Fall 2009

Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2009
 

QUEENS

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (73236)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
This course is designed to introduce new majors and minors to the fundamental skills necessary to be successful in English studies.  We will be focusing on reading, writing and research: close reading of the major genres of literary texts; writing formal papers on literary subjects; and the basic tools required for meaningful research.  We will also practice class presentations and the writing of research proposals.  We will read some poetry, some fiction, and a play, but our emphasis will not be on "coverage" but on intensive reading and writing.  In other words, this is our methods course, our “how to be an English major” course.   

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (74529)
TR- 1:30 – 2:55 pm
Dr. Nicole Rice
This course is an introduction to the methods and terms fundamental to literary analysis. As we study examples from several major genres (the short story, lyric poetry, drama, and the novel), we will investigate how different authors use language to create meaning. We will be tracing images, themes, and narrative patterns, learning how to perform “close readings” of texts, working to create links between literary works, and reading selected critical essays. We will make a sustained effort to link careful reading with analytical writing and to demystify the writing process using writing exercises, discussions of essays in progress, drafts of essays, and peer-editing sessions.

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (74525)
MWF 12:20-1:15 p.m.
T/B/A
A foundation course introducing English majors and minors to the disciplinary practices of the English major.  Required of all majors and minors in their sophomore or junior years.

E. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism & Theory (73230)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Scott Combs
Film Emphasis
This course introduces students to major works of twentieth-century critical thinking.  We will read prominent examples from different theoretical paradigms, including formalism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, and postmodernism.  For each unit, we will pair our first reading with a second corresponding reading from film theory.  Our emphasis, then, is not on “applying” the theory we read to objects and texts, but rather to see theoretical work in practice.  In this course, our object of choice—that is, the kind of text through which we will illuminate theoretical work—will be film, not literature.  To that end, take this version of the class if you are interested in studying film and media.  Half the coursework will be devoted to reflecting seriously on the moving image.

E. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism & Theory (74533)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
The aim of this course is to introduce the key thinkers in literary theory. We will begin with Plato and work our way through the “classical” theorists to examine how their ideas form the foundations for contemporary schools of theory and the questions that are posed about gender, identity, sexuality, writing and literature. The goal of this course is familiarization with the work of important theorists. We will not be treating theory as a set of formulae that we will “apply” to literary texts, but examining it as a set of texts and questions in its own right. Theorists to be covered: Plato, Freud, Marx, Saussure, Butler, Derrida, Spivak, Said, Lacan, Barthes, Austin, Foucault.

E. 3110:  Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) (74520)
TR - 10:45 – 12:10 pm
Dr. Nicole Rice
This course introduces the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century poetic masterpiece. This is a work of tremendous variety, containing stories of chivalry and betrayal, fidelity and adultery, piety and blasphemy, romance and bawdy humor. We will study some of Chaucer’s most important and engaging tales, learning to read and pronounce the original Middle English as we go. Chaucer lived during a period of major social, religious, and political upheaval. We will situate the Tales in their historical contexts while introducing some important recent critical approaches to Chaucer.

E. 3130: Shakespeare: Elizabethan Plays (73232)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
Education and Power
What is a literary education for?  What does reading Shakespeare’s plays help us do?  This course uses Shakespeare to interrogate our models of literary education and its social consequences.  Richard Brodhead, President of Duke University and Professor of English, emphasizes that teaching is one of the few relationships of unequal power that has the primary aim of undoing its own inequality.  While on some level education is always “for” something, acquiring power through education can also unsettle the social structures and hierarchies that support educational systems.  We start by considering The Taming of the Shrew as a harsh and sometimes brutal comedy of education, in which Katerina functions as both ideal student and rebel.  We then examine various examples of education and power, including Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, who conquered the world in his twenties; King Henry V, whose education stretches across three plays; and finally two contrasting images of the way education translates (or does not) into social power: cross-dressing Rosalind in As You Like It, and the eternal student Hamlet.  We’ll use these plays to consider the dynamics of the modern classroom at St. John’s, and the role of education in our city and our world.
*This course may be of special interest to English majors and minors interested in working in education at any level.

