Spring Term Schedule for Graduate Courses
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Spring 2024
Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
---|
ENGL 403-1
Steven Rozenski
MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM
|
What did drama look and feel like in the Middle Ages? How much can we know about performances that took place well over 600 years ago? We have two main goals ahead of us in this course: to read the major extant works of drama in Middle English, and to stage a medieval play. Along the way, we will discuss the texts themselves, the manuscript history of the surviving plays, their performance history, their relation to drama on the Continent, the religious opposition to them, sixteenth-century attempts to de-Catholicize them, their ultimate suppression after the Reformation, and their revival in twentieth-century England and North America.
|
ENGL 405A-1
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM
|
The second 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 the second half of 'Purgatorio' and the entirety of 'Paradiso,' students learn how to approach Dante's 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 Dante's 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. No prerequisites. Freshmen are welcome. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster.
|
ENGL 406-1
Thomas Hahn
MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM
|
We will try to do justice to the lives, experiences, and desires of late medieval women and men, reading narratives that then and now hold or challenge the imagination of living readers. We will engage accounts of ghosts and revenants who bridge the world of spirit and flesh, and encounter reanimated corpses and souls who speak to the living from purgatory or hell, all revealing intense medieval responses to daily life, bonds of love, and thoughts of death and afterlife. In addition to narratives of lost souls, zombies, and reanimated corpses, readings will include the out-of-body experience of Pearl, the amazing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, several other Arthurian / Gawain romances, fantasies of global and racial diversity in Mandeville’s Travels, and personal revelations by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, among the first women writers in English. All texts (with glosses and notes) will be supplied by the instructor, or will be available online through the UR’s own amazing Middle English Texts Series (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text-online ). We will also use digital resources to immerse ourselves in surviving physical books and images that medieval people treasured. Our purpose is to enrich our sense of the present by gaining a sure grasp of this earlier, distinctive version of English as well as the dreads, longings, and joys felt by its speakers and writers. Students will lead discussions, write short responses / analyses, and a longer final paper.
|
ENGL 407-1
Rosemary Kegl
MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM
|
This course focuses on four very different major authors in the English Renaissance -- Robert Greene, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. We will have time to learn about each author, their writing, and their audiences. Why do we know more about the lives and writing practices of some of these authors than others? What is distinctive about their writing? Which literary traditions and social circumstances are most salient as we analyze their work? Who were their audiences? Did this writing always appear in print and, if not, how did it reach its audiences? Because each author was quite prolific and wrote in a wide range of literary forms, we will have at hand a rich set of readings. We will study examples of short verse and longer narrative and epic poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction essays, and drama designed for reading and for performance. We also will consider, among other topics, the tension between autobiographical and fictional voice (the celebrity persona cultivated by Greene’s pamphlets, the “I” of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, Cavendish’s self-presentation in public appearances and in her writing), these writers’ engagement with each other’s work (Shakespeare’s use of Greene’s Pandosto as a source for The Winter’s Tale, Milton’s references to Shakespeare’s plays in Paradise Lost and in his non-fiction prose), and the impact of the English Revolution on the writing and reception of Milton and Cavendish. No restrictions – all students welcome.
|
ENGL 412-1
Robert Doran
W 4:50PM - 7:30PM
|
Narrative is fundamental to many areas of inquiry, including literary studies, film and media studies, history, anthropology, psychology, law, and political science, to name just a few. This course studies narrative from various perspectives, including historiography (Hayden White’s Metahistory), philosophy (Aristotle’s Poetics; Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative), narratology (Mieke Bal’s Introduction to the Theory of Narrative; Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov), film studies (Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film). The course will enable the student to develop the necessary analytical tools for understanding both literary and non-literary, textual and non-textual narratives. Conducted in English.
