English
- ENG 732: Studies in Victorian Literature
- Course Description: This course offers students the chance to study five rich, complex Victorian literary works from diverse critical perspectives. The novels to be read and analyzed are Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. These novels will be paired with classic and recent critical studies that examine them from a range of interpretive perspectives. The methods of post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and socio-historical criticism will be considered, as well as those of eco-criticism, animal studies, disability studies, and cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to literature. All interpretive approaches are welcome, including the knowledge that creative authors build in their attempts to write evocative fiction. The course will pay special attention to Victorian writers’ representations and evocations of emotion. The class is designed to guide and inspire literature teachers, but there is no presumption that students plan to teach Victorian literature or that they have any expertise in it. The course aims to enrich students’ backgrounds by creating familiarity with some superb fiction and insightful criticism, which they may then apply to their research and teaching. Two 8-10 page conference-length papers will be required rather than a standard seminar paper, and students are encouraged to prepare conference presentations that link the works analyzed to their particular fields.
- Frequently Taught By: Laura Otis
- ENG 752: Studies in 20th Century American Literature
- Course Description: Topics Vary
- Topics Include: American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, William Faulkner
- Frequently Taught By: Mark Sanders, Barbara Ladd
- ENG 789: Special Topics
- Course Description: Topics Vary
- Topics Include: The Literature of Politics, Issues in Southern Literature and Literary History, Publishing Postcolonial Literature, Cannibalism in Caribbean Literature, Dark Continent: Blackness and the Feminine, Locating Irish Studies, Affect in Aesthetic Theory, Black Feminist Genealogies of Subjection and Survival, Anglophone Poetry Since 1950: Postcolonial, Transnational, Global
- Frequently Taught By: Munia Bhaumik, Barbara Ladd, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Valerie Loichot, Rizvana Bradley, Geraldine Higgins