E. 3190: Special Topics in Medieval Literature: Poetry and the Globe (74542)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
The ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew very well that the world is round, but it was not until the fifteenth century that Western Europeans began to produce globe-shaped maps.  The first European globe was built by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg in the symbolic year 1492.  Behaim’s work touched off a flurry of globe-making that coincided with the global expansion of European culture.  This course looks at early modern English poetic responses to the newly global world.  We’ll begin in Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, built in 1599, and what was possibly the first play staged there, King Henry V.   Other texts may include narratives of exploration like Francis Drake’s The World Encompass’d and Walter Ralegh’s History of the World; world-spanning plays like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus; lyric poems by John Donne, Michael Drayton, Thomas Wyatt, and others; and prose narratives by Thomas Lodge and Mary Wroth.  The course will conclude with a second Shakespeare play, King Henry VIII, during a performance of which in 1613 the Globe Theater burned down.  The symbolism was of course unintentional, but we’ll use the burning Globe to consider ways in which early modern globalization – perhaps like more recent global trends – carried the seeds of its own destruction.

E. 3200: Eighteenth-Century English Literature (74530)
MW 10:10-11:05 a.m. F Online
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will survey the major (and some minor) authors, themes, and genres that constitute English literary culture from 1660 to around 1800, a period that historians credit with giving rise to a widespread print culture, increased literacy rates, women readers and writers, and England’s view of itself as an enlightened, polite society. We’ll explore how literature participates in forging such social changes. How do texts in this period uniquely pose ideological questions? How do they envision progress? How do they theorize human subjectivity? We will explore how some definitive literary events of the period—a renewed idealization of classical texts, the quest to establish a distinctly English poetic tradition, the emergence of the novel genre—both confirm and question England’s view of itself as a modern, virtuous, and enlightened society. Readings will include poetry by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gray; prose fiction by Defoe, Haywood, Burney; and non-fiction prose by Addison, Johnson, Boswell, Smith. Evaluation will be based on a total of 15 pages of formal writing, participation, and a final.

E. 3250 Victorian Literature (74519)
M, W 10:10 – 11:05 a.m. F. Online
Dr. Amy King
The Victorian age (1832-1901) in England is defined by the stability of a sixty-three year reign by Queen Victoria, but the period was anything but monotonous.  The period is marked by enormous social change, technological innovation, imperial rule, and urbanization—most tangibly, the population doubled between 1800 and 1850 from nine to eighteen million, which could perhaps be a metaphor for the myriad changes that the era saw.  Like our own society, Britain in the Victorian age was an urban industrial society— indeed the first in history— and subject to its own form of shock from information overload and technological change. 
     Our own middle-class, economic, mobile, complex and interwoven world, increasingly urbanized and organized, was first described and mapped in this period— hence, perhaps, our moment’s continuing interest in the literature of the period. In this course we will read Victorian poetry, novel, and non-fiction prose.  Our largest intellectual task will be to explore the ways in which these texts mark the complex inauguration of our own modern consciousness:  this will be our theme, tracked through various texts, various genres, and various geographical sites (London, the suburbs, the country, the empire). 

E. 3300: Colonial American Literature (74523)
MW 9:05-10:00 a.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will emphasize contact with aboriginal Americans, but it will also survey some of the basic texts of the New England literary tradition which influenced later writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. We will begin with Child's backwards-looking (and romanticized) Hobomok (1826) and then turn to the primary texts themselves. Texts will include John Smith's accounts of his interactions with the Indians of Virginia (is this a history, an advertisement, or a novel?); early histories of the Plymouth colony and New England (the kindness of Squanto, and butchery of all other Indians); the actual court transcripts of the prosecution of the antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, who boldly challenged the Puritan orthodoxy over the interpretation of the Bible; Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative (her family killed, she is dragged along in the dirt behind a Wampanoag army for several months, eating bear fat and clinging to her Congregationalism); Ben Franklin's Autobiography (the ur-text of American success); several treaties with the Delaware and Haudenosaunee Indians; and  a hell-fire sermon of Jonathan Edwards that has come to represent a highly durable American literary form known as the "jeremiad."

