All languages change over time, often in predictable patterns. Where did today’s standard English come from, and how is our sense of that standard tied to assumptions about race, class, gender, and nationality? To find out, we will begin roughly 5,000 years ago, studying the common ancestor of languages as different as English, Hindi, and Polish: Proto-Indo-European. We will learn about the prehistoric roots of English, then turn to the earliest written evidence of it: “Anglo-Saxon” or “Old English,” ca. 600-1100.The language was transformed in the wake of the Norman Invasion of 1066, as English became lower in status than both Anglo-Norman French and Latin for a few centuries. Next, we will learn about the growth of English, and its changes, in the age of Chaucer (Middle English) and Shakespeare (Early Modern English). Finally, we will explore processes of standardization, hybridization, and diffusion in the complex effects of English’s spread across the globe over the course of the past 450 years.

Location

Lechase Room 104 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

The first of a sequence of two, the course approaches 'The Divine Comedy' both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through a close textual analysis of 'Inferno,' and the first half of 'Purgatorio,' students learn how to approach Dantes poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a way to understand and affect the historical reality. They also gain a perspective on the Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with the multiple levels of Dantes concern, ranging from literature to history, from politics to government, from philosophy to theology. A visual component, including illustrations of the 'Comedy' and multiple artworks pertinent to the narrative, complements the course. Class format includes lectures, discussion, and a weekly recitation session. Intensive class participation is encouraged. Dante I can be taken independently from Dante II. No prerequisites. Freshmen are welcome. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster.

Location

Gavett Hall Room 310 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course will introduce you to the literature of medieval Wales and Ireland by giving you translations from some of the best scholars. The major emphasis will be on what the title suggests: goddesses, warriors, and shamans. We will examine the nature of the warrior cult as it emerges in Welsh and Irish romance and epic, and the relationship of men and women. Related to this theme is the figure of the "bard" (Welsh; in Irish: fili), the poet whose poetry was combative, magical and esoteric. We will compare heroic tales and romances in the Welsh Gododdin and Mabinogion, and look as well at the Druid and the Saint. To what extent do all three draw from or redefine the cult of the warrior? Where does the druid leave off and the Christian saint begin? What is the cult of the cauldron? The Severed Head? The Morrígan? The Sovereignty Figure? The Sheela na Gig? What are our fond myths about the Visionary Celt? The Celtic Twilight? Wiccan? Fairies?

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course is not a history of the book. It does not follow the epic parade of culture from alphabet to quill, printing press to keyboard. The story we tell here is in the elegiac mode: how cultures failed and their artifacts disappeared, how fabled texts and records were lost and forgotten, and how, with effort and ingenuity, a paltry few were clawed back from oblivion. From Europe to the Middle East, Asia to Latin America, an unsung group of scholars, adventurers, scientists, and rogues trekked across deserts and over mountains, plundered tombs and monasteries, rummaged between the legs of mummies, entered hidden caves and bricked up rooms, deciphered lost languages, and developed new technologies all so as to recover for the world a group of texts that would change the history of the past. That is if anyone actually bothered to read them. Here is the history of the hidden canon, great yet little-known books drawn from far-flung collections: Monte Cassino, Verona, Herculaneum, the Fayum, Dura Europos, Ras Sharma, St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, the Cairo Genizah, the Qumran caves, Khotan, Dun Huang, Chichen Itza, and Guatemala City. Its cast of characters includes the famous, the flamboyant, and the obscure: Petrarch, Poggio, Flinders Petrie, Grenville and Hunt, Solomon Schechter, Marcus Aurelius Stein, Zelia Nutall, Brasseur, Alexander von Humboldt, Konstantin Tischendorf, the Smith sisters. Because the territory this course covers is large, the format will be lecture and exam. In a companion course, Reading the Hidden Canon, students will consult excerpts from the most important documents and pieces of literature these scholars recovered, many still largely unknown.

Location

Lechase Room 181 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

This course examines the literature and culture of the Victorian period. The Victorian period was not only an era of rapid modernization, imperialist expansion, and scientific advance, it also bore witness to class tensions, urban poverty, religious doubt, and political upheaval. This turbulent era also saw the rise of numerous great literary figures (e.g. Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Pater). In this course we will explore many of these well-known Victorian poets, novelists, and essayists, examining how the intellectual preoccupations and aesthetic strategies of these writers responded to their historical and cultural moment. Fulfills the post-1800 requirement. No prerequisites.