|
ENGL 431-1
Bette London
MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM
|
When the now-classic novels of writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence were published in the first part of the 20th century, readers were shocked by both their style and content. In the face of revolutionary upheavals in social and political life and in the understanding of human psychology and personal relationships, these writers proclaimed the end of fiction as we know it. Exploring the limits and possibilities of language and form, they called into question the very idea of “the novel” and its appropriate subject matter. Looking back from our vantage in the 21st century, we will reassess what made these novels appear so shocking. Pairing earlier twentieth-century works with novels from the second half of the century, we will also look at the way later writers revised the idea of modern consciousness and the fiction appropriate to it and at the ways they responded to the post WWII remapping of the British Empire and to the construction of postmodern and postcolonial identities.
|
ENGL 438-1
Bette London
MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
With its unprecedented death toll and new technologies of destruction, WWI shattered illusions and exploded the fabric of society as people then knew it. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the war was instrumental in shaping the modern world in terms of geopolitical shifts and the weakening of Empire, transformed gender roles, reinvented language, and new practices of remembrance. In the wake of the Covid pandemic and the ongoing struggle in Ukraine, the questions of how and why we remember so forcefully posed by the war are newly relevant. While in the US, WWI remains our “forgotten war,” in the UK it is nothing short of a national obsession. Despite subsequent world conflicts and other 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 culture. 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 and what it can tell us about our own historical moment.
|
ENGL 443-1
Katherine Mannheimer
TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
This course places Jane Austen's novels within the context of other female novelists writing in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Readings will include Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, in addition to works by Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. Fulfills the pre-1800 Requirement for the English Major.
|
ENGL 449-1
William Miller
TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM
|
What is a witch? Culturally, most people associate the term with pointed hats, black cats, and broomsticks. Historically, it refers to a threat to the social order, an enemy of the state, a confederate with the devil. Many scholars see the figure as a figment invented to attack those (usually women) perceived as defying community norms or infringing on official turf. Complicating these accounts, witch identity has been subsequently claimed by those who see in the term forgotten histories of female power, and better attitudes toward nature, gender, mind, and being. Through readings in drama, fiction, criticism, and history, this course introduces and explores this complex of perspectives on the figure of the witch. We will spend the bulk of the course in the early modern period (focusing in particular on the witch-hunting crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). But we will also read ancient and current writing on this subject. Authors will include Euripides, Shakespeare, Condé, and many others.
|
ENGL 451-1
Steven Rozenski
MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
What can we learn about disordered and diseased minds from the past? How does literature from previous centuries illuminate how we understand psychology and psychiatry today? This course explores narratives of mental illness in English and German literature, the strangely romanticized relationship between insanity and creativity, and the changes in social and literary attitudes to various manifestations of mental illness over the course of five centuries. We will read intricate autobiographical accounts of mental illness (beginning in the fifteenth century, with a long poem by Chaucer’s biggest fan), novels and plays depicting mentally ill characters (and, in one case, the parallel madness of an entire society), recently-famous poems written in obscurity and despair in the asylum, and early theoretical and sociological works on insanity.
|
ENGL 452-1
Katherine Mannheimer
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
This 4-credit intersession course will be conducted in London, UK, from December 26, 2022–January 7, 2023. Attending two plays per day with a seminar discussion each morning, students in this course are exposed to a full range of theatre experiences, from intimate theatre-in-the-round to monumental productions at the National Theatre, and from West End spectaculars to cutting-edge works mounted in post-industrial spaces. See the link on the English Department homepage to find the course's website, which describes the program in greater detail and contains syllabi from the past 25+ years. Need-based financial aid is available. The fee total is $2850
|
ENGL 458-1
Joanne Bernardi
R 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee but students provide their own transportation). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course.
|
ENGL 462-1
Andrew Korn
MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
This course explores three of Italy’s most prominent post-WWII directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific thematic and stylistic innovations, such as Fellini’s carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and Zabriskie Point; and Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles.
|
ENGL 463-1
David Bleich
TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM
|
In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir said “throughout humanity superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.” Is it true that the matter with men is killing? Do men kill because they think they are superior? Do they think they are superior because they kill? Are men violent because they can’t speak? Why don’t men “use their words”? How is men’s woman-hating related to killing and raping? Why do women say that “men don’t listen”? Writers, who do use their words, have depicted men’s killing and their chronic melancholia over two millennia. This course considers how well-read stories and poems show men’s struggle with shame, anger, violence, and language. Writers studied include: James Baldwin, Samuel Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Greenberg, Ira Levin, Herman Melville, Anne Petry, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf.
