ENGLISH DEPARTMENT FALL 2013 COURSES     

(Descriptions and meeting times may be subject to change.)

1-English 190 Section 1: Borders and Bridging: Passages (CPLT 190)
Introduction to Literary Study (W, 5T)
Lisa Haines Wright. 12:00Noon-1:50PM TTH

This course engages widely various texts, all of which foreground passage—movement from one location (physical and/or psycho-social) to another, quite different one—and focus on the generative complexity of ‘in-between'. Diverse as they are, they all confirm what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has suggested: a “boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing.” What sorts of something? We'll ask that question of each text we engage and, by comparing the answers, cohere our course. Our primary task, though, is not to cover content, but to develop a skill: close reading. The course trains and practices interpretive analysis and analytic writing to interpretive ends. No prerequisite.

2-English 190 Section 2: Mackey Writers (CPLT 190, AMST)
Introduction to Literary Study (W, 5T)
Diane Lichtenstein. 11:15AM-12:20PM MWF

For more than 25 years, Beloit College has hosted eminent writers who hold the Lois Wilson Mackey '45 Distinguished Professorship of Creative Writing. We will read fiction, poetry, and non-fiction by a number of these Mackey Professors such as Ursula LeGuin, Denise Levertov, Pam Houston, Scott Russell Sanders, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Li-Young Lee, Carolyn Kizer, and David Shields. English majors should register for English 190. No prerequisite.

3-English 190 Section 3: Other Minds, Other Worlds (CPLT 190)
Introduction to Literary Study (W, 5T)
Tamara Ketabgian. 10:00AM-11:05AM MWF

How does literature help us to imagine the minds and feelings of others? This course explores how various texts serve—or refuse to serve—as mental and emotional “simulation chambers.” We will devote special attention to works that challenge established ways of knowing, seeing, and perceiving, among both human and nonhuman beings. Along the way, we will consider some new and exciting developments surrounding the relation between literature and cognitive theory. Why do we read, and how do we understand notions of consciousness, relationship, narrative, environment, and time as we read? Texts will include a wide array of fiction, poetry, and drama, by authors such as Austen, Bishop, Hughes, Shakespeare, Shelley, Stoppard, and Woolf. Throughout the term, we will practice a variety of interpretative approaches and will develop skills essential for crafting literary essays. Students will draft and revise approximately twenty pages of prose. No prerequisite.

4- English 190 Section 4: Magic and the Metatextual (CPLT 190)
Introduction to Literary Study (W, 5T)
Matthew Vadnais. 1:30PM-2:35PM MWF

Throughout history and across cultures, writers of stories, poems, and plays have been interested in subjects departing from strict realism. From Aristophanes and Shakespeare to the fabulists, postmodernists, and magical realists of the twentieth century, writers interested magic, miracle, and madness have frequently conjoined such subjects to the metatextual exploration of how human beings write and read stories, poems, and plays. While reading and analyzing the work of Italo Calvino, William Shakespeare, Lynda Barry, Anne Carson, Leslie Marman Silko, Vladimir Nabokov, Aristophanes, Nikky Finney, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kelly Link, we will examine how and why literature about things beyond or outside human reality so often doubles as work about how stories function, why we read, and what exactly makes a poem a poem. In addition to providing a diverse set of models regarding the relationship(s) between magic and the making/reading of stories, poems, and plays, our reading list will also ask us to engage in variety of different kinds of interpretation that will expose us to a broad swath of approaches to the study of literature while helping us determine how, individually, we most like to read. No prerequisite

5-English 195 Section 1: Falls and Redemptions
British Literary Traditions (W)
Steve Wright. 11:15AM-12:20PM MWF

The story of the "fall" in Genesis–the expulsion from paradise, the sudden sense of distance from God–has permeated Western culture. As a loose framework for our discussion of works in a variety of genres–from Chaucer to Angela Carter–we should be able to detect continuities and to distinguish between permutations of paradise (the green world of pastoral, e.g.), the inclinations of the deities, and the claims of the caste that proposes to lead us back. We’ll sample Chaucer and late medieval romance and drama, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Renaissance poetry, Milton and Swift; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Blake and Mary Shelley, Woolf, and assorted illustrative readings. Prerequisite: English 190.