Location

Lechase Room 121 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

We will focus on American literature, especially fiction, from 1865 to 1914. We will also consider some philosophical, polemical, and popular texts from the period. Definitions of realism and claims writers made for the relationship of literary art to the world around them, the potentialities of fiction to represent and to influence society and politics, and the influence and implications of nationalism and imperialism will be of particular interest.

Location

Harkness Room 210 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

The explosion of black culture during the early Twentieth Century known as the “Harlem” or (more broadly) “New Negro” Renaissance included the emergence of some of the most important works of the African American literary tradition. This course will provide a survey of the literature and culture that reflect the spirit of that era. In addition, the course will consider recent African-American fiction in order to ascertain what the Harlem Renaissance has meant for subsequent writers and artists. Special attention will be paid to the following topics: migration, jazz, the Blues, literary modernism, theories of black identity, and difference within black America. Readings include works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and more. Requirements include class participation, six 1-page reading responses, and two 6-8-page formal writing assignments.

Location

Morey Room 501 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

With its unprecedented death toll and new technologies of destruction, WWI shattered illusions and exploded the fabric of society as people then knew it. Despite subsequent world conflicts and traumatic occurrences, the Great War has remained for the British a haunting presence, becoming, in poet Ted Hughes’s words, the “number one national ghost.” As we move past the 100th anniversary of the war, we will trace the history of this national obsession in the searing poetry of the trenches, the combatant’s memoirs that exposed the war’s horror and futility, and the modernist fiction that registered the war’s impact in new ways of seeing. We will also explore returns to the war in late 20th/early 21st c. film, theater, television, and popular fiction. For as War Horse and Downton Abbey have dramatically demonstrated, the memory of the war continues to fascinate, sustaining old myths and feeding new ones. This course will attempt to explain why the Great War has had such a remarkable hold on the modern imagination.

Location

Hylan Building Room 102 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

Over the past hundred years, various schools of literary theory have asked fundamental questions about (and offered provisional hypotheses on) the nature of signification, of interpretation, of beauty, and of truth. Not just methods for reading, these approaches challenge us to rethink the relationship between representation and reality, language and power, intention and meaning. Our syllabus will cover all of the major branches of contemporary literary theory, including New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Marxism, New Historicism, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. Each class period will begin with a brief introduction by the professor, followed by collective close-readings and seminar-style discussion; additionally, students will engage with the material via periodic in-class exams and a final paper. 

Location

Lechase Room 141 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

An isolated country parsonage. A half mad father. A profligate brother addicted to drugs. Three uniquely gifted sisters who burned their hearts and brains out on the moors, but not before leaving us some of the most passionate and revolutionary literature of the 19th c. This is the stuff of the Brontë legend. This course will explore the continuing appeal of the Brontës and the peculiar fascination that they have exercised on the literary imagination. Looking intensively at some of the best-loved novels of all time, we will explore the roots and reaches of the Brontë myth. We will also consider the Brontës’ legacy in in some of the many adaptations (and continuations) of their work in print and on the screen. And we will look at our seemingly insatiable appetite for new tellings of the Brontës’ life stories. The course, then, will consider not the only the Brontës’ literary productions, but also our culture’s production and reproduction of “the Brontës” over the years. 

Location

Meliora Room 205 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

Despite being misunderstood as the most infantile of genres, comic books have recently proven themselves capable of astonishing artistic achievements and of infiltrating both Hollywood and academia. This course has three parts: 1) a formal analysis of the art of comics, a combination of text and image used to tell a story; 2) a cultural history of comic books, from their modern origins during the Great Depression to the 21st Century; and 3) close readings of important primary works in the field, including Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Alan Moore & David Gibbons’ Watchmen, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and more. Course requirements include class participation, bi-weekly 1-page reading responses, a mid-term examination, and a final paper.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

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Location

Morey Room 205 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

This course contests its title. There is language and literature/film that records how language has failed as a means of (human) species adaptation toward conflict resolution in domestic and international contexts. This course, following the observations of Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1939), tries to document the language/literary connections between domestic violence and war making. In domestic situations, violence is protected by traditions of privacy and male governance of households; in public situations, there has been an inertia throughout recorded history in enacting the ideal announced in Isaiah: "[nations] shall not learn war any more." In our own society genres of popular and elite culture teach the necessity and glory of war through literature, film, toys, sports, and ideals of heroic behavior. Our normal ways of speaking still presuppose violence and war as a "last resort" in solving domestic and international antagonisms.

Location

Morey Room 504 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course surveys the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. We will explore the diverse forms cinema took and functions it performed during this period by looking closely at a range of films and writings about films and film culture. We will also examine contexts within which these films were produced and experienced as well as theorizations of cinema that emerged concurrently with them. The course thus introduces students to the study of film history as well as a key national and international trends in making and thinking about cinema as it rose to prominence as a vital component of the art and culture of the twentieth century. Previous coursework in film is recommended, though not required; please contact the professor if this will be your first experience studying film in an academic setting.