|
ENGL 468-1
Gregory Heyworth
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of multispectral imaging, photogrammetry, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and spectral image processing using ENVI and Photoshop. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections.
|
ENGL 472-1
Jeffrey Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
ENGL 473-1
Jeffrey Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
ENGL 474-1
Jeffrey Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Restricted to Selznick Students
|
ENGL 475-1
Stephen Schottenfeld
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction.
|
ENGL 475A-1
Stephen Schottenfeld
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction. Section for MALTS student.
|
ENGL 476-1
Jennifer Grotz
T 2:00PM - 4:50PM
|
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. In addition, this course will explore and attend to process, which may include questions of inspiration, generation, and revision. and Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions.
|
ENGL 480-1
David Bleich
TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM
|
The seminar considers the extent to which people assimilate the language of literature into ordinary usage. As we read, language, fantasy, and thought in literature combine in a social and political gesture. For most literature, we remember stories and characters, but rarely words. Literary language acts on us mostly without our awareness. With attention to a variety of genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and popular song lyrics, the seminar estimates the social and political speech action of literary language. Seminar members are invited to re-use the language of the works on the reading list by placing this language in new contexts and then comparing the new usages with those experienced in reading. Works on the reading list, which raise issues of language action, suggest how such actions appear in any literature. Authors studied include Dickinson, Kafka, Lawrence, Morrison, Olds, Orwell, Pinter, and Shakespeare. Obscene language is considered as a model of how literary language is politically active.
|
ENGL 491-3
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Credit to be arranged.
|
ENGL 491-4
Ezra Tawil
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Credit to be arranged.
|
ENGL 504-1
Gregory Heyworth
R 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
From chivalric quest to supernatural adventure to love-story (tragic, comic, ironic, allegorical), romance was the most popular secular genre of the Middle Ages. Its characters and conventions form the basis of much popular literature and film today, and shape enduring ideals of masculinity and social etiquette. This course will examine some of the most popular works in the English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and French traditions. Beginning with Arthurian legends in Chrétien de Troyes, Béroul, the Gawain poet, and Malory, it will survey its appearance in the most popular play of the Middle Ages – the Latin Pamphilus de Amore – along with characteristically odd examples in Anglo-Norman (Marie de France) and Middle English – King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo and others. We will also investigate the social and gendered behaviors it encoded, and the historical problems it responded to through readings both in medieval primary texts and modern criticism.
|
ENGL 516-1
Rosemary Kegl
M 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
We consider how the utopian figures a selection of plays, poetry, and fictional and non-fictional prose from England’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We discuss the literary and social impulses that animate writing typically categorized as utopian like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, James Harrington’s Oceana, and Thomas More’s Utopia. And we identify and analyze utopian tendencies within English Renaissance writing, more generally, including plays by Richard Brome and William Shakespeare; poetry by Ben Jonson, Amelia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and Isabella Whitney; short prose fiction by Francis Godwin, Robert Greene, and Margaret Cavendish; and non-fiction prose focused on economics, politics, religion, a universal language, and vegetarianism by Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes , John Milton, James Naylor, Thomas Tryon, John Wilkins, Gerrard Winstanley, and Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. Our focus on the utopian allows us to discuss a number of interpretive issues not restricted to English Renaissance studies. What defines the utopian? How might we distinguish among the utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian? What literary and social circumstances allow authors and their readers to imagine the utopian? What kinds of literary analysis are most persuasive? How have scholars argued for the relationships among literature, other forms of culture, politics, and economics? This course does not assume that students already are familiar with either Renaissance writing or theoretical arguments about the utopian. Students have the option of writing two short essays or one longer seminar paper.
