The course is an exploration of the history of friendship focusing on the 19th century and the United States. We will consider friendships between women, between men, and cross-gender friendships; we will also discuss love letters and letters of courtship. To the extent possible, we will look at friendships among children in the years between 1820 and 1870, and between children and adults. We will read and discuss several famous friendships from that era--e. g., Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the poet Emily Dickinson and her childhood friend and ultimately sister-in-law Susan Dickinson--and use the family correspondence from the Seward Family Archive digital humanities project as our core primary-source evidence for arriving at a historically and culturally situated definition of friendship and the nature of epistolary relationships.

BUILDING: RRLIB | ROOM: 456

Blending satire with happy endings, crossing irony with romance, Jane Austen's novels subsist on contradiction and enjoy more popularity than ever. This course will read Austen's work closely, while also considering it against the backdrop of other literature of the time. Readings include Austen's juvenilia, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, as well as works by such authors as Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. This course can fulfill the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

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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.

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Female genital cutting encounters vaginal cosmetic surgeries at the intersection of poverty and wealth, race and class, barbaric practices and the pleasure principle. Bodies of poor, African, and mostly black women and children embody a fateful condition that can be redeemed by technologies of progress and humanitarian discourses. This course invites students to challenge assumptions related to agency, race, class, the representation of the body, and the fragmented transnational sisterhood. The discussion expands to bodies caught in domestic violence, rape, lynching, and skin whitening. Readings and films: Alice Walker's "Warrior's Marks" and "Possessing the Secret of Joy"; "Manya Mabika"; "Fantacola"; "Sarabah"; "Women with Open Eyes"; "Black Sisters, Speak Up"; "The Suns of Independence"; "Desert Flower"; and Maryse Condé's "Who Slashed Célanire Throat?"

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 441

In the 1970's the matter of whether gendered discourse exists, and if so what it is, was posed by several researchers. Each of these researchers described how language uses are political, and they insisted that the discussions of gender and language acknowledge the political values that affect the uses of language. Although there is no established "theory" of language and gender, several sources in modern and contemporary literature and popular culture have portrayed situations in which it is possible to relate language uses to political manifestations of gender. A most effective recent text in this regard is the current Showtime series, "Masters of Sex." The reading list has three kinds of texts: (1) The early language studies by Lakoff, Spender, and Tannen; the discussion of the Thomas hearing by Lakoff and by Morrison; the language of law, using essays by Susan Estrich and Patricia Williams; (2) novels that highlight the political valences of language use; and (3) contemporary TV series and films.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 501

Eve let the Devil through the door, and her punishment was terrible pain in childbirth: for the vagina is a crossroad between the external and the internal. Todd Akin’s now infamous remark about female physiology reveals a misconception about conception that goes back to the Middle Ages exposing the patristic need to control female reproduction. This course examines medieval and later texts where the feminine and the monstrous intersect: the female body is porous, secretive, associated with the abject, the messy, and all the more horrifying when it’s not constrained socially and politically. We'll look at the “monstrous feminine” in the evil mother, the temptress, the hag, the witch, the fairy and the shapeshifter in Eve, Medea and Melusine; the vetula, the “loathly lady”; Sheela na Gig, Malleus Maleficarum, De Secretis mulierum, “Duessa” and “Error” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, “Sin” in Milton’s Paradise Lost, films about monstrous mothers, and articles from Cohen, Kristeva, Miller, Urban and Creed.

BUILDING: RRLIB | ROOM: 416

We consider issues raised in Walter Ong's '82 study, "Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word." His account related the growth of writing & print to the development of science & modern rational thought, exploring possible changes in collective consciousness as a result of the shift of media emphasis. We'll examine classical sources, incl Plato's suspicion of the power of oral poetry, & consider levels of literacy achieved in ancient society; we'll look at European medieval traditions. Discussions on the roles language & literature played in the lives of non-literate people as contrasted with literate. Study of the modern & contemporary periods focuses on practices as conversation, becoming literate, collection of oral accounts & their uses, uses of ethnographic writing, & different approaches to speech, writing, & language in African American & white communities. Key aim of the course is to show the politics, mutual dependency, & reciprocity of oral/literate uses of language in literary/nonliterary

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 303

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