Department of English
Undergraduate Studies
online newsletter
Volume 3, Issue VI Summer 2008
Coming Soon to an English Department Near YOU!!
Ghosts! Salsa! Supertramp! Man-Eating Swamp Monsters! The English Department is pleased to announce the “Special Topics” courses for Fall of 2008. Read on…IF YOU DARE!!
English 369: Minority Traditions in American Literature
Latina/o Popular Culture (Gabriela Nuñez)
This course examines Latina/o popular culture in the U.S. to analyze the daily practices of Latinidad, or ethnic Latina/o identity, by paying close attention to the ways Latina/o cultural production responds to stereotypes in mainstream popular culture and reconfigures cultural icons. While there are important similarities among Latinas/os, this course also examines the differences in histories, class, sexuality, gender, geography, as well as immigrant and non-immigrant experiences that define the heterogeneity of Latinas/os in the U.S.
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ENG 371: Pulp & Cult Fiction (Aaron Jaffe)
Pulp: 1.) any soft, soggy mass, 2.) the soft moist part, 3.) the inside of a tooth, and 4.) sensational literature printed cheaply on inexpensive paper.
Cult: 1.) religious-like adherence, 2. a fad, 3.) interest followed with exaggerated zeal.
Count Dracula of Monte Cristo, Sherlock Bond, Orlando Pimpernel, Svengali Dedalus, Supertramp, the Dude, the Beetle, Tarzan Presley, the original Homer Simpson, the good Dr. Thompson - we'll look at a literary family including some of these and perhaps other pulp/cult characters and investigate literary fan culture and readership.
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English 373: Women in literature: Chicana Literature (Gabriela Nuñez)
This course examines ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and socio-political agency by focusing on novels, short stories, poetry, and essays by women who identify as Chicana in the U.S. While we will focus on contemporary Chicana writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna D. Cervantes, Ana Castillo, Cherríe Moraga, and Helena María Viramontes, we will also engage with 19th century Mexican-American women’s writings in the U.S. as precursors to contemporary Chicana texts.
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English 373: Women in Literature: Monsters and Madwomen (Joanna Wolfe)
We will look at ways that women have traditionally been demonized for exhibiting masculine traits, such as authorship, and examine how women authors have contended with and attempted to transform such stereotypes. Texts will include work by Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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English 391: Studies in the Novel (Susan Ryan)
In this course we’ll examine American novels from the late 18th to the late 19th century. Among the questions we’ll be asking are the following: What makes a novel “American”? Is it a matter of the author’s birthplace or adopted home? The novel’s themes and settings? Which subgenres and narrative strategies have been especially influential in American literature? How have American novels represented the culture in which they were produced? How have they sought to change that culture? How might such matters as didacticism and aesthetics have intersected in these texts (and in their reception)?
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English 401: Jane Austen and Film (Karen Hadley)
Observing the proliferation of Austen adaptations of the past decade or so, this course will focus on a number of issues around the recent obsession with bringing Jane Austen’s novels to the screen. Attention will be given to the creative, collaborative, process of translating literature to the medium of film (and its increased attention to scenery, fashion, and physical beauty), with special focus on issues relevant to Austen’s texts such as passion, romance, wealth, manners, and social commentary. Is it (or why is it) the case, we will ask with one Austen critic, that translations too faithful to the books cannot achieve broad enough appeal for the movie industry?
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English 401: Theories of Literacy (Bruce Horner)
In the last few decades, "literacy" both as a subject and as an issue—the literacy "crisis"—has been the focus of a broad range of scholars working in a wide array of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, anthropology, literary criticism, history, sociology, rhetoric, classics, education, and linguistics. The purpose of this course is to make sense of both the range of this work, its development, and the uses to which it has been and might be put: to understand the relationships between the different ways literacy has been defined, the different sorts of significance attributed to it in history and theory, and the policies and pedagogies enacted to address it. By reading and reflecting on a variety of work on the histories, theories, and pedagogies of literacy, we should come to a better understanding of literacy as it has been variously constructed in recent scholarship on literacy, more generally in history and specific cultures, and also in our own experiences as readers, writers, and thinkers.
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English 515: Old English Language and Literature (Andrew Rabin)
Cannibalism! Beheadings! Dragons! Obscene Riddles! Vikings! Swamp-Monsters! This course will focus on literature of England before the Norman Conquest in all of its diverse (and often bloody) glory. As this course is designed to prepare students for further study in Old English literature and culture, we will focus of the acquisition of those linguistic skills needed to encounter Anglo-Saxon texts in their original language. Additionally, we will survey Anglo-Saxon history and culture, taking into account the historical record, archeology, manuscript construction and illumination, and the growth of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline.
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ENG 547: Modern British and Irish Literature (Suzette Henke)
The aim of this course is to engage in an examination and discussion of major modernist texts produced between 1901 and 1941 by some of the most important British and Irish authors of the modernist period: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. Class discussion will focus on intellectual, aesthetic, and political issues that characterized the “high modernist” period, 1914-41. Students will be required to write three research papers, deliver a class report, and take a final examination.
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English 552: Gender and Science Fiction (Dawn Heinecken)
This class will examine women’s contributions to the science fiction genre. The course will develop student’s critical reading, thinking, writing and presentation skills. Students will be expected to develop an understanding of the ways women have worked within the genre to explore issues related to gender, race, and class historically and currently. Students will be asked to consider the ways women writers have participated in on-going dialogues within the SF community, both developing, responding to, and resisting SF tropes, particularly those related to gender roles, identity, and social structure. Some areas we will consider include women’s early presence in the pulps, distinctions between women’s “soft” SF and the “hard” SF of male writers, as well as the ways that women have used the extrapolatory nature of SF to explore feminist issues.
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English 575: Slave Narratives (Karen Chandler)
In this course, we will examine the slave narrative as an influential genre in American literature. The course will consider how conceptions of slavery have changed from the depictions in antebellum abolitionist narratives to those in the neo-slave narratives (fiction and film) that have emerged since the early 1960s. It will examine how the evolution of the slave narrative has reflected our culture’s changing understanding of selfhood and of American history.
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