6-English 196 Section 1
American Literary Traditions (W)
Cynthia McCown. 1:30PM-2:35PM MWF

Introduces students to American texts from the 17th century to the most recent literary periods, with emphasis on broad historical patterns of literary and cultural influence. Each course examines the formation and transformation of literary canons, national traditions, and evolving concepts of artistic value and creativity. As a reading-intensive study of literary texts and their specific historical contexts, this course is appropriate for the general student and also provides groundwork crucial for more advanced English classes. Prerequisite: English 190.

7-English 205 Section 1
Introduction to Creative Writing (W, 2A)
Shawn Gillen.

Experimentation and practice in writing poetry and fiction. Readings to suggest and illustrate forms and techniques. Offered each semester. Prerequisite: English 190 or sophomore standing.

8-English 205 Section 2
Introduction to Creative Writing (W, 2A)
Christine Clancy.

Experimentation and practice in writing poetry and fiction. Readings to suggest and illustrate forms and techniques. Offered each semester. Prerequisite: English 190 or sophomore standing.

9-English 205 Section 3
Introduction to Creative Writing (W, 2A)
Matthew Vadnais. 10:00AM-11:05AM MWF

Experimentation and practice in writing poetry and fiction. Readings to suggest and illustrate forms and techniques. Offered each semester. Prerequisite: English 190 or sophomore standing.

10-English 210 Section 1
Creative Writing Poetry (W)
Fran Abbate. 7:10PM-9:00PM TTH

Analysis of representative poems to increase understanding and appreciation of the nature, styles, and methods of poetry. Composition and discussion of original poems in various forms. Prerequisite: English 205

11-English 220 Section 1
Creative Writing Fiction (W)
Chris Fink

Study and practice of the techniques of short story writing to increase understanding and appreciation of the nature, styles, and methods of fiction. Includes analysis of representative examples and practice in writing fiction of various lengths. Prerequisite: English 205

12-English 228 Section 1
Practicum in Literary Editing: Beloit Fiction Journal (LAP1)
Chris Fink. 2:00PM-3:50PM MWF

This course is an editing workshop aimed at selecting manuscripts for publication in the Beloit Fiction Journal, an established national literary magazine. Students will read and critically assess unpublished manuscripts submitted by writers from all over the world. They will also participate in various facets of literary magazine production. (Also listed as Journalism 228. English majors should register for English 228) Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.

13-English 252 Section 1: Shakespeare and the Actor (TDMS252)
Studies in Renaissance Literature (W)
Matthew Vadnais. 12:00-1:50PM TTH

Over the course of the semester, we will read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Richard III, As You Like It, Othello, and The Tempest. While we will certainly approach these six plays as texts to interpret and understand, we will also be using the plays to think about the relationship between Shakespeare and two very different kinds of actors. We will begin by placing the plays in the context of Shakespeare’s professional theatre, focusing specifically on ways that early modern performance practices including the use of cued parts and the lack of female actors might have altered the way the plays made meaning in Shakespeare’s playhouses. Alternately, we will place the six plays in the context of actors working more contemporaneously to us; throughout the semester we will read Linklater’s Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice and Kaiser’s Shakespeare’s Wordcraft, two staples of modern acting training regarding Shakespeare’s language. The course will include traditionally analytical/interpretive writing as well as projects that require elements of performance. Though the relative ratio of the two kinds of work will largely be left to the discretion of individual students, the course will culminate in performed scenes open to the public. Prerequisite: English 190 or consent of instructor.

14-English 254 Section 1: Jane Austen: Fiction, Film, and Fan Culture (WGST 200)
Studies in Romantic Literature (W, TD)
Tamara Ketabgian. 1:30PM-2:35PM MWF

Jane Austen may have lived centuries ago, but today her novels are still vibrantly alive and well—in film, fan cultures, and adaptations ranging from zombie novels to Bollywood to the BBC. Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice, this class will explore both Austen’s major fiction and its enduring popular appeal for readers, writers, and “Janeites.” Our focus will be literary, historical, and anthropological, with a particular emphasis on gender politics. We will closely examine Austen’s fiction in the cultural and literary contexts of Romanticism, Regency Britain, bourgeois domesticity, and the evolving nation state. We will also assess Austen cults and cultures, questioning the varied social, political, and sexual meanings of her novels. What did it mean to be an ‘Austen fan’ in 1813, and what does it mean to be one today? Should we view Austen’s novels as the products of “Aunt Jane”—a spinster apologist for the ruling order—or of a more subversive writer—a woman keenly aware of the ironies of kinship, marriage, and social order? Requirements: two papers, numerous short assignments, film screenings, and a take-home final exam. Prerequisite: English 190 or consent of instructor.