|
ENGL 531-1
Supritha Rajan
T 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, nineteenth-century British writers are well-known for exploring the cutting-edge sciences of their day in their literary works. As much recent scholarship has shown, these interactions between literature and science did not rest at the level of metaphor or analogy, but profoundly shaped understandings of aesthetic experience, the imagination, and literary experiments in genre. In this course, we will read and discuss a number of canonical Romantic and Victorian writers (e.g. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater) in order to understand how their knowledge of sciences like geology, chemistry, astronomy, and various life sciences shaped their writings, as well as their evolving attitudes on what distinguished the literary arts from the increasingly differentiated domain of the natural sciences. The course will thus simultaneously ground students in canonical literary figures and texts of the nineteenth century and introduce them to an ongoing debate within the university on the particular status of the literary arts vis à vis the natural sciences.
|
ENGL 560-1
Joel Burges
W 2:00PM - 4:40PM
|
In this class, we will explore the role of scale in moving image media, especially in film and television, by turning to the history of the close-up to grapple with its aesthetic and critical genealogy across directors, theorists, genres, periods, and regions. The scale of the close-up is a singular site for exploring much larger questions about what kinds of attention, sensation, and orientation the relative size of an image creates for a spectator; how film and television organize experiences of distance and proximity through scalar perception; how expressivity, subjectivity, and interiority are mediated by scale; what horizons of historical reception—e.g., large screens in the public space of movie theaters, television sets in the living rooms of private homes, mobile phones that we carry between public and private horizons—do to the scale of moving image media; where detail fits into film and television as a form over and against other mediums; and how histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation are intertwined with close-ups and the scale of moving image media.
|
ENGL 572-1
Matt Bayne; Ashley Conklin
M 9:00AM - 10:15AM
|
The yearlong practicum has two components, a practicum group, which is led by a 571 course instructor, and a mentor group, which is led by an experienced WSAP instructor. These two groups involve new instructors in a combination of small group meetings, class observations, individual meetings, and workshops designed to support and further educate new instructors. Small group meetings, classroom observations, and individual meetings offer new teachers a chance to gain different perspectives on their teaching, identify their teaching strengths, and work out solutions to teaching difficulties. The larger goal of all meetings is to encourage instructors to work with colleagues across the disciplines to create a supportive and intellectually challenging community, a community that they can call on throughout their career as educators.
|
ENGL 574-1
Jeffrey Stoiber
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
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.
|
ENGL 580-1
Ezra Tawil
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
No description
|
ENGL 591-1
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Credit to be arranged.
|
ENGL 591-3
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Credit to be arranged.
|
ENGL 591-4
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Shakespeare
|
ENGL 591-5
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Restoration Drama
|
ENGL 591-6
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Victorian Crime and Sexuality
|
ENGL 594-1
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 595-1
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Credit to be arrangedThe following courses may be taken for four hours of graduate credit.
|
ENGL 595A-1
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 897-1
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 995-1
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
No description
|
ENGL 997-1
Ezra Tawil
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 997A-1
Ezra Tawil
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 999-01
William Miller
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 999A-1
Ezra Tawil
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
ENGL 999B-1
Ezra Tawil
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
Blank Description
|
Spring 2024
Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
---|---|
Monday | |
ENGL 572-1
Matt Bayne; Ashley Conklin
|
|
The yearlong practicum has two components, a practicum group, which is led by a 571 course instructor, and a mentor group, which is led by an experienced WSAP instructor. These two groups involve new instructors in a combination of small group meetings, class observations, individual meetings, and workshops designed to support and further educate new instructors. Small group meetings, classroom observations, and individual meetings offer new teachers a chance to gain different perspectives on their teaching, identify their teaching strengths, and work out solutions to teaching difficulties. The larger goal of all meetings is to encourage instructors to work with colleagues across the disciplines to create a supportive and intellectually challenging community, a community that they can call on throughout their career as educators. |
|
ENGL 475-1
Stephen Schottenfeld
|
|
Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction. |
|
ENGL 475A-1
Stephen Schottenfeld
|
|
Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction. Section for MALTS student. |
|
ENGL 516-1
Rosemary Kegl
|
|