E. 3350: American Women Writers (74541)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course will investigate the constructions as well as the challenges to the "Cult of True Womanhood”: the cult of purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity that largely defined the acceptable boundaries of female behavior from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.  The sentimental novel, written primarily by women in the mid-nineteenth century, sought to train readers how to be good Christians, obedient daughters, selfless yet self-reliant, as well as good consumers in a growing American marketplace. Moreover, domestic ideology and the literary conventions that expressed that ideology often excluded working women and women of color from the very definition of woman.  The essayist Margaret Fuller argues this case in her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845):  "Those who think the physical circumstances of Woman would make a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable are by no means those who think it impossible for negresses to endure field work, even during pregnancy." Fuller offers insights into the contradictions of womanhood in antebellum America; we will carry the questions she raises into our reading of the sentimental tradition (and we will look back to its precursor: the seduction novel) as well as the residual responses in the early twentieth century of several women writers of color.  Our authors will include: Hannah Webster Foster, Fanny Fern, Harriet Wilson, Zitkala-Sa, Kate Chopin, Zora Neal Hurston, and Nella Larsen.

E. 3390: Special Topics in American Literature to 1900 (74518)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
PANIC: Capitalist Literacy in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Culture
This course will examine how financial panics and economic crisis shaped U.S. fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   From 1837 to 1907 Americans experienced several market “crashes” that rocked Wall Street and Main Street.  These financial catastrophes encouraged fiction writers to narrate in new ways the appearance of market crowds, corporate chaos, and “epidemic emotions.”  Writers may include: Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Edith Wharton.

E. 3460: Contemporary Drama (74532)
MW 11:15-12:10 p.m., F Online
Dr. Angela Belli
This course explores questions in contemporary dramas that reference a post-modern era through an examination of relevant, selected plays. We will consider the response of current dramatists to socio-political currents of the day.  Paying particular attention to the forces that have shaped the twenty-first century of human experience---economic, political, scientific—we will consider how the theater presents life in our time.  In examining representative plays, we will consider the function of tragedy and comedy, including the absurd, in offering a valid reflection of current culture. Our study will include readings of the texts as well as an examination of the theoretical and critical points of view that led to their creation.  Dramatists whose works have been selected for study include Samuel Beckett, Robert Bolt, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Brian Friel, John Guare, Cheryl West, Martin McDonagh, John Patrick Shanley, Neil Simon.      

E. 3500 (CLS 3500), Classical Literature (74537)
MWF 8:00-8:55 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
This course, as offered in fall 2009, will analyze the nature of power as the motif evolves in the literature of Greece and Rome.  Its organization will be “diachronic” rather than linear and pair works of Greece with those of Rome. 

Some of these pairings will seem unlikely: as one example, Homer’s Odyssey (8th c. B.C.) with Petronius’s Menippean satire the Satyricon (1st c. A.D.)  Even so, Petronius was mindful of Odysseus’s adventures when he created his own hero Encolpius (“Crotch”). In both works, acquisition of material goods, and what not having them implies, is a recurring element.  Disconnection appears as well, and the sociopathic suitors of Penelope bear a striking resemblance to the guests of Trimalchio’s banquet—and to the host himself.

The course will also consider how the ancient world presented the theme of power in its art.  Fine arts majors, psychology majors, and classical studies minors should also find it interesting.

E. 3550: Short Fiction (74534)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
T/B/A
A study of the major developments of this genre through an analysis of representative texts of Chekhov, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, Borges and others.

E. 3590: Literature and the Other Arts (74521)
MW 12:20-1:15 p.m., F Online
Dr. John Lowney
This course will concentrate on the interaction of literature with jazz.  Of the many influential forms of African American music, jazz has had the greatest impact on literary forms of expression.  In considering the significance of jazz for literature, especially African American literature, we will examine literary representations and adaptations of jazz from the early twentieth century through the present.  Through the study of exemplary literary texts that feature jazz as a social discourse as well as a mode of artistic expression, we will investigate how jazz has been represented as both a distinctive mode of African American cultural expression and a complex medium of interculturalism.  We will consider as well the interaction of jazz with the visual arts and with other forms of popular African American music, from the blues and ragtime to soul and hip hop.  While the course does not presume much prior knowledge of jazz, an interest in learning about jazz music and jazz history is essential.  Course texts will include James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”; Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans; Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Paule Marshall, The Fisher King; poetry by Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, and Jayne Cortez; jazz autobiography; and documentary film.