15- English 256 Section 1: Sex, Salvation, Adventure: Early U.S. Women’s Personal Narrative (AMST, WGST)
Studies in American Literature Before 1860 (W, C, TD)
Diane Lichtenstein. 1:30PM-2:35PM MWF

Autobiographies, memoirs, journals, letters, “autobiographical fiction”–all have been used by U.S. women to narrate personal as public experiences. In this course, we will read personal narratives from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and ask, what defines a personal narrative? Who has written personal narratives, and for what purpose? (To circumscribe women’s sexuality? To prove one’s piety? To document the adventure of homesteading?) Texts will include Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth-century captivity narrative, Elizabeth Ashbridge’s eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography, Susanna Rowson’s eighteenth-century novel Charlotte Temple, Caroline Kirkland’s nineteenth-century “autobiographical novel” A New Home -- Who'll Follow?, and Linda Brent’s nineteenth-century slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slavegirl. Prerequisites: English 190 and 196 or WGST course or consent of instructor.

16-English 258 Section 1: A Literary Look at the Harlem Renaissance
Studies in Literature Later 20th Century and Beyond (W, C, TD)
Cynthia McCown. 10:00AM-11:50AM TTH

Zora Neale Hurston, remembering her youth, said “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We may not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” This is just what artists and writers were doing in New York City’s Harlem in the 1920s, when a groundswell of confidence and optimism made the neighborhood the vibrant epicenter of African American intellectual and cultural life It was the jazz age, and all of Harlem was jumping: musicians, painters, sculptors, and writers were producing an effusion of excellence in their various fields. The phenomenon was called then, as it is now, “The Harlem Renaissance.” Racial pride was part of it; modernism was part of it; the renewed interest in the cultures of west Africa and the West Indies added to the mix. And Harlemites, led by such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Hurston herself, embraced it all, attending the rebirth of the African American spirit. This course will examine the cultural history of the Harlem Renaissance primary through its literary art, but with attention to other forms such and painting and music as well. It fulfill the “Later Literature” requirement for English Majors but is meant to serve any student with an interest in this remarkable period. Prerequisite: Eng 190 or 196 or an AP course in American Literature.

17-English 262 Section 1: “Dark Shadows”: Gothic Fictions, 1790s to Present (CPLT 231)
Genre, Mode, Technique (W, TD)
Lisa Haines Wright. 7:10PM-9:00PM TTH

The Gothic is a tempest of horrors and a fog of fatal omissions. It trips the dark fantastic: subterranean spaces and live burials; nocturnal landscapes, dreams, and nightmares; convents and monasteries, morgues and madhouses; fires, storms, and civil insurrections; rapes, murders, and incest; poisonous guilt and shame; apparitions, doubles, and nameless wanderers; echoes and silences, unreadable writings, unspeakable utterances. This course investigates the coherence of Gothic fictions.

They concentrate their energies at the boundaries dualism regards as inviolable: between man and woman, self and other, spirit and body, conscious and unconscious, life and death. Such boundaries are both arbitrary and formidable: an arbitrary boundary would not exist, were it not defended with terrific force. At the breach of conventionalized boundaries, we see the Gothic's worst violence, most potent magic, and most paralyzing uncanniness. Is the boundary or its violation affirmed? Among different artists and historical contexts, that question is variously answered. We’ll ask it from the 1790s to the present.” Topics course. Prerequisite: ENGL 190 and either ENGL 195, 196, or 261. Requirements: preparation, attendance, participation; five brief responses; one formal essay, two exams, and one engagement of others’ exams.

