothic Literature
Deborah Lutz
In the last fifteen years we have seen a revival of all things Gothic: an interest in supernatural haunting and communion with the dead; a depiction of the attraction of the villain, the demon lover, the vampire; a reveling in the sublime of altered states of consciousness such as nightmares, drug-induced fantasies, and hysterical episodes. In this course we will study Gothic movements from the late 18th century to the present, in the realms of literature, architecture, painting, and music. We will seek to understand the fascination with mystery, corruption, and evil throughout the ages and why we are still held in their grip today. We will be attentive to the way the Gothic novel of the late 18th century influenced and was influenced by Romanticism, and we will explore the Victorian Gothic and the slow movement of the genre toward its contemporary status as, for the most part, created by and for women. Our investigation will extend to 20th- and 21st-century manifestations of the Gothic: in romance, in cinema, on television, in music, and in fashion. We will read such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will read the poetry of Lord Byron, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti.

ENG 44-2/WLT 37-2 Non-Canonical Writers – The Making of the Superhero (WAC)
Sheila A Gunther
Analysis of the development of the superhero in world literature. Concentration on how heroes from ancient times and futuristic worlds embody the values and aspirations of their respective cultures. Lectures and classroom discussion provide insights from artistic, historical, philosophical and social points of view. Film supplements lectures. Writing of papers and essays encourages improvement in writing skills and analytical thinking.

Texts, supplementary readings, reserved books, etc.:Iliad (Homer), Odyssey (Homer), Holy Bible, New Testament, The Song of Roland, Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), Benya Krik (Babel), Tarzan (Burroughs), The Jack Tales, Paul Bunyan, Metamorphosis (Kafka), The Running Man (Bachman a.k.a. King), Dune (Herbert), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), Burning Chrome (Gibson).

ENG 47-1 Literary Forms and Genres - Eighteenth-Centrury Writers on Writing (WAC)
Richard McNabb
This course acquaints students with the theory and practice of writing in the eighteenth century. The first half of the course is devoted to examining different theories of writing and its relationship to philosophy, religion, science, and literature of the Enlightenment. In the second half of the course, we will use these theories as lenses to examine modern discourse practices. We will examine how eighteenth-century writing principles are reflected in current political speeches, advertisements, food packaging, and university websites.

Although primarily a course on the theory of writing, you will practice using the strategies defined by these theorists. By the end of the course, you will become more conscious of your writing choices and style. Although you do not need to have a strong background in writing to succeed in this course, by the end you will be more conscious of writing choices and style.

ENG 55-1 The Romantic Period
Joan Digby
By the late eighteenth century, England was in the midst of a great shift in sensibility. Exhaustion with urban life, nostalgia for a rural past and a great swell of political agitation leading to revolution fomented a movement we have come to know as Romanticism. In this course we will read poetry and prose of the major figures of English Romanticism: Wordworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron. A number of minor writers will round out an exploration of the period–its ideas, aesthetics, politics and influence. Since Romanticism, in a broader sense, is always a movement of exhilarated youth, the course will end with a look at “romanticisms” that have followed in the wake of the historic movement.

ENG 72-1, -2 Survey of American Writers Since the Civil War
Thomas Fahy
After the Civil War, realist depictions of upper- and middle-class life in American literature soon gave way to a darker, more fragmented vision of the world. How did American writing move from William Dean Howells, who was celebrated as the greatest living writer at his seventy-fifth birthday party in 1912, to T.S. Eliot’s nightmarish portrait of modern life in The Waste Land ten years later? What were some of the social, cultural, and political forces that shaped such a change? How were American writers influencing and/or responding to other artistic media such as painting, photography, film, and music? This course will examine these types of questions as we survey four literary movements since 1865: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. We will not only make connections across the boundaries of social class, gender, race, and culture, but we will also interrogate the notion of “American” literature itself. The readings will include works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nathanael West, John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Pynchon, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