E. 3640: Vernacular Literature (74524)
Cross-Listed with Hon. 3640 (74816)
MW 1:25-2:20 p.m. F. Online
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
In this class we will read novels, short stories, and poems written in various forms of non-standard English: slang, creole, patois, and others.  In the United States, we are familiar with the vernacular tradition from the works of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner.  We will begin the semester by re-examining some of those old standards, and will then move on to literature and theory from the West Indies, Nigeria, Kenya, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, and Ireland.  While maintaining close attention to aesthetic matters, we will also consider these works in their particular historical contexts, examining the import of vernacular writing in an era of globalization.  Can we understand vernaculars as stubbornly local phenomena, expressions of transnational hybridity, or both? The course will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays with Fridays conducted online.

E. 3650: Caribbean Literature (74543)    
MW - 1:25 – 2:20 pm     F  - online
Dr. Lisa Outar
This course will be an introduction to the rich field of Caribbean literature and critical debates. Since the Caribbean was colonized by the French, Spanish, English and Dutch and includes peoples of European, African, Indian, Chinese and Syrian origin (among others), its literature is particularly diverse in its languages, themes and political and aesthetic concerns.  We will look at poetry, plays, novels and short stories from writers of various ethnic and national origins in the region who range from Nobel Prize winners to working class writers whose audiences are far more limited.  We will also consider the images of the region created by the tourism industry (in particular, how the Caribbean appears to us here in the US) and the cultural productions of Caribbean peoples who have moved to the US, Canada, the UK and elsewhere. Among the writers we will look at will be Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Junot Díaz and Shani Mootoo. 

E. 3710: Creative Writing: Non Fiction Prose (74527)
TR 7:35-9:00 a.m.
Prof. Maryann Reid
An introduction to writing various forms of nonfiction.

E. 3720: Introduction to Creative Writing (71889)
MW 11:15-12:10 p.m. F Online
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is an introductory course in creative writing and also an introduction to the Creative Writing Minor.  Students will practice writing essays, prose poems, poems, short plays, and short stories, and they will read and comment on each other’s work.  We will also read and discuss a variety of exemplary works—scenes by Suzan-Lori Parks and David Mamet, poems by Li-Young Lee and Charles Baudelaire—works which will help us consider the possibilities and powers of the genres we explore.  Students will finish the semester with a final project from one of their chosen genres, or with one that incorporates multiple genres.

E. 3720: Introduction to Creative Writing (74536)
W. 3:35-6:25 p.m.
Prof. Thomas Philipose
    This introductory creative writing workshop will focus on your writing and your thoughts (that means you will be writing a lot).  We will explore the creative aspects of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and playwriting.  We will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of what your writing voice/style can be.  You will be expected to attend public readings and performances (off campus and on your own time).  We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques of others (outside of this workshop) to help us become careful readers and diligent writers.  An experimental and non-traditional approach will be encouraged to help elicit fresh, unique work that reflects the individual writers in our workshop.  The majority of our classwork will entail reading and discussing your writing (you will read and write in—and outside of—every class every week). 

E. 3730: Poetry Workshop (74771)
MWF 2:30-3:25 p.m.
T/B/A
Intensive writing workshop on poetry and poetics.

E. 3770 Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop (74528)
M 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Prof Gabriel Brownstein
This course is for undergraduates who would like to develop and deepen their work in writing fiction.  It is conceived as a continuation of English 3740, the fiction writing workshop.  In this class, students will write several independent projects—stories, sections of novels, and experiments of their own devising—and will show them to the class for discussion and critique. As we read and discuss our own fiction, we’ll read some great writers—a varied set of readings that will help us consider basic problems and difficulties that face writers of stories and novels.  At the end of the semester, students will put together a portfolio of their best, revised work. 

E. 3810: The History of Silent Film (74526)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Scott Combs
This course provides an intensive introduction to the history of silent film from the late nineteenth-century until the early sound era of the late 1920s.  We will focus on the development of film aesthetics and the institutionalization of industrial practices, mainly in the US and Europe.  We should resist the temptation of reading silent cinema as a “primitive” form compared to modern movies.  Instead, we will try to understand the distinct aesthetic possibilities and modes of address contained within these films, a task much more challenging and rewarding.

E. 4991: Seminar in British Literature (74544)
MW 4:40-6:05 p.m.
T/B/A
Prerequisites: E. 2200, E. 2300.  Research problems in literature and criticism.  Students may take more than one seminar. Limited to junior and seniors.