We consider how the utopian figures a selection of plays, poetry, and fictional and non-fictional prose from England’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We discuss the literary and social impulses that animate writing typically categorized as utopian like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, James Harrington’s Oceana, and Thomas More’s Utopia. And we identify and analyze utopian tendencies within English Renaissance writing, more generally, including plays by Richard Brome and William Shakespeare; poetry by Ben Jonson, Amelia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and Isabella Whitney; short prose fiction by Francis Godwin, Robert Greene, and Margaret Cavendish; and non-fiction prose focused on economics, politics, religion, a universal language, and vegetarianism by Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes , John Milton, James Naylor, Thomas Tryon, John Wilkins, Gerrard Winstanley, and Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. Our focus on the utopian allows us to discuss a number of interpretive issues not restricted to English Renaissance studies. What defines the utopian? How might we distinguish among the utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian? What literary and social circumstances allow authors and their readers to imagine the utopian? What kinds of literary analysis are most persuasive? How have scholars argued for the relationships among literature, other forms of culture, politics, and economics? This course does not assume that students already are familiar with either Renaissance writing or theoretical arguments about the utopian. Students have the option of writing two short essays or one longer seminar paper. |
|
Monday and Wednesday | |
ENGL 407-1
Rosemary Kegl
|
|
This course focuses on four very different major authors in the English Renaissance -- Robert Greene, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. We will have time to learn about each author, their writing, and their audiences. Why do we know more about the lives and writing practices of some of these authors than others? What is distinctive about their writing? Which literary traditions and social circumstances are most salient as we analyze their work? Who were their audiences? Did this writing always appear in print and, if not, how did it reach its audiences? Because each author was quite prolific and wrote in a wide range of literary forms, we will have at hand a rich set of readings. We will study examples of short verse and longer narrative and epic poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction essays, and drama designed for reading and for performance. We also will consider, among other topics, the tension between autobiographical and fictional voice (the celebrity persona cultivated by Greene’s pamphlets, the “I” of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, Cavendish’s self-presentation in public appearances and in her writing), these writers’ engagement with each other’s work (Shakespeare’s use of Greene’s Pandosto as a source for The Winter’s Tale, Milton’s references to Shakespeare’s plays in Paradise Lost and in his non-fiction prose), and the impact of the English Revolution on the writing and reception of Milton and Cavendish. No restrictions – all students welcome. |
|
ENGL 403-1
Steven Rozenski
|
|
What did drama look and feel like in the Middle Ages? How much can we know about performances that took place well over 600 years ago? We have two main goals ahead of us in this course: to read the major extant works of drama in Middle English, and to stage a medieval play. Along the way, we will discuss the texts themselves, the manuscript history of the surviving plays, their performance history, their relation to drama on the Continent, the religious opposition to them, sixteenth-century attempts to de-Catholicize them, their ultimate suppression after the Reformation, and their revival in twentieth-century England and North America. |
|
ENGL 431-1
Bette London
|
|
When the now-classic novels of writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence were published in the first part of the 20th century, readers were shocked by both their style and content. In the face of revolutionary upheavals in social and political life and in the understanding of human psychology and personal relationships, these writers proclaimed the end of fiction as we know it. Exploring the limits and possibilities of language and form, they called into question the very idea of “the novel” and its appropriate subject matter. Looking back from our vantage in the 21st century, we will reassess what made these novels appear so shocking. Pairing earlier twentieth-century works with novels from the second half of the century, we will also look at the way later writers revised the idea of modern consciousness and the fiction appropriate to it and at the ways they responded to the post WWII remapping of the British Empire and to the construction of postmodern and postcolonial identities. |
|
ENGL 438-1
Bette London
|
|
With its unprecedented death toll and new technologies of destruction, WWI shattered illusions and exploded the fabric of society as people then knew it. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the war was instrumental in shaping the modern world in terms of geopolitical shifts and the weakening of Empire, transformed gender roles, reinvented language, and new practices of remembrance. In the wake of the Covid pandemic and the ongoing struggle in Ukraine, the questions of how and why we remember so forcefully posed by the war are newly relevant. While in the US, WWI remains our “forgotten war,” in the UK it is nothing short of a national obsession. Despite subsequent world conflicts and other 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 culture. 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 and what it can tell us about our own historical moment. |
|
ENGL 451-1
Steven Rozenski
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What can we learn about disordered and diseased minds from the past? How does literature from previous centuries illuminate how we understand psychology and psychiatry today? This course explores narratives of mental illness in English and German literature, the strangely romanticized relationship between insanity and creativity, and the changes in social and literary attitudes to various manifestations of mental illness over the course of five centuries. We will read intricate autobiographical accounts of mental illness (beginning in the fifteenth century, with a long poem by Chaucer’s biggest fan), novels and plays depicting mentally ill characters (and, in one case, the parallel madness of an entire society), recently-famous poems written in obscurity and despair in the asylum, and early theoretical and sociological works on insanity. |