ENG 74-1 The American Novel - From Nathaniel to Nathanael
Dennis Pahl
In this course, we will cover major American novelists, starting with examples of American romanticism, works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who both deal with Puritanical notions of good and evil and who are also concerned with representing social consciousness and themes of law and justice in ways that are surprisingly modern. From those writers, we will proceed to two distinctly different realists, Henry James and Mark Twain, whose works address the attitudes and tensions among the social classes of the late nineteenth century and who, within that context, attempt to comment, respectively, on the changing roles of women and on race relations and the problem of slavery in antebellum America. While Kate Chopin has the reputation, like James, of being realist focusing on gender issues, we will read one of her short novels to see how it differs from James’s manner of depicting men and women within the same Victorian culture. Moving into the modernist period, we will read Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel about the “lost generation” of the ’20s, and then one of William Faulkner’s Depression-era novels of the ’30s that experiments with points of view and interior monologues in order to show, among other things, the fragmentation and alienation of an American family trying, in their tragicomic way, to cope with loss in a time of great economic struggle. Finally, we will look at a short novel by Nathanael West, whose portrayal of Hollywood’s movie industry elaborates on some of the Gothic motifs and moral questions introduced by the earlier novelists and brings vividly home-or out West-the more chilling, or nightmarish, realities of the American Dream. Requirements and methods of evaluation: one short paper; one research paper; pop quizzes; possible1-page reflection papers; in-class writing; participation in class discussions. Format: lecture/discussion.

ENG 80-1 Advanced Expository Writing (WAC)
Wendy Ryden
In this course, we will study what it means to write effectively through a consideration of purpose, audience, context, and genre. In particular, we will pay attention to the strategic deployment of pathetic, ethical, and logical appeals as well as other relevant rhetorical principles that aid us in creating and understanding “good writing.” Class will be conducted in a workshop format whenever possible with emphasis on the composing process.

ENG 81-1 Creative Writing Workshop I
Dan Levin
Geared toward the dynamics of the short story and poetry, this course requires regular submission of original material and of reviews of other students’ work. Writing is commented on in the workshop class by both peers and instructor—with a view to helping the writer and with a view to developing the critical abilities of class members. There will be additional reading assignments in the genres.

ENG 82-1 Creative Writing II
Dan Levin
The course will involve consistent writing throughout the semester in any genre congenial to the studentCpoetry, essay, short story, part of novel, short play, or what-have-you. Students are encouraged to attempt writing of a larger scope that in ENG 81Cor writing with a more organized unity or simply in different genres than they have tried before.

ENG 85-1 Disciplinary Literacy in English (WAC)
John Lutz
In this course we will explore the basic elements that contribute to insightful scholarship. Drawing mainly on book-length sources and the MLA International Bibliography, we will examine various critical methods for approaching the required texts. For each research paper you will be expected to create an annotated bibliography and present some of your research to the class. Throughout the course, we will discuss how to apply various methods of analysis to the explication of literary texts, the basic features of clear and effective writing, and effective methods of research. This course will approach the close reading of literary texts through a detailed examination of the tools of serious literary analysis and emphasize the process of writing, rereading and revision as central to the construction of a well-researched work of literary analysis.

ENG 100-1 Seminar in English - Literature and Culture of Baseball
John Scheckter
This course examines the ways that baseball has been discussed over the past century and more. We will look at how the game is described, how the people involved are characterized, how those aspects are positioned in relation to one another, what terms are used and when (and how those circumstances change), and how the discussion is monitored and directed by particular concepts of the game. In search of those concepts, we will also look at the intersections of baseball discussion with other discourses—ways of talking about economics, education, gender, media, and citizenship—as we attempt to form clear ideas of how such verbalization works and why it matters.

This is not a course in baseball as such, so no level of expertise or experience is required—but it will be fun.

Possible texts include poetry and song (“Casey,” “Take Me Out …”), fiction (Shoeless Joe, “Pafko at the Wall”), nonfiction (Roger Angell, Jim Bouton), film (The Natural, Bull Durham), and musical drama (Damn Yankees, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”).