Location

Hylan Building Room 202 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course will explore developments in world cinema—industrial, social, and political—from 1959 to 1989. It will explore film aesthetics, technologies, and circulation questions, considering questions like the following: What’s new about the French New Wave? What do we mean by Third Cinema? How do different national cinemas influence each other? In what ways have various national cinemas responded critically to Hollywood’s commercial dominance and to its conventions? How do popular and “art” cinemas speak to each other. How does cinema respond to the pressures and provocations of other media at the inception of the digital age? Weekly screenings and film journals required. FMS 132, “Introduction to the Art of Film,” typically a prerequisite.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

A focused study of Godzilla on film, beginning with the 1954 film that inspired and helped define the Japanese kaiju eiga genre. The larger context of the course is a critical investigation of genre film, specifically the science fiction/horror/creature-feature film, and a careful consideration of the culture of war (World War II through 21st century). We begin with a sampling of seminal non-Japanese titles that provided the foundation for the Godzilla film paradigm, then focus on a close textual study of select Godzilla films that help us understand the historical and social contexts for Godzilla’s erratic trajectory since 1954. Recent DVD releases with both dubbed and original Japanese language versions enable us to dissect the culturally generated permutations of kaiju eiga. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 209 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

For many, the mental image of American artistic production from the Depression Era is far more akin to the barren black & white Kansas homestead than the sparkling technicolor of Oz. This was hardly the case. In fact, the 1930s was a decade of diverse artistic experiments in the United States—a veritable laboratory for debating art’s forms and social aims that would come to redefine American culture itself. This course introduces a range of those experiments, focusing on the network between film and the other visual arts. Topics include federally sponsored New Deal programs, the social realisms of African-American and immigrant artists, the rise of photo-journalism and emergence of “documentary” across mediums, the aesthetic diplomacy of World’s Fairs and films such as Capra’s American Madness, Lang’s Fury, and Ford’s Grapes of Wrath. Throughout the course we will be asking in what ways did these experiments represent propositions about the direction and shape of modern art and culture in America.

Location

Hylan Building Room 201 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

3/4 Per CS no meeting pattern needed and should be 4 credits ca

Restricted to Selznick Students

Restricted to Selznick Students

Restricted to Selznick Students

This workshop is for advanced fiction writers who have completed ENG 121 or have permission from the instructor. The course emphasizes the development of each student's individual style and imagination, as well as the practical and technical concerns of a fiction writer's craft. Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of modern and contemporary writers. Students will be expected to write three original short stories as well as to revise extensively in order to explore the full range of the story's potential. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing.

Location

Lechase Room 163 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The Advanced Creative Writing Tutorial is for advanced fiction writers who have completed ENG 121 or have permission from the instructor. The course emphasizes the development of each student's individual style and imagination, as well as the practical and technical concerns of a fiction writer's craft. Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of modern and contemporary writers. The Advanced Tutorial gives undergraduates the chance to work on their literary and creative interests to further the development of their original writing. Group meetings will be supplemented by faculty-directed, student-centered tutorial meetings. Students will design individualized creative projects specific to their interests.

Location

Hylan Building Room 306 (W 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

Poems, as William Carlos Williams once said, are machines made out of words, and in this advanced poetry workshop we will work on making the most gorgeous, gripping, and efficient machines possible. To that end, we will read both one another's poems and poems by established authors, in either case paying attention to the ways in which the authors harness aspects of their medium, the English language: syntax, diction, rhythm. The poems we write may take any shape, any form, but we will work towards understanding why a particular poem must take the shape it has; we will pay attention not so much to what the poems say as to how they say it. Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions, a final project.

Permission of instructor is required. Students are to submit 3-5 typed poems, preferably before the first class.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course will introduce students to the theoretical backgrounds, practical challenges, and creative activity of literary translation. We will survey appropriate theories of language and communication including semiotics, post-structuralism, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. We will consider varied and conflicting descriptions by translators of what it is they believe they are doing and what they hope to accomplish by doing it; and we will study specific translations into English from a variety of sources in order to investigate the strategies and choices translators make and the implication of those choices for our developing sense of what kinds of texts translations actually are. Finally, students will, in consultation with the instructor or with another qualified faculty member, undertake exercises in translation of their own. By the end of this class each student should have a working knowledge of both the critical backgrounds and the artistic potentials of translation..