E. 4992: Seminar in American Literature (74517)
M. 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This seminar focuses on American literature and culture of the 1930s, a decade of extraordinary social, political, and cultural change.  The socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism challenged writers to radically rethink their purpose and audience.  While the Depression tends to evoke mythic images of social suffering and revolutionary struggle, the innovative arts of the 1930s have also had a lasting impact on American culture.  Emphasizing the interaction of American modernism with mass culture in the 1930s, this course examines the relationship of literature to film, popular music, and the visual arts.  Readings will include Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust; Richard Wright, Native Son; and poetry by Kenneth Fearing, Sterling Brown, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks.  Films will include Modern Times, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Sullivan’s Travels, and O Brother Where Art Thou? 

E. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (74531)
TR 4:40-6:05 p.m.
T/B/A
Prerequisites: E. 2200, 2300.  Research problems in literature and criticism.  Students may take more than one seminar. Limited to juniors and seniors.
 

STATEN ISLAND

 ENG 2100 (College Core class)
LITERATURE AND CULTURE:
Comics and Culture
Instructor: Prof. Regina Corallo
MWF 12:20-1:15
This course focuses on comics as a cultural medium during the second half of the twentieth century. We will explore the significance of various comics genres such as superheroes, crime/noir, fantasy, mythology, humor and alternative, and the various movements in comics that helped shaped much of its modern day legitimacy.  Tentative reading list includes narratives from Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Alan Moore (Watchmen), and Neil Gaiman (Sandman).
 
ENG 2100 (College Core class)
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
The Supernatural
Instructor: Prof. Stephen Greeley
TR 1:30-2:55
In this course we will be exploring the supernatural in British and American literature, considering how such works reflect fears about the self and society, express issues related to gender, and demonstrate the human need for
realities that exist beyond the senses.

ENG 2200 (Required for Major)
INTRO TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Instructor: Dr .Robert Fanuzzi
TR 1:30-2:55
This course introduces students to the skills essential to critical thinking and the analysis of literature.  We will examine texts from a variety of genres and learn new and tradition research methods.

ENG 2300 (Required for Major)
INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY
Instructor: Dr Melissa Mowry: Mixed Mode Course
MW 10:10-11:05; F On-line
This class will be taught as a hybrid on-line course.  Students will be responsible for posting formal responses to the assigned readings once a week and for discussing the responses of their fellow-classmates.    Readings will cover major schools of theory, including but not limited to formalism, post-colonialism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.  The aim of this course is to provide students with a critical vocabulary and theoretical knowledge that will enrich their readings of literature and bring them to a deeper appreciation of the way literature and theory participate in and contribute to broad intellectual conversations that affect the way people live their everyday lives.

ENG 3190
SPECIAL TOPICS IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE: The Exotic Nation
Instructor: Dr. Brian Lockey: Mixed Mode Course
MW 11:15-12:10; F On-line
Why are so many Renaissance fictional works concerned with travel and encounters with exotic lands and the strange and unfamiliar people that inhabit them? What can we learn from such works about England and its relation to the rest of the world? This course will address such questions by considering how a selection of literary works portrays encounter and conflict involving competing national, religious, and racial identities. Renaissance literature was, in truth, a window onto the rest of the world, a window through which English writers imagined an Africa, where Amazon women enslaved and oppressed their men, and an Orient inhabited by humanoids whose faces grew beneath their shoulders. Among the works we will read are Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Antony and Cleopatra, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and excerpts from Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania.
 
ENG 3240
ROMANTIC LITERATURE
Instructor: Dr. Melissa Mowry: Mixed Mode Course
MW 9:05-10:-00; F On-line
British Romanticism was an immensely influential but short-lived literary movement that straddled the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. It emerged in the wake of the American and French Revolutions and sought to harness the revolutionary fervor of those movements to make literature reflect more accurately and more closely the emotions and experiences of everyday people.  The course will cover a range of writers from William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelly, and Lord Byron, among others.  We will meet two days for discussion as a class and one day "on-line" for discussion.