ENG 100-2/AMS 102-1 Seminar in English - American Modernism and the Art of Making It New
Thomas Fahy
Something radical happened in the early twentieth century. Painters moved toward abstraction. Composers embraced atonality. And writers created a new literary aesthetic through fragmentation, stream of consciousness, and other experiments with language. So what were some of the social, cultural, and political forces that brought about these changes? How were twentieth-century artists rejecting the practices of the Victorian era? How were they responding to drastic changes in technology and science? And how were they challenging audiences to be new readers, viewers, and listeners? This class will examine this period (1907-1929) in American literature, art, and culture. We will read fiction, poetry, and drama, study visual art (Duchamp, Balla, Boccioni, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne), listen to music (Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ellington), and do research on historical and social context, including topics such as lynching memorabilia, nineteenth- and twentieth-century etiquette manuals, World War I propaganda, and Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes. This interdisciplinary approach will not only provide a richer understanding of the writings of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, but it will also challenge us to think critically about the social and cultural changes shaping modernism.

ENG 100-3 Seminar in English - Irish Renaissance (WAC)
Margaret Hallissy
Writing in the early twentieth century, social and literary critic Douglas Hyde observed that “the Irish race is at present in a most anomalous position, imitating England and yet apparently hating it. How can it produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions as long as it is actuated by motives so contradictory?” The movement now called the Irish Literary Renaissance is an attempt to resolve that contradiction; its goal was to question the influence of English literature on Irish writers, and develop a specifically Irish literature for an independent Irish nation. This course will be a study in cultural context of the major Irish writers involved: John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Lady Augusta Gregory, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. Regular attendance, class participation, a final examination, and a research paper are required.

Readings will be chosen from the following texts:
Harrington, John P., ed. Modern Irish Drama. Norton Critical edition. ISBN 0393960633.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Viking Critical Library edition. ISBN 0140247742.
—. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Viking Critical Library edition. ISBN 01401155031.
Pethica, James, ed. Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical edition. ISBN 0393974979.

ENG 100-4 Seminar in English - Comparative Literature
Suzanne Nalbantian
A comparatist exploration of the modernist movements of the twentieth century and their contribution to the notion of the avant-garde in both literature and painting. The various "isms" such as Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Existentialism will be probed in the context of their philosophical and scientific underpinnings, the manifestoes on aesthetics, and the theories of modern art by painters themselves. Literary works by such writers as Marinetti, Woolf, Hesse, Breton, Rosamel del Valle, Faulkner, Camus, Nin, Borges, and Paz will be included in the readings. The varieties of Modernism will be highlighted by recourse to leading comparatist literary critics who have probed the term. Students will be encouraged to present oral reports based on investigation of these secondary sources. A fifteen-page paper with a comparatist approach is required.

ENG 101-1 Internship
Staff
Career-oriented course with placement and supervised work in a professional setting in law, publishing, public relations, or the like to provide direct practical experience in the application of skills from academic course work. Independent study, not a regular classroom course. Prerequisite: nine-credits of upper-level English. A student will usually be a participant in the COOP Program who has completed EEE-1. A student must arrange through the Department Advisor to work with a particular faculty member before registering for this course.

ENG 352-1 Imaginary Places: Utopias and Dystopias in Modern Fiction
Margaret Hallissy
Utopia: “an imaginary and indefinitely remote place . . . a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions . . . a practical scheme for social improvement.”

The course involves fiction, drama, and film which depict ideal societies, utopias, or their opposite, dystopias. The stimulus for the course came from a book entitled Why Read? by Mark Edmundson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004). Edmundson, a critic of theoretical analysis of literature, believes that most readers read serious fiction for a purpose, and that purpose is to see what in the fiction is applicable to our own lives.

Utopian/dystopian literature lends itself to this kind of analysis in that the authors are asking us readers to talk about the imaginary societies they have created: Are these utopias as ideal as the author claims? What exactly is wrong with the sinister parallel universes, the dystopias? Are any of these works “desirable as a source of belief’? Can these fictional countries of the mind “make a difference”?