Location

Hylan Building Room 101 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Credit to be arranged.

Introduction to Graduate Studies in English is a semester-long introduction to doctoral study in English.

The wife is invariably found in the wilderness: Melusine is doomed to be half-snake every Saturday unless her loyal husband won’t reveal her secret. The origins of the flying, shape-shifting fairy wife stretch back to antiquity, but the motif finds a local domain in 12th-century Poitou and its Celtic substrata: it attached to Eleanor of Aquitaine, tempestuous Queen consort to Henry II, who kept a salon of poets during the early stages of Arthuriana. But the famous story is by Jean d’Arras and Coudrette in the 14th-century: a supernatural matriarch who merges with the history of the Lusignan family. Over time it was translated or modified in England and Germany. We’ll look at writings by Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, medieval romances including Libeaux desconnu, Paracelsus, Spenser, Keats, de la Motte-Fouque, A.S. Byatt in the light of category crisis, political upheaval, and the polysemous female body. 

Location

Morey Room 403 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Students in this seminar will explore James’s mature work in the context of the history of the novel and the evolution of narrative theory. We will consider the novel as a form for thinking about globalization and world literature as long-standing historical developments, not only as recent ideas. We will analyze the formal aesthetics of James’s novels and consider their relationship to literary, social and cultural history, including the contexts of changing markets for literary work. With the help of major theorists of narrative and the novel, we will investigate the relationship of the novel to social stratification and historical ruptures, cultural heterogeneity and global circulation, and discuss how considering these enriches our understanding of the novel generally and of James’s achievement in particular. We will all, I hope, gain some insight into and a refreshed sense of the complex situation of art and aesthetics in the modern world. In addition to James, readings will include works by Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Lukacs, Kristeva, Bal, Latour, Apter, Butler, Dimock, and Amitav Ghosh.

Location

Morey Room 403 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This seminar focuses on the aesthetic in literary and cultural theory. How has our understanding of the aesthetic shaped our definitions of literature and of art? the effects of literature and visual media on us as readers and viewers? our interpretive emphases? How might we discuss the aesthetic in other forms of culture, including everyday life?

We consider, among other topics, the aesthetic as object, judgment, attitude, and experience; aesthetics and politics; aesthetics and formalism; aesthetic categories like beauty, taste, disinterestedness and the sublime; and aesthetic categories central to the work of scholarship in African-American studies, feminism, Marxism, and queer studies.

Our focus on the aesthetic also allows us to discuss a number of more general interpretive issues, including how best to assess the persuasiveness of literary and cultural analysis, and how to move between theoretical arguments and applied criticism.

We sort through the writing of, among others, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Monroe Beardsley, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Edmund Burke, Noel Carroll, Arthur Danto, Jennifer Doyle, William Empson, Northrop Frye, John Guillory, Stuart Hall, Phillip Harper, David Hume, C.L.R. James, Fredric Jameson, Immanuel Kant, Georg Lukacs, Sianne Ngai, Plato, Yuriko Saito, W.K. Wimsatt, Raymond Williams, and Janet Wolff. Each week, we also consider examples (typically short excerpts or small collections of images) of British and American literature and other forms of art and culture to provide some common ground for our conversations about applied criticism.

Students have the option of submitting either two shorter papers or one longer seminar paper (with a research proposal submitted when the first of the two shorter papers are due). A short in-class presentation is based on this work.

Location

Morey Room 403 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The horror genre has consistently put on spectacular, fantastic display a range of historically and culturally specific fears and anxieties. These anxieties have been rooted in moments of societal change or conflict, and have included responses to: technological development; social and political movements; economic change and job loss; environmental toxicity and destruction; state and geopolitical violence. The genre has been especially generative for theorists seeking to understand the somatic and affective capacities of the cinematic medium, and scholars have explored the complex and contradictory politics imbricated with the genre’s visceral effects. This seminar examines the work of scholars of horror film and those whose writing has been influential on the study of horror. Readings may include work by: Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Carol Clover, Noël Carroll, Barbara Creed, Eugenie Brinkema, Adam Lowenstein, Jack Halberstam, Linda Williams, and Sianne Ngai.

Location

Morey Room 403 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Restriction: Instructor's permission required

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room G121B (MWF 10:00AM - 1:00PM)

Under the direction of English Department Faculty and staff of George Eastman Museum’s Moving Image Department, the student will plan and undertake a significant project designed to challenge her/his abilities to function at a professional level in the moving image archive field. Examples of potential projects include: archival projection, public programming and exhibitions, collection management, video and digital preservation techniques, processing and conservation of motion picture related materials, acquisitions, access and cataloging.
 

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