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ENGL 462-1
Andrew Korn
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This course explores three of Italy’s most prominent post-WWII directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific thematic and stylistic innovations, such as Fellini’s carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and Zabriskie Point; and Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles. |
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ENGL 405A-1
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
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The second 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 the second half of 'Purgatorio' and the entirety of 'Paradiso,' students learn how to approach Dante's 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 Dante's 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. No prerequisites. Freshmen are welcome. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster. |
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ENGL 406-1
Thomas Hahn
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We will try to do justice to the lives, experiences, and desires of late medieval women and men, reading narratives that then and now hold or challenge the imagination of living readers. We will engage accounts of ghosts and revenants who bridge the world of spirit and flesh, and encounter reanimated corpses and souls who speak to the living from purgatory or hell, all revealing intense medieval responses to daily life, bonds of love, and thoughts of death and afterlife. In addition to narratives of lost souls, zombies, and reanimated corpses, readings will include the out-of-body experience of Pearl, the amazing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, several other Arthurian / Gawain romances, fantasies of global and racial diversity in Mandeville’s Travels, and personal revelations by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, among the first women writers in English. All texts (with glosses and notes) will be supplied by the instructor, or will be available online through the UR’s own amazing Middle English Texts Series (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text-online ). We will also use digital resources to immerse ourselves in surviving physical books and images that medieval people treasured. Our purpose is to enrich our sense of the present by gaining a sure grasp of this earlier, distinctive version of English as well as the dreads, longings, and joys felt by its speakers and writers. Students will lead discussions, write short responses / analyses, and a longer final paper. |
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Tuesday | |
ENGL 476-1
Jennifer Grotz
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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. In addition, this course will explore and attend to process, which may include questions of inspiration, generation, and revision. and Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions. |
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ENGL 531-1
Supritha Rajan
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From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, nineteenth-century British writers are well-known for exploring the cutting-edge sciences of their day in their literary works. As much recent scholarship has shown, these interactions between literature and science did not rest at the level of metaphor or analogy, but profoundly shaped understandings of aesthetic experience, the imagination, and literary experiments in genre. In this course, we will read and discuss a number of canonical Romantic and Victorian writers (e.g. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater) in order to understand how their knowledge of sciences like geology, chemistry, astronomy, and various life sciences shaped their writings, as well as their evolving attitudes on what distinguished the literary arts from the increasingly differentiated domain of the natural sciences. The course will thus simultaneously ground students in canonical literary figures and texts of the nineteenth century and introduce them to an ongoing debate within the university on the particular status of the literary arts vis à vis the natural sciences. |
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Tuesday and Thursday | |
ENGL 463-1
David Bleich
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In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir said “throughout humanity superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.” Is it true that the matter with men is killing? Do men kill because they think they are superior? Do they think they are superior because they kill? Are men violent because they can’t speak? Why don’t men “use their words”? How is men’s woman-hating related to killing and raping? Why do women say that “men don’t listen”? Writers, who do use their words, have depicted men’s killing and their chronic melancholia over two millennia. This course considers how well-read stories and poems show men’s struggle with shame, anger, violence, and language. Writers studied include: James Baldwin, Samuel Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Greenberg, Ira Levin, Herman Melville, Anne Petry, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf. |
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ENGL 468-1
Gregory Heyworth
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This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of multispectral imaging, photogrammetry, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and spectral image processing using ENVI and Photoshop. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections. |
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ENGL 449-1
William Miller