Edmundson’s book also directs our attention to the role of the specific language of a work. One characteristic that many of these readings (especially the dystopic fictions) share is their own peculiar ways of handling language. The works ask the reader to consider the psychological function of naming, defining, labeling. In some works, language has serious consequences, because linguistic acts imply power over those who are named, defined, labeled. It is up to the readers to decide how language creates the reality it claims to describe.

WLT 37-2/ENG 44-2 The Making of the Superhero (WAC)
Sheila A Gunther
Analysis of the development of the superhero in world literature. Concentration on how heroes from ancient times and futuristic worlds embody the values and aspirations of their respective cultures. Lectures and classroom discussion provide insights from artistic, historical, philosophical and social points of view. Film supplements lectures. Writing of papers and essays encourages improvement in writing skills and analytical thinking.

Texts, supplementary readings, reserved books, etc.: Iliad (Homer), Odyssey (Homer), Holy Bible, New Testament, The Song of Roland, Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), Benya Krik (Babel), Tarzan (Burroughs), The Jack Tales, Paul Bunyan, Metamorphosis (Kafka), The Running Man (Bachman a.k.a. King), Dune (Herbert), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), Burning Chrome (Gibson).

Graduate Course Descriptions Spring 2009

ENG 515-1/LIN 515-1 Sociolinguistics
Richard Auletta
This course provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics and relates sociolinguistics to other branches of language theory. It surveys the various sub-branches of sociolinguistics and cites case studies illustrating these areas of study. Students are introduced to linguistic variation according to geographic, ethnic, socio-economic, gender, age, occupational, religious, and other social variables. The course presents some of the sociolinguistic problems in the USA today and relates them to classroom teaching and language acquisition. There is some study of languages in contact, code-switching, pidgins and creoles, and linguistic pluralism in a multicultural society. During the semester, the class will view and discuss the videos Yeah, You Rite and American Tongues. The main text will be Language in Society by Suzanne Romaine.

ENG 517-1/LIN 517-1 Applied Linguistics
Rachel Szekely
The course is a wide-ranging introduction to the application of theories of language to domains such as cognition, culture, gender, society, second language acquisition and teaching, computational linguistics and lexicography. An overview of current linguistic theories will provide a backdrop for readings, discussion and assignments on topics in applied linguistics.

ENG 531-1 Theories of Academic Literacy
Belinda Kremer
Intended for graduate students working in the Writing Center and as fellows in the WAC Program, this seminar focuses on alternative theories of reading, writing, and literacy to prepare writing tutors. The course will also examine definitions of intellectual work in various disciplines as well as the literacy needs of students from a range of cultures, language backgrounds, and life experiences.

ENG 533-1 Contemporary American Drama
Phyllis T Dircks
This course is a study of plays and other dramatic presentations from mid-twentieth century to the present. It is designed to introduce students to the temper and forms of recent American drama and to familiarize them with significant changes that developed in the genre. Readings include works by playwrights Hansbery, Albee, Shepard, Baraka, August Wilson, Norman, Wasserstein, Mamet, Lanford Wilson, Kushner, and others. Non-traditional dramatic forms like the musical and the monologue will also be considered. Non-traditional forms like musical, the monologue, and the performance piece are also considered.

ENG 563-1 Comparative Literature
Suzanne Nalbantian
A comparatist exploration of the modernist movements of the twentieth century and their contribution to the notion of the avant-garde in both literature and painting. The various "isms" such as Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Existentialism will be probed in the context of their philosophical and scientific underpinnings, the manifestoes on aesthetics, and the theories of modern art by painters themselves. Literary works by such writers as Marinetti, Woolf, Hesse, Breton, Rosamel del Valle, Faulkner, Camus, Nin, Borges, and Paz will be included in the readings. The varieties of Modernism will be highlighted by recourse to leading comparatist literary critics who have probed the term. Students will be encouraged to present oral reports based on investigation of these secondary sources. A fifteen-page paper with a comparatist approach is required.