18-English 301 Section 1: James Joyce's Ulysses
Literature in Context (W)
Shawn Gillen.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is the great modernist novel and a singular artistic achievement. Its reputation, however, as a difficult text keeps many people from reading it or leads them to study only excerpts from it. One goal of this seminar is to reveal that its profound, comic and deeply human significance is best experienced with an understanding of its sprawling reach and stunning final chapters. This course provides students with the rare opportunity to work though the book with a group of fellow readers, studying one chapter per week over the course of the semester. Alongside Ulysses, students will read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, stories in Dubliners and sections of Homer’s Odyssey. They will study the modernist movement, Ireland’s history and culture, and Dublin in the decade leading to the Easter Rising. Students will discuss Joyce’s frank and sometimes bawdy representations of human sexuality and come to understand a few of the major scholarly and theoretical approaches to the novel as well as various attempts to censor the book as a work of a pornography. Although this is an advanced seminar, students from any discipline with a strong interest in the novel, Joyce, modernism, and Irish culture are encouraged to seek the instructor’s consent to enroll in the class. Prerequisites: ENGL 190 and ENGL 195 or 196 or consent of instructor.

19-English 310 Section 1: After Words, After Worlds: Contemporary Literature Revisions the Classics
Literature as Process (W)
Fran Abbate. 2:00PM-3:50PM MWF

This course, a capstone for English majors, will combine critical reading and writing with the production of creative work, and will culminate with a student-curated gallery exhibit at the Wright Museum and a catalog containing images of the artwork chosen for the exhibit paired with writing from students in the course—writing influenced by our readings and curatorial choices. Our (tentative) book list includes recent renderings of Antigone (Anigonick by Anne Carson), The Inferno (by Mary Jo Bang), The Iliad (Memorial, by Alice Oswald, which details each death in that poem), and the book Readings in World Literature by Srikanth Reddy, which is the daybook of a professor teaching a course subtitled “Introduction to the Underworld” (and cross listed, of course, with comparative literature).

As we read and create our own retellings of these and/or other classics, one of the questions we’ll face is propriety—how does one write over a classic without doing it some injustice? And to what extent, if at all, should we care? Although the books listed above have, in general, been well-received, there has been some controversy regarding the “violence” that some writers have done to the original texts. (The Times Literary Supplement, for example, recently took Carson to task for the liberties taken in Antigonick: “the voice-overs by Hegel, Virginia Woolf and Bertolt Brecht are a facile diversion. Kreon’s ‘new powerboat,’ Antigone’s ‘Bingo,’ her desire ‘to lie upon my brother’s body thigh to thigh’ are vulgarities which subvert this most adult, unsparingly formal and radiant of masterpieces.”) Thus the course will also focus, in part, on the critical reception of such renderings. Prerequisites: Junior standing and ENGL 190 and 195 or 196.

20-IDST 210: Pursuing Happiness
Diane Lichtenstein. 2:45PM-3:50PM MWF (IS)

What is happiness? Can it be measured? How does an individual pursue it? Can it be sustained? In the past few decades, psychologists, economists, philosophers, poets, novelists, essayists, political and legal theorists, and religious thinkers have studied happiness in order to understand how human beings experience and produce happiness, how wealth or poverty affects individuals’ happiness, how ideas about happiness have changed over time and differ across cultures, and what moral questions arise when we pursue happiness. Students in this course examine the construction of disciplines and then study happiness through multi-disciplinary methods and perspectives. No prerequisite.

21-Writing 100: Utopia Limited
Writing Seminar (W, 5T)
T. Ketabgian. 8:45AM-9:50AM MWF

Since Thomas More coined the term in 1516, “utopia” has meant both a “good” place and “no” place—an impossible place. With this concern as our starting point, our course will explore the limits and challenges of visionary thought in a wide range of sources, including fiction, poetry, film, philosophy, and cultural criticism. How, we will ask, do utopian works seek to refashion politics, economics, family, gender, aesthetics, and humanness itself? What are the problems of pastoralism? Along the way, we will focus on the current explosion of dystopian and millenarian thought in science fiction and public discourse. Throughout the term, members of this writing-intensive class will gain experience constructing verbal and written arguments, revising written work, working with sources, and drawing connections both within and between academic disciplines. They will write and revise over twenty pages, including short essays and many informal writing exercises. For their final writing projects, students will “build” their own utopias. No prerequisite.