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What is a witch? Culturally, most people associate the term with pointed hats, black cats, and broomsticks. Historically, it refers to a threat to the social order, an enemy of the state, a confederate with the devil. Many scholars see the figure as a figment invented to attack those (usually women) perceived as defying community norms or infringing on official turf. Complicating these accounts, witch identity has been subsequently claimed by those who see in the term forgotten histories of female power, and better attitudes toward nature, gender, mind, and being. Through readings in drama, fiction, criticism, and history, this course introduces and explores this complex of perspectives on the figure of the witch. We will spend the bulk of the course in the early modern period (focusing in particular on the witch-hunting crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). But we will also read ancient and current writing on this subject. Authors will include Euripides, Shakespeare, Condé, and many others. |
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ENGL 480-1
David Bleich
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The seminar considers the extent to which people assimilate the language of literature into ordinary usage. As we read, language, fantasy, and thought in literature combine in a social and political gesture. For most literature, we remember stories and characters, but rarely words. Literary language acts on us mostly without our awareness. With attention to a variety of genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and popular song lyrics, the seminar estimates the social and political speech action of literary language. Seminar members are invited to re-use the language of the works on the reading list by placing this language in new contexts and then comparing the new usages with those experienced in reading. Works on the reading list, which raise issues of language action, suggest how such actions appear in any literature. Authors studied include Dickinson, Kafka, Lawrence, Morrison, Olds, Orwell, Pinter, and Shakespeare. Obscene language is considered as a model of how literary language is politically active. |
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ENGL 443-1
Katherine Mannheimer
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This course places Jane Austen's novels within the context of other female novelists writing in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Readings will include Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, in addition to works by Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. Fulfills the pre-1800 Requirement for the English Major. |
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Wednesday | |
ENGL 560-1
Joel Burges
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In this class, we will explore the role of scale in moving image media, especially in film and television, by turning to the history of the close-up to grapple with its aesthetic and critical genealogy across directors, theorists, genres, periods, and regions. The scale of the close-up is a singular site for exploring much larger questions about what kinds of attention, sensation, and orientation the relative size of an image creates for a spectator; how film and television organize experiences of distance and proximity through scalar perception; how expressivity, subjectivity, and interiority are mediated by scale; what horizons of historical reception—e.g., large screens in the public space of movie theaters, television sets in the living rooms of private homes, mobile phones that we carry between public and private horizons—do to the scale of moving image media; where detail fits into film and television as a form over and against other mediums; and how histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation are intertwined with close-ups and the scale of moving image media. |
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ENGL 412-1
Robert Doran
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Narrative is fundamental to many areas of inquiry, including literary studies, film and media studies, history, anthropology, psychology, law, and political science, to name just a few. This course studies narrative from various perspectives, including historiography (Hayden White’s Metahistory), philosophy (Aristotle’s Poetics; Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative), narratology (Mieke Bal’s Introduction to the Theory of Narrative; Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov), film studies (Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film). The course will enable the student to develop the necessary analytical tools for understanding both literary and non-literary, textual and non-textual narratives. Conducted in English. |
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Thursday | |
ENGL 458-1
Joanne Bernardi
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Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee but students provide their own transportation). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course. |
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ENGL 504-1
Gregory Heyworth
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From chivalric quest to supernatural adventure to love-story (tragic, comic, ironic, allegorical), romance was the most popular secular genre of the Middle Ages. Its characters and conventions form the basis of much popular literature and film today, and shape enduring ideals of masculinity and social etiquette. This course will examine some of the most popular works in the English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and French traditions. Beginning with Arthurian legends in Chrétien de Troyes, Béroul, the Gawain poet, and Malory, it will survey its appearance in the most popular play of the Middle Ages – the Latin Pamphilus de Amore – along with characteristically odd examples in Anglo-Norman (Marie de France) and Middle English – King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo and others. We will also investigate the social and gendered behaviors it encoded, and the historical problems it responded to through readings both in medieval primary texts and modern criticism. |
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Friday |