ENG 572-1 The English Novel
Jonna Semeiks
The novel as a distinct art form in England emerges in the eighteenth century, and what a wildly variable parentage it had. Its early practitioners were free to invent as they chose, since there were very few models and conventions defining the genre. We will begin our investigation of the novel with Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the “true history” of a thief and a prostitute who aspires to middle-class respectability and material possessions, as is perhaps appropriate to a citizen of the newly-emerging capitalistic age that will be codified and legitimized by Adam Smith in 1776.

Then we will move to the nineteenth century, where the novel, by and large, tends to behave itself stylistically: conventions are established and readers’ expectations gratified. (And what an enormous readership these novels had!) But the novel (we will read one each by Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy) are not “tamed.” They push the boundaries of nineteenth-century ideologies and conventions in their exploration of the tension between money and love, between the individual's passionate desire for freedom and the equally strong pushback from society, between socially-sanctioned, rigid gender roles and the attempt to move beyond them. We will see how these struggles are resolved.

In the twentieth century–which gave birth to “the shock of the new” in art as well as to the literal explosions of two worldwide wars–“modernist” novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf rejected the authority, the artistic conventions and the “certainties” of the past century. Even today, their work is thrilling and challenging; in this respect they seem more “modern” than most of the novelists who succeeded them. There are any number of ways in which one may approach their work (as is the case with any novel, the “great book of life,” as D.H. Lawrence, Joyce's and Woolf’s contemporary, saw it), but we will concern ourselves most with their presentation of consciousness and their deliberate break with inherited values and norms.

We will finish our anatomy of the novel with Atonement, written early in this century by Ian McEwan. As is the case with Woolf and Joyce, consciousness–its limitations, its glorious epiphanies, its sometimes fateful mistakes–is a theme in McEwan’s novel. While the latter's formal experimentation with the novel is different from Woolf’s and Joyce’s, his post-modern defiance of one of narrative's most hallowed conventions, that which governs point of view, suggests an eighteenth-century legacy as well as a twentieth-.

ENG 688-1 Special Literary Topics - African American Literature
Sheila McDonald
TThis course will examine varying perspectives on the black experience. Most writers, blacks, whites and “passers,” will be from the United States, but Russia, France, and the West Indies will also share the stage. We shall begin and end with autobiography, moving from the public persona of Frederick Douglass to the confessional of Jamaica Kincaid. Other issues to be addressed will include cultural differences and diverse points of view: blacks writing about blacks, whites writing about blacks, those who would “pass” avoiding racial themes. Ultimately, we shall be attempting to define the black experience.

Texts:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative
Alexander Pushkin, “The Captain’s Daughter,” “The Queen of Spades,” “The Negro of Peter the Great”
Alexandre Dumas, fils, Camille
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land
William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Jean Toomer, Cane
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir
Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother

LIN 515-1/ENG 515-1 Sociolinguistics
Richard Auletta
This course provides an introduction to the field of sociolinguistics and relates sociolinguistics to other branches of language theory. It surveys the various sub-branches of sociolinguistics and cites case studies illustrating these areas of study. Students are introduced to linguistic variation according to geographic, ethnic, socio-economic, gender, age, occupational, religious, and other social variables. The course presents some of the sociolinguistic problems in the USA today and relates them to classroom teaching and language acquisition. There is some study of languages in contact, code-switching, pidgins and creoles, and linguistic pluralism in a multicultural society. During the semester, the class will view and discuss the videos Yeah, You Rite and American Tongues. The main text will be Language in Society by Suzanne Romaine.

LIN 517-1/ENG 517-1 Applied Linguistics
Rachel Szekely
Applied Linguistics is a survey of linguistics applied especially to language acquisition, including second language acquisition, cognitive processing, assessment, uses of technology, and the learning and teaching of grammar, with additional information on language structure, variation, evolution, semantics, pragmatics, literacy, language use in professional contexts, translation and interpretation, discourse analysis, and the politics of language use. Course objectives are that the students become aware of current theories and research in applied linguistics through reading, discussion, and writing, and, in the grammatical component of this course, that they examine and practice the application of grammatical rules to academic writing.