ENG 3360
EARLY NATIONAL LITERATURE:
International Relations after the American Revolution
Instructor: Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
TR 10:45-12:10
This course covers the literature written during the critical period after the American Revolution, when the United States was trying to decide whether it was a European or a native American country, whether it could be culturally English and politically French, and what it meant to be commercially dependent on Jamaican rum.  At the same time, the new nation was embarking upon its first Muslim conflict in the middle East and beginning to realize that its destiny lay west, inhibited only by the resistance of the native peoples who themselves were once known as Americans.  Early national literature, in other words, is really international literature, representing through novels, poetry, and prose the connection of the United States to the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. When we read late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American literature in this global context, we discover new meanings in familiar works and phrases by authors like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. We also discover new writers like Susannah Rowson, Royall Tyler, and Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote thrilling dramas of international conflict and fantastic stories of colonial traumas.
 
ENG 3460
CONTEMPORARY DRAMA
Instructor: Prof. Giovan DiDonna
TR 1:30-2:55
  Readings of important post-war playwrights like Albee, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter.

ENG 3710
CREATIVE WRITING-NONFICTION PROSE
Instructor: Dr. Stephen Miller
TR 10:45-12:10
Is this really a “nonfiction” course? We will begin by discussing Foucault’s notion of “fictioning,” in which even “truth” must be “fictioned.” Why is this? We will then read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night as an example of “creative nonfiction.” Students will then present their own versions of creative nonfiction and critique their works and the works of others for the bulk of the class.
ENG 3720
INTRO TO CREATIVE WRITING:
Screenwriting
Instructor: Prof. Lily Alexander: Mixed Mode Course
MW 12:20-1:15; F On-line

ENG 3890
TOPICS IN FILM GENRE:
Screwball Comedies
Instructor: Dr. Stephen Miller
TR 9:10-10:35
Screwball Comedy of the thirties and the forties has most typically thought of as escapist when related to the Depression. This is particularly understandable given the extreme apolitical perspective of a filmmaker such as Preston Sturges and right wing points of view of filmmakers like Frank Capra. However, another cultural reading of many screwball comedies might involve a kind of celebration upon reaching important social and economic answers “on the other side” of accepted norms of reason. As FDR escaped seemingly contradictory ideologies to craft a mixed and interacting public and private economy that he often paradoxically presents with a reassuringly champagne air, do screwball comedies mix principles of escape and confrontation?  How would this be typical aspects of Althuserrian ideological artistic accounting, Barthean mythmaking, and the Jamesonian political unconscious? Filmmakers whom we will treat include Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Gregory LaCava, Leo McCarey, Mitchell Leisen, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder.

ENG 4991
SEMINAR IN BRITISH LITERATURE: Women and Warriors in Renaissance Literature
Instructor: Dr. Brian Lockey: Mixed Mode Course
MW 10:10-11:0; F On-line
From the Greek myth of the Amazons to the contemporary television show, “Xena the Warrior Princess,” the idea of the woman as warrior has fascinated writers and readers throughout history. In this course, we consider the origins of this fascination in a number of literary texts that were written during the Renaissance. We will begin by looking at the ancient myth of the Amazons, the warlike tribe of women, who threatened to conquer and subjugate Western European men.  We will consider some Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish writings on the Amazons (in English translation). Then we will turn to some important English works on this subject in order to consider how the “virgin Queen”, Elizabeth I of England, fit into English obsessions with the figure of the Amazon. Among the texts that we will read are Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, John Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage, and Aphra Behn’s Restoration play, The Widow Ranter.

EVENING COURSES
ENG 2060
STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Instructor: Prof. Rebecca Hennessy
T 6:50-9:50

ENG 3490
SPECIAL TOPICS – 20TH CENTURY
LITERATURE: Film Adaptation
Instructor: Prof. Leah Anderst
W 6:60-9:50
How do we talk about cinematic adaptations of novels? Must a film remain faithful to the source text in order to be considered successful? Film audiences tend to regard adaptations that make changes to the originals as failures, but is this a fair judgment? Can films do what novels do? Recent film scholarship moves the discussion of film adaptation beyond questions of fidelity, promoting instead a dialogue on intertextuality and adaptation as interpretation. We will study some of these recent approaches to adaptation by focusing on six novels and several of the movies that have been adapted from them including Mann’s Death in Venice, Duras’ The Lover, and Nabokov’s Lolita.

ENG 3570
WOMEN AND LITERATURE
Instructor: Prof. Rosette Allegretti
R 6:50-9:50
This course explores works of British and American fiction written by women. It focuses on the role of women both in society and their home lives. The course will explore the development of women’s roles and how they adapt to various situations during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tentative reading list includes Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility), Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth), and Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents).